Generation Iron: The Weird World of Body-Building

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Football is one of the most watched sports in the world and it’s easy to see why; when a game is good it’s mesmerising. The ball seems to flow from player to player as they dance around each other, juggling the ball with only their feet and charging around a pitch for 90 minutes running an average distance of 7 miles per game. Whatever you think of the game, you can’t deny that these are incredible athletes with a huge amount of dedication and who train for hours a day to play like they do. Similarly, sprinters train to be faster than everyone else, snooker players train to be the most accurate, high-jumpers to jump the highest. Body builders train to be the biggest. When you say it like that it sounds like any other sport but this is the only sport I can think of where, when you enter a competition, you don’t do the thing you have spent all day, every day doing in order to get there. It’s like playing football for 5 hours a day then going to a match and having all the players stand around taking it in turns to hold the ball in a way that best shows off their legs. Or playing snooker for 5 hours a day so that you can show all the people in the audience how exceptional your thumb arch is. Even weight lifters lift weights at the Olympics.

I think most people are probably a little weirded out by body building. I don’t mean going down the gym and throwing a few weights around, I mean the proper, hardcore, steroid-using, 3 inch thick veins popping out everywhere, strutting around a stage in too much tan and a thong that your missus lent you kind of body building you occasionally see on the glossy front pages of those magazines you always walk straight past in WH Smith. You might have picked one up once or twice to gasp and make disgusted faces at but really, that’s probably all the thought you’ve ever paid towards it. Enter Generation Iron; a documentary by Vlad Yudin, a 32 year-old Russian film-maker with a feature film and two documentaries about rappers, Big Pun and Twista under his belt.

The documentary takes place in the run up to the Mr Olympia 2012 competition where the most jacked, freaky muscle meat-heads in the world go on display to compete for the biggest, most symmetrical body while covered in enough fake tan to supply the population of Essex for a whole month. It is basically a modern day freak show, but where the players are there by choice rather than by whatever unfortunate circumstance life threw their way. It starts out as a modern-day Rocky story with the underdog, Kai Green, an artist of sorts who paints self portraits and poses in subways with a mask on, setting out to beat the current egocentric champion, Phil Heath. The former believes all it takes is “hard, hard work,” and the latter believes he has the added advantage of talent, whatever that means. It is hard while watching this to take any of them seriously I have to confess. They are, after all, doing all of this for aesthetics, and although people generally love to watch achievers doing whatever it is they do best, no-one really likes vanity. Their cause isn’t helped by the constant comparisons with art and sculpture. Schwarzenegger himself says at one point that “the only difference is that we in body-building use a certain machine to train the front deltoid if it’s missing … and an artist or a sculptor uses a chisel and a hammer,” but while the latter requires dexterity, and the talent and vision to create something from nothing, the former simply requires you to make bigger what is already there. There is no talent in having someone point out which muscle is not quite big enough and then sitting at a machine to work on it.

That is not to say that they do not work hard. These guys train in a gym 3 times a day for hours at a time and eat huge, boring meals 6 or 7 times a day usually consisting of some combination of egg whites, white fish, white meat, broccoli, rice, peanut butter and supplements. They make huge sacrifices to try and be the best at what they do, so in that respect they are not that much different from any other athlete, but you can’t help but think they are all troubled human beings in one way or another. Victor Martinez, who finished runner-up in the 2007 Mr. Olympia, lost his sister to a murder in 2009. Kai Green was abandoned by his mother, raised by several foster families and in and out of a juvenile facility before he found body-building. Hidetada Yamagishi was born into a strict Japanese family who never understood him. Branch Warren was born in Texas… One or two presumably didn’t have an interesting enough history to include their back stories so you never really find out why they are doing it, and this is where you start to see cracks.

The main problem is that this film is about the sport of body-building rather than the people that devote their lives to it. If it had been about Heath, and Green’s struggle to best him, then you have a story that follows in the same vein as documentaries such as Seth Gordon’s excellent “The King of Kong.” Had that film been about Donkey Kong the game as opposed to the struggle between lovable hero Steve Wiebe and total weirdo Billy Mitchell it would never have won as many awards as it did. Unfortunately Yudin just introduces character after character, many of them unexceptional, and who all end up saying the same things. He clearly has a deep respect for the sport since everything is presented seriously and without irony, but he somehow fails to capture the emotions of these men when they fail a competition or when they injure themselves. As a result you end up laughing when you should be feeling waves of sympathy. Case in point is when Branch Warren, the film’s most unlovable character, is sitting on his horse when the director says that “people think if you keep working out the way you do in the gym you’re gonna get injured,” to which he replies “the past two injuries I’ve had weren’t in the gym, they were outside the gym,” and then rides off before his horse promptly throws him off the saddle injuring his hamstring. When a documentary is done well, really well, that kind of thing is a tragedy. This was hilarious.

Ultimately the film left me feeling empty and unsatisfied, and that could be as much to do with the subject as much as the documentary itself. If you’ve never seen Pumping Iron and you’re even remotely curious about the weird world of body-building then I would recommend that over this – Arnie is on top amusing form. If you find Generation Iron on Netflix or something then it might be worth a look just so you can point and the screen and go “eww, look at that one!” Parts of it are interesting and informative but at 1:50 it could easily be 20-30 minutes shorter.

Winter in Warsaw, Poland

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IMG_4443 (Medium)Since my company changed its overtime policy earlier this year I seem to have ended up with rather a lot time off in lieu. At the beginning of August (after I’d just taken a week off to sit in Finsbury Park and read) my team lead took me to one side and said “Now look here… It’s August and you still have 25 days left. You need to start taking some.”

IMG_4446 (Medium)It’s not every day your team lead tells you to take holiday. So I did. One week every month for the rest of the year in fact. Thing is though, while I should be taking flights to here there and everywhere, there are only so many holidays a man can afford so for the most part I just sat around at home playing computer games and video-conferencing friends in far flung parts of the globe. I couldn’t face doing this again in December (no offence to my Skype friends intended) so I jumped onto a flight checker and searched for the cheapest flights to anywhere in Europe for a 3 night stay. First up… Warsaw, Poland. Three things instantly popped into my mind upon reading this:

  1. Joy Division (who wrote a song called “Warsaw” about Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s deputy in the first half of the war)
  2. The Second World War
  3. Winter

The only images I could conjure up were of an emaciated Adrian Brody, walking across piles of rubble searching for scraps of food in The Pianist. I knew absolutely nothing of post-war Warsaw, or even Poland for that matter besides being told that there were apparently legions of hot raven-haired women and cheap beer. Both those things appealed to me greatly, but I am also deeply fascinated by WWII so I figured, why not? How cold can it really be anyway?

 

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My next dilemma was where to stay. When I went to Rome in June I picked the hostel with the best reputation for partying. This was fine on the first night because I just went down to the bar on the Saturday evening, made loads of nice people and went clubbing but the second night I had been out walking all day and couldn’t wait to just read a book and pass out. Not likely in an 8 bed dorm at the front of the building with the noisiest fan in the world, no air conditioning and an all-night party outside.

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I figured that evening, lying in bed staring at the ceiling while willing the snorer in the bunk below to choke to death on his own tongue, that I don’t actually need to do this any more. I’m not a penniless traveller trying to save money in every city I go to; I’m a working professional on holiday. The only reason I actually stay in hostels is so I can hang out with nice people while I’m away and in most places you can go to the hostel bar without actually needing to stay there anyway. So this time I booked a 4 star hotel, the Radisson Blu Sobieski, not far from the city centre. I had not one bed, but two, my own bathroom, room service, clothes hangers, a safe and a mini bar. Not to mention my own old man’s chair where I could sit, fingers on chin, and contemplate the day.

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The flight was delayed by 6 hours. That is a loooong time to be sat in Luton airport, believe me. I solved logic problems and tweeted to Wizz Air. They laughed. Only because I was trying to be funny though; I’m pretty sure they don’t usually laugh at their customers. Actually the only thing I could complain about were the other people on the flight and there wasn’t a great deal the airline could do about screaming children. I discovered a helpful little trick on the way back, however… They all go in the front. Pick a seat near the back entrance and the journey is blissfully quiet. There’s one for your little book of holiday tips!

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Once we touched down in Poland I walked off the plane into a snow-drenched airport and a blast of cold air that enveloped me like a bath of liquid nitrogen. It was then a half hour wait for a bus, an hour ride on said bus (while the driver attempted to compensate for the nitrogen bath by melting our faces off with the on-board heating), a short 10 minute walk and I was greeted at the hotel by Carsten, a friend of mine who popped up from Berlin for the night. It was midnight, so naturally we stepped out to find a club and ended up in “The Opera House,” a catacomb-y type place with red brick tunnels, red lighting, cheesy house music, a live violinist and beers for £2.50. It was free to get in and free to use the cloakroom. It was also warm. Oh so warm. Two Żywiecs and a Jägerbomb later and we were on the dance floor busting out moves that would make James Brown weep. With joy obviously.

IMG_4471 (Medium)Apart from this little escapade much of my time was spent chilling out, eating, drinking coffee and poking around the various districts of Warsaw. I also tried out my theory for infiltrating hostel bars, which worked a treat, and spent an evening playing card games with some new Polish, Dutch and Italian friends. Thoughts of the war prevailed thanks to the overwhelming number of communist buildings everywhere and the general look and feel of the place. Everything you look at seems to conjure up an image from one holocaust film or another, but then you walk around a corner and there’s a mass of steel and glass skyscrapers reminding you that democracy and capitalism did arrive after all. I bought a book on the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 to try and fill in some blanks, which was lucky because I managed to get flu on Monday and ended up spending the rest of the holiday in the hotel room.

IMG_4454 (Medium)A bit of a mixed bag then, this holiday. A good break from London but I’m left thinking that maybe I should just save up and go somewhere warm for my winter holidays. If for no other reason than to avoid catching a cold and having to spend another plane journey with head that feels like it’s going to explode every time I cough! I’ll save the European trips for the summer (ski holidays excluded obviously).

Ramble On

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It’s been a while, I know. You could put it down to laziness, maybe writers block or even a lack of material but the end result is the same. I’ve neglected you, and I’m sorry. Way back when I started blogging in 2006 I used it as a way to keep in contact with friends and family while I was travelling around the world. Rather than just writing online letters with a few pictures thrown in I started to experiment with reviews and anecdotes for all the places I’d been. When you’re travelling around it’s easy to find things to write about that people will find interesting. Every day is an adventure, or a potential disaster, and both make great reading material (with the latter actually always offering more laughs). Likewise when I was living in Japan, there was simply no end to the amount of material available, I mean, seriously! Train men that randomly point at things for no apparent reason? Builders that dance together in the morning and then wave mini-lightsabers at passing cars? Chicken testicles on sticks?! That place is a blogger’s treasure trove!

England though. I love the place, really I do, but it’s totally and utterly normal. All two of my readers live here already and the discovery of cultural insights that people don’t already know about is tough and, well, basically the domain of professional stand-up comedians.

What does one write about then? Politics? Dry. TV? Never watch it (unless you count the 72,000 episodes of the latest series of Masterchef: The Professionals or the continual onslaught of Grand Designs and Man V. Food repeats). TV is just something you have on the background while you’re eating so you can avoid having one of those “conversation” things and besides, Charlie Brooker’s got that locked down already.

At the beginning of this year I played with the idea of doing a different challenge every month and actually, January 2012 was probably the most productive month of my whole life; I learned 500 kanji, a couple of hundred Japanese words, drank so much green tea that I anti-oxidised the air around me wherever I walked and got back into weight training after my broken hand had finally healed. As with so many New Year’s Resolutions though, the idea was dead by February. You don’t realise how difficult it is to do the same thing every day until you do it, and then you feel like it’s the only thing you ever do, even if it’s only an hour or two every day. It also serves to show how much time we waste sitting idly around watching TV or surfing the Internet.

That pretty much takes me right back to where I started – travel – and with my fateful trip to Italy earlier this year, a recent trip to Poland and a bout of flu preventing me from doing much besides lying in bed reading, heating up some Heinz Cream of Chicken soup or staring at a computer screen, you can probably expect another entry or two in the next couple of days.

Japanese: A Quick Overview

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I am placed in a rather unique situation at work (for England at least) whereby there are something like 9 different languages spoken in our team of 10 people. There are, in no particular order, speakers of Urdu, Arabic, Gujarati, Greek, Swedish, Japanese, Russian, Belarusian and a Nigerian dialect of English. I may even have missed one or two. Certainly in all the English-speaking places I have lived and worked before most people will speak English, and only English; but that’s not to say that people don’t have an interest in learning other languages. People will often express that they would like to learn a language but they don’t have the time or the opportunity to speak it. I had always said the same. I even went on an Italian course 1 night a week to try and kick-start things but the only thing I can remember how to say now is “can I have a glass of red wine, please?” Useful, but hardly nearing the fluency required to impress a long-legged, olive-skinned Italian goddess with my in-depth knowledge of graphics cards and central processing units.

I failed at Italian because no-one had ever taught me HOW to learn a language and exactly WHAT to study and practice. Had I figured it out by going to Italy and being forced to learn the language I would have, perhaps, got much further in a much shorter space of time. But I wasn’t going to Italy; I was going to Japan, and I either had to learn Japanese or spend my entire year there confused and disorientated. As it happened I ended up doing both but, I hope, in a slightly less confused manner than I would have had I simply remained squarely in the expat bubble.

To those who have never studied Japanese, the written language is a mishmash of mystical symbols and pictures and the spoken sentence just an endless stream of syllables where no-one takes a breath for 3 minutes at a time. The notion of ever being able to speak it, let alone read it, is a monumental task that most normal people leave to the manga fans. Look deeper however and you will find that it is endlessly fascinating, constantly surprising and actually, rather logical in its construction. For those cunning linguists out there with a passion for languages in general, or for those who would simply like to know what all those mysterious little pictures actually mean, read on. American/Canadian readers take note, you may need to put on your best Hugh Grant impression when pronouncing the letters/words in bold so that you get the right Japanese-equivalent sound.

The Alphabets

Yes that is alphabets, plural. Four to be precise (well, 3 really but we’ll get into that in a bit) and you already know one of them:

  • Romaji (or the Roman alphabet to you and me)
  • Hiragana
  • Katakana
  • Kanji

This means that there are also 4 different ways to write many words. The word ‘bicycle’ for instance can be written (in the above order) as:

  • jitensha
  • じてんしゃ
  • ジテンシャ
  • 自転車

We’ll go into that in a bit.

Romaji

Yes, they all know and learn the Roman alphabet, but no that doesn’t mean they can read English (as I’m sure you will all know from reading the posts over the last year!). They use Romaji for a number of different things including, obviously, English words, but also for Japanese words they think just look cooler in Roman letters. When you see Japanese in phrase books, it will usually be written in Romaji because people don’t have time to learn 3 new alphabets for a quick 2 week holiday, but you should note that this is not Japanese; it is merely to help you pronounce Japanese words using letters for which you know the sounds. For example the Japanese word for I or me; in a phrase book you would see it written as watashi where in fact the Japanese is わたし. Which brings me nicely onto…

Hiragana

This is the original Japanese alphabet and it differs from the Roman alphabet in that almost every single character contains a vowel sound*. For example, し sounds like she (or shi as written in Romaji), な sounds like na (as in nappy), か sounds like ka (as in karen). So rather than have a load of separate consonants and vowels which you can then combine in any number of crazy combinations and sounds like in English, you have a set number of 1-syllable sounds which you then just string together to make a word.

There are literally only 5 vowel sounds in the entire language. Yes, I know we have 5 vowels in English but I’m talking about vowel sounds. Take the vowel, o for example; put it in the word now and you get more of an a sound than an o, but stick an s on the front – snow – and the sound completely changes. In Japanese this never happens. A か will always sound like ka wherever you put it in a sentence, な will always sounds like na and し will always sound like shi.

For an English-speaker learning to speak Japanese this is a wonderful thing. It means that you don’t even have to listen to someone say a word for you to know how to say it; you just read the characters as you see them. For a Japanese-speaker learning English though, this gives them a serious handicap; try to get someone to tell you the difference between mood, mud, mode and mod and they will break down and have a fit there and then. Likewise, if you try to get a Japanese person to say ‘squirrel’ they will still be standing there trying 12 hours later.

Katakana

Katakana is used mainly for Japanese words that they want to ‘coolify,’ and for words that have been adopted from other languages, for example:

  • Coffee becomes コーヒー (pronounced core-hee)
  • Television becomes テレビ (pronounced teh-reh-bee)
  • Super becomes スーパー (pronounced sue-paah)

If you really listen hard, you can hear the English word behind it but usually only after you become trained at it. After I had learnt to read Katakana, Maria (another JET in my area) and I used to have to team-up to read menus; I would read them – very slowly – and repeat faster and faster until she could decipher the English word it was supposed to replicate.

I would understand its usage if they had never learnt the Roman alphabet (besides, who wants to learn Hiragana before you’re able to read, write and pronounce tsunami or karaoke?), but when they know how to read and write Roman letters it needlessly prevents kids from learning the proper spellings and sounds in English. All the characters look the same as well, for instance シ is shi and ツ is tsu – both identical but for a slight change in the way they mock you as they grin outwards from the screen.

Kanji

These are the little pictographs that you’ve all seen in both Chinese and Japanese (the Japanese nicked them from China years ago), and if you’ve been reading my other posts recently then you’ll know that I am currently attempting to learn 1000 kanji before the end of the month. It’s not going very well but that’s one for another post. There are countless kanji in Chinese and Japanese though a common dictionary in Japan, the ‘Daikanwa,’ currently contains around 50,000. Luckily, only about 2 to 3 thousand are in common use in Japan. That is still quite a steep learning curve though, and if it wasn’t interesting I would have given up long ago.

Each and every kanji has a meaning. Sometimes one kanji will be be a word on its own, and sometimes it will form part of a word with other kanji. Take 彼 and 女 for instance. 彼 means he/him/boyfriend, pronounced kah-reh, and 女 means woman, pronounced on-na. If you put them together though – 彼女 – the pronunciation completely changes to ka-no-jo, and the meaning to she/girlfriend (in case you were wondering, the kanji for man is 男).

How do you ever learn these? It really helps if you know the meanings of the individual kanji because you can often make up little stories in your head to help you remember what the word means – this is what I am doing at the moment. Sometimes though, you don’t even need to make up stories because it’s obvious from the meaning of the kanji alone. Remember bicycle? 自転車? Well 自 means oneself/itself, 転 means rotate/revolve and 車 means vehicle, so a vehicle that rotates itself is…? You get the picture. What you really need to do is learn as many words as you can in hiragana and then mass-learn all the kanji and their meanings when you think you’re ready. After that you can go back over all the words you learnt in hiragana and attach their pronunciation to the proper, kanji word.

Learning a foreign language has been a lot of hard work, but it has provided me with a great deal of fun, intrigue, and interactions with people I never would have spoken to had I not jumped into it head-first. If you’re one of those people who have always wanted to learn one then just start. Get a book and give it a go. You won’t regret it.

*The only exception to this is ん which is pronounced simply, n (by putting your tongue on the roof of your mouth and emitting a dull sound through your nose).

Failures

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“If you’re going to make a mistake, then make it LOUDLY because then we can correct it and move on.”

That’s what my Dad used to say at choir practice, and it’s what I would come to teach my students in their first lessons with me at school in order to pull them out of their shells and keep them talking. I think it worked too. “Are mistakes good or bad?” I would say as they looked at me dumbfounded, likely scared that whatever they said in reply would be the wrong answer. Eventually they pandered to my little game and a couple of the more confident ones would say “bad,” to which I would reply “nope.”

“Mistakes are GOOD!” I would say, and then I would explain why very simply in English, and the JTE in Japanese, before attempting to build a relationship of trust, and an environment where people would not be afraid to at least try without fear of humiliation from their teacher.

I too have failed, and it wouldn’t be right for me to pretend otherwise but rather, to write it on the Internet for all to see lest I forget my father’s words of wisdom. My mistake lay in the goals I’d set myself for this month. They were, I now admit, a little far-fetched. I was a little high on life at the time and thought that I could accomplish anything I put my mind to. But 31 days is a long time. A very long time. No milk, sugar, alcohol, TV, computer games, films, relaxation, or basically, ANYTHING FUN. FOR 31 DAYS?! What the hell was I thinking?! I was obviously MENTAL. However all is not lost. I haven’t just been sitting on my arse playing Mass Effect 2, stuffing my face with Burger King and binging all over London Town… Real changes have been made:

  1. I am eating much more healthily. Granted, I’ve had a couple of Dominos pizzas and a McDonalds but the rest of the time I have stuck to the diet. I have scrambled eggs for breakfast every day, nuts, seeds, dried fruits and beef jerkys for snacks, chicken salads for lunch and meat/fish and vegetables for dinner. I aim to keep this up for the foreseeable future, and I’ll occasionally throw in some junk food for fun.
  2. I am fitter and stronger. More like 3-times-a-week fitter rather than the 5 I promised but it’s a good start. I am running regularly for the first time since school and lifting more weight than I ever have before. I will continue at least 3 times a week (preferably every other day) for the foreseeable future. This is not a short-term thing – I am actually enjoying it.
  3. I’ve cut down on the booze. Only two nights of drinking in 15 days can’t be bad.
  4. I now know 384 kanji. Doesn’t sound a lot, yet consider this one on the right. It means “admonish” and takes 19 strokes to write. Imagine learning that and then doing the same for 383 equally complex kanji varying from “run” to “Decameron” (don’t ask). I’m not trying to impress… Only to try to help you understand the pain I am going through even without a whole 2 hours of study a day.

Oh yeah… That 2 hours thing? There is absolutely no way in hell that I could ever fit in two hours of study every single day. It is impossible. There are simply not enough hours in the day. I know I know, that’s the other kind of thing our Dads say but seriously, when we would just go “yeah yeah” and assume they were making up excuses for not putting up that shelf or descaling the shower head, they would be running around like a blue-arsed fly, permanently worried that all the things on their to-do lists wouldn’t get done. I could do 2 hours a day if I had a butler but I don’t – partly because I can’t really afford one but mainly because I could never convince one to come and work in Wood Green – so I am forced to forgo the excessive amounts of study in favour of not dying of starvation or wearing the same dirty clothes every day.

My **revised** goals for January then, are very simple: Keep up the diet and the exercise, don’t go overboard on the booze and learn 1000 kanji by the end of the month. Should be doable.

January Gymathon

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If you’re reaaaaally clever, you may have guessed what this month is about from the title. Yes, New Year’s Resolutions (yawn). January is all about bettering myself. Shedding the fat and looking like Arnie, yes, but we’re also talking about the gym of the mind. Here are the rules:

  • Detox – No alcohol. Too easy? We’ll go one better. Shizuoka Green Tea and water are the only liquids I’ll be drinking this month. No exceptions… Bring it.
  • Eating – No carbs before a gym session. Only complex carbs after. We’re talking brown rice, wholewheat pasta and bread, sweet potatoes, pulses; that sort of thing. What does this mean? It means scrambled eggs and cheese for breakfast every day, protein shakes (made with water) and nuts/seeds for morning and afternoon snacks, chicken salads for lunch and cottage cheese and fruit before bed. “Proper” dinner using whole foods only. No sugar at all, and no milk.
  • Education – 2 hours a day of personal education. What does this mean? Reading up on history, philosophy, sociology, economics, Japanese and anything else that takes my fancy. You get the point.
  • Sleep – 8 and a half hours of sleep every night. No more, no less. Yes this includes weekends, so no lie-ins. I’m not going to have a lot of spare time this month so I’m not going to waste it sleeping.
  • Gym – Every weekday. Yes you heard that right. Weight lifting on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and High Intensity Interval Training on Tuesday and Thursday. What’s that? It’s where you sprint for 30 seconds, jog for a couple of minutes, sprint for another 30 seconds, wash, rewind, repeat for about 30 mins.

This is pretty brutal, so I’m going to allow myself some leeway when it comes to my social life. If I go somewhere for the weekend then I can obviously relax some of the rules around eating and education a little bit. Likewise, if there is a one-off event on a certain day during the week that I desperately want to go to I will allow myself to skip the gym and the education. I still want a life, I just want to make more of the spare time I have rather than waste it in front of the TV/laptop. The drinking rule is non-negotiable however.

After all that, any spare time is mine to do with what I will. Games, TV, tiddlywinks, writing blogs, skydiving.

If anyone else thinks they’re hard enough and wants to get involved, let me know. It’d be good to compare progress. For the rest of you, I will of course keep you updated, and if anyone in Japan fancies sending me some green tea supplies they’d be gratefully received!

Challenge Bobbika!

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This time last year I was lying on a couch, dying from flu, freezing my arse off and scared to go out in case I broke my neck slipping up on the solid ice sheets lining all the pavements in London. I think back then my excitement for the coming year was dampened by the fact that anything would be better than what I was experiencing at that point:

Get up and walk 10 metres without worrying that the muscles in your legs are going to give way at any moment? 2011 IS AMAZING!

Eat your lunch without puking? 2011 IS AMAZING!

With short-term goals such as this, you might say that I missed the big picture. While I was concentrating on keeping my food down and wondering how the hell I was going to manage a 12 hour plane journey to Japan, everyone else was thinking about the year ahead, and all the excitement, joy, sadness, opportunity, love and conflict it would bring. That is what the first of January is for. You think they gave us a bank holiday to go down to Oxford Street and spend the whole day taking off 7 layers of clothing to try on a t-shirt, find it doesn’t fit, put all the layers back on again and walk into another shop, seemingly in competition with the last to see how high they can get their thermometer to go? To spend the whole day standing in queues watching everyone’s miserable faces as they attempt to convince themselves that the £10 they saved was worth it, getting angrier and angrier at the world and cursing every other person there? The banks are on holiday, but your account takes the biggest hammering it’s had since the last time you went abroad and took out €3,000 because you weren’t sure what the exchange rate was and anyway… It’s not real money, is it?

Personally I can’t think of anything worse than getting sucked into the sales, so I’m staying at home, wiping the slate clean and laying out my game plan.

And I’m excited.

“Does that mean you’re going to Singapore?”
“Nope.”
“Eh? I was sure you’d snap that up straight away.”
“I was tempted for a while, but for all the great things I’m sure it would have brought, you have to follow your gut feeling.”
“Scared?”
“Me? Never. It’s just too soon. I got back from Japan in August and spent a great deal of physical and mental effort getting a job and a place to live, settling down and seeing friends and family I haven’t seen for 8 months or more. Every time I see someone else I haven’t had a chance to catch up with, I put another root down into English soil; and I feel better about my decision.”
“Deep.”
“Yeah.”
“So what now? Isn’t this year just going to be 9-5 London living, watching TV, going to the gym, picking up your groceries and paying your taxes like a good little boy?”
“In part, yes, but I’m setting out some serious plans for this year, and I’m actually really excited about them. In fact, January is already in the bag.”
“Go on then.”
“Ok.”

My New Year’s Resolution is to set myself a challenge for every month. This could mental, physical, work-related, personal, serious, fun; whatever. I will try to make them interesting and I’ll note them down on Ramblin’ Man for your amusement along with the usual shits ‘n’ giggles you’ve become accustomed to.

So let’s get on with it!

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

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To say I was too busy to post anything in the last couple of months would be kind of a lie. Yeah, work’s been busy, but not that busy. Spending a lot of time in the office is never an excuse for doing nothing with the time you spend outside of it.

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve sold my soul to the finance industry and I’m currently supporting an online spread betting system for people with so much money they don’t know what to do with it. What’s spread betting? It’s based on normal stock market trading, so if the price of a unit of gold is £10 and you buy 5 of them for £50, then the price of a unit goes up to £15 and you sell what you’ve bought, you’ve made yourself another £25. In spread betting though, you don’t actually buy any gold; you buy a contract that says we will pay you the difference if the price goes up, and you will pay us the difference if the price goes down. Oh and we’ll loan you a load of cash so you only have to pay a percentage of what you buy.

That means that you could buy 1000 units of gold at £10 a unit for only £100 (normally £10,000). We put up the other £9,900 and if the price goes up to £15 a unit then you’ve just made 5 grand! FROM £100! But wait, there’s a catch… If it goes down to £5 a unit then you owe us 5 grand. Not so keen on the idea now are we?

Suffice to say it’s a very complex game with rules, patterns and strategies like any other, but with the potential for going bankrupt. People who do it successfully will sit in front of their 4 widescreen monitors all day looking at hundreds of numbers flashing yellow and red, watching 24 hour market news updates and reading nothing but the business columns of various newspapers and websites while they sip on their lattes, smoke their Davidoff cigarettes and dine on sushi served from gold platters balanced precariously upon the collective breasts of 12 virgins lying naked on the snow-leopard rug in front of the fireplace. I’m a troubleshooter though – the man who puts out the fires and greases the wheels that keep this machine running. I will often pick up the phone to hear some bloke going on about how “there’s no pricing on UK Equities. Legacy looks alright but the tick data doesn’t seem to marry up. Can you take a look please?”

“Sure, um, tick data? Let me just… Mmm… No it still looks like it’s still ticking.”

“What? Did you even hear what I said?”

“Yeah man, Equities… Equities… Legacy and shit innit. *long pause* Can I just put you on hold for a minute?”

I am actually getting the hang of it now, which is comforting because I’ve been here for nearly 3 months. The learning curve is massive, the pace is frantic, the atmosphere is professional… It’s a very exciting place to work and I frequently look at my watch at 16:30 only to wonder where on earth the rest of the day has gone.

So you must be wondering what the title is about then. “If he’s happy here then what’s all this about going somewhere?” I hear you ask. Well, my company allows its clients to trade on many of the markets around the world including NZ, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Europe and the US. That means we need to offer 24/7 support as well which, at the moment, means night-shifts once every 4-5 weeks. Very soon after I joined however, my boss announced that they are opening an office in Singapore and would any of us like to go there to live…

My initial reaction was no, definitely not. I’ve only just got back from Japan and got a house, job, mobile phone contract, etc. I’ve been moaning about the lack of sausages and mash for months and now I’m going to throw all that away again!? Yet over that weekend I got to thinking about it. The main reason I came back from Japan when I did was to get into my career and start to take it seriously, but now I’m firmly within my chosen career and they’re offering me the chance to go and live abroad again. Ever since my trip around the world in 2006 I’ve been banging on about how travelling is the holy grail and how it makes you into a better person, and it was in these very pages that I spoke about comfort zones and how important it is to shove ourselves out of it every now and again, so why does my mind just seem to want to buy a rug, a lounge chair and a sideboard, and stack it full of vinyl, vintage memorabilia and lava lamps?

Now, I can see you there, reading this and getting all excited about the prospect of a whole new adventure to read about. You’re probably peering through your hands at the screen barely able to read for fear of what I might say but completely unable to stop, quietly chanting…Whispering… “Go Bobby, go. Do it. Go.”

Probably.

It’s true that from a blogging standpoint, a move to Singapore would be the refresh that Ramblin’ Man needs; the next adventure that stops it from becoming a relic; an archive of all the interesting things I used to do before I bought some long-johns and an egg poacher, but I can hardly go to Singapore just to keep a blog going can I?

Ultimately the decision will have to be based around what is best for my career, and what is best for my happiness, and at the moment, I’m sorry to say, the sausages and mash seem to be winning.

One more week to decide…

House Hunt

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I hung up the phone and walked along the road towards the house, running through the usual nonsense in my head. Be charming and funny, I thought to myself, but are they gonna be weirdos? Will I like them? Will they like me? What kind of state will it be in? Will I walk into a room to find them pouring wine from a monkey skull and dancing around a teapot in the dark? As I approached the house itself I saw a figure waiting outside staring solemnly at his phone. He was tall and gangly, with long brown hair and a nervous disposition. As he heard my footsteps approaching, he looked up at me like he’d just been caught masturbating by his mum. He quickly looked the other way as if to make out he was just taking in the surroundings. Is that one of them? I thought. I hoped not. As I got closer I figured it out.

“You’re here for the viewing too are you?” I inquired.

“Yeah. They said 19:00 though so I thought I’d better wait outside.” Sitting on their wall like a weirdo I thought. I looked at my watch; it was 18:58.

“I’m sure they won’t mind,” I said, “let’s ring the bell shall we?” At which point a third man dressed in skinny jeans, pointy shoes, NHS glasses and a beard turned up as well. The door opened, and everyone put on their best Ooh-Look-How-Friendly-I-Am faces.

It’s hard enough to be funny and charming at the best of times but when you arrive at a house occupied by four people you’ve never met before with two people you just met on a doorstep and then attempt to have a meaningful conversation with any of them, it’s all a little bit… well… strange, shall we say? Normally when you go to view a house people will set aside timeslots – half an hour is a safe bet – so that they can actually have a proper chat with their prospective housemates. Occasionally you’ll get someone who just hasn’t thought about it, names a timeframe, and tells everyone to come at some random moment during that timeframe. Chaos ensues.

It was a French guy that opened the door. Nice enough chap; dealt with the situation pretty well. He led us – all three of us – through the hallway and into a kitchen about the size of a skip, stuffed with 4 people cooking, and 3 of the biggest house flies I have ever seen lazily swooping through the air in the same way a tired commuter’s head bobs in and out of consciousness on the tube. They burrowed like moles through the dank, sweaty air as I took in the scene around me. The housemates seemed nice enough and, when led upstairs to view the room I thought it was a good size, but the place as a whole was old, dirty and crowded. I decided there and then that I couldn’t live with 4 other people again – I’m too old and grumpy for all that nonsense. I made my excuses, said thanks very much, and left.

A couple of years ago when I was looking for a house in London it was a piece of cake; there were plenty of rooms going that were of good quality at a low (for London at least) price. In 2007 I was able to get a sizeable double room with an en-suite bathroom in zone two with all bills included for £550 a month. Supply and demand was pretty even back then but now, as I’ve been informed by every newspaper I’ve read in recent weeks, the house-sharing market is saturated with people who have been pushed out of rent-on-my-own market by rising rental costs in London. Every estate agent I walked into had a sign on the door saying “CALLING ALL LANDLORDS. PROPERTIES DESPERATELY NEEDED,” and when I went in asking about any 3 bedroom properties that might possibly be available you’re greeted with a tired shake of the head and a look that says “nor will there be. Ever.”

To increase my chances of ever being able to live in a room in someone else’s house, I raised my limit to £650 per month including bills. This was somewhat galling considering that for the past year I have been living in a 2 bedroom flat on my own; I had my own walk-in wardrobe, I could walk around naked all day (as long as I kept an emergency tracksuit near the front door), and I could have a poo with the toilet door open; all for little over £230 a month.

Increasing my budget made no difference though. Hundreds of people have obviously done the same; competition was still fierce and the situation wasn’t helped by the few adverts that trickled through which contained such gems as “I am quiet, into meditation and have cats.” Just who, exactly, is she trying to attract with this kind of statement? Within a microsecond of digesting this my brain had already constructed a complete and detailed image of a woman with dirty, matted brown hair dressed in an Indian sari, and sat cross-legged in the middle of a living room filled with pictures of elephants, spirit crystals, burning incense, and cats that crap on the antique bureaux in the corner. Of course with me being someone who is a bit noisy, who finds the prospect of emptying my mind for an hour about as enjoyable as sticking pins in my eyes, and who finds cats a little bit annoying, I’m probably more prejudiced than most.

In the end though, it has all worked out beautifully. My sister and I have found a delightful maisonette in Wood Green opposite a park, newly refurbished for £450 a month each. It came on the market on Friday – the only 3-bed on the market in all the estate agents around Finsbury Park – we viewed it on Saturday, and told them we’d take it there and then.

After 2 months of searching for jobs and houses, everything is finally coming together. Now that I have a home base I can join a gym, change my diet, meet up with old friends; basically do all the things I felt like I couldn’t do before. I also have a great, challenging, techy job a world away from teaching with a steep learning curve and plenty of opportunities for progression.

Now all I need is to find a decent ramen shop and my life will be fulfilled.

I Predict A Ri… Oh, Too Late

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Whoa! England’s going mental! One week back and a man is shot by the police, a peaceful protest is made in reply, a couple of idiots start a riot, and the media causes a bunch of riots over the whole of England for the rest of the week. Oh, no, wait… It wasn’t the media it was the parents. No, wait, it was the government. No, it was society, and actually, we’re not surprised this happened at all.

Hmm.

Everyone’s talking about it and everyone has a point of view. Debates are raging on Facebook statuses and more people have been defriended this week than during any other (complete speculation but probably true judging by some of the heated debates I’ve seen). People seem to think that there are only two, clear-cut points of view on this. There are those who believe that this is the government’s fault for years of alienating the working classes and that, rather than punish the looters, let’s give them a hug and tell them that we all understand why they did it, that we are sorry our society is built on material wealth and they feel they have to keep up, and that if we weren’t all so middle-class and well-off then we’d probably be out there looting with them, side-by-side, like brothers. Then there are those who believe that this is the fault of the parents and the individuals; that people are responsible for their own actions; that they know stealing is wrong but did it anyway and for this they should have their hands cut off, their eyes gouged out, and be sold to market as drones that roam blindly on their knees, forever scrubbing the pavements of the Big Society with the brushes now strapped to their stumps.

Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ might seem like a great idea in the predominantly white middle-class majority that voted him in but, as has been widely suggested in the news, many of the people who were part of the riots probably don’t feel part of ‘the society’ and so feel that they don’t owe that society anything; after all, what has it given them? This would seem to be a logical assumption, but it is just that – an assumption – coming mainly from the liberal middle-class. Or coming from a bunch of kids in hoodies after the reporter has asked them a question like “do you think that the rioters feel that they are not part of society and that this is why the riots started?” instead of letting them form their own answers to an open question. “Yeah, definitely,” comes the inevitable answer.

Who really knows what the cause was? I’m willing to bet that most of the looters don’t know themselves. They’ll probably say “oh yeah it’s cos that bloke was shot innit,” but only because that’s the sequence of events they saw on the news.

Seumas Milne from the Guardian writes:

The London mayor and fellow former Bullingdon Club member Boris Johnson, heckled by hostile Londoners in Clapham Junction, warned that rioters must stop hearing ‘economic and sociological justifications’ (though who was offering them he never explained) for what they were doing.

This just before he launches into a diatribe about how the reason for the riots were due entirely to the economic and sociological failings of the government. Well we know they didn’t hear them from you, Seumas, but I’m pretty sure there are scores of other journalists who have already expressed your point of view far and wide enough for them to hear. Had every reporter on the planet not rushed at once to give their own personal, and often completely unfounded, opinions on the underlying problems with the government or society or parenting or cuts or individual responsibility, then I imagine that the looters would have more trouble coming up with excuses as to why they felt compelled to go out, smash a shop window and steal a bunch of Paul Smith watches.