We're Really Hiding in Your Cupboard

Blog on 3news.com

2009-01-14T19:51:00.001-08:00

Click on the title to see some writing I have done on the 3 News website...

Or read a review of Christchurch's Hotel So here:

http://www.3news.co.nz/News/HealthNews/Size-isnt-everything-at-Christchurchs-Hotel-So/tabid/420/articleID/86983/cat/58/Default.aspx

One step for mankind and oh bugger a step backwards

2008-11-05T17:40:00.000-08:00

Click the title above for the Timesonline story.

One overlooked story from the US election is California's decision to ban gay marriage. Proposition 8, which stated that marriage is the union only of a man and a woman, was voted on at the same time as the presidential election. Anti-gay marriage supporters won the vote 52.1 - 47.9. It is the first time gay marriage has been banned retro-actively.

It is shameful that on a day when discrimination and those who wish to discriminate took a slap in the face, this backwards step has been taken. What right do those people who voted "no" have to impinge on a person's life in such a manner.

The discrimination of homosexuals is no different to discrimination of any other groups. Opponents may argue dubiously that being gay is a choice. Whether it is a choice or not, a person should not be discriminated against because of any choice they make - provided they are harming no one directly.

Offending narrow-minded people's sensibilities is not reason enough.

Barack Obama - a leader to believe in?

2008-11-05T00:16:00.000-08:00

So America now has that rare thing. A leader that inspires people to be better, a phenomenom that draws huge crowds of supporters eager to make good in the world. The last time America had a president like that he was assasinated. Lets hope the same fate does not befall Obama. Footage of McCain supporters calling Obama a terrorist is easy to find and the new president may be considered a target by the far right.

It is also important not to get carried away. The World's problems are not insolvable but they are large and increasing. When Obama talks about change he is addressing the whole world not just American citizens. Across the world people hope that a changed America will solve all our problems.

It won't, it will help, but one man and one concept will not make fundemental change overnight. If there is one lesson to be learnt from the last one hundred years, it is that the World should take responsibility for its own problems and not rely on the shepherding of Superpowers.

The USA's power is waning in the bright sunlight of China and India's economic growth. The USA can no longer hope to provide a moral compass for such powerful nations, they must do this themselves. Human rights abuses in China and the Middle East and abject poverty in many areas of India are things that also must be changed.

Barack Obama cannot be expected to bring about change in these sovereign countries, but we can hope that a new spirit of governance from the USA may seep into the conscience of others and make the planet a better place to live in.

A key moment

2008-10-26T05:13:00.000-07:00

John Key was in relaxed mood after this Sunday's episode of Campaign 08. He took off his tie and enjoyed a couple of beers with the show's panel journalists, even though he has a strictly enforced 11pm curfew.

He was a different man, in this media-centric situation, to the man I met briefly over a year ago. He has either been well trained or learnt to relax. There were even a few jokes that people laughed at. Although, I wonder how much of this was to do with journalists wanting to be on the right side of a man who may be the next Prime Minister.

As he drank his bottle of Corona someone asked why he wasn't drinking a New Zealand beer. Fortunately for John there was only Steinlager in the fridge. Even politicians shouldn't have to drink Steinlager.

On the wide-screen, and we are at Sky TV so it's a mammoth widescreen, Barack Obama's waving and grinning face hogs the corner of our eyes. Key notices the placards that Obama supporters wave no longer read "a change you can believe in" but "the change we need". He points his PR guy, Kevin, towards this and says "maybe we should change ours"...

It's hard to tell whether his tongue is in his cheek.

Key left in good time for his 11pm bed-time.

Alternative Maps of the World

2008-09-26T14:27:00.000-07:00

Click on the title for a fascinating way of analysing the planet. These maps have been made in proportion to certain criteria. For instance the first map you see shows the world through the lens of the amount of books published. Consequently the UK looks like it is suffering from a rare form of giganticism - its nearly bigger than the USA and Canada.

The image above shows the most popular destinations for refugees. It clearly expounds the myth that countries like the UK are being overrun by asylum seekers. Most refugees, according to this map, cross national borders - not continents.

Debate over Sharia Courts in Britain shows internet's ability to spread hate

2008-09-17T15:46:00.000-07:00

Click on the above title to read a story from the UK's Times newspaper about the use of Muslim Sharia law in the UK. Then read the comments; largely from denizens of the USA, but also, to my shame, from citizens of the UK.

I will copy a few examples:

Unbelievable! When do we get the first beheadings of Christians daring to hold a service in Bradford or any of those other Islamic areas Its time the politicians started looking at what is happening in this country, sorry they are too busy wallowing at their expenses trough in Westminster.

John Dykes, Pontypool, Wales UK

Insanity and disgusting. Are we going to see woman stoned to death in the street for having an affair like they do in Iran? In Iran they hanged to 19 year old lads because they were gay. There was a picture of it on the internet, they were hanged off two JCB diggers! Considering joining BNP!
Peter Duffy, Glasgow, Scotland

The only good thing that will come out of this, apart from the amputation of the limbs of proven thieves and the death sentence for murderers and traitors, will be the rise in support for the BNP. Out of bad comes good my mummy used to say.
Peter C. Lucas, Torquay, England

The crusades lasted 20 some years and where the desperate response after more rthat 400 years of aggressions by the Muslims, we need another crusade.
juan, Brownsvile, USA

Islam is not a "Religion of Peace" -- nor is it even a Religion -- it is a POLITICAL SYSTEM! This is a start of a Very Slippery Slope..... Adios, amigos.
Abigail, Tampa, FL, U.S.A

The people who have left these comments clearly have an inability to read. The story refers to a part of UK law which allows alternative arbitration for disputes if both parties are in agreement, the results are legally binding. They do not apply to criminal law, only civil law, and Jewish Beth Din courts have operated in a similar fashion in the UK for more than a 100 years. I don't see the UK being overrun by hordes of barbaric Rabbi.

The comments here, and of course there is no way for me to know their true origin, have a flavour of what I imagine hatred of the Jews was like in the first half of this century (or throughout history).

Ill-informed and exaggerated stupidity and hatred coupled with threats to vote for a racist, violent party (the BNP) are a sign the love of different cultures that many in the UK hold dear is being threatened. These comments are from an ignorant bunch of reactionaries too lazy to get out of their IKEA-clad box flats and walk down the street to talk with neighbours who are just that bit different..

Don't be appalled by their difference - be interested, it's what makes the world go round.

This is not to say the idea and concept should be without debate. I am against courts set up in the name of religion - religion should be a personal value not an arm of the state. However, I am prepared to argue the point without the use of such racist, ignorant language - instead using the time honoured tradition of logical argument and debate.

I also find it strange that, although these courts are for civil disputes, cases of domestic abuse have been heard. I thought this was a criminal offence and should therefore be heard before a criminal court. I am also concerned about the treatment of women in such a court - we cannot allow inequality between the sexes in our legal system.

So - I am fine with these courts with two recommendations. Firstly that they are not used for criminal cases only for dispute arbitration and secondly that the UK's equality laws hold sway over decisions.

There, I managed to say it without calling a single muslim a barbarian or calling for a new crusade - how clever of me.

Read all about it! What can be done to make the internet trustworthy...

2008-09-14T20:38:00.000-07:00

Click on the title for a BBC news story about Tim Berners-Lee's ideas for making the internet more trustworthy.

His proposal for a foundation to vet internet sites is a good idea but I wonder about the sheer volume of sites and the amount of work this would create. I fear the creation of a bureaucratic monolith that slows down innovation on the web.

Important questions about who would control such a foundation and how it should be funded need to be answered. Would the process be thorough? Or would the sheer volume of internet sites mean that those setting up a website would have to jump through a few hoops to gain creditation? Who monitors a site's ongoing work - would a site need to be checked on a yearly basis and what could a divisive, race-hate site get away with inbetween being checked?

Berners-Lee is absolutely right in his assertion that the internet needs to be verifiable for it to succeed in the longer run as a reliable resource. However, I imagine that at some point newspapers would have been thought of with a similar level of distrust. On the whole, we trust our Western newspapers these days, despite the quality of some of their coverage of events in the Middle East and other controversial issues, and this is because their brand has been built up over a long period of time and is now considered trustworthy.

This trust is not based on any code of ethics that journalists share, or legislation that punishes journalists who lie or attack maliciously, it is branding pure and simple. No one buys The Sunday Times in the UK and trusts it because of the good work of the Press Council. They trust it because it is the Sunday Times and has been around for years.

Established newspapers know that it is suicide to break that trust and go to huge lengths to make sure they appear consistent (anyone who has spent any time designing a newspaper will know how painstaking the process can be to ensure that pages and copy are accurate and consistent). There is also a culture within most professional journalists that promotes honesty, bad apples are usually syphoned out (I accept that there are instances of unethical journalists though).

For the internet, I see the branding as being a cinch. It has only been in widespread use for ten to twelve years yet we already have sites such as Google that we, wrongly or rightly, trust. Websites are cottoning on that trust is essential for them to survive - the moment, and a moment is a long time in cyberworld, people start to distrust the Google search engine is the moment Google the company hits economic decline. What is needed now is a culture of professionalism amongst bloggers and the like to ensure that trust isn't broken.

At the moment this is where the internet fails, not enough people take it seriously. It's ok to break the rules on the internet because it is only the internet. New frontiers are often lawless and it's because the ethics for these frontiers are not understood yet - no one knows the consequences of cheating or no one thinks they will get found out. How many rogue cowboys were arrested and tried in Wild West?

The internet may develop in an instant but the ethical constructs of mankind evolve at a much slower rate.

You only have to look at the attitude of Auckland City councillor Aaron Bhatnagar, who has admitted writing detrimentally about other candidates on their Wikipedia sites, to see this problem in a real life situation. He claims what he wrote was true but by using the pseudonym "Barzini" (a psycopath from the Godfather novel) he was clearly trying to hide his identity and in doing so he must have known that what he was doing was not really top of the ethical billboard.

He was quoted in the New Zealand Herald as saying:

"Anyone can make a comment on Wikipedia and if someone doesn't like something that they see it is very easy to change it. I think it is all a bit of a storm in a tea cup."

Mr Bhatnagar, that is a very arrogant statement. What you have done is tantamount to electoral fraud in my opinion, it is certainly not in the spirit of fair play. I wonder if the people of Hobson would have voted for you had they known of your underhand tactics?

I imagine that Bhatnagar would shy away from such electioneering in more tangible form, his actions are borne of a misunderstanding of the internet's power and the ethics that surround it.

Once the ethics are more understood, more ingrained into our society, I think the internet will become a more trustworthy resource of its own accord.

Click on link below for Bhatnagar's story.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10531375

Creationism vs Evolution

2008-09-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a post about, what I consider, the blinkered, head in the sand concept of creationism and then stumbled upon this article in the Sunday Times which pretty much says it all..

Click on the blog title.

A criticism of Fisk

2008-09-11T01:53:00.000-07:00

Fisk's suspicion of the internet is perhaps understandable; he is an old school journalist that has been much maligned by cyber critics.

However, there is a generation of young journalists who do not all share the same distrust. Fisk may be right that newspapers still have the only authority, but this ignores a growing wave of online media that although in its infancy will some day command the same respect.

More on Robert Fisk

2008-09-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

Hey,

More Robert Fisk video footage can be found by clicking on the title of this blog entry.

Some thoughts on Robert Fisk's talk:

The man holds a remarkable amount of history and information about the middle east in his head. When the US or UK government attempt to hoodwink their citizens into condoning war in Iraq, they often do this on spurious grounds. This does not get past Fisk because of his immense knowledge of the area; unfortunately this does not hold true for most people.

I wonder how many people know that invading Iraq has been a favourite pastime of the West since the time of the crusades? Or that many of today's problems in the Middle East are due to way this area was carved up after the First and Second World Wars?

Fisk brought up two interesting analogies. The first came from Colin Powell's, now infamous, speech about weapons of mass destruction to the UN Security Council. What the cameras didn't show was the graphic behind Powell, an image of an Iraqi making chemical weapons in a train.

Fisk argues the Iraqi rail system is so shonky, as a result of economic sanctions, and trains are so liable to come off the tracks, that the last place anyone would make volatile chemical weapons is on a train.

He asked the US authorities, who had control of the rail system, whether they found any weapons of mass destruction.

"No," they replied, but they thought that prior to invasion the chemical weapons had been rushed over the border to Syria or Jordan (memory fails me here).

It took Fisk to point out that there was no train line from Iraq to Syria or Jordan.

Again, knowledge that the average person does not have and will not know if the mainstream media continues to be lazy in reporting this conflict.

The second analogy that interested me was a comparison between ancient crusader castles and US army bases.

Apparently, Crusader castles were built one days march from each other so that the crusaders were not left exposed to attacks from Arab assassins.

American military bases are spaced exactly one hours cherokee ride from each other so they can avoid being attacked by suicide bombers.

The comparison is chilling; especially when you take a look at a photo of the US's imposing Baghdad embassy.

Not too disimilar to an imposing castle?

I wonder how much contact the US army gets with the Iraqi citizens sitting in this monolith.

Facts about this embassy are available at:

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2004/03/the-largest-embassy-ever-run-by-any-country.html

Apply for a job in Baghdad at the US embassy here:

http://iraq.usembassy.gov/iraq/jobs.html

John Key spins out of control with Barack Obama comment

2008-09-10T16:51:00.000-07:00

Excessive spinning leads to dizziness, and John Key certainly placed himself at a dizzy height this week when comparing himself to Barack Obama.

Was his comment published in a Financial Times profile the work of the National Party’s spin machine Crosby-Textor, or a slip of the tongue by an inexperienced politician?

The Labour Party nearly choked on their tongues in mirth, but it was a mirth misplaced. John Key wasn’t directly comparing himself to Obama.

He was clumsily trying to explain away the Financial Times suggestion that he would be the most inexperienced politician to lead New Zealand in more than 100 years.

Any party leader would like a slice of Obama pie at the moment; the US democratic candidate is riding high on the back of his policy of change and commands a stadium-sized audience of devotees.

He is the new rock star of politics. John Key is just new.

The question we have to ask about this fiasco is whether John Key is a puppet of his public relations company, or just green. To be fair to Key, he is right in saying Wellington hasn’t jaded him yet.

Like Obama, his career has been largely outside politics and like Obama he is offering change to the people of New Zealand. But what sort of change?

Crosby-Textor has done an excellent job with brand Key, but at some point we need to see some concrete policies.

Labour has tried various attacks on Key. First he was slippery, a politician who would go back on his word given the slightest opportunity.

But then it emerged that Key was far too wooden to be slippery. Now Key has a secret agenda.

According to the media he is going to turn into an evil dictator as soon as he gets into power and sit laughing at us from his pedestal in the Beehive.

“Mwah, hah, hah, there goes your precious KiwiBank!” he’ll mock.

Either that or senior National politicians love to talk more than gossiping grandmas in a tea room.

Spin is no laughing matter though. It has real effects on a nation’s politics and is very expensive to do properly. Companies like Crosby-Textor do not come cheap.

The advent of spin has seen a system of politics, in the Western world at least, that relies too heavily on image.

Policies are the last thing on a politician’s mind these days; a killer sound-bite and a witty one-liner to put down your opponent are more important.

Spin has turned parts of the media from an independent communicator to a ventriloquist’s dummy.

A political campaign dies its death or thrives on the pages of the newspapers and the screens of televisions.

Much better to see elections fought on the streets with well informed citizens able to hold their leaders to account on tangible matters rather than the ephemeral whirr of the spin machine.

Illustration: Sally Connor

Robert Fisk at AUT

2008-09-10T16:44:00.000-07:00

A video of Robert Fisk, one of the World's leading journalists and middle east correspondent for the Independent newspaper.

Fisk is known for his outspoken views on the state of journalism, which he believes supports oppression and is a strong critic of American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Click on the title for Fisk's writing.

Katie Llanos-Small wrote this article for the Pacific Media Centre at AUT University:

http://www.pmc.aut.ac.nz/niusbeat/090909_Fisk-Small.shtml

Low Alcohol Beer

2008-09-10T16:38:00.000-07:00

Low alcohol beer is becoming worryingly popular. For christ's sake if you don't want to get drunk drink water or a juice.

I wonder whether low alcohol beer can be considered a gateway beer for other stronger beers such as Heineken Cold Filter at 3.3%.

Published in Singapore!

2008-09-04T15:02:00.000-07:00

I have been published in Singapore - how novel!

Click on the link to see the story...

UK's International Shame

2008-08-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

The International Express (alongside the International Guardian) is one of the few UK newspapers readily available in New Zealand and should be a source of shame for expats living here.

Published weekly with a selection of the Express and Sunday Express's 'best' stories, the paper is aimed squarely at expats. Some strange breed of jingoistic expat that left the UK because it was getting too full of darkies - if the front page is to believed.

Not a week goes by without the International Express making us English out to be a bunch of racist twats. This week the front page headline reads something like "1,650 immigrants move to the UK each day as more real British people leave'. Never have I seen a newspaper so fond of using arbitrary statistics to beat up news stories.

So... to the International Express - bugger off home where you belong.

Ethnicity - It don't matter if you're white or black

2008-08-27T04:52:00.000-07:00

AUT University recently hosted a media diversity forum hosting talkers from programmes such as Tagata Pasifika and Asia Downunder among others.

The event was interesting and there was some positive outlooks for the future of minority culture programming as well as some more gloomy moments.

It seems that budgets are being slashed just as attitudes are changing. Taualeo'o Stephen Stehlin, of Tagata Pasifika, said there had been a "marketing change" at TVNZ and suddenly Pacific Island faces are everywhere.

In the real world though these programmes struggle on very tight budgets in very poor time slots. Tagata Pasifika is broadcast when the majority of its audience are asleep or at church and Asia Downunder gets shunted to tomorrow if there is a rugby match worth watching (or even not worth watching) on.

The producers of both programmes spoke of being under pressure from TVNZ to increase viewers, to run less positive stories and bizarrely to make sure their content wasn't "too worthy".

Programmes such as these need more support and more editorial control. Journalists are supposed to tell the stories of people who do not have a voice and the stories of the Asian and Pacific Island community are rarely told in mainstream media unless one has robbed and murdered the other.

This is akin to reporting on a general election but only writing stories about Labour's successes or National's failings. It is cock-eyed and short-sighted and ignores the needs of the viewing public.

***

A second point to make. Stop using the word 'ethnic'. It drives me nuts.

'We were eating out at an ethnic restaurant.'

'He wore ethnic clothes.'

To some people that food isn't ethnic it is just food. And the clothes... well a pair of trousers is always a pair of trousers.

Just because something is different to your culture doesn't mean it should attain the alien status of 'ethnic'.

The word is divisive - we should all stop being so astounded at our differences and instead take a convivial interest in them.

From paper to pixels

2008-08-27T03:56:00.000-07:00

By James Murray ⋅ August 22, 2008 ⋅

As news moves online, print is forced to evolve. Jamie Melbourne-Hayward and James Murray investigate how this will affect the industry and the way we use news. Illustration by Jamie Melbourne-Hayward, additional reporting by Carly Tawhiao.

“Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

-Dylan Thomas

The newspaper is under threat. The newsprint has been on the wall since the spread of high-speed broadband and the decision by several UK papers to break news on their websites first in 2006. The media industry is at a tipping point and must evolve to survive.

Just recently APN, which owns the New Zealand Herald, announced an annual drop in advertising revenue of about eight to 10 per cent. A result of the recent credit crunch, perhaps, but across the pond in the USA, where new media is far more prevalent, newspapers are losing money hand over fist. For example, the Capital Times in Wisconsin is no longer a hard copy paper at all. In April this year the presses stopped and now the paper publishes exclusively online.

The only places where newspaper advertising revenue is increasing are emerging economies such as India and China. Advertising revenue on the internet is rapidly increasing. In the UK, internet advertising is poised to overtake TV advertising and will make up one fifth of the total revenue from advertising by the end of the year.

It’s ironic that a medium which was used to advertise hard copy newspapers is now replacing it. The Wisconsin Capital Times now issues a free-sheet twice a week that acts as an advert for the website.

So should the newspaper ‘rage’ against this death or are we actually seeing a reincarnation? Should newspapers go ‘gentle into that good night’ or bite back and move with the times?

Democracy is about knowledgeable citizens making informed decisions for the greater good of mankind. Power within democracies is supposed to be watched over by the fourth estate: the media. However, citizens can start to lose faith in the integrity of their media if they perceive it becoming the fourth branch of government or a vehicle of business interests.

In countries where human rights are in question, information is often biased by a polarised media. State run papers such as the the China Daily, which faces daily censorship are a good example.
People are increasingly turning to the internet to find what is seen as unfiltered information.

Newspapers have previously been complacent about the digital revolution, with an over reliance on reader loyalty to their brands. But recently the internet is proving a catalyst for the reinvigoration of newsprint.
Many UK newspapers have changed their format to a tabloid, and moved to a magazine look.

News was once dispensed in a ‘top-down’ format, where Murdoch-style management and editors decided upon content and direction. Now citizen journalism, blogging and discussion boards have become popular avenues for a population disconnected from the “national debate”.People can dictate which content they are interested in, and are able to access varying viewpoints and “twitter” to their hearts delight.

The Independent in London has picked up on this trend and is now unafraid to break the taboo of printing opinion on its front page. It has successfully rebranded itself as a ‘viewspaper’ with its most popular content coming from columnists such as Robert Fisk. But the digital revolution has not improved the content of newspapers entirely for the good.

Newspapers are being drawn into television sensationalism, and dependence upon flashy news cycles to sell copies. The 24-hour news cycle has also been duplicated online, with stories breaking as they would on television, but with more immediacy. This could have an affect on the accuracy and depth of stories.

So, should newspapers die? On the one hand, the increase of “an open market place of ideas”, which the internet provides, is liberating to democracy. But does that freedom come at a cost?
Journalists are no longer just answerable to the letters page and there is a value in having a wider dialogue between the public and the media.

However, the freedom of the internet also allows the spread of bigotry and hatred: blogs and comment should be taken with a grain of salt – along with everything else for that matter.

While western newspapers service a wide-enough spectrum of views, the same cannot be said for Latin America, Africa and Asia. Citizen journalism in these parts is sometimes the only available balanced coverage - and investigative journalism occurs only online.

As more funds enter the internet-news market, a flow on to investigative journalism is needed. Furthermore, journalists are trained to be fair and balanced. As objectivity is only an ideal, the internet’s draw card is its ability to bring together opposing views from around the world, and allow them to be debated in the electronic halls of democracy.

What are the consequences for the world if newspapers disappear altogether or, at the very least, can only survive if targeting a niche market?
Leading US journalist John S Carroll believes the national conversation has already changed.

“Millions of people who previously had been excluded have now been allowed to join in. Whoever saw it coming? This is a First Amendment miracle,” he said in a lecture at the University of Kentucky this April.

He is referring to bloggers and the proliferation of opinion on the internet. But the gathering and dissemination of news is still largely done by traditional reporters who either work for newspapers or websites that are affiliated to newspapers.

According to professor of journalism Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine, a blog which analyses the progress and role of new media, traditional media networks such as newspapers or television stations now have to operate differently to survive.

“Networks were defined by control of content or distribution. But now, you can’t own all distribution and content is controlled where it’s created. So, I wonder, where’s the value and where’s the money in the fully networked world?”

Jarvis suggests that the way ahead is for media companies to aggregate content. A good example of this would be Yahoo Xtra.
Yahoo Xtra makes very little content itself. Instead it bundles news and entertainment sourced from other content providers in a way that is attractive to advertisers.
John Hagel, a US expert on the internet’s effect on business, agrees:

“The most powerful brands in the media business will be held by successful intermediaries that help to consistently improve return on attention for audiences.”

If there is more money to be made from simply aggregating news, the incentive to gather it decreases. The Catch 22 occurs when news aggregators realise profit depends on poorly paid content providers. For this system to work, an effective way of sharing advertising revenue through link networks needs to be devised – if news aggregators are too greedy their content supply will dry up.

If the media’s future lies in aggregating the most popular blogs and websites in attractive bundles the balanced viewpoint is going to struggle to be heard. The controversial will always get more hits than the accurate.

The danger to our ‘national conversation’ is our own thirst for sensationalism. Our national commentators will effectively be those we vote for with our mouse.

Barack Obama is all style and no substance. As are the Beijing Olympics.

2008-08-27T03:52:00.000-07:00

Click on the story title to go to Te Waha Nui website - AUT students

By James Murray ⋅ August 22, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

On your mark...get set... (Illustration: Sally Conor)

Winning is at the top of everyone’s agenda these days – winning with style and not necessarily substance.

The opening ceremony at the Olympics celebrated style over substance when event organisers chose aesthetics over reality. A little girl who couldn’t sing became an overnight superstar, miming in the place of another little girl who could sing delightfully but didn’t match up in the beauty stakes.

And superstars are the theme of this year’s ‘presidential’ elections. In the US the front runner is Barack Obama, a man who says little more than “America is ready for change” to a country passionate for change of any kind.
Obama may well bring change in America and it may well be change for the good, but it is the style of US election campaigns that grates: all fist-pumping razzamatazz and very little in the way of policy.

In New Zealand you could be forgiven for thinking we are going to elect a figurehead rather than a political party to run this country, especially if you are a member of our supposedly ignorant and apathetic youth.
According to the Electoral Commission, 107,500 of 18 to 24-year-olds are not enrolled to vote in this year’s election. It is clear young people are turned off by this cult of personality.

Clark, Key and Peters dominate the political hurdles, falling over each other in their Olympian efforts to get the media high-ground in the run-up to the election.
Where are the rest of our politicians and why are the issues being discussed so narrow? An outsider might mistakenly believe that the only things New Zealanders care about are taxes and the cost of living.
This presidential style of campaigning lets the electorate down. It is the fault of a lazy media and political spin machines that prefer to focus on personalities rather than issues such as domestic violence and a lack of affordable housing.

The focus must be less on personality and more on character; a politician of good character should never put their ego before their country.

The opportunity to improve China’s human rights record has been lost at the Olympic games.
Several athletes, such as the UK basketball player and Olympic ambassador for Amnesty International John Amaechi, spoke out before the games about the possibility of protests in light of China’s human rights record.

Amnesty International proudly announced that 40 competing athletes had signed a letter condemning China’s human rights record. Fair play to those athletes and take note that they have been able to compete at these games without hindrance.

However, there are 10,700 athletes at these games so 40 dissenters is a disappointing number.
It is a shame that many athletes are now toeing the party line that the Olympics is not the right arena for political protest or that politics and sport do not mix.

These statements are simply not true – sporting sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid system, notably anti-Springbok tour protesters in New Zealand, ably assisted the downfall of that cruel regime.

The brave actions of senior members of the Zimbabwe cricket squad, who wore black armbands mourning the death of democracy during the 2003 World Cup held in Africa, alerted a whole nation to the villainy of Robert Mugabe.

It is foolish to tar all of China with the same brush and short-sighted not to acknowledge the way in which it is slowly giving its citizens the rights they deserve.

But as long as human rights are not being satisfactorily met in China there is room for protest and this protest should have been visible on the biggest stage of all.

Romeo And Juliet and Showgirls - every English rugby players favourite haunt

2008-07-24T21:11:00.001-07:00

Click on title for related story.

It’s not every day the missus suggests ogling Oceania’s finest from a shadowy corner of Showgirls. But then again it’s not every day that I take her to the ballet. It seemed a fair exchange.

Strip clubs usually fill me with a clammy fear. As if my mother and a whole procession of former teachers will see me enter and reveal me to be drunken pervert.

Walking in with your girlfriend though alleviates that problem; suddenly having some platinum blonde’s derriere waft in front of my face is pretty cool. Hell, it may even be socially acceptable, it’s probably something I can mention to my grandmother at Christmas nowadays.

I am here for the dancing I remind myself. A purely cerebral affair I note, as a leering buffoon steps drunkenly on my foot.

The cheering, star-crossed, morons inside Showgirls resembled Shakespeare’s ‘groundlings’ (Elizabethan peasants in the cheap-seats who came for Shakespeare’s more comic moments), especially self-confessed regular, city boy Dave who urged the crowd to “big it up for Showgirls”.

It was quite a different crowd at the New Zealand Ballet’s production of Romeo and Juliet at the EDGE Theatre, though in some ways no more engaging. A well-spoken lady unfairly berated the usher for letting in a couple of latecomers during the opening fight scene. Really madam, was your view that impinged?

The first act was nearly as exciting as Oceania contender Nicki’s flaming shaving foam trick. A pint-sized Mercutio snaps, crackles and pops his way across the stage, an engaging mix of arrogance, coquetry and tragic fool. Romeo is a wistful, hormone-filled, flirt – primed to fall passionately in love with the first girl that grabs his attention.

Romeo and Juliet is about doom and pre-destined fate. Tracy Grant Lord’s set portrays this excellently. Dark greys and blood reds are lit by a portentous moon which looms like the sword of Damocles over the stage.

Meanwhile back at Showgirls, Kylie takes the stage. Her dance is a homage to Baywatch, complete with shower scene. Despite struggling with her life saving ring and banging into her surfboard she is so far the hot favourite for the opportunity to represent New Zealand in the finals in Australia.

And then there is a break. The showgirls break sees two of the clubs exotic dancers take the stage offering gartered legs to money waving blokes. Incidentally, my lemonade cost four bucks and my change came in the form of a dollar note only to be used for tipping strippers.

The interval at the Edge is a more sophisticated affair, if of course you like the theatre tradition of queuing fifteen minutes for a drink that you then have to consume in two minutes. I can’t stress my dislike of intervals enough – they break the magic.

A disgruntled boyfriend sneaks outside for a cigarette telling a mate on his cell phone that it’s “not his cup of tea.” A woman in the toilet queue complains that the beginning was too “fighty”.
There are several scenes that really work in this production of Romeo and Juliet. The ‘fight’ scenes are excellent as is the dance where Romeo first meets Juliet – the high point of Prokofiev’s foreboding score.

Mercutio is portrayed with just the right measures of loyal friend and pompous fool. His dancing duels with the bullying Tybalt are full of Baz Luhrmann and the fights of martial arts legends.
Other scenes are slightly awkward. When Romeo and Juliet are married in secret the priest joins in their dance in a disturbing triumvirate that just looks and feels plain wrong.

The tragic ending is rushed and consequently the pathos is not sufficiently eeked out. I want to be an emotional wreck at the end of Romeo and Juliet – instead I went to the supermarket.

There was no such problem with the ending of Showgirls. Malaina, who had rushed from a job as a naked human platter to be the night’s final contestant, paraded down the stage as a sexy secretary. She actually had a sense of eroticism and won hands down, or knickers down as they say round here.

Romeo and Juliet is about passion over-riding the brain and Miss Oceania is about lust doing the same thing – it really just depends which is your cup of tea.

Tsvangirai's actions are humane not cowardly

2008-07-03T20:50:00.000-07:00

MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai has been criticised in some quarters for not having the guts to carry on in the struggle for power in Zimbabwe.

It is exactly this decision that contrasts him from despots such as Mugabe. His respect for humanity and human life distinguishes him from leaders for whom power is everything.

He may not be fighting fire with fire but he is fighting fire with compassion and diplomacy.

Political Shennanigans etc

2008-06-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

The news story I am waffling on about here can be seen by clicking on the title.

I am not sure whether it is reason to be happy or reason to be deeply depressed that we live in a world where a politician will appear as a breakdancing dwarf to curry favour.

Rodney Hide, the leader of ACT: a relatively small right of centre NZ political party, has apparently appeared on a celebrity "who can dance" style show. It clearly hadn't helped as he swivelled awkwardly, flapping his arms like a horny amphibian.

He danced with the social grace and timing of your mother-in-law at a wedding.

I'm genuinely torn. On the one hand it's good to see a politician actually involving himself with something. Better that than churning out politspeak at a rate of knots.

But on the other, the cause he was fighting for was just naff.

Hide was trying to make the point that education funding should go to the child rather than to schools. That way all our children can go to drama school and rehearse pantomimes while they dream of becoming the next Britney "too many beers' Spears.

Is this everyone's dream Hide.

I hope not.

Perhaps other politicians could take a leaf out of Hide's unorthodox book though...

Mugabe could promote his party by appearing in a stage version of the Last King Of Scotland

Gordon Brown could tour the UK in a campervan hoping nobody will notice he isn't at work.

John Key could do a sponsored stint in the history section at Auckland library

That Green party guy with dreads could (and perhaps should) have a televised haircut

Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton could see how much money they can possibly spend promoting themselves when they could have stayed at home farting into tea cups for free.

McCain could do a documentary on a chip factory.

Any other offers are welcome..

J

WEST PAPUA: Media confusion reigns over ‘non military strikes’

2008-06-26T19:46:00.000-07:00

Asia-Pacific Journalism, 12 June 2008

Disputed reports of military sweeps in West Papua have cast a spotlight on the Indonesian government’s restrictions on media in the area, reports James Murray.

A month-long military sweep of villages in the Jayawijaya region of West Papua may have targeted civilians in its search for “separatist symbols” according to the Cenderawasih Post in Jayapura.

However, confusion about the sweep – which apparently never happened - has highlighted the need for greater media access in the Indonesian-ruled province.

Maire Leadbeater, of the Indonesian Human Rights Committee, says there is doubt surrounding the accuracy of the story.

She cites a report from Catholic Justice and Peace (SKP) that suggests Suara Papua Merdeka (SPM), a Papuan media outlet that translates as the Voice of Papuan Independence, got the story wrong.

According to SKP, the police and military became involved due to a village conflict over a stolen pig.

Although there was a military raid on the thief’s family and extended family it seems nobody was killed.

Misleading stories like this only serve to highlight the Indonesian government’s media restrictions in West Papua, says Leadbeater.

“If they would open up West Papua and it was easier for people to communicate freely we perhaps would not get these misleading stories,” she says.

The executive secretary of the umbrella human rights group FOKER, Septer Manufandu, echoed these sentiments.

He said journalists “must clarify the truth” when writing stories about West Papua as much “news” from the province was propaganda.

He said the Cenderawasih Post was government-backed. The report seemed surprising considering that many people would regard such a military strike as poor public relations for the Indonesian government.

Manufandu, who recently visited New Zealand, regards Pax Christi and local news agencies such as Jubi as reliable sources.

FOKER is an umbrella organisation that co-ordinates 64 non-governmental organisations in West Papua and campaigns for human rights and development strategies that involve the indigenous population.

The confusion does not lie only with those fighting for West Papuan rights and independence. Even the Indonesian Embassy seemed confused by events.

When asked about the “military sweeps”, Tri Purnajaya, First Secretary of the Indonesian Embassy, said he did not know how extensive they were but assumed they were quite moderate.

He added there had been “some arrests” and those who been arrested were awaiting sentence.
He said “Indonesia adopts a liberal press. In fact – the most liberal in the region. The government guarantees freedom of expression throughout Indonesia including Papua.”
However, in a commentary published in the latest Pacific Journalism Review, Leadbeater disputed this claim.

“While Indonesia keeps this troubled province off limits to foreign journalists and human rights investigators, Indonesia’s human rights credibility should be critically examined,” wrote Leadbeater.

This is despite Indonesia being re-elected in 2007 to the United Nations Human Rights Council for a three-year term.

According to Leadbeater, only a handful of journalists have been allowed access to West Papua.
In 2007, two United Nations rapporteurs, Hina Jilani and Manfred Nowak, were granted access.
Both rapporteurs raised concerns regarding military and police harassment, arbitrary detention, torture and persecution of those who sought to investigate human rights investigations.

In the same year, BBC correspondent Lucy Williamson reported on extreme poverty and allegations of human rights abuses after being granted a permit to report on the opening of an independent radio network in the Papuan central highlands.

According to Leadbeater, the only stories that seemed to gain government support were small human interest stories. The United Nations and BBC journalists had inadvertently caused a tightening of media control:

“Some Papuans believe that access may have tightened up since the BBC visit.”

Lindsay Murdoch, of the Melbourne Age, also believes Indonesia’s record on media freedom is below par.

When asked about the amount of media coverage of immigration issues in West Papua, Murdoch replied:

“Disgraceful, virtually non-existent. Jakarta's refusal to allow journalists free access to Papa is one of the main reasons. Also, Jakarta comes down hard on any foreign NGOs which expose human rights abuses or issues like the Islamisation of Papua.”

Media coverage of West Papua is also scant in neighbouring Papua New Guinea’s press.
Patrick Matbob wrote in Pacific Journalism Review that “there had been a dramatic decline in the Papua New Guinea press coverage of West Papua over the past 20 years”.

This lack of coverage is linked to a general decline in the PNG media, specifically now that the PNG media now relies heavily on official sources.

Matbob’s news content analysis of the Times of PNG and the Post-Courier revealed that in 1984 there were 133 news stories published on West Papua. By 2006 this number had declined to 70, with many of the stories included in the “briefs” sections.

PNG media coverage is especially relevant to West Papua as more than 10,000 Papuan refugees live there.

West Papuans Forge Alliance To Push For Independence

2008-05-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

Click on title for link!

Asia Pacific Journalism, 8 May 2008

Groups seeking independence for West Papua have in the past been divided. Now, reports James Murray, unity is the buzzword and activists have joined forces.

West Papuans hoping for wrest independence have taken an important step with the formation of a coalition designed to unify the country’s resistance to Indonesian rule.

The West Papua National Coalition for Liberation (WPNCL) was set up after a meeting held in Port Vila, Vanuatu, last month.

Richard Yoweni of the National Liberation Army of West Papua was elected as chairman.

The coalition allows the West Papuan people to protect and reclaim its resources and culture said coalition spokesperson Clemens Runawery.

“Indonesian government control over West Papua for the past 45 years and the implementation of its so-called ‘special autonomy’ package in the past five years has grossly failed the West Papuan people,” he said.

Runawery is a West Papuan politician who has lived in exile since the so-called Act of Free Choice handed control of West Papua to Indonesia in 1969.

He said that under the Indonesian administration there has been a “rapid deterioration of health and education, an ever increasing wave of the HIV/AIDS disease and huge profiteering from the West Papuan natural resources and rainforests”.

The WPNCL will be based at the West Papuan People’s Representative office in Port Vila.
Maire Leadbeater, spokesperson for New Zealand’s Indonesian Human Rights Committee, said Vanuatu’s support was vital as it was hard for the coalition to meet freely in West Papua.

Leadbeater was not surprised at Vanuatu’s stance.

“They had to struggle to achieve their own freedom so it’s not just the government, it’s the people as well – they pray for it [West Papuan independence] in their churches. If the Vanuatu government backslides it faces a lot of domestic pressure,” she said.

This view was shared by Pacific-based photojournalist Ben Bohane.

“Vanuatu was the only Pacific nation to join the non-aligned movement during the Cold War and has maintained an independent foreign policy since then,” he said.

Vanuatu’s support for West Papua and the formation of the WPNCL is the first step in presenting a strong, unified Melanesian position to Pacific Island regional bodies.

Bohane says it is important for West Papua to gain the support of regional bodies for the issue to be dealt with by the United Nations.

Runawery says: “WPNCL is now seeking observer status with the Melanesian Spearhead Group and the Pacific Islands Forum as a platform for the people of West Papua within the UN and other international forums.”

Groups such as the Melanesian Spearhead Group will benefit from this unity when the West Papua issue is brought up at the Pacific Island Forum. The forum does not necessarily support West Papuan independence.

“Since the issue has been ‘swept under the tapa mat’ by the forum for so long, we have to say that the forum is not neutral but anti-West Papua. This has been because of pressure from Australia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea to keep it off the agenda,” says Bohane.

The WPNCL also protests against the international investment of companies with extensive interests in the resource rich area such as BP in Tangguh and Freeport, which operates the Grasberg copper mine.

Bohane says “having considerable resources has been a curse, not a blessing for the West Papuans”.

“BP, like every other mining company, is exploiting the situation there, particularly if they are relying on Indonesian military for security,” he says.

BP’s liquefied natural gas project in Tangguh may eventually be worth $100 billion dollars and the Grasberg copper mine is one of the world’s largest sources of precious metals contributing heavily to Freeport’s estimated worth of $26 billion.

Guardian journalist John Vidal writes that Papuan leaders were pleased with BP’s initial humanitarian efforts. The company was keen to avoid the experiences of extraction companies in Africa and South America where they have been accused of exploiting local communities.

“BP completely rebuilt one fishing village, poured money into the nearby communities, and employed leading environment, human rights and health groups to advise them on how to avoid conflict and bring prosperity to the villages,” wrote Vidal.

However, relations have started to turn sour with indigenous Papuans becoming frustrated at the number of Indonesian immigrants taking jobs in the area - jobs that have not been offered to West Papuans. They also accuse BP of taking sides with the Indonesian government to ensure that they have access to the Tangguh resources.

Protests by the Free West Papua (UK) group have been lodged at BP’s Tangguh Independent Advisory Panel (TIAP) meeting. They claim that BP has ignored abuses of human rights including the long-term imprisonment of West Papuans accused of raising the indigenous Morning Star flag.

They say Indonesian soldiers had threatened to shoot a Papuan who had erected a banner saying “Welcome Prince Andrew to the land of Papua – the Land of Genocide” during the prince’s recent visit as the UK business envoy.

Tapol, the Indonesian Human Rights Campaign, has written to BP to warn that they have caused instability in the region. They say Papuans “see them as a collaborator with Jakarta’s exploitation of West Papua’s natural resources”.

Runawery said the role of companies such as BP had been “disastrous” and was causing Papuans to become a minority in their own country. The investment of BP and Freeport had “effectively underwritten the occupation of West Papua by the Indonesian security forces”.

“The expansion of Indonesian government backed businesses and economic interests is at the expense of the people of West Papua,” said Runawery, in a reference to tight military controls, a lack of political freedom and the abuse of human rights.

Considering the large financial incentive that the Indonesian government has to keep control of West Papua it may be some time before their dream of independence is realised.

Bohane believes West Papua will be independent at some point but that it will take time.
The formation of the WPNCL was certainly a step in the right direction though.

“It is hard to be optimistic. However, it is a significant development to have the realisation of a unified command and leadership under WPNCL which will give the independence movement a better chance of success in its international diplomacy,” he said.

The first moves of this unified command will be to get West Papua on the UN Decolonisation Committee and to seek to repeal the Act of Free Choice.

James Murray is a Graduate Diploma in Journalism student at AUT University and this is an Asia-Pacific Journalism assignment.

Auckland graffiti artists operate in legal grey area

2008-05-04T18:59:00.000-07:00

Auckland graffiti artists are operating in a legal grey area as there is a lack of legal places to practice their craft.

“There are nowhere near enough!” said graffiti artist Pest5 of TMD crew.

TMD crew are one of Auckland’s most successful graffiti art groups. Artists come from as far away as Germany and members such as Askew have exhibited work in Europe, Australia and Japan.

“Usually a particular artist or artists will have acquired permission from the property owner,” said Pest5.

In Auckland legal street art is actually an oxymoron as there are no officially designated sites.

However, police in Wellington have taken a different approach to dealing with taggers.

Sara Tamati, aka Spexone, is a member of the Triple S crew in Wellington.

She said that the police there often refer young people, who have been caught tagging, to the Triple S crew to learn more about the writing culture.

In Auckland, suitable sites are few and far between and artists have to queue up to use them.

Pieces can only be painted over once they have been defaced by “a stupid young tagger”.

In other situations graffiti artists will use a site that has been tagged several times. A site is deemed safe to paint over once it has been covered in tags.

This practice is still technically illegal as permission has not been granted but police can turn a blind eye to graffiti artists when they are painting over a heavily tagged wall.

“It depends on the moods of the cops that day. If you’re doing a proper piece over existing graffiti they can see that you’re not causing any trouble and let you get on with it,” said Pest5.

Graffiti Enforcement Officer for Auckland City Police, Reginald Alofa, said that he was aware that “’proper graffiti artists’” were different to taggers.

“They see it as a real art form and that they do in fact commit quite a bit of resources into it in terms of their time, the purchases of paint and brush not to mention spray cans and all other neccessary 'tools of the trade'. They are quite passionate about it and seem to draw a lot of enjoyment from it,” he said.

He did not know of any cases where officers had been “blasé” towards people causing wilful damage though.

“It's always important to charge taggers (and I do) to send a clear message out to them that we do not tolerate wilful damage, in line with the Government's renewed commitment to combating graffiti,” he said.

Tamati does not believe that taggers should always be viewed negatively and said that the distinction between ‘real’ graffiti artists and taggers is often a misconception.

There is a hierarchy in the writing element and taggers are at the bottom of this, learning the basics.

“There is no school to go and do this, you start off as a tagger and try and enhance yourself,” she said.

Writing (graffiti) is an integral part of hip-hop culture, which also includes b-boying (breakdancing), djing and rapping.

“Within our writing culture we find young people with the potential to grow within the culture and mentor them in the process that we know.

“Most of the young people we work with end up doing some good work,” she said.

This attitude has proved successful for the Triple S Crew who between them run three successful businesses including Top Shelf Creative, a clothing and design venture.

The crew have also been commissioned by Save the Children to create murals which pass on knowledge in a way that is accessible and understood by young people.

The mural at Cannons Creek Primary School in Cannons Creek, Porirua reads “Passing on the Knowledge” and Tamati says it reflects the crew’s aims in “passing on our hip hop knowledge artistically through to young people”.

Creative New Zealand was unaware of any similar schemes in the Auckland area.

Browning it

2008-04-27T20:22:00.000-07:00

It all looks a bit tits up for Gordon Brown as he continues to obfuscate his way from one problem to the next. Even Peter Mandelson is having a go at him with the fervour of the bullied child for once getting his own back.

UK politics has become increasingly bizarre over the past few weeks. Prescott is the world's least successful bulemic, Blair is accused of over long massages with Carole Caplin, Peter Mandelson is calling for a return to core policies. Have they all gone senile?

David Cameron of course continues to be a shining example of complete buffoonery as he divides his time between changing nappies on his webcam and out running limousines on his BMX. He has now invited ITN to film him and his family at home. Yes we get it David, you are family friendly, so family friendly that every family can only hope for a Cameron of our own. So we can be all traditional and modern at once.

In fact I think I might make that the point of this rather rambling blog entry.

Politicians are caught, like Borodin's mule between the modern and the traditional. The advantages of being seen to be either are so great that they want both and will literally rip themselves in two to achieve this.

Poor little David - on the one hand he wants to be traditional but by god does he want to be traditional in a hip and modern way. If we lived three million years into the future Cameron would simply turn himself into Jamie Oliver and have done with it. That would be Cameron's wet dream.

Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone face much the same problem. Boris wanders around like an old, drunken fart insulting all who cross his path - but doesn't he do it in such a charmingly new way. Its almost as if Boris comes from a future where feelings have been eradicated and replaced with befuddled wit.

Livingstone with his five children by three women lurches around the inner-city like an uneducated, teenage, council estate sperm machine but appears to not give a hoot. Five kids by three women is quite the modern way - in the most traditional of senses of course.

Blair combined wooly headed, ex head boy, now minor university guitar strumming rebel fantasist, with charming statesman of the world who is unafraid to get an 'overly long' massage from his power-wifes crystal ball weilding faith healer with such success that we voted for him over and over again. He combined modern with traditional superbly - he knew exactly what a blackberry was but had no idea how to use it. He knew exactly where the Middle East was but had no idea what to do with it - a very contemporary idea indeed.

Margaret Beckett combined the look of the modern career woman with seventeenth century dentistry.

Peter Mandelson was gay but suitably embarassed about it - once again the modern and the traditional in perfect harmony.

Helen Clark is both a lesbian and not a lesbian at the same time. As is her husband.

Which brings us back to Brown whose basic failing is he wants us to think of him as New Labour when he is really old labour wishing he was New Labour, so he can stop all the lying. He wants to bring back union power so he can diminsh it once more so he can feel guilty about it and then get that eating disorder that he is so jealous of - if only he had thought of it first.

Apologies for the rambly stupid nature of this post - am trying to get over writers block.

James

The Man Who Sold The War

2008-04-10T18:51:00.001-07:00

An interesting article that Jon Stephenson of TV3 suggested as good reading material for those interested in the media operation behind the war in Iraq. Click on the title.

Also found a strange tit bit of Iraqi war news that may not have come to people's attention.

At some point during the war the the US provided their soldiers with a deck of cards that had the 55 most wanted Iraqi dissedents as pictures on it.

Quite apart from this being a very surreal way of managing a war it is also fairly convenient (and perhaps the basis of a very good conspiracy theory) that the number of dissidents exactly matched the amount of cards in a deck.

Prince Harry In Helmland Hoo-ha

2008-04-09T18:07:00.000-07:00

On January 7 the Australian women’s magazine New Idea blew the lid off a press agreement that had allowed Prince Harry to tour Afghanistan as a working soldier. The entire UK media had agreed to a Prince Harry moratorium in exchange for unprecedented access to the prince once his tour had finished.

The press moratorium on Prince Harry’s posting in Afghanistan was not unusual. These arrangements are not uncommon and not necessarily unethical. There are many situations in which it is necessary for the press to remain silent to preserve peoples’ safety.

For instance, the travels of politicians are routinely reported after the journey has been undertaken and specific bomb scares are never reported.

What is unethical about the situation is the very nature of the deal and the style of the reporting. It was disappointing that the leading lights of the UK media were so eager to get their hands on a blatant PR exercise in return for their silence and even more disappointing to see them happily regurgitate spoon-fed, government-friendly journalism.

Max Clifford, a man who really should know about PR exercises, described the tour as a “very calculated PR exercise.”

One Press Association journalist was allowed access to the soldier prince and once the story was leaked by the Drudge Report no time was wasted in releasing the prized coverage as 10,490 words of copy and over 200 pictures hit the desks of editors across the UK.

The story dominated the press. There were eleven pages devoted to Harry in the Daily Mail and Daily Express, nine in The Sun and six in the Daily Telegraph. We learnt about Harry’s breakfast routine, his baseball cap and even his toilet arrangements.

The picture spreads were heavily stylised. We had Harry posing in various military guises; striding purposefully towards us like Tom Cruise in Top Gun. As the Independent wrote, Helmland was receiving the “Hello! Treatment”.

The same editors then rushed to wildly praise Harry for his heroism and his change in character.
“Here’s To You Harry The Brave” toasted the Daily Mirror – a paper that usually relishes the sight of Harry dressed as a Nazi or stumbling out of an over-priced West End meat market.

It was journalistic fodder – the bad boy turned good story that they were all hoping for so they could eventually write the bad boy turned good then went bad again reprise.

A self-congratulatory pat on the back could be heard echoing down Fleet Street as the papers applauded their morality in keeping the prince’s whereabouts a secret.

There are three main areas in which this moratorium could be considered unethical.

Firstly, the moratorium would undermine public trust in the press. As Jon Snow said, “one wonders whether viewers, readers and listeners will ever want to trust the media again.”
This argument seems a hard one to fully support though.

The Independent, which has been critical of the press coverage of Harry in Helmland, said:

“In the case of Prince Harry, the alternative to agreeing to play ball was to break the story in advance, thus preventing Harry's deployment, or break it when he was there, so adding to the risk he was already taking. It requires a considerable egotism to place one's tuppenny scruples as a journalist ahead of the safety of British troops.”

A decent enough sentiment but as Joyce McMillan of The Scotsman writes this leaves the press open to accusations of hypocrisy.

“I am seeking to demonstrate that once we start suppressing news stories for any reason, however apparently sensible or compassionate, we stand at the top of a very slippery slope, and that a media industry which, in recent years, has rarely hesitated to wreck the lives of hapless ordinary people or vulnerable celebrities whose stories interest the public, can hardly expect to win many brownie points for keeping quiet in the case of a young prince desperate to prove his manhood on active service.”

It is also interesting to note that the continuing war in Afghanistan has been under-reported. It takes the arrival of Prince Harry and a PR exercise designed to legitimise our presence there to get it in the newspapers at all.

Secondly, as Afghanistan veteran Leo Doherty writes, the gung-ho reporting on Harry’s tour serves to perpetuate a myth that the war in Helmland is a “just war fit for heroes”.

Doherty believes that the army depends on such images of heroism and sacrifice to legitimise its operations. When a soldier dies in action it is insensitive to belittle the very cause of his death:

“This graveside reasoning goes roughly like this: ‘He loved his job and the Army; he was an honourable man; therefore his death can only be honourable and worthwhile.’”

This psychology allows soldiers to “come to terms with the deaths of their colleagues without calling into question the fundamental reason for such deaths.”

The fresh faces keep on turning up at Sandhurst for officer training.

If the media is all too happy to jump on the vainglorious bandwagon of war with the triumphant imagery of Harry the hero this myth can only be perpetuated. Only a rigorous media, unwilling to compromise with the state, can point out what Doherty describes as “the unpleasant truth”.
The willingness of the media to be used as a tool for propaganda is the final way in which the reporting on Prince Harry was unethical.

Ever since the original Gulf War in 2003, war has become a television spectacle. Journalists were embedded with coalition forces and were able to provide captivating images for their audiences.
The imagery may have been spectacular but the scope of the journalism was narrow. There was plenty of action but little insight.

As Anup Shah at http://www.globalissues.org/ writes, embedded journalists were only granted this access in return for sympathetic reporting towards the war.

“For the military however, it (embedded journalists) provided a means to control what large audiences would see, to some extent. Independent journalists would be looked upon more suspiciously. In a way embedded journalists were unwittingly making a decision to be biased in their reporting, in favour of the Coalition troops. If an embedded journalist was to report unfavourably on coalition forces they were accompanying they would not get any co-operation.”

The access granted to a single Press Association journalist by the Ministry of Defence was a particularly obvious example of this. The bargain went as such; you trade in your journalistic ethics to expose “the unpleasant truth” in return for some really cracking pictures that will sell lots of your papers. Anyone who didn’t want to join in would miss out, a terrifying prospect for editors operating in the oligopolistic UK media market.

Consequently, the majority of the UK press did just that and we were presented with what amounted to a massive advert for the war in Afghanistan.

Ironically, Prince Harry didn’t seem that enamoured with the efforts of the Ministry of Defence and the UK press to bolster his image when he said "I generally don't like England that much... it's nice to be away from all the press and the papers and all the general shite that they write."

No propaganda machine can counter foot-in-mouth expertise like that.

Max Clifford Quote: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/harrys-war-the-ugly-truth-790316.html

“Hello! From Helmland quote”, information on the Press Associations copy and pictures, Jon Snow Quote and Harry’s “shite” quote: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-peoples-prince-with-harry-in-afghanistan-dog-of-war-or-pr-pawn-790323.html
The Daily Mirror
Joyce McMillan:
http://living.scotsman.com/joycemcmillan/Joyce-McMillan--Silence-over.3833030.jp
Leo Doherty:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/harrys-war-the-ugly-truth-790316.html
Anup Shah – http://www.globalissues.org/

Journalists in bunfight

2008-04-02T19:22:00.000-07:00

So this is the next piece of work I have had published. On the PAcific Media Centre's Global Watch website...

Some of the defamatory comments that I wanted to add were edited out by my tutor David Robie.

Click the title ay.

James

An interesting story about Spitzer - click here

2008-03-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

Greg Palast is a great journalist and this is quite an interesting story.

It's intriguing how the media are used to create stories like this. Is it our fault we are obsessed with illicit sex rings (or for that matter Britney's cunt, Prince Charles's desire to be a tampon or Janet Jackson's slippery nipples), something to do with human nature or are media organisations being manipulated in other ways?

Has the media become so obsessed with sex that governments can routinely cover up real atrocities with sexual ones?

I wonder if their is a sexual saturation point at which every story in the newspaper is about sex in some way. Even the sports pages just showing pictures of footballers kissing eachother. And if that happens will governments be able to run riot. Will Rupoert Murdoch be forced to wander around in nothing but a corporate condom (there must be some good side to all of this)?

James

Strange editorial from the BBC

2008-03-17T16:20:00.000-07:00

Click on the title above to see the story.

Normally when the BBC do these Vox pops they publish a few different opinions. Here we have three identical opinions on the independence struggles in Tibet.

I can't decide whether the BBC is trying to paint China as a monolithic, mono-idea brainwasher (which i suppose you could argue it is... if you had a very simplistic view of the world), doesn't like Tibet or is trying to flog the Chinese Fawlty Towers.

Selling Fawlty Towers to the Chinese could in theory raise enough money to abolish the licence fee. So there is an incentive.

This story is also the fourth most viewed page on the site.

My site is being overrun by perverts and Boyzone fans

2008-03-12T04:21:00.000-07:00

I just added some software that tells me what people typed in to search engines to find my blog.

So far - Ronan Keating is in the lead

Next is - crotch grabbing photos (???)

and then countless searches along the lines of Thai prostitute, thai massage parlour and so on.

What a revolutionary tool the internet is! You spend ages writing a blog hoping that people enjoy your writing and they are only reading it in the hope that I will divulge the best place to get sucked off in Bangkok or whether Ronan really is an arse-faced tosser with a voice like a hoover thats sucked up a choir boy.

Good night

James

Catholic Church Raises the bar

2008-03-10T20:30:00.000-07:00

So the Catholic Church has revamped the Seven Deadly sins - to fit in with a modern world. They are now:

Environmental pollution
Genetic manipulation
Accumulating excessive wealth
Inflicting poverty
Drug trafficking and consumption
Morally debatable experiments
Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

Great. I will no longer burn in the fires of hell once I die. These mortal sins are surely harder to acheive than the previous set....

Pride
Envy
Gluttony
Lust
Anger
Greed
Sloth

which were worryingly easy to fall for. Unless of course they are running side by side and greed is somehow equated with a "violation of the fundemental rights of human nature". Kids who have eaten one too many bowls of ice cream will be next in the queue to Pol Pot and the like under this system.

Its also nice to see the Catholic Church conecerned about Human Rights and the obscenely wealthy. Black pot looking for similarly shaded kettle springs to mind.

james

A few thoughts...

2008-03-10T03:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jan/13/barackobama.uselections2008

Cracking Iannucci story about the difference in rhetoric between US and UK politicians. Its seems he shares my view that Obama has become the pied piper of politics and that no woman with a haircut like Clinton's should be allowed control of a can of hairspray let alone the United States of America.

Also noticed that the Mirror is running a campaign to stop underage drinking. Someting like help the Mirror "'Can' Underage boozing". Made me wonder whether you could consider the newspaper crusade as a news value in itself. Other examples include the Daily Mail's "what is the world coming to" campaign which attempted to whip the nation into a fervour of jingoistic wooly-headedness with stories, ney lies, about immigrants being given Rolls Royces and handjobs from the Royal Family once they had rowed up the channel tunnel cunningly disguised in coats made of Euros.

At any rate it pisses me off when newspapers take on these campaigns. They are either making a general assumption that everyone in the country is thinking much the same thing and then having the arrogance to believe that their extravagant headline will actually make a difference. Or they are cynically trying to sell newspapers with cheap issues rather than making the effort to actually go out and investigate news.

"Slow news day - lets try and get everyone to bash a Paki. Or swear at a granny."

The other silly UK news trend, which to be fair has been going on for quite a while now, is to have small bits of editorial appear in speech bubbles launched like vacuous crack pipes from the chemically swollen lips of page three girls. Things such as "Tricia thinks its great London has got the Olympics but worries about where the dosh is coming from"... or "Jamie Oliver may be cute to look at on the telly box but Michelle just can't help but have her heart melt like a gooey chocolate fondant when she see him slobbering all over those fat kids"... they go a bit like that anyway.

Whats the point of this? Well... its just a basic insult to everyone involved's intelligence.

Good night

James

Te Waha Nui Online - AUT

2008-03-05T15:09:00.000-08:00

Te Waha Nui Online - AUT

Te Waha Nui is the student paper we write at AUT. It's literal translation is "Big Mouth" and isn't a reference to the hardcore pornography on page three.

If you click on the title above (which through the magic of the internet is also a hyperlink) you will go to my first New Zealand published story. As you will see I have been studying to become a journalist for about a fortnight and I am already writing stories that are slightly biased towards Rupert Murdoch.

James

DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ ABOUT WIKIPEDIA

2008-03-03T20:18:00.000-08:00

A new piece of software known as Wikiscanner, developed by the California Institute of Technology, has revealed the site to be “the province of the covert lobby” according to Sunday Times columnist Oliver Kamm.

The big bad boys of the corporate underworld, Dow Chemicals, AstraZeneca and Exxon Mobil to name but a few, may have been editing their own entries to show themselves in a more flattering light.

AstraZeneca have deleted references to the suicidal side-effects of its anti-depressant Seroquel, Exxon Mobil has altered passages explaining their failure to pay more than $5 billion dollars (US) in compensation to Alaskan fishermen affected by the Exxon Valdez oil spill and Dow Chemicals have mysteriously deleted a paragraph referring to the Bohpal chemical disaster of 1984.

Perhaps more worryingly the CIA has also been at it - reportedly guilty of inserting “Wyaaaah!” after every mention of the Iranian President.

The cynicism is astounding; it’s akin to scribbling on the Dead Sea Scrolls and changing Jesus’s name to Kevin.

Have columnists such as Kamm who believes we should “jeer at its (Wikipedia’s) pretensions“, in their haste to condemn Wikipedia, somewhat missed the point of the website itself.

What’s your view on the Wikipedia issue? An unbiased opinion based on a careful summation of both sides of the story no doubt. A considered viewpoint that takes into account all available information and concludes with an original insight. Honestly?

Or have you been spouting something you read elsewhere? Perhaps even from Wikipedia itself. Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, claims to love Wikiscanner saying it “brings an additional level of transparency to what’s going on at Wikipedia”. This despite the fact that it has brought to the fore Wikipedia’s main frailty - namely that is completely unchecked and can be edited by anybody. Wales, though, has been quoted as saying that it is only through transparency that Wikipedia will achieve quality.

Recent moves by Wikipedia have served to improve the reliability of information on the site. Although it is only in a trial format, the new software that only allows trusted editors to immediately edit Wikipedia pages will certainly help matters. A user can become a trusted editor by submitting suggestions for changes to articles to other trusted editors. Once a user has posted enough reliable entries they will gain the status of trusted editor. If too many of their entries from here on in are disputed they lose their status. This system is tied closely to the ethics of traditional journalism and should quieten the doubters.

The success of Wikipedia seems bound up with a very modern definition of truth; an epistemology of consensus rather than hard facts. The pursuit of knowledge has never taken a straight path, its history is littered with avenues of thought that led nowhere, wrong turns and journeys no doubt of ingenious imbecility. We remember the path that went forward, the Galileo’s and the Einstein’s but we forget those who for one reason or another decided to postulate that the Earth was a cube or that light travelled on wheels. Wikipedia works on this principle, if enough people edit an article it will eventually become accurate. Until now the process has been vulnerable to information sharks such as Exxon but those corporations that have been caught with their online pants down this week will certainly think twice about doctoring their entries from now on.

Kamm’s and the rest of the traditional media’s criticisms of Wikipedia seem to harbour a certain paranoia. They seem to dislike the public’s trust of this young pretender, who is potentially ousting them from their seat of arbiters of all relevant information. The criticism they lay at the feet of Wikipedia, that it is nothing more than a bunch of amateurish opinions, is rather ironic as it is an accusation that could be leveled at many newspapers or television stations in the world. Across the board it seems that comment and opinion is taking the place of good honest reportage.

From bolshy, one-sided television journalists, the rants of tabloid newspapers and the increasingly large comments sections of the broadsheets to the rampant parturition of websites such as You Tube that allow even those of us who don’t have a column in the Herald to voice our opinion, unbiased news coverage is a Sleeping Beauty awaiting its kiss.

Whatever happened to surveying the facts and coming up with our own thoughts? It seems certain that there is a complete distrust of statistics et al and this is not surprising seeing as our governments and some sections of our media couldn’t be trusted with a plastic spoon let alone a dossier of war secrets or a DNA database. One almost had pity on Tony Blair when he childishly cried out about the media being a feral beast. The Prime Minister should be big and ugly enough to take the criticism, the satire and the downright dumb spat at him from various media sources, but he does have a point when it comes to the sensationalization of the media.

No longer can we have the story “Cat Rescued By Fireman From Tree” it must be “Terrorist Cat in Daring Rescue Mission By Underpaid Fireman in Tree Funded By The National Lottery - Where Will It End!”

Perhaps journalists are bored. The less discriminate of us seem to fire off ill informed opinions like a senile major with a blunderbuss. Maybe we just can’t face the mundanity of the world we live in and try to exaggerate. This doesn’t seem to add up though - the current world, whether
you like it or not is a very exciting place to live, as long as you don’t necessarily combine exciting with pleasurable. It seems more likely to be the product of our beloved market forces pushing their noses in where they are not needed. What sells newspapers or advertising space? Scandal and gossip. With a media that is all outraged bark and corporate muzzle this won’t change unless we stop falling for it.

The irony of the traditional media sneering at Wikipedia’s shortcomings is blindingly evident. However, Wikipedia must embrace the ethics of traditional journalism if it is to achieve its aim of becoming a reliable source of information. Using the trusted editors system is a good step in the right direction.

Rather than jeering at Wikipedia’s pretensions - I shall be sticking my tongue out at the pretensions of Kamm and his cronies. A brief trawl through Wikipedia reveals the slightly anal nature of the average poster and the lengths that most posters go to reference their articles, lengths that reveal a passion for honesty that escapes companies such as Exxon. Wikipedia must aspire to a higher set of ethics than corporations; at the same time though, as a uniquely democratic arbiter of information it must be allowed to thrive.

HARAWIRA IS RIGHT TO STAND UP FOR HIS BELIEFS

2008-03-03T20:15:00.000-08:00

Song and dance making has long been a core subject for the average MP but a whole Opera seems to have been composed in relation to Hone Harawira’s unscheduled trip to the Northern Territories. NZ First MP, Ron Marks, has led the criticisms accusing Mr. Harawira of “going AWOL” and questioning his actions in Parliament.

If only more politicians were like Hone. The trip to Victoria to discuss election finance law and victim’s rights seemed to be something of a junket; the National Party certainly thought so and pulled out. This was more an opportunity for cocktail sipping and ego stroking, especially for members of opposition parties who have very little say at these Committees. This is patently not an arena that Hone, to use his own vernacular, is stuffed about and unlike many politicians before him he actually went to the heart of the matter.

How much can politicians learn about victim’s rights in a conference room staring at a biscuit?

Isn’t Mr Harawira correct in going to the victims themselves? With his visit to the Aboriginal communities he has increased awareness and understanding of a group of victims and a social issue more used to being swept under the carpet than receiving national media coverage.

Harawira’s forthright style has the media sitting up and begging for a story or a sound-bite. The media loves it when a politician speaks his mind; Harawira knows this and plays it to his advantage. Ably protected in Parliament by the shrewd Dr Sharples - Harawira has made a name for himself, bought an issue close to his heart a huge amount of press and made some other Mps look a little less macho in comparison.

This story is really a microcosm of what is wrong with a lot of the developed world’s politics. Hone Harawira only stands out because he is a rarity - a politician who speaks his mind and follows up his words with actions. The public are surely tiring of the hamstrung politician too scared to say what he thinks in case he gets told off by his party. The World needs politicians that aren’t afraid of actually doing something rather than hiding behind a veil of statistics, committees and damned obfuscation.

This isn’t to say that Hone has it plain-sailing from now on. Calling Howard a “racist bastard” perhaps smacked a little of naivete. It’s quite possible that this would actually help Howard’s case for re-election as conservative elements of Australian society may feel stung and react defensively by casting their vote in his favour.

Hone Harawira shouldn’t let these concerns hold him back though, he’s currently a breath of fresh air. It is important that his party, especially Pita Sharples, protects him and ensures that his efforts and skill are focused in the correct areas. If Hone sounds off about every issue under the sun, his effect will be diluted and his style of politics relies very heavily on impact. Hone will ultimately be judged on how he approaches social issues in his own backyard; so watch this space.

IMMIGRANTS SHOULD BEWARE OF EMPLOYMENT HOAXES

2008-03-03T20:03:00.000-08:00

(The guy that this is about, the hoaxer not my friend, scares the bejesus out of me!)

For many immigrants a period of time working in New Zealand offers the ideal opportunity to gain valuable experience, earn better than your home countries wages and a step up the career ladder. Unemployment is extremely low in comparison to many other countries and consequently employers are often prepared to take a chance on a candidate’s personality and enthusiasm rather than a CV bursting with experience.

Considering the skill shortages that New Zealand has, it is unsurprising that the government makes a considerable effort to promote immigration. For instance in my own country, the UK, every year there are several government funded exhibitions extolling the virtues of a new life in the World’s youngest country. With English as my first language adapting to the working environment here has been relatively-simple, a breath of fresh air in comparison to the stifling, micro-management favoured by so many uninspired middle managers in the UK.

For the many immigrants who come here without English as their first language there are some understandable barriers to employment. That said, the majority of these people that I have met have, at the very least, a good standard of conversational English. It is only when the more esoteric language used in the workplace comes into play that they struggle.

Carlos Muniaz arrived in New Zealand from Chile about three months ago. He has good conversational English, is a qualified safety engineer in the gas industry and is looking for work in this industry. After searching the internet he found a Neil Parker, Managing Director of a company called SafeSystems Ltd. Neil claimed that he would be able to find work for Carlos working for contractors such as Northpower, that are used by the utility firm Vector who outsource maintenance and building work on the North Island’s electricity and gas infrastructure.

At first, things went well. Carlos received training at Utilitech and attained a warrant allowing him to work in this environment. He was even given some English tuition. Soon he was given a weeks work in Whangarei working for Northpower.

Things started to wrong however when Mr. Parker became reluctant to pay his wages. Eventually Carlos received a sum of money equivalent to about half the work he had carried out. Without a good enough knowledge of English he felt unsure as to how to defend himself in this situation.

Mr. Parker offered further work but this time, on the morning that he was due to start, Carlos received a phone call from Safesystems demanding that he paid them $500 “insurance” before he was allowed to start work. Fortunately, Carlos turned the work down. Since then however, Mr. Parker has acted in an intimidating manner to Carlos and has threatened to go to immigration to “make his life difficult”.

Although Carlos is here legally this is a worrying prospect for any immigrant and without fully knowing the procedures and laws that New Zealand has to protect people in these situations was unsure as to where he stood.

I asked an insider at Vector whether anyone had heard of Mr. Parker or SafeSystems. Nobody had but it was impossible for them to know whether he may have an informal employment arrangement with any of their contractors.

On phoning Utilitech, who carry out training for Electricity and Gas contractors, I was told that Mr. Parker had worked for Northpower several years ago but had left. They seemed to think it was highly unlikely that he now worked for, or had relationships with, any other contractors and hinted that there were currently rumours circulating around the industry concerning Mr. Parker’s fidelity.

Both Vector and Utilitech believed a $500 insurance fee to be highly unusual and morally dubious. It was certainly not industry practice to charge this fee.

Suspicions were confirmed on contacting the police. Mr. Parker has a criminal record for, among other things, credit card fraud and extortion. The police told Carlos that if Mr. Parker threatened him again he should phone 111; without any real evidence though it would be impossible for them to prosecute.

Understandably the thought that other immigrants may have already been fooled by Mr. Parker is rather distressing. It seems to me that there is not clear enough information for non-English speaking immigrants as to what they should expect from an employer or the labour market and their rights and avenues of reply if they find themselves in a situation like this.

Arguments in the UK and Australia surrounding immigration often centre on whether immigrants can adapt to a culture without speaking English. Socially, this may well be true. At work this is also true but it should also be our duty to protect those who are vulnerable at the beginning of their time in New Zealand. Who would want to immerse themselves in a culture that is unable to protect them when they are most likely to fall prey to a scam such as this?
New Zealand needs immigrants to fill the gap left by those leaving to find work in Australia, the UK and the USA. The rights and wrongs of this are not for this article to debate but it is a reality that the government needs to face. Consequently, as much should be done to help new arrivals settle and this includes giving them the information they need to find secure employment, housing and so on in a way that they can fully understand. Learning English at its highest levels will come with time but scam merchants strike while the iron is hot.

(Names and details changed to protect the identities of persons involved).

PRIVILEGE PLC

2008-03-03T19:47:00.000-08:00

(This article was inspired by the UK government's love of creating a private market for everything even if, as in the case of healthcare, it would seem to be an artificial model. Like trying to pass a cat off as a dog. It is not a criticism of the Royal Family as such - the inbred idiots are quite capable of doing that for themselves. I suppose its also a bit of a dig at the proliferation of pointless technologies that are currently being wafted around - "permanently watch Paris Hilton on my mobiel so I don't miss a thing" - just fuck off.)

An article by James Murray

As mantras go "Privatisation, Privatisation, Privatisation" doesn't really cut the mustard. Nevertheless, since the late 1980's it has certainly been the buzzword within UK politics, a buzzword that has seen many of our institutions, rightly or wrongly, given over to private corporations to be run more efficiently.

Three months ago today it was the turn of the Royal Family to be thrown to the capitalist vultures. According to most they were a dying corpse waiting to be picked to pieces by the ravages of the private market; mere sailors drowning in the Neptunian choppy seas of big business. Yet in reality, how have they coped?

Wild predictions predicting the instantaneous downfall of the House of Windsor have proved to be highly fallacious. As they may say themselves, they've done rather well indeed. Never a family to bypass tradition, the Windsors have grasped the, as yet, meagre traditions of privatisation and clung to them like a determined lobster. Their immediate reaction was to choose a funky new name. Close advisors to the Queen are believed to have advised her that the brand "Royal Family" had become stale and outdated. There were also copyright issues to be thought of – there are after all several other Royal Families throughout the world. Their new name, ‘Privilege’, is thought to be the brainchild of Prince Edward (now known as the Prince Formerly Known As Edward) the Royal Families new director of Marketing.

Along with Prince Phillip, (now known as Phillip McWindsor, an attempt to woo his Scottish following as the former Duke of Edinburgh) the Prince Formerly Known As Edward has been at the forefront of re-branding Privilege; a task which he has apparently taken on with gusto. "A fabulous opportunity to make the Royal Family as popular and relevant to today's society as Take That and the Spice Girls," he announced at the unveiling of the new name. Prince Phillip, the new Director of International PR, has been working tirelessly to transport this new image abroad.

"I have encountered some opposition in the countries our good friend Livingstone found. They don't seem to grasp the idea of re-branding and seemed quite confused when I told the chaps there that I was now to be called Phil McWindsor rather than Your Royal Highness. Very amusing to see such bemused faces and so many bright white smiles... I thought. And as for the Greeks!"

Not all members of the Royal Family have taken to their new roles so enthusiastically. Prince Charles, once previously guaranteed a shot at the top spot, is said to be fuming at the prospect of facing competition for a job he considers his own. A source close to the Queen said that she is now considering applications to be the new Queen and that it is by no means a foregone conclusion that Charles will become the new Queen once she retires to become a silent partner. He is also said to be furious at suggestions that he should now be known as Bonnie Prince Charlie simply stating that this was "Bloody demeaning”. Other contenders for the top job include Richard Branson, Tony Blair (in his autobiography he states that it has been a lifelong ambition for him to become Queen), the surviving members of the Rock Band Queen and there are rumours that a job share proposal has been submitted from the Beckham estate.

The economic impact of Royal Privatisation has been unusual to say the least. Privilege has been set up as a Ltd company as the Queen is apparently unwilling to lose control of the business. However, modernisers such as the Prince Formerly Known As Edward and Prince Andrew (now to be known as Andy Pandy as Privilege's Executive In Charge Of The Youth Vote), are said to be keen to float the Royal Family on the stock exchange. This is a prospect that has city investors twiddling their thumbs with barely concealed excitement. Financial "gentle giant" Alan Sugar recently released a press statement expressing his interest in acquiring Privilege stating that the firm would make an interesting sister company to his main interest Amstrad and that "(he) would love to see Wills and Harry peddling his cheap tat".

However, the greatest threat to the security and success of Privilege comes not from within, but from new-found competition. Under European Competition Law it is now possible for anyone in England to set up their own Royal Family. In fact this is being positively encouraged by Blair's Government. In a recent Prime Minister's Question Time Blair said that "(he wanted) every child in England to have access to their own local Royal Family. For too long having a local Royal Family has been the preserve of those children living in West London or certain remote parts of Scotland. In the name of devolution it is important that every village, every town, every suburb has their own Royal Family so no child misses out." He promptly pledged a fifth of Gordon Brown's budget to achieving this and in the upcoming election it will be New Labour's primary manifesto promise.

George Williams of Newby on Ashe in Sussex was one of the first people in England to start his own Royal Family. Described by locals both as an entrepreneur with an eye for a business opportunity and a conniving pain in the arse, Mr Williams has been a successful businessman in the area for nearly thirty years. I was fortunate enough to interview him:

JM: What made you decide to set up your own Royal Family?

GW: Well, it seemed as if the old Royal Family seemed to have a good old time, it was easy money to be honest.

JM: So what have you called your Royal Family?

GW: The Royal Family, you know the name was just waiting there to be used – it seemed a waste really (laughs).

JM: And what is your role in the firm?

GW: Well obviously, I am Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth the Third.

JM: I see, and how does the business work?

GW: Well essentially the local people pay for my food, clothing, holidays and shelter and in return I ride up and down the street twice a week on a horse wearing a robe.

JM: Do people come out to watch you?

GW: Oh yes… but I think most people come for the free plastic flags I hand out.

Although I felt that Mr Williams had slightly missed the Government's point he was indeed running a thriving business and he is now only two hundred pounds away from affording his first throne – a vital asset for any Royal Family business.

This rosy picture, is, unfortunately, not typical for the whole of the country. Many communities have lodged complaints against their localised royal families with the new industry regulator, OFF-TOFF. It seems that many local Royal Families are simply not offering value for money. Mike Nobalding, the Ombudsman for OFF-TOFF, explains:

"Consumers have become used to a high level of entertainment from our old nationalised Royal Family. Divorce, death and scandal always lurked round the regal corner. What many people did not realise when approving the privatisation of the monarchy is that the existing monarchy actually provided very good value for money. It was a case of simple economics – as the monarchy lost power in relation to government it naturally sought out other ways of justifying its existence to a modern audience. Charles I, of course will always be known as the Godfather of "Roytainment" after commandeering his own death. People soon realised that a country without a Royal Family, as proposed by Cromwell, was a very dry place and soon returned to a more familiar state. King George III was an extremely entertaining madman with impeccable comic timing and Victoria was everyone's favourite straight-woman. The current Royal Family were perhaps the most sophisticated arbiters of "Roytainment" and set a very high standard. Unfortunately for new Royal Families, governed by the laws of business, providing such high standards of entertainment is simply not cost effective. They are limited as to how much scandal they can dole out."

I asked Mike Nobalding to give me an example of the sort of complaint that OFF-TOFF received:

"Well… for instance the Royal Family set up in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire have been in operation for six months now. People have paid them money in good faith but they haven't even left their house. There hasn't been so much as an illicit game of golf and the eldest son just received three A grades at A level with absolutely no assistance from his teachers. This is just not acceptable."
If local Royal Families are successful it is thought that Big Business will soon tread in their footsteps'. National energy behemoth, the National Grid, recently announced that it was drawing up plans to offer its own Royal Network service. Ian Lightbolt, CEO of Powergen, was ever so keen to explain this idea:

"The National Grid will set up a national network of Royal Families all linked up by big pipes through which information is carried in the form of blood infused with blue food colouring. Then a plethora of 'middlemen' companies, Dukes or Duchesses if you like, will be able to sell their service nationally. The consumer will be the only winner as Royal Families will no longer be localised and competition will rise –resulting in greater customer benefits for all. A man in Bournemouth could get his Royal Services from a Royal Family in Scotland… the possibilities are endless!"

Endless, maybe, perhaps eternal also – but how did Powergen fit into the picture.

"Well you see… this is where things get even more exciting for the consumer.”

Note; the reporter arches an eyebrow.

"Powergen are looking to offer people the opportunity to buy not just their gas and electricity from us but also their Royal Needs. We feel that only a large faceless company will be able to deliver the high-octane thrills and spills that the modern day royalist thrives on - unlike, small businesses who simply do not have a high enough cash flow."

However, plans to deliver Royal Services via blue blood sent through pipes have been criticised by many as it is estimated that it would take upwards of five years to dig up the roads and pavements in order to install the lines. Even then only seventy percent of the country would receive an adequate service. Mobile phone operators have dismissed the Blueblood method as primitive and instead want to champion their Third-In-Line-To-The-Throne Generation Royal Handsets which will deliver mobile Royal Services to the consumer who likes to be on the move. Hand Sett, Technical Director of Finnish Phone Company NOKIA explained how this mobile system would work:

"First we erect 20 foot metal poles all over the country, about one every square mile and then the information is sent from our virtual castle in which we have a 24hour Royal Family on call. The information is sent by what we like to call the Royal Wave. Users can watch highlights of the Royal Family's day on their handset – you can see the Prince eating breakfast, the Princess talking on the phone – you can even see the Queen using the toilet. We will also be offering customers the chance to chat or text the Royal Family, texts will cost £1.50 and chat will cost £4 a minute – these services will of course be mainly marketed towards children who don't understand the concept of money."

Channel 4 has also jumped on the proverbial Horse and Carriage and is soon to launch Royal Big Brother. Royal Family members from around the country are invited to apply by sending in a short five minute audition tape. Twelve members will be chosen and a Queen will be chosen via an arm wrestling competition. Channel 4 executive Jake Sideburns stresses that Royal Big Brother will be unlike any previously seen reality television shows;

"In order to create a sense of reality there will be no audience voting. Contestants can only be
removed by death, revolution or a change in the balance of international power such as the fall of the pope or the rise of a European Emperor."

Perhaps the biggest dissenters against the privatisation of the monarchy are the British National Party – not because of the inevitable dissolution of a British institution – they are instead worried about a European Invasion. As the law stands in Europe there is absolutely nothing to stop a foreign Royal Family from entering our country (perhaps illegally) and taking a slice of the power fruit-cake. Mike Hunt, leader of the BNP stated in a recent rally;

"Can you imagine being ruled by Germans or Greeks, or Gypsies or Arabs? It would be bedlam... no one would know where we stood and the fabric of society as we know it would stain like a white sheet in a hot wash with a red sock. There would be chaos. We should return to the days when we had one Royal Family, all of them English, all of them blue eyed and blonde and fond of marching. Good decent people, that's what we need, good decent people to rule us. Not muck."

A salient and concise point indeed; it is undeniable that the privatisation of the Royal Family has provoked many an opinion. Yet in many ways it seems to be the natural extension of Royalism in a modern, competitive, new, progressive, computer-literate society. Lets face it as our media needs grow it is almost unfair to expect one Royal Family to be able to meet all our demands. Two wouldn't even be enough. By privatising the whole system we have opened monarchy up to the joys of the competitive market and with all the wonderful initiatives he has heard this reporter is certain that this can only be a good move.

NHS: Clinically Obese

2008-03-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

(I wrote this after actually working for the lumbering behemoth that is the NHS. The decision making processes of Europe's largest employer are worryingly not too far off the example below)

Last week the NHS controversially refused itself lifesaving treatment on the grounds that the organisation is clinically obese. The much-debated obesity policy, that has up till now only affected members of the public, was originally intended to act as an incentive for those who have over-eaten to tighten their belts but has now taken on much more serious consequences.
Dr Alexander Simmons, spokesperson for the NHS, attempted to explain the organisation’s position;

“For several years the NHS has run a policy of refusing to help those who do not help themselves. Why on earth should a man who has existed on bean curd for the entirety of his life come second in the queue for heart bypass surgery to a man seemingly addicted to hydrogenated fats? Why should the sober Buddhist play second fiddle to the drunk Irishman in the queue for livers? And why should the Swiss cowgirl who has breathed nothing but mountain fresh air all her life not get treatment for lung cancer when she is trampled in the queue by a horde of wheezing and yellowed nicotine addicts. Its just simple common sense at the end of the day.”

I questioned him further as to why this policy has been extended to the NHS itself;

“Well the government has very much taken the view that the NHS has to help itself before it can be helped by itself. If we are to convert money into food and the NHS into the body of a man, it quite clearly becomes extremely transparently obvious that this man has eaten far too much and done little or no exercise. Consequently, this man has ballooned to quite astronomical proportions.”

I asked how the NHS should help itself;

“Well we must quite clearly and honestly and above all else definitely pledge to eat less and exercise more. Only once we have attained an economically sustainable body mass index (and one must remember that a well paid team of information analysts will come in to play here as we need to make extremely scientific measurements not just pinch the proverbial fat between proverbial forefinger and thumb!), only then will we be able to confidently say that it may well be the right time, approximately but relatively certainly, for the NHS to finally help itself… perhaps with a stomach stapling operation.”

I ask him what a stomach stapling operation may represent.

“Well I suppose, one could make some sort of loosely-linked comparison with job cuts or salary decreases. Perhaps, but only perhaps of course, there may be adjustments, small but large-scale, to pension funds, possibly. But if the NHS, now being described as the body of a man who has eaten too much and run too little, does enough exercise then the job cuts and salary decreases and the potentially possible, yet, if entertained seriously, certain adjustments, here or herewith, to pensions may not need to come about at all, or in some circumstances they may be lessened by a nominal or even substantial degree.”

I ask how the NHS will be expected to lose weight?

“Well obviously, well obvious to the trained eye at the very least or perhaps even that is an extremely obvious statement, obviously people may have to work harder. More efficiently, streamling productivity or somesuch idea so that the overall effect is one of a fat man straining to run a 100 metres in under twenty seconds.”

The spokesperson, turns a subtle shade of pink for a moment and then I ask him, if job cuts are still inevitable after all this exercise, who will be the first to go?

“Well, of course this is a contentious subject, contentious yet strangely palatable when viewed through the correct lens. Of course we value our nurses and our cleaning staff with high esteem but unfortunately it is they who must be the first to go, in some circumstances, though largely and predominantly in all circumstances (with some notable exceptions).”

Why? Why are managers and clerical staff not being considered?

“Another very good question, of course, well obviously to be sacked you need to be sacked by someone who is hierarchically, if not in physical stature, greater than you (of course this isn’t to say that they are a better person although we are unable to not reflect this in their paypacket and the size of their office seat but these are of course trivial items. Especially chairs!). Therefore it would only actually be possible to sack those at the bottom lest we loose a chink in our coil and the whole system comes tumbling down and all we are left with are hardworking, perhaps mythically so, nurses and cleaners. Who would never be able to be sacked under any circumstances as they would, of course, no longer be under the control of a manager. As for clerical staff, well I have only been aware that we employ clerical staff since last week, I thought all my letters were typed by a “PC” not a person but I guess we would be unable to let these people go as managers and doctors would have to either write legibly, or perhaps even in capital letters, or type their own work up, which is obviously quicker in the first place but would leave no room for long-winded phone conversations with understaff detailing exactly what font the letter should be typed in and would, of course loose all the fun of sending documents back and forth covered with an increasing amount of squiggly red pen. So they of course cannot be sacked, especially as they are the only people who know where we get the P45’s from.”

I question the man further about the relevance of bureaucratic work within the NHS.

“Well, it seems to me that at the bottom of all this if someone is sick they need to receive treatment. Bottom line… unless of course they are dead and then of course they’ve got nothing to do with us!”
He lifts his hands up in mock surrender and smiles bashfully while emitting a half-laugh half-spit which wets the lapel of his suit.

“At any rate people certainly come to the NHS to get well and that is an awful lot of people and if all those people were to get in the same queue at once obviously there would be bedlam. So really we need all these people to make sure that the queues or waiting lists, as you may refer to them, are organised fairly and properly. Imagine, persay, that you were at the fairground and you were queuing for a fast ride. There may well be, I am not sure as I have never personally been and therefore cannot vouch for the accuracy of this analogy, some sort of attendant keeping the queue in order. He may perhaps send drunk people and people who are too short for the agreed safety limits to the back of the queue or even out of the queue altogether, if he is particularly good at his job and a man of great resource he will add them to the queue of a ride that would be more suitable to their condition of inebriation or shortness. This man is very much a symbol, here, within this analogy that I am, of course, uncertain as to the actual accuracy of, a symbol of bureaucracy within the NHS. To paraphrase we could say, (I suppose, if I may parenthesis within a paraphrase), that the job, nay worthy occupation of the NHS bureaucrat, or Operational Manager as they are correctly called as bureaucrat is of course anachronous, that the job is really to move short and drunk people from one queue to the um… other.”

James Murray

Sharp Objects Banned From Parliament As Skin Thins Alarmingly

2008-03-03T19:39:00.000-08:00

Mps from all parties were relieved today to see all sharp objects removed from Parliament. The move follows several gory incidents involving pens, staples and even sheets of paper.

One politician, who asked to remain anonymous in case anyone laughed at him, described a horrific scene.

“The honourable member only fell asleep for a couple of seconds. His head just glanced his neighbour’s raised copy of the day’s newspaper… and just like that his head split open. His ego went everywhere. It just wouldn’t stop…”.

We have been unable to show footage of this event as it’s just far too funny for the public to understand.

(written in response to New Zealands curiously draconian laws regarding the satirisation of politicians. your not meant to.... on video in parliament at least)

Feral Media Put Down After Eating Blair

2008-03-03T19:34:00.000-08:00

At 2pm yesterday a lethal injection was administered to the media two weeks after it had been found guilty of eating Tony Blair.

The move has been widely criticised by Animal Welfare groups as being supremely arrogant and unnecessary as the Media was thought to have been close to death anyway.

“Eating Tony would be enough to kill off any living creature. Post mortems revealed Tony as being mainly made up of Asbestos, straw, smarties, legacies and soap.” Said one activist who wished to remain anonymous.

“Its so horribly ironic,” sighed Cherie Blair at her husbands funeral.. “Tony and the media used to get on so well. He’d take it for walks, throw it bones. Tony would always have a bit of bacon in his pocket to make it look like the media liked him.”

Meanwhile, 30000 unemployed Media workers marched on the capital. They were described as being gay, communist and predominantly from ethnic minorities.

(Written in response to poor little Tony moaning that the media had gotten too big for its boots. Didn't think that in 1997 did you Tony?)

Citizen Journalism

2008-03-03T19:23:00.000-08:00

This is an article by Peter Horrocks - head of the BBC news room about the pros and cons of citizen journalism. It also describes how the use of new media and "accidental journalists" has made actual changes to the structure of the BBC newsroom.

I particularly like what he writes about the difficulties in ethically editing comment forums such as Have Your Say - trying to balance the public's right to a forum with the real possibility that that forum can be overtaken with views based on hatred rather than informed debate.

James

PS. It may not be clear but the link for the article is embedded in the title if the blog.

Blog Due To Restart

2008-03-03T19:16:00.001-08:00

Hiding In Your Cupboard is due to restart... less of a travel blog and more of a political opinion blog... if you can stand to listen to me blather on.

If any Grad Dips are reading this brilliant... but I apologise in advance for the lack of editing etc. I just write it as i go along and consequently there will be a lot of mistakes - especially with New Zealand names which I always mishear and then have to approximate. A good example would be me using the word Pahoa instead of Pakeha for ages.

To fill in the six month gap I have posted some of the writing I have done over the last six months.

Cheers

James

SHOCK HORROR - CENSORSHIP REIGNS IN NEW ZEALAND

2007-07-31T17:11:00.001-07:00

I have finally met the Prime Minister. Frankly it was about time... even then we were separated by a glass door panel. I was three minutes away from a face to face meeting, possibly even a handshake. However, at the last minute I was turfed out of the waiting room (for the second time), to make way for Helen and her “people”. Despite this I managed to catch Helen’s eye – and there was certainly an exchange: an exchange between political rebel and political stalwart.

Why am I referring to myself as a political rebel – I hear you ask? Well, on the same day that I met Helen Clark – I learnt that the New Zealand government had agreed to the filming of Parliamentary sessions but in exchange had outlawed the use of images of parliament or MPs being used to “satirise, denigrate or ridicule”. What a bunch of children! I thought Mr Blair was a bit of a scaredy-cat when he tried to describe the media as a Feral Beast – but this takes the biscuit. The TV companies have said that they are going to ignore this ban but the crime is a serious one – laughing at a politician while using an image of him in Parliament (i.e. actually being a politician) puts a person in contempt of parliament which is an imprisonable offence.

One politician virtually cried when a reporter described him as “examining the insides of his eyeballs” when he was caught asleep. He claimed that journalists weren’t funny and that they should consider a different career if they wanted to be comedians. Ironically enough for the politician if the comment isn’t funny it doesn’t meet the criteria for satire or ridicule and whether such a comment could be said to denigrate someone is fairly dubious. So it seems that as long as journalists remain tacitly humourless they can say anything they like.

I.e. it is permissible to say:

Politician A is a liar who is responsible for the deaths of many innocent people.

But not:

Politician A smells of Poo.

This leads us, prima faeces, to the conclusion that Politicians would rather be known as mass murderers than smell of poo.

This arrogance on the behalf of the politicians makes clear their dim view of the general public. Why are Blair and the New Zealand government so concerned about their portrayal in the media? Essentially, because the message they are trying to communicate via the media is often torn to shreds by the time it gets to the electorate. Blair complains that he has tried to convey the facts via other forms of media (i.e. his website, carrier pigeons, Morse code and smoke signals) but to no avail. This is bollocks – Blair and governments world-wide have made only perfunctory attempts at embracing an alternative media that scares the wits out of them because they struggle to control it (Blair is a famous, and strangely self-congratulatory technophobe – which is fairly shameful for a leader of one of the richest countries on the world).*

When they get upset at the media’s treatment of their press releases they are essentially upset because they want the media to act as their direct mouthpiece with little or no comment. They fear that the general public are essentially too stupid to read through the lines and make their own analysis.

If they are so concerned about straightforward “FACTS!!!” being communicated to the public (which they are strangely reticent about when it comes to issues such as cash for honours, invisible weapons of mass destruction or accurate rates of inflation and unemployment) they should take the responsibility of publishing them themselves and then we can all breathe a sigh of relief and tear them to shreds anyway as they will probably be doctored beyond any sense.

I could write for ages on this subject but I fear a rant coming on so will stop myself here.

I have procured another, slightly better paid job for the next few months. One problem… I have to start at 7am. Starting at 7am is for morons… the sort of people who say things like “you wouldn’t recognise hard work if it punched you in the face” or “twenty pounds!!! You were ripped off mate. If you had driven up to Hastings, got on the 32 bus, got off at Wimpole, swum through a Ford, jogged up a mountain, scratched out your eyeballs with a feather and then eaten your own appendix you could have got that for 19 pounds.”. You know the type – inevitably a bit ruddy in complexion, simple in the eyes and prone to laughing at the wrong bits. They quite often get to work early for seemingly no reason whatsoever except for the fact that they don’t have the concentration span required for sleep.

So I’ve been lumped with that entertaining lot. I can’t wait to become a student again and then get a relatively interesting job.

Jayne’s job however, is much better. She has met a lot of her caseload now and it seems pretty interesting. The lengths that people are able to go here for children who are having difficulties put the UK to shame. I can’t go into too much detail though as most of what she does is confidential.

Jayne’s first school meeting provoked much merriment. After walking in to the room and introducing herself in a professional manner she stepped on what turned out to be the school dog.

In all seriousness the head-teacher said:

“I can see the school dog playing a really important role in the speech therapy you are delivering.”

In what sense?

“I’m very sorry I am unable to make my appointment today but Rover here, he’ll take charge. He can’t fucking speak but that’s no matter nor can the children.”

Anyway – I have to scoot.

Hope everyone is well.

Lots of love

Jayne and James x

* Blair has said that he is going to use his early retirement to learn how to text message. Come on Tony, my Gran can send Text messages it requires the simple skill of pressing a button and reading. Surely you can read and press buttons Tony?

Whoops forgot to post this bit - start of blog 24/6/7

2007-07-18T03:34:00.001-07:00

Apologies for the unreasonable length of time since the last update of this blog. Jayne and I have been extremely busy trying to avoid being unemployed and homeless. With these two objectives now achieved, I feel its appropriate to take half an hour paid leave from my Temp job to cover the last few weeks.
Our week in Sydney was short: perhaps too short… for me the end of a period of travelling is always quite poignant. You can’t help but think of all the things you may have missed or whether you could just throw everything to the wind and spend the rest of your life traipsing round, scraping the bottom of your rucksack for change or socks. A life without routine can either be extremely fulfilling or extremely frustrating. The last minute decision to jump on the next train to nowhere compared to the realisation that you have missed sun rise at the Taj Mahal/Angkor Wat/ Great Wall of China because you lost track of time/ overslept/ got engrossed in your book. The proximity of New Zealand and a tightening of funds magnified the prospect of a return to routine and brought with it feelings of panic mixed with converse feelings of relief.
We were able to stay at our friends Jen and Ben’s place in Sydney, who, as it turned out, lived in the building next to the Palladium in Pyrmont. Four years ago, myself, Pat, Adam and Charlie rented a flat here and stayed for about six months.
On an exciting note of reunion I managed to track down my good friend Hannah Roughvie who went to York University with and also travelled Asia with me. I hadn’t been in contact with her for about four years and somewhat flukily managed to get in touch a couple of days before we arrived. Hannah arrived in Sydney about three months after I did (four years ago this is) armed with a school rucksack, a duty free bag full of Marlboros and about 200 quid to her name. She then proceeded to stay at my flat (invited of course) and work as a fishmonger.
Now though, she is well on the way to becoming an Australian resident, manages a home for disabled adults and is expecting a baby sometime soon. She has the dubious honour of being my first pregnant friend (being the first that is not that it is dubious for her to be pregnant – she seems over the moon about it and I have no doubts that she’ll be a really excellent mum).
Jayne and I have carried on mine and Patrick’s habit of doing ridiculously silly things while checking in at airports. On our way out of Sydney we were convinced that we would be able to print a copy of our New Zealand visas at Sydney Airport.
On arrival we were told that there were no printers at Sydney Airport.
The international Airport of one of the most important cities on Earth doesn’t have a printer. They sell plates of oysters (who in God’s name eats oysters before a flight?), and you can buy a pair of Gucci heels but you can’t print anything… anywhere.
Consequently, when we presented at New Zealand immigration I was slightly worried that we might be refused entry (seeing as we had a single ticket, were short of the required amount of money to emigrate by about 2000 and had no evidence at all of being in possession of a valid visa). I didn’t help matters by saying that we had arrived from “Symbmy… yeb, thabs it Sybmy” as my throat went a little dry.
Fortunately, after routinely asking us whether we had jacked up heroin in Vietnam (and us correctly saying no), the immigration officer let us through without seeing any documentation at all. He gave us a year long stamp and that stamp is the only thing that any employer has bothered to look at since I have been here. They have no idea about my work status… I could be planning to bring down New Zealand by subtly undermining their bureaucracy. It could happen NZ… one illicit shift in a café could be enough to bring your entire economy down… watch out.
Our first couple of days are spent in the centre of Auckland which I feel was a disappointing start for Jayne. Auckland has to have one of the least inspiring city centres in the world. Wolsey Place and the Peacocks in Woking have more charm and slightly better clothing shops (you’ve got your Madhouse, your Olympus Sports, your Burtons and the Next Sale that sees hordes of tragic mid-thirties wannabee Bridget Jones’s cueing from Dawn to get their hands on that pencil skirt made from 40% polyester by a blind, 2 year old monopod in China using a spoon and some spit). It is Aucklands suburbs that really give the city its character.
You have districts like Ponsonby and Parnell: wide avenues lined with trendy shops, excellent cafes and restaurants and reasonably trendy cocktail bars. Then K Road with its all night club venues, dirty gig venues, vintage shops and proliferation of cheap sushi. Further out you get places such as Mission Bay which are near to the water and are laid back and pleasant to stroll around and have a good nightlife. Unlike any other city I have been to, Auckland is littered with excellent restaurants. On my street alone there are three restaurants that would possibly be classified as one star Michelin restaurants. They are also fantastic value – the best restaurant here charges about 40 pounds for its Menu Degustation – 8 courses of foodie heaven and only another twenty eight pounds for a quality wine to match each course. As soon as Jayne and I are rolling in it I shall update those who are culinarily motivated with some reviews.
We eventually, and perhaps short-sightedly, find shelter lodging with a little old lady called Marilyn. She is the owner of an extremely hungry Pointer called Hetty. So hungry indeed, that when I left some frozen chicken in a bowl to defrost I was not unsurprised to find Hetty hiding under a duvet shivering combined with a mysterious absence of my chicken.
Marilyn lives next door to a chap called Ron Davies. Ron is very gay, although it was news to Marilyn, and also used to present the Kiwi news. Jayne met him first and was told that he was writing a novel. When she asked him what it was about he replied egnimatically that it was about “an extremely disturbing incident involving himself and a professional rugby player which he couldn’t possibly go in to at that very moment”. I have met him just the once. He was helping Marilyn paint the front of her house and spotted me leaving with a couple of DVDs that I was returning to the shop.
“Hello lad,” he said. “What have you got there; porn?”
It was a bit like Jon Snow asking you if you you’re a legs or a tit man. Marilyn chimed in…
“Porn. I didn’t know they rented out porn at that shop.”
Being fully confirmed as not only a watcher of porn but the flagrant type who rents it from public video stores and then flaunts it in peoples front gardens was a little unsettling but neither of them seemed to mind very much.

Snapper

2007-07-01T19:11:00.000-07:00

My career as a hard hitting news journalist took its first teetering steps this Friday as I spent an evening at TV New Zealand’s offices courtesy of Janet, the producer Jayne and I met a couple of weeks back.

The building is a white affair situated next to the hypodermic Skytower (a vertical lollipop of tacky bars, glitzy casinos and a pretty decent theatre). Slightly nervous, I tried listening to the Libertines to gee me up before I met Janet. Unfortunately, the reception staff were unable to find her so I soon found myself sitting in the recording studio waiting room with the shows guests.

The show I had come to see is called “Eye to Eye”, it’s a topical debate programme with a focus on Maori affairs and is hosted by Willie Jackson, a lugubrious and combative interviewer with a compensatory bald pate. The set up is simple, Willie in the middle, Maori’s on the left and Pakeha on the right. In comparison to Australia, where the relations between Aborigines and settlers are excruciatingly embarrassing, relations between Maori’s and Pakeha are relatively cordial. There are however, some stresses but New Zealand seems to play these as a strength. Things aren’t perfect but in my opinion New Zealand is a good example of how a multicultural society can survive; its willingness to debate the issues of race frankly and honestly removes their taboo and enables real change or action in a way that the two opposing facets of political correctness and voluntary racial segregation never will.

Before Janet arrives a camp production assistant waves me in and invites me to sit down. The guests are already there – helping themselves to a corporate cheese platter (they always contain that mysterious pale white cheese with a green wax coating; origins unkown) and sandwich selection (with obligatory and much-hated seafood cocktail (two words that should never be combined – not even in the murkiest depths of Hell, other contenders: crab stick)).

The guests introduce themselves to me, confident that I know them. Unfortunately I don’t so I have to assume a look of ever increasing mild astonishment as I shake each hand.

A Maori lady who looked to be in her sixties implored me to eat the food. Consequently the first few minutes of my career in journalism were spent eating spicy chicken legs.

Janet soon arrives and whisks me away to watch the news being recorded live. The room is just as one would imagine, an impressive bank of television screens fronted by an imposing, Maginot line of technology. The news team busily count in various different reporters and cue prerecorded interviews and graphics etc. Janet introduces me to Tate Urale – the producer, who offers me a beer and tells me to ring him for some experience. (YAY!)

Next I see a few offices and the Newsroom (where the news is received and stitched together). It is a Friday and there seems to be much opening of wine and beer, journalists seem to perch on their desks like chicks eager to fly into Auckland's after work bars.

Next I watch the debate, which interestingly enough, turns out to be on immigration. Awkwardly enough, it turns out that the Maori lady, the leader of the Maori First Party, is against the current level of immigrants from white countries (her argument being that they were restricting opportunities for Maoris – I have no facts to bolster either side of this argument so I won’t bother expostulating). I wondered if she was annoyed at offering me the spicy chicken wings after hearing my Anglotwang (my new word readers). Perhaps that small amount of sustenance was all I needed to avoid starvation and thrive on this Island restricting others from attempting to get a career in writing.

The guests on the Pakeha side of Willie included the rather maverick Minister for Immigration who sported a funky leather jacket. This garb would be worn with a mountain of self-consciousness by any British politician (think Hague in a baseball cap or a lank haired Blair twiddling with an out of tune guitar); but this guy pulled it off. Not completely, but perhaps in the way that Harrison Ford might just pull off the next Indiana Jones movie.

After the debate I met Brendan, New Zealand’s leading weatherman. He is literally all smiles. I think I could have told him that his grandmother had just been died and that God had decided to give up on the weather idea (it was always flawed in my opinion) and he would have just smiled at me and said “aw shucks” like a Hanna Barbara cartoon.

After a short conversation he thrusts a bag of fresh red snapper into my hands and tells me he caught it that day in his Kayak. It was the Kiwi version of a depressed Michael Fish reluctantly proffering me a bit of his lukewarm kipper in a bygone Shepherd’s Bush greasy spoon.

Or being given a fish finger by Andi Peters.

I cooked it Thai style and bloody lovely it was too.

It was a very interesting evening indeed and to top it off Janet asked me back next week to watch the recording again. Except this time they are questioning the Prime Minister. I’ve been here 4 weeks and I am about to meet Helen Clark (big chin et al – google her Anglophiles). Any suggestions as to what I should say to her are extremely welcome.

Must scoot

James

PS. Amusing moments of the week so far:

Our new Irish friend pointing at my cuboid Gastro-chip exclaiming “Is that a… no it can’t be… is that a potato! Its so impressive what they’ll do with them these days.”

And

“Pirates of The Carribean, oh I liked it, three hours of Johnny Depp. But I didn’t understand it, far too many different storylines”.

Really… – I just remember the single pirate themed one. Perhaps by storylines she meant post-modern Johnny Depp references.

auckland at last!

2007-06-24T18:51:00.000-07:00

Things with Marilyn started ok. We were slightly worried that we would find it hard to make friends while living with someone so much older than us but the people here are so friendly that making friends has been no problem at all.

Unfortunately, Marilyn seems to be suffering from some sort of post-menopausal aversion to heat and insists on having all her windows open all the time, taking cold showers and not letting us put a heater on. It is winter here and quite cold especially in the morning and Jayne and I were spending most of our time in bed trying to oust eachother from the small electric blanket we were so generously provided with.

There were so many rules with Marilyn that I would inevitably forget. The sort of rules that old ladies seem to make up out of the blue to annoy people. Here are a selection of Marilyn’s rules:

Wash out all your tin cans before you throw them away.

Don’t unplug the phone charger to put your Ipod speakers in for even a minute because the phone cuts out (no Marilyn this occurs because you don’t put the phone back on the charger and also because you associate losing the call via pressing the wrong button with battery failure).

If you put the heater on open all the windows (???????????)

Make sure the blinds twist upwards not downwards.

Things came to a head with Marilyn after Jayne and I came back from an extremely entertaining Friday night. I left the kitchen door open while I remonstrated with the tirelessly inefficient folks at HSBC Bank. I unfortunately woke Marilyn up and the next day she as good as asked us to leave as “our lifestyles didn’t match”.

Fortunately enough this played into our hands as we managed to find somewhere really quickly with some really nice young people for less rent – so all is well that ends well I suppose.

Jayne and I have both had colds which has affected our hearing. We are occasionally like an old couple who’ve ended up at a rock concert. A typical recent conversation went like this:

Scene: Grungy K Road – home of Adult shops, massage parlours and gay bars.

James: Look that shop sells nipple clamps.

Jayne: What??? Nickle Lamps.

James: NO NIPPLE CLAMPS>

Jayne: Wicker Amps??

James: NIIIIIPPPLLLLE CLAMPS!!

Jayne: Wicked Lamps

To finish this horribly long and poorly written blog entry I must mention the work we have procured. I have been doing spreadsheet stuff for Chubb Security and Vector (an electricity infrastructure company) and have currently become obsessed with budgets. Did you know that when Jayne and I both work full time we will be able to afford either 380.16 beers a month, 16.42 pairs of boots a month or 110.22 CDs a month.

Jayne has been working in a café with a lazy harridan. Fortunately she has now left and is working for a recruitment agency as their hostess. On a much better note than this though Jayne has done extremely well in her job search and has been offered two excellent speech therapy jobs. She chose the one with the company car (beat that NHSers) and will start mid-July. The managing director of the firm she worked for invited us over for Sunday lunch. Pip (for that is the ladies name) lives in a house on an Eastern Peninsula and has the most incredible view of the water and all of Aucklands islands. Her family were really nice and hopefully Jayne will really enjoy working there and maybe learn a lot about setting up her own practice in the future.

Final point I promise, if anyone is still reading. I have been attempting to network my way into a media career (so I can get on my journalism course and become the next A A Gill/Greg Palast (think Michelin starred restaurants populated by the extremely corrupt situated in the Gaza Strip)). This was always a fruitless exercise for me in Blighty, partly because networking isn’t my greatest of skills. In New Zealand though things are a completely different kettle of fish. Two nights ago me and Jayne were having a cocktail and just happened to sit next to the CEO of TV New Zealand and his wife, who is one of NZs leading journalists, I told them what my plans were and they immediately invited me round to their house, tonight, to discuss my career. How cool is that!

Right I am finally buggering off. Hope everyone is well and good.

Lots of love

Jayne and James xxx

Sydney

2007-06-02T19:51:00.000-07:00

Me and James in Sydney

2007-05-18T03:56:00.000-07:00

I think this ladies head has been photoshopped onto a different blouse - I can't think of any legitimate reason why.

James

So Hue Hue Hue... do you think you are! Do you think you are...

2007-05-18T03:21:00.000-07:00

Events have taken a surreal turn in the charming city of Hue. Last night an electric storm lit the sky with its veiny white fingers. Today, as I stepped out of my hotel the first thing that came to my attention was a charred Vietnamese hat left on the ground - owners whereabouts unkown.

I have provided a picture of a slightly dull looking lady sporting a Vietnamese hat to bring colour to this otherwise troubling story.

This is not all though. The people of Hue have a strange fascination with the Kangaroo. The following conversations have occurred.

Slightly unnerving Vietnamese waiter: Do you know of the kangaroo.

Me: Yes - from Australia.

Waiter (leaning towards me conspiratorially): Yes they are very big - their young they raise in pouches. Do you have a pouch?

Me: No. (I amusingly unzip my pocket) I have a pocket though.

Waiter (guffawing): yes but that is for your baby wallet. Did you know they box - man and kangaroo - thats what the Australians do. And I also saw on Discovery channel that some kangaroos can fly!

Me (incredulously): no... they're far too big. Do you mean flying squirrels?

Waiter: No, Kangaroos - 300kg it weighed and it could fly.

The next Kangaroo exchange occurred with a cyclo driver on the way to the Citadel (imagine oriental ruins of the like I have described many a time before).

Cyclo driver: Do you have a coin with the kangaroo on it?

Me: No - an australian coin you mean. No sorry.

Cyclo: Are you sure... my baby collects coins (my baby collects coins?! what?). This is a very good coin.

A short pause occurs while he is silent. He pipes up again as we pass a blonde girl of indeterminate origin. He waves at her to get her attention and points at me.

Cyclo (to blonde girl while pointing at me): Look, Kangaroo. You Kangaroo too.

Cyclo (to me): You like that Kangaroo (winks).

And finally in a tour office.

Tour salesman: Do yu know the Missy Roo cafe? They sell take-away salads and fruit shakes.

Me: No.

Salesman (looking slightly crestfallen): Oh a shame... do you see my Kangaroo (points to inflatable Kangaroo of the variety carried by Aussie sports fans worldwide).

Me: Yes its very nice.

Salesman: Yes it is isnt it. The cafe they gave it to me as a present - such a lovely Kangaroo - in exchange I promote their restaurant.

Me: They pay you in Kangaroos...

The salesman just goes a little dewy-eyed and stares with longing (lust?) at his Kangaroo.

All very strange. I really haven't imagined this!

Take care

James and Jayne xxxx

Angkor Wat , Cambodia and Vietnam pictures...

2007-05-17T04:38:00.000-07:00

More pics for you to have to a squiz at....
http://picasaweb.google.com/hidinginyourcupboard/CambodiaAndVietnam

Apocalypse Nam

2007-05-16T03:33:00.000-07:00

I write from the charming city of Hue (pronounced Hweh - like the policeman in 'Allo 'Allo). Very French, pleasantly quietish, too many shoe shops. Oh and too many hat shops also.

If Cambodia is the country of the ubiquitous pyjama Vietnam is plagued by the erroneously worn surgical mask. I presume they are to stop people taking in traffic fumes, but they seem to be worn everywhere. I think they may be paranoid about germs - I personally would spend more time cleaning the toilets than wearing a face mask.

Hmmm some sort of order please. Saigon first - more aptly described as Missed Saigon as we spent our entire time failing to get our plane tickets changed and then it rained and rained and rained. So despite going out for some drinks we spent most of the time watching old Bond movies.

In the small amount of time we did have to walk around the following observations were made. People buy nodding pigs or horses for their car rather than dogs and secondly that Vietnamese food is insane.

Completely insane.

So far we have eaten shrimp vinegar fondue (the most complicated eating process I have ever come across. Douse rice pancake in cocounut water, lay it on plate, cook prawns in vinegar, take them out of boiling vinegar with miniscule chopsticks, place on paper with fish sauce, unripe banana, pineapple, lettuce, mint and then wrap into an elegant origami style cylinder - all in the space of about thirty seconds before your pancake sticks to the plate), fiddled with rice and pork mush wrapped and steamed in banana leaves and been physically threatened with vodka marinated with cobra or more pleasantly sea horse.

There is a French influence in Vietnam stemming from their occupation of the country between 1850 approx and the Vietnamese War. Fresh bgauettes are widely available as is dark rich coffee. The coffee is actually a little disappointing - a bit too sweet. They also eat a lot of pate which is very odd for this corner of the world.

From Saigon to Nha Trang. Nha Trang is simply a beach resort, nothing of any note except some good bars and too many gap year students talking to me about how many days they have been on the sauce for. This makes me feel a little over the hill as I struggle to go out two nights in a row at the moment. Time for me slippers, pyjamas and face mask possibly.

After drinking all the teenagers under the table we undertook an arduous 14 hour bus journey to Hue, our starting point (only in a written sense). The scenery more than made up for the two hours sleep. Rolling green hills sauntering into wide blue bays. The landscape is pockmarked with colourful tombs, seemingly placed randomly, as if families all have their own morbid plots at the end of their garden - Great Uncle Albert's just past the washing line and the plastic climbing frame.

The rules and regulations of my hotel have politely asked me not to bring any radioactive material into my room. I sleep better at night knowing that there is unlikely to be any radioactive material lurking in my hotel - its a common worry. I was surprised that they let me take up my curiously deformed rucksack (its like a bag with cerebal palsy) up to my room as rule five states: no suspiciously bulky items allowed in rooms. Thank god we're not travelling with chubby lothario Russell Grant - he'd have to sleep on the stairs.

Well thats it so far. Hope everyone is well, fine and reading the Dandy.

Lots of love

Jayne and James xxx

A Phnom Penh(y) For Your Thoughts or I Didn't Use a (Phnom) Penh To Write This I Used a Keyboard

2007-05-11T04:25:00.000-07:00

Cambodia, glorious land of pyjamas, inappropriate topiary and somehow humorous adverts dsiencouraging child prostitution.

The women here wear pyjamas everywhere (literally pyjamas - they are decorated with whimsical designs of babies sleeping and sheep leaping over fences).

The topiary is ubiquitous and seems to be done to every living plant imaginable - from hedgerows to mighty oaks!

The adverts star a little stick-pervert in a kind of comic strip. Firstly he gets on a plane, secondly he gets a hotel room holding a stick-child's hand and next we see him clinging desperately to the bars of his prison cell with an anguished stick-grimace.

We are now in Phnom Penh - Cambodia's capital city. In short - here is the report:

National Museum: Rough Guide says "take at least 2 hours to explore". Our survey says "take five minutes to walk round three hundred slightly differing statues of the Buddha".

Grand Palace: Rough Guide says "visit the glorious silver pagoda and the Royal Throne". Our survey says "spend a few minutes looking at another statue of the Buddha and then some silver floor tiles".

I am beginning to become the worlds leading enemy of idolatry.

With the sights dissappointing all that was really left to do was go out - and go out we did to the world famous "Heart of Darkness" Bar. Mad dancing with the locals ensued alongside our new Kiwi friend Carly who is heading to London in the opposite direction to us. One guy was wearing a flat cap similar to those worn by Cambodian soldiers during Pol Pot's reign of terror. International opinion (well mine and Jayne's anyway) is split as to whether he was wearing this hat through coincidence (Jayne) or in irony (James). The guide book is again slightly innaccurate when it comes to Phnom Penh's nightlife - claiming that there is an arrogant middle class youth that frequents the late night bars - Cap Guy and his friends proved to be very nice giving me free beer (not laced with rohypnol) and dancing the tango with Jayne and strangely enough myself.

The next day was wisely spent lazing in bed although we did manage to book a tour to the infamous Killing Fields.

The Fields are unsurprisingly an unnerving experience. For a start I thought the mass graves would be much bigger in size. Its horrifically surprising how many bodies can fit into one small hole. The biggest grave contained over 400 bodies all in a space 6m deep, 3m wide and about 6m long. Most people were killed with blunt instruments, children were killed by holding their ankles and flinging them into trees or throwing them in the air and piercing them with a bayonet.

There are many people still alive in Cambodia who were involved with Pol Pot's regime. Many lower ranked people have served jail sentences although Pol Pot never faced a court and died in excile in the late 90s. Its very hard to imagine how these people must feel now - they were after all victims themselves of coercion and brainwashing (soldiers who refused to kill dissenters etc were executed themselves along with their families). I wonder whether they have a detachment to it, live in a state of shock or still believe in their actions. In all it is estimated that about two to three million people were killed and the vast majority of the population is now under the age of 25.

Next door to the Killing Fields site there is a school and the cries of the children float over the graves. Thunder cracks and the clouds draw in and suddenly we find ourselves talking about affable Irishman Ronan Keating as he is performing in Phnom Penh tonight (as if Pol Pot wasn't enough!). The whole scene is fairly bizarre and I find myself making the guide laugh when i tell her I don't like Boyzone.

We are now in Vietnam and although the topiary and pyjama wearing has sprung up again like Rocky in the final rounds, we haven't done anything of note yet. Will fill you in when we do.

Love

James and Jayne

Angkor.What? Not another bloody temple!

2007-05-08T22:33:00.000-07:00

Hi there everyone. Well after the hedonism and wild living of bangkok for a second time, we are now in cambodia the land of eerie temple ruins, land mines, child sex tourisn and apparently cultural performances of shadow puppetry.

Our first stop was Siem Reap, a city slap in the middle of the Angkor temples which seems to have developed over the past few years at a phenonenal rate purely to support the massive influx of tourists who come here to see Angkor Wat. It's mostly made up luxury hotels, backpacker guesthouses, huge 'souvenir shops' and overpriced bars and restaurants. Even though it sounds awful there's something really pleasant about the place. Maybe after the 15 hour journey from Bangkok which included 7 hours driving on the worst road imaginable in a bus that had definately seen better days any place would seem pleasant?

Anyway along with 15 million japanese tourists we decided to buy 3 day passes to really explore angkor. It really was amazing to see Angkor Wat and the hundreds of other fascinating temples in various stages of ruin. The temples were only "discovered" by the western world in the early 1900's but they are so steeped in history and myth that walking around inside the huge temple complexes made me feel as though I was stepping back in time. So different to seeing exhibits in a museum. The experience was slightly marred by the crowds of tourists and being mobbed by aggressive children who desperatly competed with each other to sell you a cold drink. These kids could speak 4 or 5 languages but never went to school and had no understanding of what they were saying but would repeat phrases like "maybe later","lovely jubbly", and even sing beatles songs at you. Cute until you wouldnt buy anything from them and then...Ive never been given such daggers!

After getting up at sunrise to visit Angkor and sated with culture, the afternoon was pleasantly spent lazing by a pool side bar owned by an alcoholic ex soldier. As we were his only customers he thought it best to sit and get sloshed whilst lecturing us on the ways of army life and giving us a bitter diatribe about the unfairness of the lonely planet guide. We ended up sneaking out as he stared morosely into space.

From Siam Reap another sticky, bumpy bus ride brought us to Phenonh Penh the capitol of Cambodia. Phenonh Penh ticks all the boxes for an Asian city (pollution, road side food stalls, suicidal tuk tuk drivers, cheap beer and food) but has an unmistakable European feel to it. The buildings are very colonial and the baguettes are very French. I could quite happily wile away a few days here drinking coffee and watching the world go by but being a diligent traveller decided to "do the sights". After a day sightseeing we thought we would reward ourselves with a couple of drinks. A "couple of drinks" turned into dancing till half three with the rich kids of Phenomh Penh to cheesy disco and even cheesier R&B...I dont know if they watch alot of MTV here but those kids can dance! They put mine and James's drunken attempt at a tango to shame (or maybe we did that ourselves!) Anyway the hangover the next was not pleasant and I dont think visiting the National Genocide Museum was the best idea.

More to come soon on the Killing Fields, and general Cambodian pursuits.

love Jayne xx

new photos!!

2007-05-01T04:23:00.000-07:00

Hello new photos can be seen at

http://picasaweb.google.com/hidinginyourcupboard/2ndAlbum

James and Jayne

Koh take a walk!

2007-05-01T01:46:00.000-07:00

Once again Bangkok languishes in Holiday while I am here - which results in raucous nights and lazy days as everything (conveniently enough for my hangover) is shut.

I think we were about to go sea kayaking the last time I wrote. It was a pleasant trip through mangrove swamps and hungry monkeys (enticed by our pineapple bait). My navigation skills left something to be desired though as Jayne and I quite frequently found ourselves propelled at speed into unsuspecting trees.

From here we were advised to go to Koh Lanta rather than Koh Phi Phi - as it is supposedly less touristy and more picturesque. Unfortunately when we arrive there the place is deserted and the food terrible (so unusual in Thailand) so we decide to just spend a night there. A relatively uneventful evening was enlivened when we met Su, a Thai man whose English name is apparently Jayne. He has very good English and informs us that he went to University to study Leisure and Tourism. In Thailand this seems to be a very different degree to the drop out subject in England. Tourism is Thailand's major industry so a degree in Tourism is very important. The teaching of the degree is somewhat dubious though as they seem to make people cling to social stereotypes - for instance Su told us that if he met an English person he would be told to say:

"Oh I love the Queen's English" and to offer us an imaginary discount.

American: "oh your country is so big!"

Irish: "The irish people are so witty but I am sure you enjoy a drink yes?"

Japanese people will apparently buy anything and never barter and German people never buy anything always believing that they can get it cheaper and better elsewhere.

Su was also surprised that he would not stand out in England because of the colour of his skin which he wished was paler. Something many people in India were surprised about.

From Lanta we moved on to Koh Phi Phi which i suppose provides one with the archetypal vision of Thailand. Azure sea napping white soft sand. This does come at a cost - Koh Phi Phi seems to be about three times as expensive as anywhere else.

Koh Phi Phi was the most affected place in Thailand after the Tsunami. On the main road in the tourist resort there is a Banyan tree wrapped in yellow ribbons which serves as a memorial - the Thai people bow to it as they walk past. Some of the damage is still apparent - some buildings haven't been rebuilt where people have run out of money. There are some photos of this on the blog.

One bar stays open late on Phi Phi - the Reggae Bar. Each night they encourage drunk tourists to fight in their boxing ring for free drinks. The men fighting really went for eachother - it was quite sad watching these two men start fighting as a joke but then start to seriously hit eachother as everyone else looked on and cheered.

From Phi Phi to Ao Nang on the mainland where Jayne and I had to take it easy due to funds. We spent one day in bed watching films and contemplated staying there for the rest of the trip and just making up the rest of it!

In Ao Nang the sex industry is very apparent. As usual Jayne and I accidentally ended up in a bar in the Red Light District and we were mobbed by Thai "bar" girls trying to drag us into their establishment. I am quite torn on this subject - as to its rights and wrongs. Ideally, I don't think any women should have to work in the sex industry but the problem here is not as black and white as it would seem.

Many men come here because they are old and feel unwanted in Europe where they are thought of as 'past it'' and unattractive (there is nothing quite as excrutiatingly embarassing as seeing a man over the age of 50 trying it on (and failing) with the new 18 year old bar girl at his local pub). Here, although they are of course paying for this feeling, they feel wanted and useful, there is a greater deal of respect for older people in Thailand than in Europe. They are obviously living a lie but it seems a lie they are happy to live with.

The funniest thing I have ever seen happened two days ago - a whore-imbibing-gentlmen (as I like to call them) had obviously run out of steam with his personal girl of choice and resolved to take her out in a kayak. I watched for twenty minutes as they went round in circles, capsizing and crashing into various rocks - he got progressively more and more red-faced and she just didn't give a monkeys - she lay back and didn't row at all, indolently dragging her manicured fingers through the water.

On the other hand some of the men are extremely seedy about the whole thing and at the end of the day, despite some sympathy (or pity) one may engender for these men, they are exploiting someone. All these exchanges boil down to lust, rejection and money so nobody comes out a winner. Throughout Asia people are forced to surrender their dignity in the name of poverty simply because Western people are a lot richer than them. Many people complain about scams and dishonesty here, but I ask you - what would you do if you had no money and were surrounded by overweight, I-pod wearing, nefariously whoring, money drizzling imbeciles. It is very easy to think yourself honest when your wallet is fat.

(As I write this (originally by hand on a bus going from Thailand to Cambodia) an American girl has just turned round to me and asked 'excuse me, do you know which of the border's we are going through?" - all fine except for the fact that she did little quotation marks with her fingers as she said borders. Now unless she sees the world as one big country and that borders are but abstract concepts I'm not sure what her little sign means. Do she not think the border is real or perhaps that Thailand and Cambodia are the same country. The border is real and its a complete pain in the arse to get through (13 different stamps in total and my passport was checked three times))

The next evening we are joined at our table outside the seven eleven (cheap beer being our motivation for this classy seat) by a Swiss man who owns a hotel in Ao Nang. He turns out to be more a fan of Thai boys than ladies and hinted heavily that he had used prostitutes before. Next we are joined by another Swiss guy who manages one of the bars in the Red Light District. He has the opinion that Thai people either can't or won't "think ahead", they live entirely for the moment and never have ambition or interest in anything further than their daily needs. This is obviously untrue and he is an obnoxious character with little foresight himself.

This trip is turning into a den of vice!

We return to Bangkok and meet Kaz - a charming Japanese guy who spent three years in London and recently tried to throw himself off a building after his girlfriend left him. After spending a night out clubbing he invites us to watch Spiderman 3 with him at the cinema the next day - I think this film might give him ideas so I advise against it.

As you know we are now in Cambodia and have seen the Temples of Angkor Wat today - however as this entry is already very long and rambling all over the place - I'll write about it later.

Hope everyone is good.

Love

James and Jayne

Bangkrocked

2007-04-19T01:55:00.000-07:00

I have had something of a dicky tummy in Bangkok - ironically enough seeing as we escaped such misfortune in 'dirty' India. It may have something to do with the local whiskey though (actually rum) as many people seem to have a similar problem. Am fully recovered now and Jayne and I are residing in Krabi - soon to do some sea kayaking and make our way to the island of Koh Lanta.

As Jayne mentioned we arrived in BKK during Songkram - the Thai new year and as she also mentioned this entails a five day water fight. You can't step out of your hotel room for more than twenty seconds without returning drenched. Obviously this is good fun, but unfortunately it makes for rather poor blog entries as there are only so many times that I can regale you with an hilarious tale of throwing a bucket of cold water over some unsuspecting child. I will nevertheless attempt to describe the scene at least once - although there will be photos and soon you will be thrilled to know there will also be video footage.

Rama I is Bangkok's main thoroughfare and, due to the Thai people's real love of their monarchy, is lined with with paintings of the King and his family. Some are just portraits and others are sort of contemporary action scenes. Imagine Oxford Street lined with photographs of Charles pretending to be Camilla's tampon, Fergie sucking a millionaire's toe or Harry giving the Nazi salute and you'll have something of the opposite that occurs here.

Normally Rama I is a wide pleasant road with little traffic except at rush hour. During Songram the street is a crush of Thai's and travellers all throwing water at eachother and rubbing dough into eachothers faces.

Naturally, a few drunk English people take things a bit too far, buying supersoakers and imagining themselves as a bermuda shorted Andy McNabb, lurking behind corners and generally not following Sangkrom ettiquette - that is: dont soak any old person who isnt joining in, anyone with food or anyone who is working (with the exception of the police who take the punishment with good grace and are not impartial to giving someone a good soaking themselves).

We manage a couple of nights out which rather inevitably sees us drinking buckets: a mix of Sangsom (Thai rum) coke and Thai Red Bull (about 14 times as strong as our own diluted stuff). All sorts of exciting and mundane characters were met but the one that sticks in the mind is Enrique - a part Guatamalen, part Brazillian, part Australian with long dreadlocks and a face like Ronaldinho's. To top this off he wears a Barcelona T-shirt with Ronaldinho pasted onto the back.

His English is very good and we chat into the wee hours about him liking very tall girls, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Office. He teaches English as a second language which is slightly worrying as he has a somewhat comic mastery of it. The funniest thing he says revolves around an amusing interlude with his exgirlfriend and her mother. His exgirlfriend's mother had been slightly flustered at the prospect of meeting her daughter's new part Guatemalan part Brazillian boyfriend and somehow came to the decision that the appropriate thing to do would be to take him to the local drag queen show in Sydney. Enrique went along, amused but unpeturbed until his girlfriend and girlfriend's mother retired to the ladies room - while left alone Enrique was approached by a gay man who asked him (well according to the way Enrique tells it - begs him in a quite extraordinarily camp manner) to buy him a drink. Enrique, although no homophobe - he insists, isn't into this and only relents to his request (and here is the coup de grace readers!) after "at least half an hour of him buggering me". I'm not sure if he saw my childish and stifled laugh but it worries me that Enrique teaches English as a second language - soon we'll all be getting extremely buggered off with all the incorrect usage.

We eventually grab gold-dust-like train tickets to get out of Bangkok and arrive at the train station dry due to cunningly taking a taxi rather than a rickshaw. We enter the station and sort out a couple of formalities and then have to stop in our tracks as the Thai National Anthem is played. As previously written - the Thai's are very fond of their King and it is actually against the law to insult him or deface his picture. Infact, a Swedish man, whose name escapes me, was recently sentenced to ten years imprisonment for defacing images of the King. The King's not such a bad chap though and pardonned the man after a few weeks. This is a law that anarchic Jayne has no fear in breaking - in the last day she has said the Queen "has put on a bit of weight" and accidentally compared the Royal family to Thailand's version of the Battersbys from Corrie.

As the anthem comes on everyone, approximately 500-700 people, stood up as one and sung their hearts out - they certainly put English footballers to shame at any rate. We take the overnight train and then a bus to Krabi - a riviera town where one can get some of the best cooked food in Thailand down at the River Market. It can be quite hard to work out how to get the best food here as there are a plethora of stalls and they are mainly used by Thai people who seem to know instinctively what they are doing. We try a couple of places and get an odd variety - some very greasy noodles, delicious garlic pork yet served in an unfeasibly small portion, a wonderfully fragrant vegetable Thai Green Curry and pork stir fried with Calare greens (a little like asparagus if it flaunted leaves rather than its customary spear) which was a fresh tasting, moreish dish.

Its low season here now so Krabi feels a little deserted, tomorrow we are going sea kayaking and my prowess as a navigator and rower will no doubt come to the fore again much as it did when I had that job ferrying BMW Bikes across the channel.

Hope everyone is feeling well and good.

Lots of love James and Jayne xxxxx

PS. The next blog may be hot on the heels of this one as I have got slightly behind schedule!

Ad Hoc Bangkok

2007-04-11T00:58:00.000-07:00

After a very long and uneventful 24 hour journey we have arrived safely in Thailand. The differences between India and Thailand were apparent as soon as we stepped of the plane. James kind of knew what to expect as he's a regular here but I feel as if I have become so acustomed to the way of life in India (the way of life for a couple of travellers that is) that for me it was a lovely surprise just to be surprised again.

Firstly as I approached the main taxi rank with a sinking feeling bracing myself for the expected onslaught of aggressive touts and leering men I noticed that no one was looking at me. In India I was constantly stared at just because I am pale skinned, a woman and not in a Burka. Secondly a taxi tout approached us, 'taxi sir'. 'NO' I growled at him in my 'do not mess with us we are seasoned travellers even though I dont have a clue where Im going voice'. He then smiled at us and walked of!!!! The Indian touts do not give up, they will even follow you out on to a dual carriage way without looking, all the time screeching 'very cheap price!'. I even managed to sit and have a fag outside the airport next to the taxi queue without an audience of giggling children, staring ladies and crotch grabbing men!

The second difference I noted between Thai and Indian people occured when James and I found ourselves in a bit of a pickle. James went to get some cash out of the ATM but his card was refused. We have had ongoing problems with our bank since we left the UK. No matter how many times we tell HSBC that we are in Asia and will be visitng many different countries they still insist on temporarily and always at the most inconvenient times, barring the cards. Anyway, we were stuck in Bangkok airport with no local currency, and about 20 Sri Lankan rupees to our name. If this situation had occurred in India we would have been swarmed with people trying to help, offering lifts on their mopeds to a million different ATM's, promising us the loan of their Grandma's savings and generally making our problem very much their problem. Used to this attitude of helpfulness mixed with nosiness I assumed that all we had to do was explain the problem and someone would let us use a phone to call the bank, have the block removed and reimburse them when we had been able to get money from the ATM. Nope. Emirates couldnt help us, the bank couldnt help us, the peolpe at the currency exchange couldnt help us, the lady at the 'Can I Help You Desk?' couldnt help us, infact she seemed put out at being approached. Eventually a young girl at an internet cafe took pity on frantic James and gave him her own phone card to use.

Bangkok so far has been alot of fun, the sort of fun that would not happen in India. Our last night in India was also a lot of fun, we decided to blow our budget by living it up with the Glitterati of Delhi society. The nightlife for the rich young hip things in Delhi revolves around impossibly expensive and showy hotel bars. The Delhi jeunesse all have fantastic drawling 'Hinglish' accents 'like yaar man I am thinking these tunes are rrreally hip'. The club we ended up in played a mixture of Hindi film songs (which got the dance floor heaving!) Bangra tunes and dodgy dance and trance remixes. In England it would have been terribly uncool but I have never seen so many people going for it. It was a world away from the chilled backpacker bars playing Jack Johnson for the millionth time, full of stoned Isrealis and we loved it!! I was sad to say Goodbye to India and Delhi in particular. We will definately be coming back.

So Hello Bangkok. So far we have been immersed (literally) in the Thai new year celebrations which involve huge street water fights, visited the seedy district of Patpong Market where we saw a rather half hearted sex show and eaten the best food in 2 months. More on all that soon.

Jayne xx

Goodbye India and the Coco Gokarna

2007-04-06T02:17:00.000-07:00

We are soon to leave India. This was really brought home to me when a slightly unusual English lad, sporting a Clark Gable moustache, bundled past me out of our hotel, fixed me in the eye and said "Goodbye India". As if me entering the hotel as he was leaving the hotel meant that I was somehow arriving and he was perrenially leaving. It wasn't - I had simply left behind my wallet.

Before I get on to the subject of leaving though there are a few more tales to tell. After leaving the cliffy sanctuary of Varkala we took the train up to Gokarna. Another beach resort you will be fervently excited to hear but this one is the most deserted so far. There are only several beach shacks here and we were lucky to find one that wasn't simply a concrete altar strewn with a blanket and surrounded by the least fortuitous pigs building material of choice.

And surprisingly enough - not much happened. We met another couple called Ryan and Steph who are doing exactly the same as us (moving to New Zealand). We get on well and have invited them to meet us in Wellington for a Roast Dinner.

The only incident of note happened to Jayne. Middle aged Indian men have a nasty habit of staring at Western Girls - if they are in a bikini it drives them into some sort of pent up frenzy. Sometimes they will set next to you (well Jayne not me) and ask sexually innappropriate questions such as "Do you remove the hair on your legs for all men or for your boyfriend?" or "do women where you come from sleep with many men?". All the time trying to sneak a touch here or a touch there.

Why they think this of Western Women is of some debate. Traditionally the west is viewed (by some, especially older people) as a place with low moral standards (or broad mindedness as the pervy men like to put it!). Also the general attitude towards women in India isn't brilliant. I seem to get a lot more respect from travel agents, shopkeepers, waiters, barmen than Jayne doees which can be frustrating. There also seems to be a slightly strange attitude that men cannot help themselves if they see a beautiful, semi-naked (this being a skirt and top in India) woman and that they should either be flattered by their crotch grabing, accidental brushing and lingering stares or accept that it is their own fault for having such an outwardly licentious presence. Hollywood films don't help either as many poorer Indians view of the West is informed entirely from Film (in many cases having not met a white person before or refusing to believe that there are many Indians that live in the UK). The image of James Bond flicking his fingers and delivering some incredibly witty double-entendre before bedding a bevy of varied beauties lingers in the mind and they feel frustrated that such wanton Western women will happily bestow their charms on men from all around the world but either ignore or swat away Indians. In a sense they have a point - when was the last time you saw a lead man in a Western Film that was Indian (Daniel Day Lewis in Last of the Mohicans doesn't count), when they are portrayed they are often quite geeky and the last character in the film to actually have any success with the opposite sex. This seems to cause some resentment which may acount partially for the racist bastards that approached Jayne on the beach.

As they approached her Jayne could hear them describing her as lovely jubbly etc, and then they stood over her, stared at her and said hello. Jayne said hello back but then covered herself over to which they replied "fucking white bitches all deaf and dumb" and then walked off. Unfortunately these things obviously ocur when I am not around so its hard to do anything real about it.

This attitude does seem to be largely confined to lesser edcuated middle aged men (the younger men sem to have more manners?) and that the vast majority of Indians you meet are pleasant. In fact it is not unusual to receive vociferous assistance from bystanders (women and men) if you are touched innapropriately by a stranger.

Anyway enough of this rant!

After Gokarn we took a couple of trains up to Bombay. The land around Gokarn is quite mountainous and the track burrows through several very long tunnels. In the small service gaps along these tunnels some people appear to live or at least permanently take shelter. As the train drove past one group they all leapt up in white sheets, howling into the damp air and pretending to be ghosts. Not scary as much as highly amusing.

And then Bombay once more - a city that is part London, part New York, part Bangkok. We drive past what I assume to be slums - wooden shacks painted brightly but later realise to be quite good accomadation when we notice that they have electricity and see a postman. Their children are all dressed in school clothes, which is a good sign as very poor people use their children to work or beg. We drive past the slums on the way to the airport tonight and I shudder to think how these people live.

A few amusing points to record;

The baseball capped Indian grandad who sat next to me on the train to Bombay was a Jehovahs witness and reading a copy of their magazine "Awake". He didn't pester me for cups of tea but was reading an article entitled "Youth Questions: How Can I Avoid Homosexuality?".

The bins in South India have clearly been designed by a delusionist. I presume his idea was to make them more appealing to children or generally more aesthetic so as to encourage people to use them. An animal motif was his choice and you might think that monkeys, tigers or elephants might have been suitable choices - instead he plumped for penguins. Possibly the least likely animal to find in India. As a result the streets of Bombay are littered (spot the irony?) with open beaked, sunward looking Penguins - all of whom have conspicuously empty bellies.

More excellent TV to report. To celebrate Easter one channel devoted the weekend to showing scenes of flagellation and modern crucifixion.

And finally - my new favourite sport. Sport Stacking - where teams of repressed teenagers race against the clock to stack cvups in pyramids. Its real and details can be found at:
www.worldsportstackingassociation.org/

Please contact these people if you would like to organise a competition of your own. Perhaps you could see how fast you can stack plates as well as cups - the possibilities seem endless!

For League Information:
Reach Matt Reed Executive Director of Leagues
Direct Telephone: 1-303-962-5667
E-mail: mreed@worldsportstackingassociation.org
For Tournament Information:
Reach Pola Metz Executive Director of Tournaments
Direct Telephone: 1-303-962-5654
E-mail: pmetz@worldsportstackingassociation.org
For General Information:
Telephone: 1-303-917-4171
E-mail: info@worldsportstackingassociation.org
Fax: 1-303-962-5650
Address:P.O. Box 260526; Highlands Ranch, CO 80163-0526

Keep stacking

James And Jayne

There aint no Vikings in Varkala

2007-03-31T02:48:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry they are just getting worse. I'm pretty sure Richard Whitely may have been reincarnated within me, perhaps he has become my larynx... or my tibia??

Like the mountainous habitat of Valhalla, Varkala peers down from the sea from its lofty clifftop viewpoint towards a curiously rough sea. The waves come from two directions and pinch the unwary swimmer who is unable to slip between the two crests. Unlike Valhalla, which must have been daunting, Varkala is a pleasant tourist resort. A line of colourful beach shacks all serving the same food queue along the cliff. They stay open until the last person leaves and unlike Goa can play music until after 10pm. The staff are friendly, sometimes very friendly as there seems to be one or two staff/tourist relationships going on; something I eye Desmond Morris style from my deckchair.

Anyone who has read some of the earlier posts on the blog knows about our rather thrilling initial experience of Ayurvedic massage. You will emphasise with me then when on our first night here I am approached by a slightly flirtatious, homosexual German called Fabien who tells us that he has been studying Ayurvedic massage for the past 8 months. His story is quite interesting - Ayurveda is a holistic lifestyle designed to balance certain elements within the body. Earth, Water and Fire (you don't know how much I wish he had said Earth, Wind and Fire!). According to Fabien I am a Fire and Water person and Jayne is an Air and Water person. The fire element within me means (unsurprisingly) that I can be quite aggressive - presumably I put out this aggression with my water side??! Other amusing things about Fabien include the fact that he is twenty but looks thirty and is also Patrick 'hips and lips' Swayzee's doppelganger.

Fabien was a foundation stone of sanity when compared to Geert the Dirt - an insane Belgian whose sartorial style of converstaion saw us literally in stitches. Behind his back though - as he warned us that he had contempt for people who 'were bitches!'. In no particular order these are a few of my favourite Geert the Dirt moments;

1) Asking Jayne 'who she really was' for about twenty minutes.

2) Ordering a coffee and then pouring it all over the floor because it "had not been made with love'.

3) Saying "a cookie is a composite of many ingredients".

4) Becoming paranoid that we would go to the press about our conversation.

5) Intermittently falling asleep for a few minutes.

6) Informing us all that he used to work as a prostitute.

7) Inviting me and Jayne to share a polyamorous relationship with him.

Where are all the sane Europeans!

Day 2 in Varkala was less crazy person than crazy incident.

Jayne has picked up body boarding like... well if not like a duck to water perhaps like a goat. She has a good knack of getting on waves but finds it hard to look behind herself when on the board so relies on me to tell her when a wave approaches. This has predictably resulted in a few funny moments where Jayne has attempted to get on waves that weren't actually there or been dowsed by a wave that I 'forgot' to mention. Normally though I am a paragon of virtue and ensure she gets on a decent wave.

Unfortunately for Jayne, as the largest most menacing wave of the day approached, I was momentarily distracted by a shoal of small fish that had suddenly surrounded me. Without her usual wave warning system in place Jayne endeavoured to avoid a soaking by using her board as a shield between herself and the wave. Jayne came off the worse from this encounter and now sports a slightly swollen eye, a grazed stomach and a gammy knee. I had to rescue her Hasselhoff style and drag her back to the beach.

As Jayne caught her breath I was struck on the head by a falling Pilchard. My initial assumption was that we were going to experience a brief shower of fish until a leathery skinned German man (in requisite towel thong (he looked like a deflated sumo wrestler)) pointed out that one of the many eagles had dropped it from the sky. The James Bellamy in me wanted to respect the natural cycle of life and allow the fish to die on the beach. Jayne however, was a lot more compassionate and threw it back to the sea.

We are now on our way back to Delhi and are heading off to Thailand soon. Unfortunately Jayne had some money stolen after leaving her purse outside our flat. Very unusual as it is usually me who does the losing!

Anyway must go, hope everyone is in tip top condition and generally having fun.

Lots of love

Jayne and James xxx

PS. Just met an Indian Professor of English who spent fifteen minutes quoting T S Eliot's Wasteland at me while I nodded sagely trying to give the impression of one who has learnt it by rote.

PPS. News Update:

Passport In Police Custody Eaten By Rats

A seemingly innocuous story that has caused a real stir - dominating one news channel for the whole day. Apparently it has sparked some sort of argument within the police force and they are now fighting eachother - with sticks.

PPPS. Advert Update

A Honda Motorbike that is so good it turns men gay?!!

My food fantasy

2007-03-29T02:41:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning with drool caking the side of my face..attractive i know but its becoming a frequent occurence as I just cant stop dreaming about home food. I fantasise in my sleep about roast dinners, bacon butties, shepherds pie, decent Chinese takeaway and so on every night.

The food in India is massively varied in type and quality but you just cant get decent Western style food anywhere. Most restaurants in the places we have visited cater for a tourists with menus full of pizza, pasta and toasted sandwiches but more often that not its just not quite right. For example yesterday I ordered 'speketty with tuna, tomaytoo, origayno and garlic' sounds fine, except they obviously were all out of tuna so substituted it for something reminiscent of smoked haddock. Even the curry seems wrong, its nothing like it is at home. To get a curry that tastes 'curryish' you have to stress 'really really really spicy please'. Even then the waiter generally smirks at you as if he knows your only joking or your doing it for a bet.

It's possible to find authentic Indian food in dingy shack style cafes full of autorickshaw drivers holding hands over chicken biryani's (open affection between male friends is very common and totally acceptable but cracks me up when I see two macho moustachiod Indian men leering at me whilst gently caressing each others arms). The menu has 8-10 items on it at most and you have no idea what you have ordered until it is plonked infront of you about 30 seconds later. Although the place is grimy, the food has not been cooked fresh to order and asking for a fork or spoon is out of the question, its mostly very tasty and very spicy. However you have to put up with being stared at as if your an alien while you try to eat potato curry with your hands, and then worrying about seeing that potato curry again for a few hours afterwards.

So after another breakfast of chickpea curry this morning James and I started one of our (actually probably just 'my' but he's very patient with me) favourite conversations...what would you be eating if you were at home? - Easy- BLT's made with Sainsburys organic white loaf and loads of mayo for breakfast. Lunch - Sushi and sashimi with a glass of ice cold Sancerre. A mid afternoon snack of Marks and Spencers naughty Chocolate Bites. Dinner - difficult one but today it would have to be Rare as Fook fillet steak with peppercorn sauce, green beans sauteed with garlic and french fries, followed by apple pie with Hagen Daas praline flavour ice cream. (Im almost welling up writing this!)

Im becoming obsessed with food I cant have. When we meet new people I have noticed myself manouevering the conversation around to food and talking about it for far too long...I know James is getting a bit bored of the topic (strangly enough as anyone who knows James will agree, he seems content to eat curry twice a day maybe even thrice). So please indulge me and tell me what you had for tea last night. I've spent all morning imagining what you may have had:
Simon: M&S lasgne unless you were entertaining your new lady then it would have been Hawaian pasta?
Mum Phillips and Brain: chinese takeaway or deli leftovers?
Baby bear: pasta and Lloyd Grossman sauce.
Matt: you were a difficult one but James and I thought you would still be getting over the weekend and wouldnt being doing take away so lamb chops with mint sauce, lots of veg and a few Danone activia things.
Jen Cuz: Easy..thai!
Rowan: Pasta carbonara.
John Dico: meat and two veg a la Dad
Jemma and Ashley: James thinks noodles??

Am I right??
Anyway time for lunch now. Byeeeeeeee

Jayne

Photos at last!

2007-03-28T02:39:00.000-07:00

hi there

We have at last got round to putting some photos up - these are of the second half of our time in India as we didnt have a digitasl camera when we were in the north.

Hope you like them - will put captions on soon!

James and Jayne

click here for the photos

http://picasaweb.google.com/hidinginyourcupboard/JamesAndJayne1stAlbum

Jayne's First Post

2007-03-26T01:15:00.000-07:00

Hello all, well I though it was about time I wrote something on this blog rather than leaving it all to James. He does such a good job though, and as I get so many more emails than him he has more time on his hands!

Well after James going temporaily insane in Cochin due to the extreme heat, our plans have slightly changed. I was woken up at 8am by a manic James (the first time I have ever known him to be voluntarily out of bed before 11) jumping up and down jabbering about going to the Himalayas. The heat had really got to him and we decided tht rather than staying in the stifling South for a full month we would have a couple of weeks here and then head back to Delhi early so we could travel up to Shimla and maybe even pop in for a cup of tea with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala.

Sanity restored and a few cold showers later we decided to take in a cultural performance of traditional Keralan Kathakali theatre. I had read in my guide book (the rough guide.. which I am becoming more and more suspicious of..its seems to have been written by the sort of traveller that insists on eating all meals a la native with their hands and believes that sitting in a paddy field with your head in a cow pat is seeing the 'real India'') that to really apprecite Kathakali you must take in a few 4 hour tourist performances followed by an allnight unabridged Kathakali marathon. The three hours of torture that was the Kathakali theatre we saw was more than enough. To me it seemed to be an Indian mixture of Carry on and Panto. The actors train for 6 years in order to be able to master thousands of intricate gestures that each mean something different.. impressive, however the only peolpe who are able to interpret the movements and thus follow the story are other Kathakali trained artists, seems kind of self indulgent to me. The acting style comprises of Parkinsonian facial twitching, each type of twitch is supposed to convey a different emotion, maybe James and I are not the cultural vultures we believe ourselves to be but we really couldnt see any difference in twitches. However I dont want to completely slate South Indian cultural arts. The following evening we decided to splash out on a fancy seafood meal with decent wine (wine!! first time since leaving home!!). Unbeknowst to us the restaurant had a Kathakali dance performance, the musicians and dancers were brill, maybe Kathakali dance rather than theatre is alot more intune with our Western tastes.. or maybe it was the wine....

Moving further South we decided to do some of the journey via scenic back water ferry. It was such a lovely journey, in stark contrast to some recent expereinces on the trains (see previous posts). There was something faintly embarrasing about being on a boat full of tourists all furiously snapping away at any sign of 'local life' but after a while they calmed down (except the obnoxious woman in front of us with the biggest camera I have ever seen) and it was such a pleasant way to get from A to B. One of the stops our boat made ws at the ashram of the famous 'hugging mama', one of India's mopst popular guru's. I expected to see a few bamboo huts and maybe a temple but the ashram was a huge tower block that wouldnt look out of place in the costa del sol. Apparently she's so popular that people come from all over to see her and get a hug and spiritual enlightenment. I would love to go and stay at the ashram on our way back through but I have to convince James who keeps mumbling under his breath about 'mumbo jumbo'. I feel that I need to at least attempt to have some sort of 'spiritual expereince'here in India!

Anyway it has taken me years to write this post due to frequent power cuts and my tan is fading so I'll say bye for now.

Jayne and James xx

ps come on you lot, get commenting on the blog, all the other blogs Ive seen are covered in comments and we feel really unloved!!!

pps. My favourite Indian news story this week: A dog that helped the police sniff out a huge amount of drugs has got a bounty on its head by some Keralan mafia group. the dog is now in police custody and may have to have its identity changed! I love India!!!Its so random!

Only Cochin.....or the Hokey Cokey Kochi!

2007-03-22T04:15:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

My marathon effort to provide a witty pun or play on words for each destination has, I think, plumbed new depths this time. However, due to Cochin's binomial status you have two for the price of one* - so you should be happy.

Cochin has had its ups and downs - the intense heat at night and our inability, till today, to get an air-con room has led to a few sleepless nights and I was only saved from becoming a ranting, sleep-deprived loon last night by Jayne administering a brown paper bag (well it nearly got that bad). The heat in the day is fine - its just when you want to sleep that it becomes oppressive. Still we have air-con now and I am an extremely happy chap indeed. Even more so as I have broken my record for emails in a day - 4. Still a bit crap though - Jayne has a little chap with a computer following her around with the amount of mail she gets. I think she's putting his kids through college!

So to Cochin.... Well the rickshaw drivers are all lying bastards and have an extremely non-euclidean sense of geometry as the distance from the centre of town to our hotel has varied by as much as 4km depending on the honesty of the driver. I am seriously considering drawing an honesty vs length of distance graph to demonstrate.

One driver we get though is extremely pleasant and takes us around a few of the local sights. Firstly we visit a nursery school/temple and we are immediately surrounded by 5 year olds desperate to know our name and for us to take photgraphs of them which they then hungrily devour as they peer into our camera's viewfinder.

We then head to Matancherry Palace, a seventeenth century building that houses the cheapest museum in the world (2 rupees and I am obviously not including free ones!) The main exhibtion is a succession of portraits of Cochin's leaders over the past 200 years. The leaders are all impressive - scholarly, progressive, fair minded and liberal. This is quite clearly reflected in Kerala's position as the most progressive of India's states (in almost every social statistic you can name - 100% literacy being the most widely known). When you compare such gallant leadership to the corrupt frogs who seem to battle it out for control of Agra (and thereby ruining this city through pollution, overcrowding and general malaise) you can see exactly why some places thrive where others wither.

During a quick lemonade break our driver reveals his hidden breakdancing skills. He invites us to attend a performance of his. He asks me to show me some of my breakdancing but I am forced to politely refuse so as not to show him up.

This leads on to Jewtown, an arts and crafts centre in the middle of Matancherry. Part of Kerala's wide and varied cultural heritage includes
a diasporic Jewish tribe of which there are only seven "pure" families left. The synagogue remains though and inside it is said to hold individually painted, white and blue tiles which are the centrepiece of "The Moors Last Sigh" one of mine and Jayne's fave Salman Rushdie's, darlings. Unfortunately due to a stinking mound of petty bureacracy bigger than the dung heap residing in the neighbouring Elephant stables we have so far been unable to enter.

Time 1: Reason for refusal of access - Jayne's bare legs and my positively slutty khaki shorts.

Time 2: Reason for refusal of access - Sarong's too garish?? Not really sure perhaps they thought I was some sort of devil-worshipping cross dresser - or even worse that we were DB and VB themselves??!!

By this time we had understandably lost patience (especially as Jewtown is in the very heart of the numerically challenged richshaw drivers territories). I blame this all on the doorman being a jobsworth but Jayne seems to be taking a more cosmopolitan approach - citing religious values. For me though - religious values stretched only as far as the hot walk home.

Well that's all about Cochin from me - the lovely Jayne will fill you in on Kathakali dancing (ethnic pantomime/dance from Kerala), she's highly qualified as she once got to the second round of her school disco dancing competition. I, however, seem to develop piles whenever I watch any form of entertainment felching the terms - ethnic, rural, traditional, rustic or barn and therefore slept throughout the whole performance. I can never get it out of my head that I am watching another countries morris dancing!

Anyway lots of love

James and Jayne

PS. Items for sale on Indian trains: pens, flapjack, cashew nuts, tea, coffee, curry, aftershave, perfume, children's picture books with an acutely horrific moral message, wind up toys, handkerchiefs, saris, samosas, torches, lighters, knives and towels.

* "Hokey Cokey Kochi" provided by Dixon's Dastardly Dido's Ltd

3 Slapping Incidents in Sleeper Class

2007-03-19T09:27:00.000-07:00

Hello there

Or should I say "Hallo Dur" due to the proximity of St Patricks Day and Ireland's famous victory in the Windies.

I have literally hauled myself out of bed to write this blog entry - we have just got off an 18 hour train to Kerala and I have left a slightly train-lagged Jayne dozing in our room. We were unable to travel in the air conditioned luxury that we have become accustomed to as we booked our train too late. Sleeper Class is the second from bottom class - so instead of sharing a cool cabin with four snoring, overweight Indian businessmen (all of whom have a little doggy bag of various smelly breads and chutneys packed for them by their loyal wives), we found ourselves next to what my mother would describe as the Hoi Polloi (in a little mock posh accent... hello mum!). Two boys stare fascinated as Jayne took out her contact lenses, it took ages to explain that they were like little glasses and there was some confusion when they assumed my gesticulations (the international method of twisting ones wrists back on themselves and forming two circles over the eyes to symbolise specs) to be describing a wisened owl.

The lights are soon off though and we find ourselves speeding through the night. The noise is deafening as the windows are open and you get a real Twainian sense of adventure as the breeze whips through your hair and the faint lights of railway dwellers wink past.

The peace is short lived though as a large brute of a man turns on the light and gives the bespectacled boy in the bunk opposite mine an almighty slap (slap no 1 folks), throws him out of his bed and settles down to sleep. The boy slinks off but is not perturbed. He waits until three in the morning to get the railway police and then starts a full scale, highly vocal argument that seems to involve the whole carriage. He reaches for the emergency stop cord and pulls it in desperation as his complaints seem to be falling on deaf ears. Slightly worryingly this acheives absolutely nothing and we are soon all back to sleep.

Just as the breeze and the repetitive noise of the train started to send me off to sleep again I was awoken by Jayne tugging on my t-shirt.

"The man opposite me is wanking," she tells me, remarkably calmy. Always a trooper our Jayne.

In my weariness I tell her she must be mistaken and that she should turn over. This she does but I resolve to keep an eye on him.

Almost inevitably I am soon greeted by the sight of him fondling his exposed phallus (slapping incident no. 2). Charged with indignation I, for some reason, shout "hicheh!" (Hinglish for "kindly desist from your secretive onanism fellow traveller, you are perturbing my lady friend")*.

When this doesn't work I am, for the second time on this trip, seized by a moment of primeval, ex-colonial outrage and deal the offender two sharp blows with the rim of my panama hat (slapping incident no 3 and no less harsh due to a couple of loose strands of whicker which could have given quite a nasty scratch).

This seems to do the trick as he mumbles and yawns and turns over as if he had been mometarily seized by some unfortunate bout of sleep masturbation (actual condition - scientific name sexsomnia - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_sex for details including a story about a sufferer who somehow broke both his fingers). Unfortunately Jayne missed my moment of bravery as she had her earplugs in.

I keep an eye on him for the rest of the night and at one point become convinced that he is making a video of Jayne with his mobile phone, further investigation though showed my worries to be unfouned - it was just a trick of the shadows.

Anyway we are safely in Cochin now - very laid back and sleepy and cloves in everything. More on this place later.

Take care, hope everyone is well.

Love James and Jayne xxx

* In all honesty i was completely at a loss for what to say... what is the international ettiquete one uses in such situations? I have emailed my query to this lady - http://www.sideroad.com/consultants/Etiquette-Experts.html

and suggest you do the same too to ensure a swift and accurate reply.

ignore

2007-03-15T02:34:00.000-07:00

Technorati Profile

Further Goans on

2007-03-15T01:16:00.000-07:00

A couple more characters for you to dissect.

The nameless French female hippie who ruined (perhaps transformed is a better word) an acoustic guitar jamming session by standing up and dancing like an extra in an Austin Powers movie while wailing like a deranged Kate Bush. Plus the ubiquitous out of time bongo player.

As a good friend used to say to me about travelling... "you'll be sitting on the beach, enjoying yourself, minding your own business, reading a book, catching some rays... and then some twat with a pair of bongos sits next to you".

Next there are the Italian American couple who come to South India every year to see this female pseudo-deity that people around here think is the messiah or some other such nonsense. The pseudo-deity is called Amma - Mother Earth, the Hugging Guru or something along these lines. They tell me she is amazing, and that if you go to see her your whole life will change. That suddenly you will see the true meaning of existence.

Unfortunately after they had travelled all the way to the deep south of India she wasn't in - gone on a tour of Delhi apparently. A sort of spiritual "gone fishin'". I worried momentarily for their spiritual health but then bumped in to a chap called Mickey who worried me even further.

Micky is a long haired Austrian drunkard who has lived in Goa for seventeen years. He has wrinkle eyes and bows his head as he speaks. He spent five years building a house here only to see the government bulldoze it after they passed a law stating that there should be no permananet dwelling within thirty metres of the beach. He seemed quite sad to be honest and we left feeling quite sorry for him.

Then there is the woman with twins who seems to breakfast next to us every day. She is obviously a very eager parent as she commentates on every single moment of her and her twins life in a bid to get them to talk before everyone elses children. So our breakfasts are a little like this...

"so mummy is drinking some tea, yes you hold the water, now you're drinking the water, umm yummy water. Finish that up. Now what will mummy have for breakfast - do yuo think she'll have the muesli or the eggs. I think mummy is going to choose muesli. Mummy is in a quandry she feels like Borodin's mule with all this choice. Mummy is going to end up insane if she comments on every little event on her life for the next few years - so please just start talking darlings..."

She then gets out what has to be the most complex childrens picture book that I have ever come accross. When she opened her book the words started off simply enough "cup", "bowl" and so on. But soon we had "Cactus", "Pomegranate"! Whats the point of trying to get your child to say pomegranate?? Especially from a picture in a book - from now it is going to think that all orange circles are called pomegranate. I half expected her to say "antidisestablishmentarianism" and have a little picture of a Roundhead fighting a Cavalier.

Being the most famous speech therapist currently on holiday in Goa Jayne informs me that this is a poor way to teach a child to talk as the more complex words will go right over their head until they are able to grasp the simpler concepts. I thought about telling her this but worried that she might talk to me in the third person and call herself mummy - which would have been disturbing.

Finally, I have been up to some amusing antics myself. A couple of nights ago I was a little the worse for wear and as Jayne and I sauntered back to our beach hut i suddenly became aware of a desperate need to pee. Most of the bars were shut now so I thought the best course of action would be to go in the sea. Unfortunately, as I approached the foaming surf (unzipping beach shorts et al) I slightly misjudged its velocity. I soon found myself skipping backwards dramatically as I wee'd into the approaching wave! I haven't urinated using this method before but I can assure you that from a visual point of view, at the very least, it is highly amusing. Soon afterwards I fell into a big hole in the sand that I had seen some children digging in the day.

Anyway must be off - we may manage to get away from this beach soon - in which case we will be heading for Cochin in Kerala - the only state in India with more women than men - I expect to be constantly followed by the flutter of excited Saris.

Lots of love

James and Jayne

Goan son

2007-03-14T01:02:00.000-07:00

Compared to the rest of our travels Goa is a different kettle of seafood indeed. We arrive at clean and sandy Margoa station and take a rickshaw for an hour and a half to Palolem Beach. Once a deserted hippy hangout the crescent palm lined beach is ow slightly overpopulated by tree houses and beach huts and seafood restaurants of varying quality.

Palolem is very relaxed and very beautiful - it seems quite easy to get stuck here. Unsurprisingly, what with the white beach, lovely sea and cheap drinks we have done very little of any import - it really is who you meet here that provides interest rather than what you do.

Our first character is Christian the hyperactive tout who takes us to our first beach hut. "Full power!" he shouts, rather quixotically, as he greets me. He takes us into our hut and starts proudly showing us the amenities.

"Lights... full power!" he exclaims as he flicks on a five watt bulb.

"Luxuy fan... full power!!!" and on comes a creaking dusty old fan.

We move into the bathroom and he flushes the toilet... not a lot happens but still he remains undaunted "State of the art western toilet with flush... Full Power!!!"

And now the shower - a trickle of luke warm water... "Full power shower!! Full Power" he says, pleased with his joke.

We take the hut though and start to chill.

The first couple of days are spent sunbathing, eating seafood and body boarding - something you will know i am an expert at due to my ability and experience at surfing on the East Coast of Australia. Friends at first are few and far between - a couple of girls who are rather uninspiring. We start to get a bit worried as there seem to be a lot of louts who may have been better off sunning it in Magaluf rather than India but we try to hold back our snobbery and by the third night we meet some very interesting characters indeed.

First there are Mick and Danny two guys from Ilford, Essex who set up market stalls. We meet them at Cafe Del Mar and they are quite evidently off their faces. They tell us proudly that they have no insurance and no malaria tablets and that they have been risking their neck on scooters for the past couple of weeks. Nice boys though and Mick was a Spurs fan so I like him straight away.

From here we moved onto Another Essex guy called Cookie. He split up from his wife a month ago and after a particularly drunken night out found himself on a plane to India about to start a cross country motorbike rally. Him and 200 other suicide wannabe's had bought Enfields (old english motorbikes) and planned to race them from North Goa to the tip of India. This is a perilous feat with plenty of near-death experiences. Their photographer has broken his back and is now in hospital in Cochin for the next six weeks.

Finally we meet a guy from Liverpool whose name escapes me at the moment. He fixes you with a stare and answers your questions about five seconds after you ask them in that curious way that scousers over the age of fifty seem to do. As if they are about to deliver a Jimmy Tarbuck style one-liner or slag off a Manc. He is covered in tatoos on Penguins. When Jayne asks him about them he pauses for five seconds and then tells us his slightly unbelievable story.

Do you remember that just before Christmas a baby penguin called Toga was stolen from an Isle of Wight Zoo. The Zoo was appealing for his return as they didnt believe he could survive in the cold of Winter without his parents. He claimed that he was the thief and that he was travelling around the World on his 25,000 pound reward money.

A small bit of detective work, however, has proved him wrong. According to www.bbc.co.uk the penguin was stolen and never returned. Bad news for our scouse friend as he is clearly insane but good news for Toga's parents as they hatched another chick on the 23rd of February.

The next day we go to see a reggae concert by Graeme from UB40. He's not bad but seems to get in a mood and storm off stage. The plot thickens however when I go onto UB40's website.* No one called Graeme has ever played for the band. Our Graeme does however looks a lot like Astro, the bands MC (part Grime/part Lilt advert). Yet more research though reveals Astro's real name to be Terence Wilson. Strange.

Paranoia sets in - is anyone in Goa who they claim to be.

Then there are the Nepalese guys who run our shack who claim to be in a Nepalese Hip-Hop group. Are they really... how can i be sure?? - I know so little about Nepalese Hip-Hop?!!!

Anyway with these worrying tidings I probably should scarper.

There will be some more photos up pretty soon so stay glued - and not like a crappy prit-stick left in the sun.

Lots of love

James and Jayne xxxxx

*(with the immortal and perhaps fatal-for-the-street-cred intro... UB40 Band Members to Start Rover Raffle at Birmingham Children's Hospital. Apparently Konk the Clown will also be there to entertain the children. Further news on the site reveals that Ali Campbell the whiny lead singer would love to move into Drum And Bass despite being a superlative guitar player. Follow this link for lots of UB40 facts... http://www.ub40.co.uk/news/20050107a.php).

Some items in the Indian press

2007-03-11T09:16:00.000-07:00

The Indian English language press is mesmerising - ranging from left wing broadsheets such as the Goan Gavind Times or the cheeky but fun tabloid the Bombay times.

Inevitably the news is littered with stories of horrific bus crashes, mass corruption, poverty and the faintly ridiculous. Despite this the press still seem to manage to put a brave face on it all.

A typical story might run a little like this;

"A protest was held today outside the offices of Gandhi Construction Ltd who were responsible due to corporate neglicence for the collapse of the local library which resulted in the deaths of a hundred school children.

The company had cut corners and not installed the correct girders. They had been found not guilty in court amid rumours of bribery and backhanders.

The vigil of course changed nothing but on the bright side the local village have started up a new book stall."

Some real stories from the press which seem completely alien to us include:

A man who bought a flat who was not allowed to live there with his family by the other tenants because his son had cerebral palsy - they thought he was clinically insane. (Bombay Times)

An astrologer was sentenced to 3 years in prison because he photoshopped a picture of himself and the prime minister and fooled his clients into believing he was the prime minister's personal sooth-sayer - despite living at the opposite end of the country.

An article determining whether you should go to the hospital if you break an ankle or whether to just rest it.

A bank that threatened to kidnap a debtor over an unpaid credit card bill for 150 quid.

A comparison of Gandhi and Tolstoy that concludes that Gandhi was spotless while Tolstoy was a syphillic, lechering brute. (not sure on my history here so unsure as to the validity of the argument).

A story about a judge who declares that all politicians involved in corruption should be hung from trees.

And some stories that are surprisingly like our own press:

A story about young doctors burning out - turning out and falling victim to "smoking uptake".

A million articles on how to avoid high blood pressure, obesity etc.

Suduko

Famous actor checks into rehab.

Fascinating - well I think so... one good thing for me is the extensive cricket coverage which seems to be written by people with a Phd for the game!

Cheers

James

Out for a Bombay Duck

2007-03-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

We arrive in Bombay after an eighteen hour train journey and immediately get ripped off by a taxi driver who charges us about three times as much it should from the station to get to our hotel.

Our hotel is expensive by Indian standards - about 11 pounds a night. We enter its lurid pink corridors and are met by a middle aged Indian man standing completely still over a Hessian mat looking intently at the wall at the opposing end of the corridor. Thinking I had perhaps caught him in a moment of repose, I peeked out of our hotel room about fifteen minutes later and he was still there staring at the same wall. The other members of staff seem to be particularly unfriendly, and virtually clamber over me to get a sight of Jayne even when she is in her favourite Burka. I seriously think a mere sight of ankle with these boys would see them all needing a new pair of trousers.

Putting these initial problems aside we emerge into Bombays humid day. It is very unlike most Indian cities - no rickshaws or cows cluttering the roads; pavements, trees and so on. We go for a lovely meal in a place called Busaba which actually sells Beef. When I get the bill though I realise that Bombay comes at a price, everything is about twice the price here as it is elsewhere.

The young Indian's of Bombay are also very different from their peers in other parts of the country. They are a lot drunker for a start - a group of lads were earlier chanting the refrain "We are the champions of the world... and we'll keep on drinking to the end!!!" to the tune of the famous Queen song. We chat to them for a bit - their names are apparently Ashar, Fernandes and Shaun. Yes Shaun. We talk about working for call centres (which they all do) and music we like (a band called Stain'd are quite big - as are the Killers and Nirvana). I eventually start talking to Ashar, who seems the quietest and most thoughtful (although how this can be said of a man who has consumed about five pints of beer in forty minutes in 35 degrees celsius, im not sure), about Shiv Sena. Shiv Sena are a political group who propose a sort of fundementalist Hindi or Hindu state. The party has varying levels of popularity across India and are also linked to to the BJP another Hindu party that up until about three years ago had a majority in Parliament. They are also extremely blinkered when it comes to religions outside Hinduism. Both parties have been indicated in causing riots that have resulted in the deaths of thousands of muslim's and both seem to have quite shady pasts.

Ashar is very anti-Shiv Sena (the mayor of Bombay is currently Shiv Sena). They apparently banned Valentines Day because it is immoral (and not because its flogged to death by Hallmark et al either) and they are also responsible for the rash of confusing name changes accross India. Thereby - Bombay is now Mumbai, the main station Victoria Terminus is now rather awkwardly monikered Chatraphati Shivaji Terminus. Ashar, who seems fairly typical of the new urban, young elite (liberated and sprinkled with new found cash) - dislikes them very much - bemoaning any restriction of his freedom.

Unbeknownst to me, while I am talking politics with Ashar, Fernandes is smooth-talking Jayne. He reluctantly moves on though when Jayne tells him I am her boyfriend... I'll warn you now - sisters, cousins and friends of Jayne's there is a very drunk, call centre worker in Bombay who really wants to meet you!

Other Bombayites we see look straight out of an episode of Friends, all leather sofa's, intellectual glasses, linen trousers and glamorous girlfriends. One group we sit near in a posh restaurant, gently ribs an incoming friend with a low mocking roar as he approaches their table - they ruffle his hair and laugh as if he had done something rather embarassing last night. This is unusual behaviour indeed!

On the flip side though, the contrast between rich and poor here is at its greatest. There are a lot of child beggars, and mothers with malnourished babies asking desperately for milk. Sometimes you give, but it can mean you get mobbed by other beggars and other times you don't and then you feel awful. Despite not being the cause or the solution of the problem you can sometimes feel like a complete bastard.

Our first night out is in a travellers pub called Leopold's. The music is hip hop of the Kanye West variety (i.e. listening to me light my farts over a loudspeaker would be more pleasant), on my way to the toilet I am accosted by a large Hoochie Mama (my camp friend Michael's description not mine), perhaps a more politically correct way to put it would be a cross between Naomi Campbell and Dawn French with Whoopi Goldberg's hair, but that really isn't very politically correct either. I make, what I believe, to be a valiant attempt to strut my stuff with her but she soon loses interest and turns away making me look a bit like the fading Rugby player forced by his agent to do a celebrity dancing show. Flustered, I press through the crowded dancefloor and stand next to what I assume to be the "engaged" toilet door. I am slightly embarassed when a huge guy pushes past me opens the door and looks at me like I am a pervert when the room is shown to be empty!

We make our way home, a little tipsy and are slightly shocked to see our hotel owner still staring forlornly at the wall.

Next stop Goa where we will mainly be doing absolutely Sweet FA.

Take Care, love

Jayne and Jamesx

2007-03-10T07:36:00.000-08:00

A picture of Jayne and I during the paint festival of Holi. The guy in the centre is our friend Balu.

Udapussy

2007-03-04T06:49:00.000-08:00

The seminal Bond classic Octupussy was shot in Udaipur. It is a faintly ridiculous tale revolving around, circuses, Faberge Eggs, teams of sexy female smugglers dressed in red lycra catsuits and a nuclear bomb that may just may allow the Russians to overtake Western Europe.

All the cheap hotels here show the film at seven pm. Although in the hotel we watched it at the kitchen staff kept on turning our telly down and their radio up so we couldn't really hear it.

If we thought Jodhpur was beautiful - Udaipur trumps it. A serene lake surrounded by an impressive palace, , and some beautiful Haveli's. In the centre of the lake there is a floating palace - a picture of which Jayne has helpfully provided you with. This serenity was perhaps boosted by our dodgy start in the city.

After enduring a terrifying bus ride (overtaking on blind corners, bravely taking on huge lorries in games of chicken) we made our way to Badi Haveli, a hotel which according to our guidebook is delightful with a garden restaurant. We get into our room and its a shit heap, Jayne isn't feeling too well after the bus journey so I try to put a brave face on it and resolve to leave the next day. However, when we find out that our shower doesn't work and that the sink leaks and that they no longer have a restaurant we decide to move next door to a hotel that really did fit the bill of delightful. To top it off our friends Rich and Shona were staying there.

This turned out to be a big mistake as when we I informed the hotel owner that I wouldn't be staying because of the state of our room he went completely ballistic called us a "pair of fuckers" and Jayne a "stupid fucking woman". At one point after I laughed nervously he shoved a finger in my face and warned me of the "direst consequences". Well nothings happened yet.

The palaces are beautiful etc but I am sure you must be bored of such things by now so I'll skip straight to the Holi festivities.

Holi is one of the four major Indian festivals (Diwali, Dhussera, Holi and one whose name escapes me but involes sisters travelling to meet their brothers to give them a bracelet that will bring good luck). According to the elderly gentlemen weho is making me a tailor made suit for sixty quid (bargain!) the festivals were traditionally designated to each caste. The brother sister thing was for the Brahmins (top caste, nearly out of the circle of reincarnation, priestly types), Dhussera is for the Kyshatriyas (warriors and second from the top), Diwali is for the Veshu (merchants etc) and Holi is for the Lebud (labourers and the lowest caste). He warns Jayne and I to be careful as these "bloody vagabonds are drinking too much whiskey and feeling up the women".

As it turns out all the festivals are now celebrated by everyone in India. The first night in Holi involves huge bonfires filled with firecrackers all around the city. Once these are burned people rush to the temple to see dancing and so on and for the final burning. The dancing is done on a stage next to the temple and we are treated to a performance by the Hedran, a community of eunuchs and drag queens that come to events like these to dance and earn money, or beg for it - one or the tuther. After that they drag some reluctant western travellers onto the stage and make them dance to Lonely by Akon and an Indianised version of Firestarter by the Prodigy.

After this has finished they go to light the bonfire. Unfortunately one of the power cables behind JAyne and I catches fire - there is a power cut and a mad scramble to get out of the way of the fire. The fire is sson out though and we spend the next twenty minutes watching a little man with a pair of pliers and some marigolds shin up the pylon to restart the power. There is a great cheer when it comes back on and the bonfire is lit - this is the biggest one and the noise from the firecrackers is deafening. As Jayne mentioned, this would never be allowed in England as it seems that the whole place is just one misplaced firecracker away from complete incineration.

The next morning is the main part of festival (or at least the bit people look forward to). We descend to the streets to find that everyone is covered with luminous powder paint. The indian men come up to you smear paint on your head and then give you a hug and say Happy Holi. Some of the hugs that they give the women are a little over-amorous but people for the most part are very friendly. We start water bomb fights with local children and generally get covered with paint. By the end of it all we look like a couple of purple turds but it was great fun. Some groups of lads got a bit unruly but we were protected by the staff at our hotel and a young lad of eighteen called Balu.

When Holi dies down we play cricket with Balu and his little brothers. They are amazing... although I obviously play an obdurate innings full of grit and then get out playing the hook shot for four like all great English batsmen.

Udaipur is the first place in India that we have had a television so I have only just been introduced into the joys of Indian programming. The sitcoms are great, plenty of tripping on banana skins, canned laughter and suggestively raised eyebrows. The adverts for men are hopelessly unrealistic - portraying the average Indian guy as a nightclub crawling, womaniser whose girlfriend always wears a mini-dress reminiscent of Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies. My favourite adverts are for the Get Wet range of mens products. The hair gel apparently makes your hair turn into "maffia style!!!!". The advert for deodarant rather bizarrely involves two, White!??, adolescent boys queuing up for a blue movie. They are obviously worried about getting past the lady on the door but entrance her with a spray of their deodarant while sneaking past.

The best programme by far is one called "Champion Of Knowledge" - unfortunately this range of knowledge is restricted to cricket and besuited and bespectacled boys, paired up, compete for a top prize of about 120 pounds. The presenter is an Indian version of Lloyd Grossman. One of the competitors hobbies was actually "mathematical statistics" which even surprised Lloydy. Questions generally run in the form of:

Who scored the fourteenth run of the match when India played the West Indies on 24th April 1978. They almost always get the answer right and give eachother innapropriate high fives for each point they get. Easy questions get you a quick single, harder ones a four and super hard ones a humongous six! At the end of the show the winners are presented with an oversize cheque for ten thousand rupees (120 pound) which they have to give to their school. Considering the amopunt of bullying they must be about to receive its surely not worth it?

Anyway better go.. lots of love

James and Jayne xxx

The floating palace of Udaipur

2007-03-04T06:10:00.000-08:00

We're currently in Udaipur "the most romantic city in Asia". It probably deserves the label as its such a beautiful place. Its centered around a lake surrounded by palaces and temples. This is a picture of the floating palace..,. now a very posh hotel. The closest James and I got to it was about 50 metres in a leaky pedalo.

Ramptart

2007-03-03T05:20:00.000-08:00

So we arrive In Jodphur in darkness and take a rickshaw to our guesthouse. We are just about ready to collapse in bed after our nerve-wracking journey but deciding to have a beer and a bite to eat upstairs. Our hotel is in a Haveli - an old style of traditional Indian dwelling that was favoured by the reasonably well off before everything got trampled after partition or by blood-thirsty and ignorant clod-homping English sopldiers around the time of the Mutiny (1857). These building are dying out but are in many places preserved a hotels and guesthouses ranging vastly in quality. Yogi's where we were staying was about in the middle - quite comfortable but as with most hotels in India blessed with dubious plumbing.

The hotel is run by Yogi's son an ambitious young Indian who tells us that he wants to see his name on every coffee table in America. If he was in England he would seem a little stuck in the Eighties, a bit overly entrepreneurial, a yuppy perhaps. Quite a few of the Indian middle classes seem to have a similar attitude and there is a real sense of get up and go, the recent glut of foreign investment bring out he businessmen in many of the Punjabi's (and no thats not a racist term!).

Anyway, I digress. We reach the top of the Haveli and survey the view. It is spectacular - above us the imposing fort and in the other direction the lights of houses, temples and palaces stretch into the distance.

The view in the morning is equally spectacular. The fort is perhaps slightly more worrying at night but the town regales in a wash of bathroom blue. Many of the houses in Jodhpur are painted blue to ward off insects. At first this was the preserve of the Brahmins (the highest strata of indian society) but now anyone can do it. The town now looks like a chalky sea, choppy with the peopled roofs of crumbling Havelis.

We visit the Fort and so far it is easily the best "attraction" we have seen. You are given a useful audio guide as you meander around and soon you are taken into the intricate palce within the fort. The previous owners seemed very fond of stained glass windows and mirrors and the rooms reszerved for the ladies are particular fetching. After this we walked around the ramparts where you might feel like the safest soldier in the world. I really cannot imagine how anyone would have contemplated attacking this fort until at least the invention of the scud missile!

As we walk around the ramparts, Jayne, who is wearing a skirt that seems to take considerable pleasure in blowing skywards Marilyn Monroe style at the most unfortunate moments, noptices that we are being followed by three Indian men. Unfortunately stares and being followed are a favourite pastime of Indian men when it comes to western women. The whole country is quite sexually repressed, despite being able to buy the Kama Sutra in every bookshop you walk past. Sexuality is a little bit Carry On style - sometimes you half expect their eyes to bounce out on springs and for some Benny Hill throwback to make a fart noise.

Talking about eyes on springs, Michael, our American friend, told us another amusing story. He had made friends with an Indian guy who promised to take him to see some sacred stones which were supposed to resemble the first of all Hindu Gods, the elephant Ganesh. When he got there he found an old stoned priests wearing RayBans, laughing to himself as he sat next to a big rock with googly eyes on stalks and a hose for a nose. Hinduism is quite easisly the most amusing religion i have ever come across.

Most Hindu god's seemed to have a favourite form of transport - Ganesh travels on a tiny mouse and according to the picture in my hotel room Vishnu prefers an overweight pigeon. I have to admit to being slightly non-plussed about the basic set up of things so Jayne and I were quite pleased to hear some of the Religion's stories one night.

On our final night in Jodhpur there was a lightning storm - the great hawks that circled the castle were initially nowhere to be seen as the clouds closed in and then there was a crack of thunder and torrential rain for about two hours. When it rains in Jodhpur they turn the electricity off as some poor guy got killed last year while holding onto a cable at the same time as standing in a puddle. Consequently we were stranded in this restaurant trying to play cards by candle light. The young boy who was serving us our food demanded to tell us the story of Diwali - in short it goes like this.

Brahmin and Vishnu exist at the beginning of the universe which at that point is no more than an infinite line of holy fire. They challenge eachother to get to the end of each side of the fire and set off, Vishnu eventually gives up but Brahma decides to pretend thathe wento to the end and basically said it was great. When Vishnu found out he was lying he gets very angry and therefore creates the Earth.

Ram and Laxman are best friends (Ram is an incarnation of Vishnu). Ram is a very good guy. He loves Sita who is the prettiest girl around. She is stolen by the Demon Ravana who takes her to Lanka (Sri Lanka) which is a bit like Hades or hell and populated by demons (a suppose a bit like believing that all Irish people are green or leprechauns).

Ram gets Hanuman (monkey God who can fly either like a Kite or with a kite (not sure which)) to track her down. There is a war for fifteen years, Laxman gets poisoned, nearly dies. Eventually Ram wins and gets the girl.

The whole things a lot more complex and as this boy told us the story he animated it with gestures of flight, fight, love and beauty that would have made Marcel Marceau proud.

He finished his story as the storm abated and then escorted us home.

Next one will be in Udaipur.

Take Care

James

a nice tight pair of Jodhpurs

2007-02-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

So having spent an extra day in Pushkar without bothering to change our train reservation we set off to Ajmer in the hope, and I can't stress the word hope enough, that we could change our ticket for that days train and that things would all go smoothly, not involving queuing at a million different booths while someone wobbles their head in blank confusion.

We share our taxi with Michael a slightly camp American involved with reality television. He's a series produce for an interior design programme similar in style to changing rooms. He told me about a new American reality tv programme called "The Flava Of Love" - in which twenty robustly built african-american ladies vie for the carnal attentions of Flava Flav (of Public Enemy fame). Apparently one of them poos on the floor when she gets evicted - sounds brilliant and much like an indian station platform.

When we arrive at the Station and fight through the rickshaw drivers we head straight for the enquiry desk who, after queuing for twenty minutes and Jayne elbowing an old but pushy granny in the face, tell us we must go the Head Ticket Collector's Office. Unfortunately i decide to confuse matters by approaching the supervisor who tells me to fill out two identical forms and return them to him instead. We opt for this seemingly easier option but as I get to the front of the queue with my hastily completed forms he puts a closed sign up and sits there for fifteen minutes watching me panic and perspire, while he picks his nose and writes impenetrably into his vast tome of bureaucratic nonsense. In India you have to write everything down at least four times. When the closed sign is removed he is replaced by a lady who fiddles around with her printer, adjusts her keyboard, shuffles her paper and generally wastes another five minutes of my life. I give her the forms and she tells me that I must queue at the head ticket collectors office!

With about three minutes to catch our train i precede dad-like to run around the office screaming fuck in random directions while Jayne follows no doubt rolling her eyes at my ridiculously flappy behaviour. I run full pelt to Head Ticket Collector's office who mercifully is without queue, we fling our backpacks to the floor as I remonstrate loudly to the man demanding that he change my ticket - after all the train is virtually empty - he nods his head , shuffles some paper and tells me that:

"i am thinking you are running out of time" - "I know!" I scream, "Just change my bloody ticket!". I am now skipping around like a deranged Basil Fawlty demon. Then he just laughs at me and tells me to just get on the train - that my Indrail pass is valid to do that. Before he can finish his sentence Jayne and I find ourselves sprinting over prostrate beggars and past bemused pakora-wallahs towards platform three. I make an arcane signal to the driver that meant to me "wait- I need to get on! And my girlfriend behind me!" (it was exceptionally clear - should probably be introduced in to BSL) unfortunately to him my gesticulations obviously meant "start the train now - as quickly as possible my good man I wish to board at a brisk run."

As I find our carriage the train is going at a fairly rapid 5 mph (quik for a train here) and I bravely leap through the door and into the main corridor. As I look back I see Indiana Jayne bravely continuing her sprint, athletically and gracefully carrying her bags like a puma might leap from one tree to another. By the time she reaches the train it is going at a rather scary 7 or 8 mph. She deftly threw me her rucksack which I plucked masterfully from the air. With a last minute grab for the door handle she swung her body round, cleverly using the weight of her rucksack as a makeshift cantilever and propelled herself to safety. We stood exhausted and panting and wallowing in the round of applause we received from the other passengers.

Well we're off for a bit of a wander now. Through the shoe district probably.

More about Jodpants soon.

Lots of love

James and Jayne xxx

Camels give me the hump

2007-02-27T04:36:00.000-08:00

Hello there,

Hope everyone is well.

The final day in Pushkar renewed my faith in all this Puja Hinduism malarkey. Jayne and I wandered around the lake to where it was a little less busy and sat on the steps of the Ghat watching Indian families worship at the lake without too much intrusion from money-grabbing faux-priests (only in India would you commonly get Priest impersonators - can you imagine cockney dodgy geezers slamming around their BMW 3 Series dressed in long black robes and dog collars in the hope that they could pilfer the collection tray).

I watched a lady in her fifties and a younger girl, maybe about twenty, walk down towards the lake. I assumed that the younger girl was her daughter and that they were mourning somebody -perhaps an anniversary of a death - as the older lady was crying and the younger girl put her arm around her. They stood there, a hugging pile of poorly matched saris and poured their flowers into the lake. As they came back up the steps the older lady was crying and smiling, slightly embarassed, wiping tears from her face as if they shouldn't be there, shaking her head with what seemed to be a sense of relief or renewal. It seems to me that for many Indians faith or spirituality is something that really gives them succour and protects them from the harsher aspects of existence.

That night as we lay in bed a great humming rose up from one of the many temples. It sounded like an enraged bees nest but was I presume the sound of many people "omming" (conjugate that verb if you will). Soon the sound of a priest chanting lifted itself above the hum and clackety rhythms of drums and castanets and reverbrating cymbals that accompanies this worship.

The next day was dominated by a camel safari. At 3pm we left our hotel and were taken to an old building that seemed to have once been some sort of stadium. Inside were seven camels. Jayne's camel, who proved to be slightly schizophrenic, was called Baba. My, evidently male camel, was bedecked with beads and ribbons. I wanted to call him Campy but was informed that he had originally being christened quite fittingly as She-Ra. Riding a camel is something of a wobbly affair - the opposite movement to riding a horse. Our camel men were quite entertaining if a little over ready to laugh at the disabled (there was a dwarf in the other group to us). They were also quite openly racist. I pointed out an unusual black camel to my camel guy. Unfortunately this camel was sitting only a few metres away from a black man. Slightly confused my camel guy replied "yes that man is very black isn't he".

Jayne had something of a renegade camel guy who liked to stand up on his camel and jump off Frankie Dettori style. Eventually he let Jayne ride the camel on her own - something she proved quite adept at except when the camel would unpredictably break into a sprint.

We were sad to leave Pushkar - we had made some good friends there and the chef at our hotel, Raju, was excellent. A master of card tricks and Jayne's best friend while I lolled around in bed.
What slightly surprised me was Raju and Bopal's (his young assistant) love of slightly dodgy american teen sitcoms. A love only surpassed by their passion for the Mr Bean film which is apparently shown nearly every week in India. They were also big fans of Takeshi's Castle - but that is quality programming.

So that was Pushkar - next stop Jodhpur - an ancient fort and at last a beer!

James and Jayne

PS Comment on the blog! Go on you know you want to.

PPS If anyone wants to email me my address is mrjamesmurray@hotmail.com. I have had one email since I left - which is pathetic compared to Jayne's million.

CLICK HERE MUM

2007-02-24T23:27:00.000-08:00

Hi Mum

Not sure if your getting my emails so hopefully you will see this. Thanks for the top up but you text the wrong number to me. It is a 16 digit number across the middle of the receipt, no letters at all. I hope you've not thrown the voucher away. Sorry to publically expose your technological dyslexia!!!

Scams Trams and Automobiles

2007-02-24T02:01:00.000-08:00

Hello All

Hope all is well.

Where to start - perhaps with the Taj Mahal. It is a magnificent building - its whiteness blinds those without shades. It is lined with precious and semi precious stones and so on. It does suffer from smelling of feet though as everyone who traipses through is forced to remove their shoes. The gardens are thronged with predatory indian families eager to take pictures of themselves with unsuspecting foreigners. Jayne managed to get involved with one family for about half an hour - unfortunately they didnt have a camera and we had to wait while they hailed one of the photographers over. The poor girl was there for ages while they took various different pictures of various different permutations of family. I can only imagine that there is a house somewhere in India lined with pictures of Jayne.

We had taken a cycle rickshaw to the Taj. On the way he thrust a book of recommendations written by Japanese tourists which basically said that he did good tours of the city. He offered to take us round for 100 rupees for the day (about 1 pound fifty). He was annoying me so to get rid of him I agreed to meet him a few hours later for a tour and said I would pay him after. After seeing the Taj though all Jayne and I really wanted to do was sit in a cafe, drink tea and play cards so with a slight feeling of guilt i broke our appointment. As the day wore on I started to feel a wee bit smug as it was I who had scammed the rickshaw driver rather than the other way round ( a much more common occurence I assure you). Later on we made our way back to the train station and I started to get a sinking feeling as I remembered that I had told him what time my train was back and lo and behold who should interrupt me as I tried to slink through the baying crowd of hotel touts and rickshaw wallahs. Yep my friend from before. I gave him 50 rp as pennance but he still put on a look of such hurt that I thought he may just have bought a KD Lang record on the way to meet us. Oh well - theres always a next time I suppose but I'm determined to scam someone.

Our journey to Pushkar was long and tiresome. Our train at Bharatpur was 4 hours late - fortunately every train in India was late that day so we managed to get our connection. At Jaipur we had a couple of hours wait so decided to go for a beer. We bumped into a chap called Rashid Khan, importer of jewels, seller of travel package tours and owner of something that he rather bizarrely described as a Swiss tent. He got us a couple of overpriced beers and invited us into his office - where we chatted for a while about camels, swiss tents and money as you always seem to do in India. Everyone we meet has a travel business, people can be quite deceptive as they chat away with you , but you can guarantee that after about half an hour you will have their business card in your hand and be solemnly promising (i.e lying through you teeth) to call them from your next destination.

The journey took 14 hours in all, the highlight of which was a naked, beturbanned, loco, ex-indian wrestler (according to himself) accosting Jayne and demanding that she leave India immediately. I bravely blocked with a Judo style arm move but still he persisted. Our second plan was to edge our way into the crowd Anglo style - muttering to passersby who assured us madam that he was "being crazy in the head". We jumped on our bus and made our escape.

The holy town Pushkar - where we are now - is very pleasant. Lots of nice clothes stalls and you don't get too much hassle. I have bought myself a white indian style shirt to blend in with the locals, soon I will be using spitoons and crouching everywhere on my haunches. Jayne has some lovely, lucky bangles and a pair of slouchy trousers. Pushkar has 1000 temples apparently although I have counted about ten so I think this may be something of an exaggeration. The idea is that you go down to the central lake and get blessed by a priest. Unfortunately Jayne and I got scammed by some unsavouries who tried to extort money out of us. I'll warn you now that (as a result of me giving them about 20p) I am now a bad man in India and that all my associates will have bad karma for seven generations... so no walking under ladders for a few weeks you lot - just in case.

Final news includes meeting a friend - Afshad. Afshad is a reasonably well to do muslim from Goa who is currently dating a Hindu Brahmin girl. As you can imagine this is something of a Romeo and Juliet situation. He is originally from an area of India called Bihar. To fill you in on the politicial situation of Bihar - there has recently throughout India been something of an uprising of lower caste peoples against the minority higher castes. This is all well and good apart from the horrific violence which has ensued. In Bihar this uprising has allowed a lower caste individual to become MP - once again this is all fine apart from the fact that this chap (laloo basad) is a thug and a criminal who has embezzled 180 million pounds from the local economy. Not surprisingly this eventually landed him in jail. This did not diminish his political popularity as he retained his seat and is now the minister for transport. Jeffrey Archer would love it here.

The upshot of this for Afshad is that Bihar is a very lawless place and dangerous for anyone of high caste or with wealth like himself. As a twelve year old he was kidnapped by bandits and ransomed back to his family for a huge sum of money. Ironically enough though while in captivity his jailers treated him like a prince - feeding him the finest delicacies. Annoyingly enough for Afshad's uncle - he ate so much in four days that the kidnappers added about an extra thousand pounds to their fee for food and service!

Thats all for now folks... we are heading south a bit sooner than planned as we are craving a beach and a party or two.

James and Jayne

Ps. Foggy - am 3-2 up in the Pushkar amateur pool open although my flip flops have caused a re-occurence of my old Snooker ankle. Can you get John Virgo to send that fit blonde masseuse that he bones for money out here, it really is quite painful.

Pps. Ford - weather news.... today it rained for the first time.

Ppps. Mum Phillips Jayne has sent a package home with some postcards and a ring for Jemma.

PPPS. Jemma Dixon - you obviously have a ring on the way.

PPPPS. Si - hello little Si! Heard about your date from Jayne - if she doesn't like drunk or hungover men she is obviously crying out to mow the lawn with her teeth (if you catch my lesbianic drift).

PPPPPS. Jemma Murray hello my darling - Love you lots. xx Help mum and Dad get on the blog they are searching for it on Google apparently??!

Ra Ra Raj Ma Haj

2007-02-20T03:44:00.000-08:00

After accidentally leaving our dynamite set at Delhi station we have finally got on the road to Rajasthan.

Am fully recovered from my chest infection for those that were worried but am now the unfortunate bearer of quite a vicious hand wound sustained while punching the crap out of a window in our luxury hotel in Neemrana. I had spent the day on the back of a moped attempting to use an ATM - on the first trip I forgot my card, on the second trip I blocked my card (wrong pin) and by the time I got there the thrid time with Jayne's card they had run out of money. Hitting my head on a ridiculously low ceiling was the last straw and frankly the window deserved it.

Amusingly enough I was kindly patched up by the same young Indian man who had given me an Ayurvedic massage. I had sworn never to look him in the eye again after him and his friend stripped me naked, covered me in oil and spent a good hour or so "accidentally" touching my scared penis. I half expected to open my eyes and see a rabid Graham Norton and Julian Clary vying for phallic control. Anyway was forced to thank him.

Moments of amusement that have happened so far include:

Meeting our new friends Chaswinder and Niyal in TGI Friday Delhi(Indian for Charles (from the Chas) and Neil) who described a good cricket player as a Monster player. I asked them whether Jeremy Snape is a monster cricket player but they looked a little blank. Chaswinder started a theme by promising to do anything for us at the drop of a hat - something all Indian men seem to want to do, they probnably fancy Jayne.

The "entertainment" at our hotel comprising of a Finnish Youth choir whose final was "Ode to Joy" as done in the final scenes of Sister Act 2 "Back In The Habit".

Things that Jayne Finds Amusing But I found Poignant:

Two robed men sitting around a fire at the side of the road playing with their mobile phones (snake I think).

Me on a bicycle (piles are worryingly imminent)

Less amusing moments:

Our journey from Neemrana to Bharatpur via Alwar: eight hours of potholed roads, full bladders, a driver who doesnt understand the word stop, Jayne weeing all over the back seat and not telling me.

Being surrounded by nodding maniacs while I tried to pay a rickshaw driver. Conversation went something like this:

James: How much?

Ricky the fricking rickshaw driver: 20 rupees.

James: Ok here's 20 rupees. Thank you. (turn to leave)

Ricky: Twenty rupees please.

James: That is twenty rupees - look two tens. Thank you.

Ricky: Twenty rupees please (head begins to wobble in expression of mild irritation).

Crowd: Twenty rupees! You give (general head wobbling all round)

JAmes: (english now all over the place) I give!

Crowd and Ricky (simultaneously as if all of Mother India was against me): Twenty rupees please.

James: For fucks sake.

We are now in lovely Bharatpur. Visited their charming National Park and saw some owls and cranes etc etc. Tomorrow we see the Taj Mahal which I've heard is a little unimpressive...

In all honesty every person we have met has been extremely nice to and everyone goes well beyond the bounds of duty when you ask for help. Such kind people.

Lots of love James and Jayne

Ps Mel Gibson advertises whiskey here - work that one out teetotal Judaiphiles!

Pps You can get photocopying done on the roadside, in a little shack.

Ppps Jayne keeps on getting attacked by monkeys - although I haven't seen it yet so I think that she is lying.

2007-01-12T07:41:00.000-08:00

Slumming it a bit at first. This is the hotel we've booked for our first couple of nights in India.

First Post

2007-01-12T04:33:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers,
Although we haven't donned our practical travel sandals just yet it feels fitting the first post on this blog should come from the IT Training Room, Manchester Royal Infirmary, Hathersage Road.
The room is painted a tribal white and lined with what appear to be sockets of the electrical variety. My companion (a man in his fifteies) is playing minesweeper.
The days are long here, the temperatures variable and the challenges are vicious in their cruelty. My only way of communicating with popular bat stiletto Jayne Dixon is via the power of email.
Soon though we will be leaving this box of blandness and travelling on a plane, no less, to several places of greater interest at which point I shall write something more relevant in the space below.