It's not really a basement, there's no bodies.

It's Monday afternoon, and I am out the back at work having a sly cigarette, when my phone rings with a number I don't recognise.

"Hello"? I answer inquisitively, hence the question mark.

"Yeah, hi.  I'm phoning about the basement you have to rent".

I have no idea what basement this is.  I certainly don't have a basement to rent, I am sure I would remember if I did.  So I obviously reply:

"Sorry dude, I think you have the wrong number".

End of conversation.

But then my mind starts working a bit.  It's Monday afternoon.  This is when the local free ads paper is available online.  Has he read an ad and dialed the wrong number?  Is there a similar number to mine attached to an ad in the paper?  I should probably check this out.  So I log in, and search for my phone number, and find the following advert:

Excuse the poor quality, and the lack of phone number,  but there it is, with my phone number attached to it.  And it is immediately obvious that this is not a mistake.  This is someone that knows I live on the ground floor when the rest of the house is upstairs.  Someone that knows I have my own private access if required through the garage door, which is next door to my bedroom.  Someone that has intimate knowledge of the fact that I use that private entrance as a toilet when I am too drunk to go upstairs.  Someone that knows that I once rigged up a complicated deodorant can/lighter device to toast a mouse in my room (in flames - not with a wine glass).  Someone that went to the effort of shortening certain words so they could still add an 's' to the word 'private'.  And with 'alt payment methods considered'?

There were calls.  I ignored them, they're not quite as fun.  There were texts.  I replied to them, because they were fun.  And they all follow.  I am still no closer to finding out who it was, and if no one puts a hand up to it soon, I will be indiscriminately advertising every single number in my phone book.

The first, Liz.  Just a bit of a warm up:

The second, the only slightly saucy one:

The third, with slightly racist overtones:

The fourth, I still hate vegetarians:

The fifth, Dan, it was late and I couldn't be bothered:

The sixth, a wife as well, for the same bargain price.  Piss taker.

The seventh, a few home truths about 'The Basement':

The eight, and my favourite purely because after the first reply he didn't come back with 'What the fuck? Do you have a basement to rent or not'?

The ninth, my second favourite.  The first tip was meant to say 'nits' but went through as 'nuts'.  I think it still works. I stopped when I felt they may have contacted the authorities:

The tenth, where I lost interest and gave up a bit.  No more since however:

Edit: The eleventh, a bit late for this shit:

I'm not too sure about vegetarians. They may be stupid.

With their stupid dreadlocks, and stupid sandals, and stupid attitude about not eating one of the most delicious foods ever.  I arrogantly refuse to quantify that further.  But even more stupid, and we all know them and all hate them, are those that are 'vegetarian' but just eat chicken.  Well done you.  Now the cows are happy, and the lambs can frolic, and the pigs can roll around in shit to their hearts content.  All because you aren't eating them.  And all the while you are looking down on me from your pedestal of a toilet, with your healthy bowel movements, you know what I'm doing?  Eating your share of animal. Naked.

But what I don't understand is why, out of all the meats in the world, they choose to eat one of the blandest, most boring ones?  What's wrong with having a bit of blood to dip your chips into?  No one can resist the smell of bacon.  So instead of having bacon flavoured rashers of tofu, or whatever rubber concoction you eat instead, just have bacon.  You're only going to comment on how good it smells when I cook it, so goddamn well eat it.  If I were to ever be a proper grown-up (unlikely), and hold a sophisticated dinner party, the only dietary requirements I would take into account would be 'I'm afraid I only eat raw beef', or 'Sorry, I'm vegetarian - however I will eat monkey'.

Being a carnivore is no easy ride though.  There are so many delicious, cute, fluffy little animals out there just waiting to be chewed up, swallowed, digested and flushed that I am always faced with the dilemma; lamb or beef?  Pork or chicken?  Venison or sloth?  Well now there is no need to have to make these critical culinary decisions for I have created the perfect solution.

You're welcome.

Step 1:  Buy meat.  Lots and lots of lovely, delicious, once cute but now butchered beyond recognition, colon clogging meat.  Here we have lamb mince, bargain bacon (a few rashers required), a pork butterfly steak (I didn't know until now that a butterfly is made from pork, but now I do I will eat more), some chicken schnitzel, and some beef schnitzel.

Step 2: Get some garlic (2 cloves), and some rosemary, which is like, herby shit.

Step 3: Mash up the garlic and herby shit with some olive oil in a pestle and mortar, until it's like a bit of a paste.  Not too stodgy, not too runny.  That's right, I own a pestle and mortar.  And I even know what to use it for.  I just swan around the gaff these days thinking I'm Gordon fucking Ramsay.

Step 4: Mix the rosemary and garlic paste in with the lamb mince, add some salt and pepper, and knead that shit until it's well mixed in.  Place in a ziplok bag (which may or may not have been originally used for the purchase of a criminally large amount of Gummi Bears), and throw it in the fridge.

Step 5:  Place the pork steak in between two sheets of cling film and batter the shit out of that bitch until it's flat.
Top Tip:  Pretending it's Celine Dion makes it a whole lot more satisfying.

Step 6:  Once it's flatter than Julia Stiles' face, find some old white wine in the fridge, fold the pork up into another ziplok bag, pour in what's left of the wine, seal and place in the fridge next to the lamb.  Leave the lamb and pork to marinate overnight, and have wet dreams about how good this shit is gonna taste.

Step 7:  Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees.  I think that's the C, not the F.

Step 8:  Get your pork and lamb out.  Roll the lamb into a sausage shape, until it looks like a giant, ill turd.  Unfold the pork too.  Ignore hole.  This may be getting a bit too sexy.  Roll the pork around the giant cock-shaped lamb sausage, which I may one day try to use in polite conversation as a euphemism for sex.  I forgot to take a picture of this stage, but you should be able to cope.

Step 9:  Once the lamb is rolled in the pork, roll the whole thing in some bacon.   I've chosen to use 2 bits, but they are quite thick.  You can use more if you like.  Go on, you know you want to.

Step 10:  Once the pork is wrapped around the lamb, and the bacon is wrapped around the pork, wrap the chicken schnitzel around the outside.

Step 11:  Once the pork is wrapped around the lamb, and the bacon is wrapped around the pork, and the chicken is wrapped around the bacon, wrap some beef around the entire bitch.

Step 12:  Coat in some mixed herbs, to try and dull the impending smell of post-death bowel voiding.

Step 13:  Get some foil, and wrap that bitch up tight.  I mean tight.  In a few layers.  Like the BEST pass the parcel EVER.

Step 14:  Throw that bitch in the middle of the oven, and leave for around 3 hours, because e-coli is seriously NOT fun.  Once your 3 hours is up, remove from oven, and let it rest for 20 minutes.  I've got no idea why, but all the professionals do it on T.V. so it must do something, right?

Step 15:  Unwrap carefully.  Don't get too excited and rush in with fat little fingers keen for the meat prize inside.  Remember - the lack of steam is not due to a lack of heat, it's due to you wrapping that bitch up tight.  Then step back and marvel at the giant poo you appear to have created.

Step 16:  Marvel at it from a different angle, and wonder to yourself if it will actually look any different when it comes out of the other end.

Step 17:  Slice.  Inhale.  Lick.  Taste.  Be proud that you have just made the worlds best and longest scotch egg.

Step 18:  Serve on a bed of pasta, with a large helping of something that may do you some good.  I got carrot.  It helps you pee in the dark.

Of course, I have been up to much more over the past few months that I haven't updated you with, but I really can't be bothered just yet.  Look, up there ^, I have lots of faeces shaped meat to eat, so I will do it soon, I promise.

In the meantime, I can only see two possible outcomes.  Either my guts are going to be fully backed up for the next month, or I am going to spend a full week squirting dirty water out of my bum-piece.

I'll let you know.

Not being an idiot. It's a pain in the ass.

Not being an idiot is the reason I found myself standing outside Christchurch Airport at 6:45am, freezing cold, having waited 30 minutes for a bus that should have been there at 6:30.  I'm not having a go at all.  I mean Jesus, it's not good in Christchurch at the moment, not good at all.  I couldn't care how long it takes them to turn up given what is happening up there, and I completely blame myself for waiting for so long.  You see, if I was an idiot, I would turn up at 6:30 on the dot, or 6:31, and hold the bus up while all the non-idiots who understand these things run on a schedule so it's a good idea to get there early so it can get away on time get to sit around and wait for even longer while I obliviously stumble down the aisle of the bus twatting everyone in the head with my idiot elbow and idiot bag.

Deep breath, rewind a second.  It's March now.  That's the third month, and I haven't let you guys know what's been happening in my life for almost 3 months now.  For that I deeply offer absolutely no apologies whatsoever.  I began writing something in the new year, but for some reason couldn't be bothered to finish it.  In fact, I know exactly what the reason is - click here for an explanation.  Just to clarify, that link is NOT porn.  Porn is the foremost and best reason not to get anything done on the internet, but this time it's not the fault of porn.  I guess I have just been too busy.  Or maybe too happy?

So I am now in my 95th hour of my latest, and hopefully last effort to quit smoking.  What made me do it this time?  Strangely it was something that hasn't had any effect on me before now, a warning on an anti-smoking advert.  I've known ever since my first cigarette that they ain't good.  They taste like rigor mortis and will turn your eyes purple and your bladder inside-out, we all know that.  Warnings on packets, billboards, television, no effect at all.  In fact there was once an advert on television showing the clogged artery of a smoker.  As it was sliced open, a fatty substance not unlike lard leaked out like toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube.  As a big fan of fatty food, rather than put me off smoking, all I could think about was how bacon would taste if I fried it in that.

But just recently there was an advert in Australia, a guy coughs into a handkerchief and as the camera pulls away, it's full of blood.  And that's what got me.  I don't want to ever have that cough.  That first one where it slowly dawns on you that this signifies the sped-up countdown to the day you die.  I fucking love smoking, and I love nicotine, and I love the feeling you get when you haven't had one for a while - you have that first drag and get the feeling of elation and euphoria.  And until now the risks have been there, but in the background.  But this one advert hammered the risks home, so that's it.  Game over.  No more.  From now on, it's just me and the crackpipe.

Australia, that's right.  I have been to Australia recently.  In fact that's why I was at Christchurch Airport.  I spent a bit of time in Melbourne catching up with some friends there.  Mostly drinking to be honest, 3 almost solid days of it.  Then spent some time in Sydney catching up with friends there, and doing touristy stuff like the Opera House, Harbour Bridge and Bondi Beach before returning to Melbourne to catch up with a few more friends before heading back over here.  The trip up to get to the airport is around a 7 hour journey.  The first six I spent rubbing my right eye as my vision was blurred as I looked out the window.  As it transpired it was just a greasy window and not my eye.  And upon running home from work to collect my luggage before running to get the bus, my earphones broke.  Which is typical just before a journey of that length.

Running home from work to collect my luggage?  Yup, I can do that now.  Late into January I moved house.  Where I was around a 25 minute walk from town, I am now 2.  2 minutes.  I can spit from my bedroom window towards the centre of town, casually saunter down towards the centre, and stand there with my mouth open ready to catch it again.  It's dangerous, but yet so much easier.  The only down side so far is that in the first few weeks it came with the guy who owns it living in another house out the back.  And he can talk. Being 79 (I presume.  He has mentioned a thousand times that he is nearly 80), he has many stories.  A lot involve the previous tenants and the state they left the house in (he has told me 'No snowboards in the house' at least once for every year of his life), even more involve basic things like how to flush the toilet, but most involve friends of his that, naturally as he is approaching 80, are all dead.  Something he seems to take pride in, maybe deservedly so.  He is a man you only read about in stories.  His eyebrows are both resplendent and relentless, with one eyebrow hair permanently tickling his lower cheek.  He appears every now and again at the window like a septuagenarian human embodiment of the Microsoft Office paperclip, if the Microsoft Office paperclip were to say "I see you are flushing the toilet.  Would you like me to remind you that you should only tap the button lightly so it doesn't get stuck? By the way, I'm nearly 80, I don't want any snowboards in the house, and all of my friends are dead".  But by far the most amazing moment I have had with him has been in the bathroom.  Stop sniggering, it's going elsewhere.  As someone who relishes the opportunity to say the most repugnant things sometimes purely for the reaction and resulting awkwardness, he outplayed me at my own game with this one.  Stood in the bathroom, he was talking about baths, showers, and his wife.

"You see at my age (I'm nearly 80 by the way), I like nothing better than lying in a nice warm bath.  It does wonders for my joints.  But my wife, she has to shower a lot.  You see when you're a woman at that age you can't have a bath because there is seeping, and if stuff can seep out, it can also seep in" - and if you imagine the word seeping coupled with his hand waving around the general area of his genitalia, you will understand why I developed a little soft spot for him.  And also why I spent the rest of the day trying my utmost to keep down my cheese and crisp sandwich.

But he is now gone (back to Dunedin I mean, not 'with his friends'), and the only way he interferes now is by phone - it would seem he has spies in town as he called me yesterday to tell me it's about time the lawn was mowed.  I presume it's spies, and not webcams.  Or at least I hope.  But then being nearly 80, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't know what a webcam is, even though I have no doubt he would be able to offer much advice on how best to use one.  All in all though, it's a good move.  It has rendered taxis a thing of the past, which I could have done with on New Years Eve.

So New Years Eve, I've lost count of the amount of times I have bitched about fireworks so I won't go into the evening.  Aside from to say that the entire population of Queenstown was trying to get a taxi the same time I was, so I ended up walking home drunk after hitting a bar and a club which played some of the most up to date music in New Zealand (mostly from the Manchester scene in the 80's).  However I was thinking about New Years Resolutions this year.  I have made them in the past, and they never last.  Quitting smoking has always been a big one, but then it gets to after midnight, and I'm still drinking, so I may as well carry on smoking until the following morning.  Which is ultimately a fall at the first hurdle on that one.  Getting fit/joining a gym?  Rubbish.  Go once or twice, cancel membership.  Eating healthily is also crap.  What's the first thing you need after a night out on the piss?  Junk food.  Another immediate fail.
I have tried others too, stupid ones like speaking in Haiku's all the time.  That one didn't work.  It's way too hard to do that.  So I just gave up.
And talking in bullet points, harder than it looks.  So this year I have come up with one that I intend to follow through on, spending time with boy-mates.

I have boy-mates.  I left most of them at home (in England) but I do have some.  For some reason over the past few years, maybe longer, I seem to have spent a lot more of my time hanging out with girls.  Not that it is a bad thing, not at all.  In fact it's amazing.  I have a job in a position that is mostly filled by girls and I love it.  It may have something to do with childhood obesity, and not being the most attractive kid so I am trying to make up for it now.  But I know nothing about football or cars these days, and most conversations I have with guys are generally non-starters unless we are talking about girls, so it works.  However, I've discovered there are downsides.  Sometimes there is nothing better than spending all day down one of the many locals drinking, chatting, putting the world to rights until that time you stand up to go to the toilet, and your legs buckle underneath you, with another guy.  A mate.  Someone who understands what it is like to have a penis and lots of girl mates.  So this year my resolution is not so much to go out and find boy-mates, just to spend more time with the ones I already have.  Go out for beers with them more often.  Hang out more.  Do guy shit.

Which brings me right back to Christmas.  My Christmas was great, thanks for asking.  You didn't, and you don't really care, but I don't care that you don't care, and you got this far so I'll continue.  A few of us were meant to be going rafting Christmas day.  Would have been great.  Didn't happen.  The weather wasn't great, the river was quite high, people kept dropping out, so it got cancelled.  Not a bad thing at all.  We had some people staying over for a few days, so the house was full, there were a few of us over Christmas dinner, and I proceeded, as usual, to smash the shit out of a bottle of Jim Beam until I couldn't remember what talking without closing one eye, pointing and dribbling was like.  It was an amazing time though.  We hit up a party later on, and things get blurry from there, but essentially Boxing Day at work at 7:20am was one of the worst, lowest points of my life.  Ever.  And just recently, I caught up with one of the visitors over Christmas in Melbourne, which brings me right back to....

Christchurch Airport.  I flew in and landed from Melbourne at about 11:30 in the evening.  My bus was picking me up at around 6:30am.  That is a window of 7 hours, some of it taken up by customs and baggage reclaim, but the majority of it time to kill at the airport.  And so I propped myself up against the wall and slowly sapped the battery out of every portable device I had to hand.  Laptop and iPod, that's it really. And it's not like I am standing out from the rest at all.  There's a lot of people there in sleeping bags, with their baggage.  It's obvious that they are travelers from the amount of wristbands they are each saving the world with, as well as that they are sleeping next to huge backpacks, but I don't think I stand out from them.  I'm sat there in clean, and in fact relatively new clothes, just listening to my iPod.  Minding my own business.  Trying my best not to smoke, which is surprisingly easy if you just, don't, smoke.

I'm slowly approached by a gentleman that reeks of cigarette smoke.  I can smell it now, I'm a self-righteous ex-smoker of about 12 hours by this point, so I can instantly smell it on the unfortunate.  He doesn't look too scruffy, his clothes look reasonably clean.  He has a straggly, but not entirely unkempt beard which is stained yellow above his top lip, and looks like he may appear substantially older than he actually is.  He has a gammy eye, it's grey, marble like. I presume it's cataracts, but the entire eyeball is grey.  It's the type of eye that would scare the shit out of children if he unexpectedly looked at them.

As he approached me, I hovered over the pause button on my iPod, and I just about made out his greeting.  It was a generic 'Excuse me mate' greeting, I didn't need to hear it to know he said it.  I hit pause, and looked up with a slight tinge of sadness into his one good, one bad eye.
"Do you have any money for a coffee or anything"?  He asked me.  I honest to God had nothing.  I had about 50 Australian cents at the most (which probably could have bought a coffee farm in NZ), but nothing else.  And I felt bad as I patted my empty pockets, shrugged my shoulders and said:
"I have absolutely nothing on me at all".
He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a wad of notes, and started peeling off a ten to hand to me.  I had to interrupt...
"I mean, I have the means to buy one if I want, I just thought you were.....",
"No", he said, "I wasn't scrounging, it's just you look so down and desolate....I just wanted to help......".

And at this point I had no idea what to feel.  At first I was offended that he thought I was desperate.  I mean, admittedly it had been going on 20 hours since my face last saw sleep, but it's not far off the face I normally have on me.  And it's not like I was wearing old clothes or anything.  But then I felt embarrassed, because I thought he was homeless, and he clearly knew that I thought that from my reaction.  Then my heart was warmed slightly by the fact that in these sad times, there are still people out there that are willing to help out complete strangers in their hour of need.  Even though it clearly wasn't my hour of need of course.  And that I could be so much more unlucky than I am, I could be living in a country where that didn't happen, where no-one gave a shit about anyone but themselves.  And I was enveloped, and confused by all these emotions in a split second (to be honest, probably more offended than anything), so I sat there in my first ever homeless/not homeless stalemate, and did what any good human being would do in that situation.

I slowly looked up with tears in my eyes, and a tremble in my voice, and said:
"Yeah.........times have been kind of tough mister.......".
Ker-ching!

---

HEY, LOOK AT ME, I'M BONO!!!
Not because I am wearing sunglasses indoors.  Nor because I am wearing leather pants, despite having both the legs AND the buttocks for them.
Mainly because I am putting a link here for donations.  If you feel like it.  The most recent earthquake has hit Christchurch hard.  It's sad to see the amount of damage done to a city which just a week before seemed to be recovering from the September quake.  At the time of writing, the death toll stands at 154, however with many more missing, this is expected to rise.  The damage estimate for the city is $12 billion.
If you feel so inclined, you can donate here:
Red cross or
NZ Government Appeal
What makes me a smug little Irish twat?  I've donated fuck all so far. Not a cent.  Not yet anyway.  At the time of writing, I have just caned my entire bank account in Australia.  It's expensive over there.  However I have just quit smoking.  So any cash over the next week that I would have spent on cigarettes will go to the people of Christchurch.  Which is really the least I could do.

I want to go sightseeing.

Congratulations.  Upon uttering those words, you have just become my most hated person of the last five minutes.  Don't worry, my fickle nature coupled with my mediocre attention span mean that at some point in the next five minutes I will move onto someone else.  Or maybe just revert back to someone on my regular hate list, but until that point:  Well done you.

Am I being a bit harsh with this?  I've been back and forth.  Sure, we all like a bit of sightseeing.  There is nothing like being a tourist in say, London.  Have a walk around the Tower of London, it was built by Jesus probably.  That's over 2 thousand years ago!  And they chopped off peoples heads and put them on spikes or something.  And it has the Crown Jewels, and ravens, and Beefeaters and stuff.  Wow.  And look, there's Buckingham Palace, it's a billion years old and is where the Queen does her poo's.  And Big Ben, Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, Tower Bridge, and look at all these buildings!  They were all here since the dawn of time, and survived wars, and the Great Fire of London and stuff, and they were lived in by important people with numbers after their name!  Stare at them all, agog, with your mouths open and dribble your intelligence all down the front of your shirt!  Fascinating stuff.  And it was, despite my general tone of sarcasm, awesome when seeing these structures steeped in centuries of history for the first time.

But here's the newsflash.  You are in New Zealand.  A country that was only invented a few hundred years ago.  And furthermore, you are in Queenstown, New Zealand.  A town established a mere 150 years ago.  If you can find a structure more than 3 minutes old here, I would like you to show it to me.  And in return, I will direct you to the only sightseeing bus in town.  It runs a 3 hour tour, one hour of which is you walking around Arrowtown which granted, is quite quaint - it looks a little like a town from the Wild West - but still no more than 150 years old.  The rest is a visit to the bridge A.J. Hackett first leapt off, a winery visit, another bridge, and a lake.  It's a different lake to the one you sleep next to in Queenstown, I'll grant you that.  But it is still a massive expanse of water, and these lake things really don't tend to differ much.  You know what though?  They do it on a genuine red double decker bus from London, which may just be the oldest thing for miles.

So yes, technically speaking there are sights, but I can't help feeling most people who tell me this want sights like you get in big cities, like the sights I (historically accurately) described in my second paragraph.  And can't help but wonder if maybe they get a little disappointed with the lack of them, and it leaves me thinking that if they wanted to go sightseeing instead of throw themselves off or out of something, that they may be vacationing in the wrong town.

It's not technically sightseeing, but you could go on a Lord of the Rings tour, that horse that still has plenty of flogging potential over here, especially with The Hobbit being announced, but you may have the same problem I have with that one.  Want to know what that is?  I thought so, settle in and I will tell you.

I was never a fan of the books, I never read the books.  For some reason growing up they didn't really appeal to me.  But then in my later youth once I discovered I could get into bars, reading went out the window.  And there is something about having 'Lord' in the title which implies some sort of camp escapade.  The Lord of the Flies (a book I did read once) is pretty brutal, fair enough.  But Lord of the Dance?  Camper than Christmas.  Lord Lucan's claim to fame (besides the speculation of his death/disappearance) must be that he is the only man in the history of Homo Sapiens (snigger) that would ensure Freddie Mercury came second in a Freddie Mercury look-a-like competition.  Even in the 12 days of Christmas the Lords are a-leaping.  You could be as hard as nails but as soon as you call yourself a Lord you may as well skip around all day telling everyone how fabulous you are.  The prime example being Chris Eubank, the self-proclaimed Lord Mayor of Brighton.  Sure, he was a boxer and could probably floor me with a flick of his little finger, but come on.  The guy wears jodhpurs and talks with a lisp.

The films however were obviously a big event, so I watched them.  All three films, which I believe to have taken around 23 decades to watch.  So as a result I have just seen them once.  And this means that every time someone points out a piece of land and says "Do you remember the battle of Scaramanga when that guy with the hairy feet and pointy ears threw that spear at that horse with the cardboard horns?", I have to look inquisitively at them, say that I do remember, and then feign a look of dawning realisation when they tell me it was filmed there.  For about 2 seconds.  Within an eon of footage.  They may as well just ask me if I remember that time I scratched my arse when I was 7.  Without a photographic memory on my side I would have to take a physical photograph of the site, go home, print it and rent the Lord of the Rings (all three, because they never tell me which one it's from), grab a haemorrhoid pillow and sit through every minute of them once again whilst holding the picture up next to the T.V. until that particular scene comes on the screen, pause it, make a note of which film it is and at what time the scene crops up on the DVD, and then commit this to memory so that next time I am round a friends house and we decide to have a Lord of the Rings marathon I can jump in at just the right time and excitedly shout "I've been there"!

That's not to belittle the amazing scenery round here, it is overwhelmingly astounding as I have said before.  It's just that it's not really a town built for sightseeing in the immediate locality.  It's more a town of locally putting yourself within inches of the jaws of death, and on a larger scale a vast expanse of beauty and serenity.  Like Milford Sound, somewhere I visited again recently but this time staying overnight.  I saw it as an opportunity to spend a little bit of time out of the bustle of Queenstown.  A time to be with myself, though not in that way (okay, maybe once in that way before I went to sleep).  A time to relax and contemplate.  And in that state of loneliness I discovered that I may be a bit of a paradox.  A lot of the time I don't like people, but conversely when alone, I really manage to piss myself off.

While I was there this time round, I took the opportunity to go kayaking.  The weather wasn't perfect, it was raining and there were high winds which meant we couldn't start kayaking in from the point we originally intended to, but when we eventually set off it was great to see the area from a different point of view.  We could get closer to the nature, watch seals frolicking in the shallow waters, paddle next to swimming penguins, and even touch one as the guide dragged a near decapitated one onto his kayak not incorrectly pointing out that "It's not the most ideal way to see them up close".  Being sea kayaks (which are operated by two people), mine - as happened before in my Festive Bitching post almost a year ago - came with an idiot in the back to steer us in the wrong direction and generally almost capsize us while dicking about trying to get the perfect camera shot, an experience I am becoming more and more familiar with, which only makes me wonder if it is actually me that's the idiot.  So with Milford Sound slowly inching it's way nearer the jetboat list of things I am arrogant enough to bore of (along with helicopter rides - I caught one back from Milford - honestly, if I have to go on another sodding helicopter.....) I decided it was time to try out another of the sounds, this time Doubtful Sound, on an overnight cruise.

Doubtful Sound is more remote than Milford.  It's accessible only by boat across Lake Manapouri, then bus over Wilmott Pass (named after 80's 'comedian' Gary Wilmott, as the historians are pretty sure they heard someone laugh at one of his jokes there), before you get to the Sound itself where you embark on the overnight cruise.  It was built in 1879 by brothers Eric and Percy Carruthers, who painstakingly carved it from the rock over a period of 34 years, losing a total of thirteen fingers between them.  Or it was carved by glaciers over thousands of years, one or the other, can't remember which one.  But if it's the latter, it would once again make it a Fiord rather than a Sound.  But this was realised way too late, and they already had Sound printed on the brochures or something, so they stuck with that.  Y'know what?  This isn't a history lesson, Wiki it.  It's an amazing place though, so peaceful, serene, full of wildlife once again.  Seal colonies, live penguins, dolphins, and sandflies.  Those bastard sandflies.  If Celine Dion and Bono ever had a bastard love child, to be honest it would probably be Jamie Oliver.  But if he then pro-created with Mariah Carey (who herself would be the bastard offspring of Chris Martin off of Coldplay and a traffic warden), the result would no doubt be those little bloodsucking harbingers of pestilence.  They have never bothered me in the past, they still don't too much.  The after effects are largely itching a lot.  And I love a good scratch, just ask my bollocks.  But being caught in an eternal cloud of them while kayaking (on my own this time - result) is the most irritating thing on the planet.  As is having them feast off my legs while eating dinner (which incidentally was amazing, they cooked my favourite food on the cruise - a buffet).  Honestly, I have never been involved in mass genocide, but I would imagine they would be marginally worse.

We were taken through to one of the arms of the Sound the following day on the way back inland.  As we approached, the water was like glass, reflecting the imposing beauty of the surrounding mountains.  And as we slowed we were told to take all the pictures we needed to now, as they were going to power down the vessel and ask for complete silence and no movement on the steel decks for five minutes to take in the immense remoteness and the sound of nature as if we were the only ones there.  It was incredible.  An experience marred largely by the fucking Germans sneaking around the deck still taking pictures.  One can only assume that upon arriving home and showing people these pictures they pulled out the first one and said 'This is us approaching the arm before we stopped', and then a second taken not five minutes later saying 'And this is exactly the same shot, but in complete silence.  Oooooh, spooky'.  Despite the fucking Germans (maybe the only thing in the world worse than sandflies), it was still a place I am very keen to re-visit.  Until such time as I get arrogantly bored of it.

Since then I have also been out canyoning.  You may remember I had an interview for them last year.  I can safely say that despite it being great fun, as I spent most of the time trying my hardest not to shit myself I am probably glad I didn't get the job.  It's essentially travelling through a canyon using various means: scrambling, abseiling, ziplines, jumping off rocks (into shallow water in a certain place to avoid other rocks nearby), slipping off rocks (not a valid way of doing it, but one that I discovered to be perfectly safe after doing it and surviving), stepping off rocks (as if you jump you will land too far away, onto more rocks), I had a great time doing it but was honestly petrified for the most part as I am still largely uncomfortable with water.  I did win a t-shirt at the end of the day.  It was a prize given to me for being petrified of the first jump - around 6 metres high into shallow water, into which you have to land with your legs raised probably to stop you breaking them.  Essentially I won a t-shirt for being the biggest pussy, which I think is the first and only time that has ever paid off.

Even though I had an awesome time out in the canyon - the day was great, the people were great, the fact I didn't cry like a little girl was great - I am still not convinced that sports involving water are the way to go for me.  I am still determined to find something to do all summer but it may be on land.  If I don't find something to do while waiting for winter it's going to be a very boring few months.  And there will be another winter, as I have just had my visa renewed until November next year.

England's loss is New Zealand's gain!  There's that arrogance once more.

This will no doubt be the last post of 2010, so I would like to take this opportunity to wish anyone still here after the RSI inducing length of garbage up there a perfectly adequate Christmas, and a fair-to-middling New Year.  It's done smaller because I am not 100% sure who reads this, and there may be some people who do read this that I would wish a really shit Christmas and a bile-infested New Year to.  But try and have fun anyway.

A massive exercise in extreme vulgarity.

I have never been one to shy away from vulgarity.  Those that know me well, and those that don't know me well at all either, will still probably know that vulgarity is something I positively embrace.  In fact, at times I am so vulgar that I would probably wait until vulgarity falls asleep whilst I am embracing it, and then do something extremely vulgar to it.

This year's end of season party didn't really offer me much chance to be too vulgar however.  With a retro ski theme, the best I could do was to borrow a bright yellow one piece, and wear very little underneath it.  I tried, with what little I had to work with, and at one point was talking to the co-owner of the company stripped down to the waist whilst covering my nipples, (or not covering my nipples, who knows, I had taken advantage of the open bar a little too much by that point), (or walked around after her trying to encourage her to touch my nipples depending on whose version of events you get), but that is about as far as I went that night.  My decision to wear little under the ski suit I came to regret early on, when we were taken on another jet boat ride before the evening began unfortunately in the freezing rain.

So here I go on a bit of a tangent.  As you can tell by my little "about me" box up there to the right, I fled normal life in England a while ago.  Yep, I had a proper job, for about 10 years.  I liked it a lot.  It was sometimes challenging, it was in an area I liked (not geographically), and it paid well.  Not well enough for me to buy a llama to lead around town to spit on all the chavvy scum I deemed unworthy of my own saliva.  Nor could I pay a midget and a dwarf to fight to the death on a whim, to finally discover which is the superior race.  But I did alright.  I rented a nice flat, had a car that looked a little bit like K.I.T.T. off of Knight Rider (if you really squinted, from a distance, looking through tracing paper), and didn't have to think twice if I needed to buy clean/flat clothes because mine were dirty/needed ironing.

But it was a life/quality balance.  I had no responsibility, no-one depended on me, and I was plodding.  Waking up every day to the same old routine, shower, work, finish work, have dinner, wait for the weekend, binge drink all weekend and wake up on Sunday to fingers that smell of chili sauce (careful now, despite my vulgarity I wasn't going there), and a lounge that stinks of half eaten kebab (but you can make of that one what you will), spend all Sunday watching movies on the couch in my underwear, go to bed, Monday.

So yeah, see above.  I jacked it in.  I yearned to be in a place where I had to actually save for something I really wanted.  I figured that you appreciate the material possessions more when you have to work hard and make sacrifices to obtain them.  And so here I am now, in a beautiful place where I wake up every morning to the view you see right at the top of the page, in a job with some awesome people that I love, where I get to meet new and interesting people every day, where I also get to meet old and dull people every day, not earning the greatest wage in the world, but it's enough to keep me living here and pay for coffee and the occasional beer which is all I really need in life.

Does it sound like I am trying to convince myself I did the right thing?  Of course I am.  I always am.  Every now and again I wake up wondering if I have done the right thing.  Should I have got this out of the way when I was younger?  Maybe so.  Do I worry that I threw away a life back home that was pretty comfortable to live in an environment where every six months I have a tense wait to see if my visa will be renewed or not?  Of course.  But you know what, if I hadn't taken that potentially massive leap, I wouldn't have met half of the amazing people I have.  I wouldn't have made friends and formed relationships with all the people all over the globe if I hadn't decided I wasn't really "going places" back home.  And I wouldn't have done anywhere near the amount of amazing things I have done here.  And here comes the vulgarity......

Since I have been in Queenstown, I have:

• Been to Milford Sound on a coach day trip
• White water rafting
• Canyon Swing
• Nevis Bungy (134m)
• Nevis Arc
• Kawarau Bridge Bungy (43m)
• Kawarau Jet (twice)
• Shotover Jet
• Skippers Canyon Jet
• Wilderness Safari (including another jet boat ride)
• River Surfing
• Paragliding
• Hang gliding
• Quad biking
• Snowmobiling
• Skydiving
• TSS Earnslaw Steamship
• Kayaking
• Clay target shooting
• Gondola, Kiwi Haka show and buffet dinner
• Gondola and buffet dinner
• Season passes for one of the ski hills for 2 seasons

And most recently I went back to Milford Sound, this time flying there and back.  You tend to forget that behind the mountains you can see, there are other mountains.  Loads of them in fact.  We flew over the Routeburn and Milford walking tracks, at least one of which I hope to do during the summer, and I got to sit in the front seat next to the pilot on the way back, an experience which left me sitting rigid with fear just in case my knee rubbed against the big red button that says "Do not rub knee against".  There were only four of us on the cruise this time around, which made the experience all the more personal, however the day was tainted by the fact that one of the others on the cruise was wearing the same trainers as me.  And to top it all off, despite spending well over a year selling a Milford Sound day trip to people, and telling those people to wrap up warm because it will be cold, I turned up for a cruise at 9 o'clock in the morning wearing shorts and a thin hoodie.  It was a morning where I didn't need to strip down to the waist as my nipples were clearly visible from a distance of miles through the scant clothing I was wearing.

So next time I wake up and wonder what the hell I am doing here, on the other side of the world, away from all the people I have known and loved for years, I will take a deep breath and think about all the friendships and relationships I have since formed, how I now have friends worldwide who I hope would be happy to see me (in small doses), how my quality of life has improved despite how horrified my Mother would be if she saw the amount of holes in my underwear, how I am not stuck commuting every day on a sweaty train, or bumper to bumper on the motorway, how I love being here and would be exceptionally sad if I had to leave, and how I have managed to experience over $6500 worth of products and adventures for absolutely nothing.  Zilch, nada, gratis, zero, nil, fuck-all.  So there's your cock-shitting vulgarity.

Get out of my life, you make me sick. And you f**king stink.

As much as I love those little tubes of cylindrical velvety goodness, they're going to kill me.  I'm going to be prone to any of the following apparently: Lung cancer, cancer of the bladder, kidneys or pancreas, mouth or throat cancer, heart disease, coronary or cerebral thrombosis, chronic pulmonary disease, emphysema, chronic bronchitis, high blood pressure, fertility problems, asthma, cataracts, loss of eyesight, dental problems, ulcers, looking really old, and having to go for a dump every time I smoke one.  Now I'm no doctor, but I don't need to google any of those to know they don't sound good at all, apart from the one that'll keep me regular.  As much as I look at the list, I can't find anything that would point to smoking causing happybreathing or supererection.  The only cigarettes that are going to be any good for me are the ones which have on the packet the warning that smoking when pregnant harms your baby.  Being a guy pregnancy is something I am not prone to so I think I am okay to smoke those ones.  Oh to live in the 1950's when smoking was good for you, before science came along and ruined everyones fun.

I first started in my mid-teens.  Weakly and lamely with tea-bags.  I was at that age where I wanted to look cool, but with limited resources, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one to do it.  Not by putting one end in my mouth and trying to light the other, it was sprinkled into a cigarette paper and rolled up beforehand.  The advantages to this were plentiful.  It wasn't going to kill me, it looked like a real cigarette, and upon arriving home to face the parents, I never got pulled to one side for a serious conversation starting "Son, have you been drinking tea again?".

Of course this moved on to proper cigarettes.  Being highly unpopular at school this allowed me to hang out with some of the cooler kids which surely is worth risking your life, and developing a lifelong addiction for, right?  I started on Marlboro reds.  Probably because I was a bit of a Guns 'N' Roses fan, and pretty much bummed Slash.  It's likely that this is the reason that I have a voice not dissimilar to the low rumble of a large plane making its final approach, and why early morning it operates on a level only audible to woodland creatures.

My first experience of being caught smoking came after a party at the local football club.  I walked home with friends, paranoid that my parents would smell it on my breath.  I had no mints, no gum, the only thing I found in my pocket was a lemon flavoured chapstick.  So I ate it.  I popped my head into the lounge when I got home, made some lame excuses about being tired, and was about to head off to bed when my Mother demanded a kiss goodnight.  All my hard work eating a little lemon flavoured lump of grease was undone in that kiss on the cheek.  The following morning my Father had "that" conversation with me about it while I was making coffee.  Luckily, the night before, neither of them noticed that I had drunk so much that if I wasn't holding onto the lounge door handle for dear life I would have fallen over and would most likely still be there now waiting for the room to stop spinning.

Smoking causes blindness.  A warning on NZ cigarette packets.  Although having a big fuckoff metal contraption shoved headlong into one of your peepers can't really help much either.

I got caught again a few years later.  It was the early hours of the morning and I had just got in from work.  Probably around 2 a.m.  Maybe later.  I was lying in bed and decided rather than go downstairs and outside, the folks who were in the room next to mine would be fast asleep so would never know if I just popped my head out the window and had a sly one.  So there I sat, with my head out the window, every so often glancing to my right to make sure there was no activity in my parents window.  About halfway through the cigarette I was shocked to glance over and see my Mothers face starting back at me.  I then did what any sensible person would do under the circumstances.  Balanced the cigarette on the windowsill, closed the window, and jumped back into bed and pretended to be asleep.  It didn't work.  Parents are apparently way too intelligent to fall for that.

And so since then it has been on and off.  Mostly on, sometimes off.  And I go through stages, as I'm sure we all do, of loving it, hating it, loving it again.  All the times before I have tried to quit, I have never looked at it very objectively.  Instead of telling myself it has been x amount of time since my last cigarette, I end up convincing myself that when I eventually cave, it's going to be fucking awesome.  Like my first ever one all over again.

I quit last winter for about a week, then went on a night out.  I was close to buying a packet when I was pretty damn wasted, and talked myself out of it.  But then ended up getting one off the taxi driver.  I sat on the steps of my flat smoking the whole thing down to the filter and it was amazing.  Absolutely amazing.  At one point I thought my eyeballs were having an orgasm.  They weren't, of course.  Delirious with ecstasy I fumbled around in the house trying to find the toilet which I knew was somewhere on the right.  Somehow I ended up in the shower cubicle fully clothed, and still trying to find the light switch ended up turning the shower on instead.  I was standing in the shower, getting drenched from head to toe, and I didn't care.  There's a warning they should put on the packets.

I've tried various things to quit.  I read Allen Carr's book but that didn't work.  I can be an obstinate dick sometimes, so when he screams at me in the text that I WILL give up by the end of the book, I stubbornly fold my arms like a petulant child, stamp my feet all the while screaming "WON'T", and rip out the page with his face on it and use it to make a smoke.  I've figured if I smoke way too much I will get sick of it and never want to do it again.  Of course that one didn't work.  I tried carrot sticks last season.  They didn't light very well.  And I ate about a kilo of them in 2 hours which led to crippling stomach cramps and orange poo. Nicotine gum worked out way too expensive.  It was cheaper to chew normal gum and smoke a cigarette at the same time.  I have thought about buying tobacco and papers instead, and this one is foolproof because a) I am way too lazy to roll up a ciggie, and b) I can't roll up to save my life anyway.  But no, cold turkey is the only method that has led to any success so far in my life, so I may stick with that, with a massive side order of gummi bears to keep my mind and mouth occupied.

So after a few months of weakness, I am going to try and quit again.  Declaring it within my blog will mean at least 3 other people now know of my intention, which may be a bit more pressure, but as winter is now pretty much over, most of the ski hills are closed or closing very soon, and as town quietens down for the summer and people begin to leave, there is nowhere near as much partying to be done.  Which means less drinking.  And less people with little common sense to deal with as I become more and more cranky.  Like the guy who called in one afternoon to declare that he had just seen a weather report on the television which said it would be raining at the Remarkables the following day, and wanted to ask me if that was true.  I guess I should be flattered that he relied on my opinion more than a professional meteorologist, however I can't help feeling my input would have been pointless.  By far the biggest hurdle will be at the staff party this season on Friday, which has a theme of retro ski gear.  God knows how I am going to come up with something offensive to go along as this year, but it does say costume optional so I figure I may just go without a costume.  Or any clothes at all.  With the amount of alcohol likely to be floating about, it will be tough.  But hopefully quitting should lead to expanding the capacity of my lungs once again.  It's been fun once more, but as much as I love them sometimes, I have to get them out of my life.  They are a drain on finances.  They slowly but surely kill you.

And most importantly, they contribute highly to the consumption of lip moisturizer.

I don't have a short attention span. But it certainly isn't that long either.

I've taken up a lot of activities in my life that I haven't pursued to brilliance, just mediocrity.  Which is why as much as it appears I have a short attention span, it is actually longer than you would believe.  But only just.

I may not remember a conversation I had with you yesterday.  Sure I was listening, and taking it in, but bear in mind there was at least seven other conversations that day that demanded my attention, which I took in, and tried to organise in my head in order of importance, but the ordering of it got too much so I just ended up thinking about snow, or lesbians, or lesbians in snow, and that conversation just dropped out of my head.  Which puts me in mind of Christmas one year, a time for giving, and receiving,  and being with family.  Bear with me, this is probably going somewhere.  

As was the tradition at the time, a few of us had been to the local pub on Christmas Eve just drinking and having a good time, as you do.  I ended up staying at a friends house and needed to get back to my parents house on the Christmas day, so they kindly offered to pick me up, drive me to my flat so I could spend a bit of time in the shower scrubbing out the smell of Stella Artois, and then drive me back to theirs for a day of presents, food, presents, beer, and presents.

Due to my mediocre attention span I am not entirely sure how this came about, but as my parents sat in the living room of my flat while I made my way off to the shower, my Mother began to look at part of my DVD collection and asked if it was okay if they could borrow some films.  Of course I said that was fine, thinking I was safe in the knowledge that any filthy films I had were secured in the bottom of my wardrobe (which a few years later, when I was moving out, she would end up packing up for me without batting an eyelid), and walked off to grab a towel and shower.  And that is how, when I walked out of the bathroom with a towel around my waist, on Christmas Day of all days, I found my Mother - the wonderful woman that spent hours in immense pain delivering me some years ago (who I still feel a massive amount of empathy for every time I get measured for a helmet and they tell me I am an extra-large), with my Dad standing next to her - holding up a copy of a DVD called Snow Sluts and asking me, with a slight under-lying tone of sarcasm, "What's this one about then?".

Back to the attention span once more.  It's fucking terrible.  Really really bad.  I could live with it if it was short.  I could live with it if it was long.  But it's fair to middling.  Which basically means I start doing something, and when I think I am okay at it, I give up.  Playing the drums in school - I took a couple of exams, got quite good, but then realised how much hard work was involved in being in a band so quit pretty sharpish.  You want more examples?  Sure, I've got loads.  Magic. Loved it as a child.  And got okay at it too when I was younger.  But this one is surely understandable as magic is not cool.  David Copperfield may have scored Claudia Schiffer, but then Paul Daniels scored Debbie McGee - and I can think of thousands of people on this planet that the words "The Lovely" should be used before, and all of them aren't her by any stretch of the imagination.  The Great Soprendo was married to Victoria Wood for ages, and she still has a bowl haircut, appears on countdown every now and again, and is only Britain's favourite "comedienne" because she has jokes that don't primarily involve periods or useless husbands.  But then where she is concerned, my attention span shortens even further, so she may actually have that, but I have never bothered to pay attention through her act.

Martial Arts. I spent quite a lot of time with this one.  I got up to blue belt, which to be brutally honest is less than halfway, but I did well.  I came second in one tournament (beaten by a girl, one of the more erotic moments of my childhood), had a good few results in group tournaments, then gave it up because I felt I had learnt all I needed to to counter the bullies at school who tormented me every day for being a lardass.  Which was wrong to be honest. To counteract most of that, I just needed to keep my fat gob shut, but who knew at the time?

So getting back to the original point, which I can't remember due to my short attention span, but am going to assume it was something to do with skiing.  Once again, during the course of the season, I have been lame.  Really lame.  Most previous seasons you would find me out there every day, working on something, whether it be on skis or a board, but this year, not a jot.  There's a website where you can check your mountain stats online for the two local hills.  While I thought I was doing really well, I checked the other day only to find I had done 12 days.  Granted, I have been out to Cardrona a few times, which it doesn't track, but still.  12 days.  That's barely a 2 week holiday.  I have done that thing where I have accepted I have the whole season, so taken it easy for a while, and am now coming to terms with the fact that there is only 1 month of the season left, and I haven't hit anywhere near the heights I have done before.  But you know what?  I'm okay with that.  Because I still have that one month to go.  And as much as I don't generally like summer - I like Queenstown.  And I intend to try and do another summer here to see if there is anything I can get into this time.  And if I do another summer, I won't be able to leave before another winter.  

This place just drags you in.

---

Dedicated - in a very strange way I guess given the subject matter - to Gramps, who passed away peacefully last Thursday.  Rest in peace.

Sometimes, I feel like Bambi.

That bit in the film where the poor little blighter is struggling for a foothold on a frozen pond? Yep, that's what my life feels like right now.

Please don't misinterpret this as me finding hidden depths, or getting philosophical on yo black asses. Not the case. I am way too shallow for that kind of behaviour, I mean it literally. Whenever I step out of the house to walk to work - downhill - I find that someone in the night has plotted my route to work and covered it entirely in a thin white sheet of teflon.

Since being in Queenstown, I have thrown myself out of things, jumped off stuff, I ski hard, I occasionally try stupid things on a snowboard, yet I can't help feeling that life enjoys dealing blows laced with irony. Just like Colin McCrae - drove cars stupidly for a living and died in a helicopter crash - I am bound to hurt myself doing something incredibly mundane like walking into work. Every day is a challenge. Every day I tentatively put one foot in front of the other, walking like Douglas Bader, just struggling to stay standing, only to suddenly find I am 30 yards further down the road with my skid marks being the only evidence of my travel. Both kinds of skid marks.

Enough, back to Bambi. Part of me thinks the film would have been way better all round if it hadn't been Bambi's mother that got shot by the hunter. It should have been Bambi. It would have made a much shorter and more bearable film, and the hunters family would have a jucier, more succulent piece of meat for dinner.

I fucking love meat. It's great. I live by a few rules when it comes to meat. I'll try anything with two or more legs, up to four. Anything with more than four legs is probably an insect, and I've stepped on insects and seen their insides, and decided many a time that those insides do not need to be in MY insides. And no seafood. Fish have no legs, and they are fast, and hard to catch unless you use a trawling net. And they were put miles underwater. If we had been intended to eat fish, they would have been give four legs, fur, and been put in fields. Much like cows, those big dumb rectangles of tastiness just vacantly chewing grass waiting for the bolt between the eyes. But getting back to the original point about Bambi again, as good as cow tastes, baby cow tastes much better. The younger and cuter the animal is, the more I would love to see it on a plate. I bet kitten tastes fucking awesome.

Since winter kicked off again here, we have had to endure some winter training which has involved a few class based sessions, but more enjoyably traipsing around town trying more activities and eating. Eating lots. If you have read previous posts you will know that I like nothing more than being told when to eat, what I am going to eat, and having all the effort taken out of going grocery shopping and preparing food. So for a few days none of this was necessary.

A few of us went on a Dart River Wilderness Safari. This involved being taken to Glenorchy/Paradise - population: 3 old men and one very sore dog - in a four wheel drive being given a guided tour of the area, with various filming locations being pointed out. Surprisingly, some film that no-one EVER bangs on about called Lord of the Rings (or something similar) was filmed around that area. Others too, Wolverine, Vertical Limit, I think I dropped off at that point because my mind is now trained to slowly start drifting off as soon as someone mentions that Lord of the Rings was filmed s........

Anyway, the scenery was amazing, the drive was sweet, the guided forest walk was interesting, climbing inside a hollowed out tree was fascinating, the jet boat ride was just that - another jet boat ride, but the soup was good, and the pizza we were given at one of the two Glenorchy pubs was astounding.

Later on that night we traveled up the gondola in town to experience the traditional Kiwi Haka, worth doing to see exactly how much weirdness one human face can achieve in 30 minutes, and then the buffet dinner - of which I only managed five courses due to over eating the pizza. It was like being at a Harvester with an extended salad cart - extended to include every type of food under the sun. Buffets are one of the few areas in life that I generally excel in.  I  managed multiple dinners that night, and who doesn't like Venison Rogan Josh for desert?

Dinner at one of the local restaurants, a sample platter of the food they offer which included a big plate of meat dripping in blood from various different cute furry little animals, a catered night out from one of the local mountains who kept the food coming all night. It's been a blessing that I currently have a toilet to myself at home.

There has been other things too. Another jet boat ride (imagine "another" being said in a voice that indicates that all these jet boat rides are becoming a real drag), an afternoon quad biking which although is a guided tour, you can still spice it up by waiting until the people in front of you have disappeared and then opening the throttle and caning it for all you are worth. There's probably been more but I am buggered if I can remember as more importantly all the ski fields are open right now so that has me completely fizzing at the bunghole. If I had a bunghole to fizz at, obviously.

Two weeks ago we had a massive dump. Could you hear me sniggering as I wrote that? I awoke with a raging hangover, went to empty my bladder which was running at twice it's capacity, and noticed that the outside through the frosted glass was unusually white. I grabbed my board, apologised profusely to my skis, and walked as quickly as I could to get the bus. Which to be honest wasn't that quick at all, as I have discovered two things about most of the trainers I have - they have no grip whatsoever, and they have less in the way of waterproofing. But none of this could bring me down, there were plenty of fresh lines to be had, and the day was probably one of the most tiring I have experienced in a while, but remarkably satisfying. Currently the ski fields are overrun due to there being something like a million schools on holiday. Myself and a friend made an effort to ski on Tuesday this week, but upon finding the hill rammed with Australians we decided it may be best to turn around at the top and spend all day in the pub instead, one of the best ideas we have come up with in a while. Until the following morning of course when it took every muscle in my body to prevent what little dinner I ate the previous night making a re-appearance from most probably my mouth, and both nostrils.

Finally, and most recently, I managed to get heli-snow-mobiling. I have no idea if I have hyphenated that correctly, and to be honest don't even really care. It was similar to the quad biking, except we were transported by helicopter to a remote area in the mountains, and were on snow-mobiles instead of quad bikes. Once again, the most joy to be had was waiting for everyone to disappear over the horizon, spend a few minutes taking in the peacefulness and serenity of the snow covered plains, then hitting the gas and firing off as fast as possible with no regard for any kind of safety whatsoever.  Slow down through narrow gateways and warn the person behind?  I don't think so, I saw it myself from a mile off and reckon I can make it doing 45.  30kph maximum round this corner?  Yeah, I'll try it at 60 and see how we go.

In fact, both this and the quad biking have now led me to realise that life is way more fun if you view warning signs as challenges.

Returning. And Catharsis.

The final week I spent in England, as predicted in my previous post, was spent catching up with other folk, and once again my apologies to those I didn't get around to seeing. It was amazing to catch up with everyone I did though, and I doubt it will be too long before I get to see you again.

My initial fears of French Canadians were not realised on the journey back out here. I emotionally waved goodbye to my parents, threw the last of my cigarettes away figuring I was flying back via shitty L.A. so had no more need for them (ever), and boarded the flight to find the mid-section of 4 seats was all mine! Unfortunately I had exhausted the entertainment I wanted to see on the way back to England and the last thing I wanted was sleep as my plan was to sleep from L.A. to Auckland, so I just spread myself out and relaxed.

L.A. was also uneventful. I made it through customs without getting shot or finger-buggered by customs, hung around for a while, and then re-boarded the flight to find my seat had been changed and I was sat next to the tallest man in the world whose knees I swear spent the whole journey in my chin. I arrived in Auckland lacking sleep at around 6 a.m. and was met very gratefully by my cousin who I spent a couple of days with catching up and hanging out with. And generally falling asleep at stupid hours due to the jet lag I had cunningly planned to avoid, but actually ran head first into.

From Auckland to Queenstown I was sat next to a Frenchman with stupid facial hair and his girlfriend. I assume she was his girlfriend as she was French too, however he seemed to prefer to encroach on my side of his seat, almost rubbing knees with me for the entire journey and resting his elbow on my hip bone. Still, it was only a short journey, and I arrived back in Queenstown and was picked up and eventually that evening moved into my new place.

To clarify, when I had left Queenstown I officially moved out of the pad I was living in. I had no problem with it, it was a great place to live and great people to live with, and the bathroom with 3 doors was pretty awesome. However it was about a 40 minute walk out of town, down an unlit road without a pavement, and as my work uniform is predominantly black and I am required to be at work some mornings at some ridiculous hour in the morning, I felt moving closer to town would result in a smaller chance of me becoming a hood ornament.

So I have moved into a house with two friends from work. It's an awesome pad with great views across the lake. And only a 20 minute walk from town down a paved road, with street lights. The only downside I have discovered so far is that on the frosty, icy mornings I have finally discovered the downhill roads in Queenstown. Arriving back has been sweet. In the time I have been away the temperature has dropped, the mountains are snow capped once again, and people are now walking around town wearing ski and board clothing, carrying equipment, and the average waistband level has once again fallen to just below the buttocks.

View of the Remarkables from my balcony.

The only downside so far has been splitting with the Girlfriend. I have always intended this as a blog to let you guys back home know what is happening in my life, and to save those situations whereby I send out a group e-mail and then get involved in 17 different e-mail conversations as people reply separately, so apologies but you must take the good with the bad.

It had only been 8 months. A relatively short period of time in the grand scheme of things, but by far the longest relationship I have managed to hold down. I began by being very guarded. I have had to learn to, to a certain extent, especially doing seasonal work, as previously I have had a tendency to dive straight in with both feet and come out the other end feeling like shit. So for the first few months I kept at a relative distance. And it was good, it went well. But then as things started to go well I let my guard down again, and grew very fond of her. So right now, it's fucking shithouse to be honest. I have always considered myself to be a simple black or white kind of person, so I continuously find it hard to understand how you can go from being in constant contact with someone to no contact at all. How you can hang out all the time one minute and then not see each other at all. How you can feel awkward in the company of someone whose genitals you recently buried your face in.

Again, I am not arrogant enough to think that I am the only one ever to have experienced this, and realise that this is a very common feeling. And for Christ's sake it was only 8 months. I know there is people that have been together for years that have been in the same situation, I mean Jesus, I've had haemorrhoids that have lasted longer. That doesn't stop it being completely shit to be honest. At the end of the day I miss her. A lot right now, and I probably always will. And I still want to do all the things during winter we had chatted about. I still want to prove to her that I can ski, and I still want to teach her how to snowboard. I still want to be around her, but I know I will be spending my time trying to have sex with her rather than having it guaranteed. But people change, there is no rhyme or reason to it, it happens and I don't hold that against anyone. I have no room in my heart for hatred, that position has already been well and truly filled by Nickelback and a guy I used to work with who read my newspaper all the time without asking.

So using this as an excuse, a lame one admittedly, I have fallen off the non smoking wagon. I was doing well. I quit when I left England, I had one brief relapse one night on the piss when I caved and had one (it was fucking sensational by the way, if you have never tried smoking I highly recommend it), but aside from that it had been almost 2 weeks. I consider this a temporary setback, and normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Only one ski field is now open, and unfortunately the company that runs it is charging extortionate amounts for the lift pass so I will not be going to that one any time soon, so I have about 2 weeks wait before I get back on the skis again. And this time it will be predominately skis if I can help it.