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:

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.

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.