Pig Sty Avenue

The thing is with blogs… What is the thing with blogs? Well, one thing is, you get a view into other ways of living and thinking. I’ve been tidying up the blogroll because I think ruthlessness is required here: one has to get on with life, there are only so many hours in a day to spend surfing (it’s bad for your eyes and can damage family relationships), so unless a blog keeps me interested, unless I’m thinking “What’s that daft sod been up to?”, then it’s reach for the “edit template” time and away they go, whirling into the blogosphere, wailing, and me muttering, like Alexei Sayle on Didn’t You Kill My Brother? “Bugger Aff!” With this in mind I’m giving the following a trial period: I liked something about Diamond Geezer : news from the metropolis, and there’s something endearing, in small doses, about cockneys. An Unsealed Room looks pretty, Israel’s always in the news, and it’s not up its own arse, and best of all she’s a proper writer and can, well… write. Finally, I used to live...

I bought Series III of The Sopranos from play247 before my last trip to Libya, and then found when I got there that the 1st disk was bloody missing; so this morning I’m writing play247 - who are based in Jersey, what’s all that about then? - a letter to accompany the box I’m returning, and of course I have to reinstall the printer’s drivers, and meanwhile the computer’s being fed endless updates from piggin' Windows, and then my son Alexander pops up on Messenger for a chat: usually I don’t run it ‘cos friends and family seem to barge into my laptop at inconvenient times, but of course I forgot to do that after what I’m beginning to regard now as The Great Easter Reformat of ’05… So that letter took several hours to write. Then I wanted to write a few emails, and couldn't get on line at all. Spoke to a nice antipodean man at my ISP and all the settings are ok, apparently, so it must be a virus, and so as I’m typing this I’m performing virus and spyware checks. All I’ve achieve...

That's from my hotel balcony in Tripoli. Was I bored or suicidal? Strange to look at this now, and then outside to the cheery dullness of home. Nice parking, eh? Reginal Molehusband was really Libyan, I believe.

24 hours later, I’ve replaced Norton with the free AVG, and downloaded MS Anti-spyware, and tweaked and added and removed programs. And now, three days after I started on a reformat, my laptop's well again, and I’m off for a wee surf.

The irony is: if I’ve managed to post this, the problem’s probably solved. But typing it off line, I’m wondering if I’ll ever surf and blog again. The laptop was a bit slow, generally, and full of crap; so I downloaded the stuff I wanted to keep, and reformatted it. As I said to my chum Christopher who was staying the weekend, this is a bit like doing the housework by having the entire contents of your house removed and magically cleaned and replaced. Except it hasn’t worked, and everything, especially access to the internet is horribly slow, and, and… Frankly: surfing and blogging are addictive; and I’m a junky who’s roasting. So far as I can tell, there’s a wee nasty called pop64 which has swanned through firewalls and given the Vs up to Norton Anti Virus. Fuck knows what it wants, but I want to stab it in the eye with blunt scissors.

This is quite good fun.

Fiona noticed that Kryton of Red Dwarf has body language exactly like Frasier .

The search for work continues. I'll get a summer school, no doubt, but that's two or three months away; and there probably won't be anything in the North East so it'll be residential, tolerating the comical capers of Italian teenagers at 3am. I've sent off the CV. What I really want is something local, teaching asylum seekers perhaps. We'll see. I notice Bell International are advertising for a new Project Manager . Thereby hangs a tale, no doubt. Briefly tempted to apply. Circumstances dictate, however: we're going to have a baby! So I need to be at hand.

a boxer in Valletta 

Tell you what's pissing me off: these fascist barm-pots who infest newsgroups. I suspect they don't get out much, and have learned that posting shite into cyberspace is much less likely to get you punched in the face than spouting it down at the pub. But punching people in the face, including Nazi masturbators, isn't right; and free speech has a price. Even so…

I quite like this . I'm tidying up the blogroll, and will add it.

This is the the bank of the Don, behind Mallam's farm, taken last summer. Lovely colours, eh? 

We went for a meal last night. We thought the Wetherspoon's would do, but it was too noisy. So we went for a Chinese. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't too good. In both the pub and the restaurant there were middle aged couples, clearly on dates. What we both noticed was, the fellas just kept talking, and the women looked desperately bored. I realised why women say they like the 'strong silent type'. The jet lag hit me Saturday night, and I had a lovely sleep. Back to normal now and ready for Real Life. Here's a picture of the 310 , in Jarrow bus station as it was years ago. Funny, the stuff you find on the internet when you're surfing aimlessly. It's made me think: canny auld Jarra doesn't have much of a web presence; I'll see if I can do something about that. And this blog wants redecorating too.

a castor oil plant 

Loopyluuk suggested flickr , and I'm giving it a go. If I've got it right, this should link to a photo of the fountain in Green Square, Tripoli

"Wherever ye gan ya sure to find a Geordie..." 

now I've remembered 

I've forgotten how to post pictures 

No Fear! 

It's good to be home!

One of my colleagues, who is off to a new job in the far east, said this morning: I hope I never have to come back to this part of the world. I don't even want to fly over it, if I can avoid it. I agreed with a smile. That might seem a harsh thing to say, but if you think so, try working out here for a year, and then analyse your feelings... But least said soonest mended. The sun's shining, the clock's ticking, the world's turning. And I'm wondering: what's been happening on EastEnders ?

Perhaps it's because we're teaching the cream of the General Electric Company of Libya's engineers, but there was another power cut this morning. I got a bath in the dark. Mostly, I have corn flakes in my room of a morning, and I've bought an electric kettle - so that was a poor start to the day, I'm thinking, when I noticed that the lights were on in the corridor, shining under my door, so decided to go down to breakfast. The lifts always take a while to come. As I'm waiting, I realise I'm a bit disoriented, possibly emerging from a darkened room into fluorescent light has done it. It's very quiet, too. I think, Hi! What if everything's changed? If everything works properly, and everyone's pleasant to one another? Then I thought: Logically, if everything's changed to that extent, you're in the hereafter… I looked around me: the carpet's cheap, some kind of man made fabric; the door edging is coming away. The lift when it com...

There was a most excellent power cut last night: it was just growing dark. I'm a dab hand with the hubbly bubbly now, and was able to disassemble, clean, reassemble and fill it in the quick twilight we have here. Then I sat looking out over the sea: NNW, home. Earlier in the evening I'd seen a large bird, a crane perhaps, flying in that direction. The moon was only a short way over the horizon: a slim crescent, like a tiny-bit lopsided, welcoming grin. Venus was there, too, just a few degrees away. I puffed on the hubbly bubbly (apple flavour) and luxuriated in the view.

Fountains! There are hundreds of them here - everywhere you go. Even a country town like Imsallata has a massive one. There are fountains at roundabouts, and in parks. The style is modernist, generally. I suppose they were built in the last two decades. There's an exception in Green Square. It's neo-classical. Four horses, appearing to fight their way up out of the water. Eye-catching. Presumably it was built by the Italian colonialists. It works wonderfully: water jets 15 foot high. None of the others do: they're all choked with dust and sand, receptacles for rubbish.

We went to Green Square, but Nothing Was Happening. So we went for a pepsi and hookah pipe at the big café opposite the old cathedral, by the post office. I wondered, when they made the cathedral into a mosque, what did they do with the bells? Did they negotiate with Rome, and have them shipped back to Italy? Or are they still hanging there, neglected, waiting to one day fall on the kneelers below, whilst Our Lord keeps a straight face? Indeed. My friend Padraig, who’s working in Misratah, has travelled up to Tripoli for the holiday weekend. We’re off to do some exploring today. My camera has been in my drawer, (I thought it was broke – that’s a whole other story), but I’ll dust it off today. I flicked through the channels last night, and came across the Big Yin, making a speech. Here’s what I noted during the course of a very long 29 minutes last night: 9:34 PM Col Mustard’s making a speech on telly. The people listening in the conference hall look desperately bored. He mak...

Today is a holiday: Libyan People Power Day, so far as one can ascertain, (our students are a wee bit vague on the exact translation). We’re off to Green Square this evening, in behopes that Something Will Be Happening. To add to the excitement, our Big Cheese from Britain, Gregory, is here on a visit. He brought a Guardian: a real, foolscap Guardian, with its tabloid supplements, the whole nine yards, in fact. I nabbed it and read it hungrily. We get the news from the internet, of course, but that can’t compare to sitting down and actually holding and reading the paper. I managed to have a word with Gregory this morning, and tell him I won’t be signing up for another year’s contract, but I will be available in the indefinite future (when I’m hard up, though I didn’t tell him that). The 'villa' has been revisited, and apparently it has four bathrooms, not two. The "Project Manager" was able to count up to four once he had the help of his boss from Blighty.