Hong Kong

I sit here typing this with a strange jetlag hangover from my trip to Hong Kong. It was an odd, testing trip, but probably worthwhile.

Travelling for work is always a challenge. On one hand, I the trip is paid for by others, and I get put up in a better standard of hotel than I’m accustomed to, but on the other hand, I can never quite shake the feeling that I’m totally owned by work – that I can’t just switch off, run away and go home. They own me, body and soul and that depresses me. So, as a rule, I avoid travelling for work, but I couldn’t really turn down the opportunity to see Hong Kong.

I was staying a massive corporate hotel, adjacent to a new, curvy chrome business park in the middle of nowhere. Everything about the place was modern, streamlined and stylish. It made me feel quite ill. There were no flaws, no dirt, no character. There was no sign of anything human at all. It was like walking around an abandoned space station. Actually, the worst part of the hotel were the arty soundscapes in the lift and corridors, as though silence was so unbearable that we needed piped pseudo-muzak 24/7. I have noted down the name of the ‘composer’ who wrote the soundscapes, and I do intend to hunt him down.

The trip was really divided into two phases. Night and day. By day, I would do my work or explore the city, and I really enjoyed myself, taking buses, trams and trains and doing all the things I promised myself I’d do. By night… oh dear… I would eat on my own in the various hotel restaurants, and then bed would call. Except I couldn’t sleep. I lay there, sweaty and confused. When I did nod off, I would wake at 3am, wide awake, feeling displaced and isolated in my hermetically-sealed air-conditioned room. The rest of my life… my girlfriend, London, my family, all seemed like fictitious fantasies as I slowly went mental on my own in a distant, silent room. And then I’d fall asleep just before my alarm woke me. This routine continued most of the nights, until I started taking sleeping pills. By the end of the trip, my sleeping had improved, if only slightly.

The city itself was amazing. It’s a strange collision of East and West, with Marks and Spencers sitting alongside wet markets where the still-live fish flap around on slabs. I ate, I shopped, I even went drinking with a load of Flemish Belgians. And I took lots of photos, because enjoying things is not as important and recollecting them afterwards…

Some things I noticed:

• On the tube, they played a bad Chinese girlband version of You Really Got Me, by The Kinks, every time the train was about to pull into the station.
• The streetfood absolutely stunk. Maybe my Western tastes weren’t up to the task, but a lot of stalls just reeked of hot, sweet piss. I had to hold my breath as I walked past.
• There are lots of 7-11s in Hong Kong.
• I saw quite a few mixed couples, but it was only ever white man/Asian woman. There were no couples where the woman was white and the man was Asian.
• Instead of Oyster cards, they have Octopus cards. You can get your money back off them if you don’t use it.

I’m sure other pithy observations will come to me in time. Just as I was about to board the plane back to London, my glasses snapped in half at the bridge. I tried sellotaping them back together in Duty Free, but to no avail. I did have my contact lenses on me, so I tried wearing them for a bit, but the air on the planes is too dry and after 30 minutes I had to take them out. Which meant that most of the 13 hours of flight was spent in a state of almost complete blindness. I had to virtually press my face against the screen to watch the in-flight entertainment. No wonder I have a headache.

Now I’m probably going back to bed to see if I can sleep off the jetlag and fever.

Pop quiz – the results

About 20 of you sent me your answers to the pop quiz. I think some people were put off by the number of songs, so next time I’ll limit it to 10 or 15 intros.

Here are the answers:

1) Tears for Fears – Head over Heels
2) Smiths – Still Ill
3) Blur – Badhead
4) Adamski – Killer
5) Rolling Stones – Time is on my side
6) White Stripes – Icky Thump
7) Destinys child – Bootylicious
8) Television – Marquee Moon
9) Velvet Underground – There She Goes Again
10) Aha – Take on Me
11) All Saints – Pure Shores
12) Estelle – American Boy
13) Sam Cooke – A Change is Gonna Come
14) Zombies – Time of the Season
15) Wiley – Rolex
16) Tom Tom Club – Genius of Love
17) Metallica – Unforgiven
18) Moloko – The TIme is Now
19) Fall – Theme from Sparta FC
20) Don Henley – Boys of Summer
21) New Order – Ceremony
22) Nancy Sinatra – You Only Live Twice
23) Justin Timberlake – Cry Me a River
24) Girls Aloud – Sound of the Underground
25) Mama Cass – Make Your Own Kind of Music

And the winner is… Scott McMillan from the UK, who did very well to get 15 out of 25. All hail Scott. If I can think of a prize to send him, then even better.

Still ill

Twitter is rapidly taking over my life. It’s a cunning little website, designed to indulge the basest aspects of your ego. As such, it’s very hard for me to resist. There’s really no point to it other than to impress people with what you’re doing or what you’re pretending to be doing.  Unlike facebook, there’s no pretence that the people you’re interacting with are in any sense ‘friends’. It’s having an alarming effect on my productivity and I’m lazy at the best of times.

I’ve spent the last two days mostly in bed with the flu (probably just a bad cold). I did have some interesting hallucinations from watching too much Bleach (a fairly generic Manga) and have been taking aspirin like its going out of fashion. I’m in the office today, but will be heading back to bed as soon as I can. When it’s sunny in London, bed is really the only sane option.

Really rubbish celeb spot: I popped out for lunch and spotted Tom Parker Bowles (the son of Camilla) on Westbourne Grove. I felt a bit ashamed that I recognised him.

I’ve also added a few new entries to the journal.

Walking, Simon Pegg, Twitter

So far I’ve had two replies to my pop quiz. One person admitted they didn’t know any of the songs, but he was Dutch, so he is forgiven. The other person did quite well but must not be allowed to win.  In hindsight, 25 intros may have been too many.

Yesterday I went for a pleasant stroll, doing a bit of the north London Parkland walk. I did the whole thing last week, and it was very relaxing indeed. I’ve been under quite a bit of stress recently and cliched though it sounds, long, solitary walks do me a lot of good. The walks have to be fairly sedate (no point walking along the hard shoulder of a motorway) and have to be somewhere I’m relatively unfamiliar with (I’ve walked from my flat to Muswell Hill approximately 4256 times in the last month alone). The Parkland walk stretches from Alexandra Palace to Finsbury Park, and aside from a short stretch on the road around the back of Archway, it’s all parkland and woods. I’d recommend it.

Anyway, yesterday, walking through Highgate Wood, I passed Simon Pegg. “This is my chance!” I thought. “I shall approach Mr Pegg and get him to help me become a comedy/film star.” But he was with middle-aged people who looked  like they might be his parents, so I left him alone. It’s wrong to disturb people when they’re with family.

Meanwhile, I have succumbed to peer pressure and joined Twitter. There’s something very addictive about it,  far too many people using it are smug twats and you probably only really benefit from it if you own various mobile devices for posting on the move – and I refuse to follow Stephen Fry. Nevertheless, I quite enjoy it. Brevity is good.

I just got a spam email telling me I’d won the Dutch lottery. Even by spam standards, it was quite implausible.

Pop quiz – intros

Behold! A pop quiz. Below is a video. Play it. See how many of the 25 songs you can identify. Some are old. Some are fairly new. Some are known around the world. Others are probably only known in Britain.

See how many you can get.

Jot down the answers and leave them here. What is the prize? Well, there is no prize, aside from me announcing that you’re the winner at some point when I decide the competition is closed. It could be a week, or it could be a month. It probably won’t be a year.

Just think of the glory and the fame.

An expensive book

Someone is selling my book on Amazon for £57.55. I like my book, but you can buy it for £7.99 at the Big Green Bookshop.

Carling Cup final, book, etc

I spent the afternoon in the pub, watching Spurs lose on penalties to lucky, lucky, greedy Man Utd in the Carling Cup final. It was a strange game – I thought we played well, but felt that our defeat was inevitable. I should feel gutted but I don’t - I suppose the main aim for the season is that we stay up and everything else is secondary. We never win against Man Utd, so I wasn’t expecting much. I wrote off this season a long time ago.

It was quite bizarre in the pub. I met my mates Sam and Jon there, but my mum also tagged along, as I know she  enjoys her football. She had to leave before extra-time and so I texted her the result. We also bumped into Martin, a bloke who me and Sam went to university with in Leeds many years ago. It turns out he now lives in Wood Green. It was one of those odd occasions where various social spheres all collide, but no-one gets hurt. A jolly time was had by all, if you remove the football from the equation.

Yesterday, in a second-hand bookshop in East Finchley, I found a copy of my book. It cheered me up, briefly. I often forget that I’ve written a book. Come April it will be 3 years since I wrote the damned thing, and I can’t say I have any particular urge to write another one. I assumed that once I’d written a book, fame and fortune would instantly beckon, but that hasn’t been the case. I should really pull my finger out and write something else, but my creative well is dry.

Anyway, here’s a good interview with Alan Moore.

Old ladies fight

Yesterday, as I sat on the 134 up to Highgate, I saw a fight between two women of advanced age. They clashed outside White Stuff in Muswell Hill. They briefly exchanged words, before the first woman (dark hair, early 60s) walloped the second woman (white hair, probably late 50s) with her shopping bag. The second woman didn’t take this lying down, and responded in kind, swinging her shopping bag with force at her opponent’s face. There was a brief stand-off before the second woman stormed off. The first woman turned and screamed: “YOU BITCH!”

It was mildly worrying/entertaining. Everyone goes on about youth crime and violence, so it was good to see the older generation doing their bit.

On the journey back home, non-comedian Roland Rivron got on bus. He got off outside La Porchetta. He looked unremarkable.

Meanwhile… my attempts to get fit have been put on hold. I’ve had a nasty cold for about 3 weeks and every time I go to the gym, it gets worse. So for now, I’m not doing any exercise other than grinding my teeth.

Absence

Apologies for my absence. I’ve been busy with work and now I have a stinking cold. I am typing this wearing underpants and a scarf.

Here are some film reviews in comic form. I enjoy them.

Photos from The Gherkin