Sleep Remedy

I find it quite difficult to fall asleep, it's probably my own fault because I cannot settle. I go to bed but need to watch television for a bit even if it's utter rubbish, although I can never watch the late night bingo. That truly would signal the death of my charisma. I then spend about an hour tossing and turning until I decide to turn on the radio. Sometimes that sends me to sleep straight away but lately that has not worked and I find myself listening to repeats of the shipping forecasts! I am not too keen to gulping various over the counter narcotics so I have been drinking a glass of red wine instead. This chills me out, relaxes me after a pretty rough day at the orifice and generally get's the creative juices flowing. So every evening around nine I go and pour myself a glass and sit back relax and watch either Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Family Guy, Heroes or of course The Mighty Boosh ( I have these all on DVD and not on Sky +). Doing this over a period of time, only broken when I go out, means that I have tried a few wines now and although cannot claim to have a cultured pallet I have by polishing bottle after bottle can claim to know which wine makes you the most sleepy (well for me). No, I have not spent months swishing it around my mouth like that lady used to do on BBC 2 in the nineties. Instead it was more of a case of me traipsing around the aisles in Tescos pointing at a bottle and remembering that I had already tried that one, then by some stretch of the imagination I recall it's affect on me. Soon I found myself standing in front of the red wine section able to select the one that would send me into a drowsy state quicker than the others. So the wine that manages to send me to sleep the quickest is some Australian wine called Rosemount Estate Shiraz which you can pick up in your local Spar, Co-op, Sainos or Tescos. Do check it out if you have trouble heading to dreamland it's completely sorted me out. Perhaps drinking one of those really cheap high percentage beers would do a better job but I don't want liver damage and touching something like Super Tennants is the first sign of your life ending. Plus, I like to enjoy the taste of what I drink and down something that resembles the taste of ear wax.

In other news, I'm loving the new football season starting. It has been a painful summer watching the Euro 2008 but now the Premier League has started and all the buzz has come back, especially on a Saturday afternoon. Hopefully Torres will turn on the style again this season and deliver the goods. He better do, he's in my dream team!

Simon Reeve

It was Tuesday night and I was laying in bed unable to sleep. Moving around trying to get comfortable I cut my losses and switched on the television. Skipping past late night bingo on ITV 1 I came across a programme on BBC 2 called Equator. It’s where this guy called Simon Reeve cruises around different countries that lie near the middle of the equator. In this particular episode he was in Colombia and apart from dodging the terrorists and army he found himself in the Amazon. Whilst paddling in a boat up the Amazon River he would give a very conservative yelp in triumph every time he crossed the imaginary line of the equator. The boat driver would just look at him in an odd way as Simon looked at his GPS satellite device in wonderment. The whole programme was quite interesting because he got to see some of the culture and highlight the poverty going around. This left me thinking ‘wow, I want his job’. So the next day I went on to Wikipedia and it turns out this television presenter is also a bestselling author on subjects like terrorism and the Munich massacre (not much humour circulating around him then). He has also presented another programme called Tropic of Capricorn where he went off gallivanting around countries such as Madagascar and Mozambique and in general seems to be doing pretty cool stuff for a living, writing books and making television programmes which I found quite inspiring. So the last few days I’ve been falling asleep with the idea that I one day will go around the world getting into adventures and mischief but also get paid for it! Sadly, this still only remains in my dreams.

In other news I saw Knocked Up for the first time last week, it’s pretty funny but nothing on Superbad. The main character kept reminding me of Yogi Bear which kept me amused. I also, check out Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay which cracked me up, it’s sick but if you need a quick dosage laughter it may do the trick.

Here’s a trailer to a new film called Watchmen that’s coming out next year. It’s based on a comic book/graphic novel I have never read but the film looks damn good.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/watchmen/med.html

Drenched!

It happened last week but the British weather haunts me like the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Last Tuesday I decided to head to the shop to buy a few things at lunch. It’s not too far about a five minute walking distance but as I stared from the window I saw tiny speckles of droplets splash against the window. Thinking it was a light shower, I plugged in my digital radio, slipped on the rain coat and headed out. Within a couple of minutes the sky decided to vomit gushes of water all over the UK. I flipped up my hood and thought that it was just a brief down pour but I was wrong. Within thirty seconds my trousers became soaked until they stuck to my legs. My brown shoes became a darker shade as I found it too hard to dodge the puddles. However, it was my jacket that let me down*. I was about midway through my journey when I started to feel the water trickling down my back causing me to sway all over the place. As the rain come bucketing down the jacket became less resistant to the water, I looked up at the sky silently asking for it to show some mercy for someone who wanted just to buy something to eat. There was no mercy at all, and it flew down ferociously until it was seeping through my jacket and reaching my skin.

I then heard a pop in my ears. At the time Bjork was playing and had thought it was a quirky beeb from her song. It wasn’t. It was my radio dying on me. I quickly unzipped my pocket and scooped up my radio and a small puddle of water. The rain had gotten through to the radio and the screen was flickering blue and white until there was crackling, a bit of fuzziness and then a flatline. My digital radio had perished. No more 1xtra, 6Music, BBC7, World Service they were all taken from me and instead it would have to be local radio for the next few weeks with the cheesy DJ deceiving the naïve into thinking he’s cool when really he’s a washed up prick. ‘Texas, what a great new band!’ I was irascible, wet and there was nothing I could do apart from venture forth. I carried on to the shop dripping all over the floor and the newspapers as I leaned over to the magazines for anything of interest. After deciding there was nothing about I brought my sandwich where the woman at the counter gave me the stink eye for creating a small reservoir in between the pot noodle and soup aisle. Handing over my wet coins I headed back in the rain.

Although it whipped across my face making it red I decided to accept the weather. It was raining and I was outside, there were a lot graver situations I could have been in. Besides I could not have gotten more soaked considering my clothes had absorbed half the River Ouse. So I flipped my hood down and casually made my way back in similar fashion as the movements seen in the opening credits of Superbad.



* I later found out that my jacket is only shower proof.

Wener

It was my last blog entry that sparked the interest of the Britpop epoch. A comment that mentioned the band Menswear had me thinking back about the bands that had only relative success during that time. Elastica, Bluetones, Nothern Uproar all spring to my mind but it was the band Sleeper who I had forgotten about. Their music rang vaguely in my mind as I tried to dredge up the memories of that hedonistic era of Adidas Campus trainers coupled with black rimmed glasses but it was the lead singer that was the most notable part of the band. I could not remember her name but recalled she had a short brown bobbed hair and it tormented me. It was like an itch that would not go away, and at various times of the week I would try to think of her name and the band she was from. It was not until I spoke to my pal Coldbrain that he told me it was Sleeper and Louise Wener was the lead singer. As soon as I heard her name it all came rushing back. The surname used to make my chuckle because of its colloquial American connotations of being a sausage. I still could not remember any songs but the small release of nostalgia had me suitably content. That was until he told me she had become an author. My ears pricked up and the curiosity ran rife inside me, apparently she is quite good.

The next day I went onto Amazon and did a search on her name, it was true she is an author. She has written three books, The Perfect Play, Goodnight Steve McQueen and The Half Life of Stars. Eager to learn more I started to read each synopsis of each book before taking the plunge and deciding on Goodnight Steve McQueen. I’ll probably have to wait till Thursday before it arrives which is fine for me because that gives me time to finish my current tome. I will let you know if her book is any good.

In other news, I’m heading towards the end of my Spanish course and I cannot wait. It feels like a weight around my neck regulating how I feel about the day. When I finish work, in theory I should be hitting the books but no one wants to work during the day just to get home and work during the night and in fact I have been flagging greatly of late. Soon it will be all over though and I can continue to learn at my own pace and feel free from obligation.

Downgrade

Yes I know, I have been rubbish over the last two months but this is the holiday season so I have refrained from bashing the keys in hope that my brain might seep out something worthwhile. It has not of late so I gave it a break and exposed it to the usual cult cultural pulp that seems to stimulate it to the same levels as a teenager watching a porno movie. However, now it is time to awaken it and start tapping again.

You may recall an entry I posted last year babbling how I managed to blag a great deal on a new mobile phone with luck, a sprinkle of hard nose attitude and some nous that was bequeathed to me by someone I met once. So eleven months later I am now able to upgrade whilst sitting on my chair pondering about what to get I realised that there is not much out there. The iPhone looks gorgeous and the fact tech geeks and the layman both salivate at the mere mentioning of the name lets us all know Apple are on to a winner. And I am tempted but their camera is utter pants considering the cheapest tariff going is £30 a month not to mention the £99 for the handset. The N96 is the behemoth of phones packed with more gizmos at hand than Data from the Goonies but it is a slide phone and does not compete with the sleekness and smoothness of the iphone where surfing the internet is actually a pleasant experience on a mobile device. So, I ditched that phone. There is a Samsung out which is supposed to be good but upon inspection it was not even an improvement on my current phone. I was pretty annoyed with the conclusion that mobile technology has not really progressed in the last twelve months leaving me with little choice but to downgrade. Yep, I decided that I want to fall downwards because to get a top of the range phone you need to be on a £30 tariff, which to me is quite pricey, for a phone that has not really improved over the last year. Not even the mouthiest telecommuniocations salesman could hide the fact that if you own the N95 then there is nothing out there to really beat it. So instead I wanted to reduce my tariff even further to less than £20, regardless of the handset they chucked at me.

It must have been an odd experience for the salesperson to hear someone go 'I want to downgrade, what pretty standard handsets have you got?' He did stumble on his words a bit, and tried to persuade me that a £30 tariff was the way forward. 'Nope, I want a tariff less than £20 a month, don't care how pants the phone is.' There was a bit of silence then an admission that they could do a £20 tariff but it was for something like 75 mins free a month. Now way, I thought and told them I want to quit, I'd rather try my luck on the pay-as-you-go gravy train than pay £240 a year for about thirteen hours worth of free talking. Finally he said I could revert to the sim only scheme for £15 a month for 200 free mins and texts per month. 'Hmm' I replied whilst pondering the offer. I almost went to that scheme last year but managed to wrangle a better package to stay contracted, it felt a bit like I was going backwards but I said 'Ok, lets do that'. I do not get a new handset but that does not bother me, in fact I am going to sell my current phone on ebay and hopefully get £150 for it. I recently bought a phone from the site for £15 and will use that. This means I will have made £135 profit which I plan to reinvest in my bills meaning I will only need to spend £45 on phone bills for the year while I wait for the Apple dudes to bring out a new iPhone with a decent camera on it.

P.S. Anyone want to go see Shed 7 with me? I don't care where.