Just a week to go now, and it's mostly all arranged, just need to sort out a hotel in Aleppo (my first choices were all booked up) and chase up a Turkish travel agent to make sure they've bought me a ticket from Istanbul to Aleppo.
The itinerary is roughly as follows:
Wednesday 6th September - Train to London. Meet up with family for Mahler's 2nd. Overnight in London.
Thursday 7th - Eurostar to Paris
Friday 8th - Spend the day in Paris, chomping on onions and going "hoh-hee-hoh-hee-hoh" (that's not racist). Overnight train - The Orient Express (what's left of it) - to Vienna.
Saturday 9th - Swan around Vienna, maybe catch an opera in the evening (Puccini or Wagner seems to be the choice).
Sunday 10th - Train to Budapest where I have four hours to kill before catching the overnight train to Bucharest.
Monday 11th - A day and a half in Bucharest. No idea what there is to do there.
Tuesday 12th - Catch the overnight train from Bucharest to Istanbul.
Wednesday 13th - 24hrs in Istanbul
Thursday 14th - Train from Istanbul to Aleppo in northern Syria.
Thursday 15th - Monday 18th: Aleppo
Monday 18th - Wednesday 20th: Damascus
Wednesday 20th: Fly home.
Thursday 21st: Back at work :-(
Kind of wish I was spending more time in Syria as it looks great, so I hope I don't regret my deliberate decision to have so many stop overs en route. Time will tell.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006 7:59 PM
Sorry if you got an error message when going to the front page of this website, I accidentally deleted the home page. Fortunatley Google had a cache of it. Good old Google.
5:02 PM
I keep a scrap book. Well, more of a scrap envelope really. Basically, a place to keep stuff that has no other home, but might be interesting to keep and look back on in years to come. I was looking for something earlier that I though might have made its way into my scrapbook, and came across a few gems from the past, such as my school report from July 1989 with such wonderful reviews as:
German:
"Uninspiring"Geography:
"This is the lowest mark ever obtained by an RGS boy [...] for at least 30 years"History:
"Christopher has been very lazy"Chemistry:
"He often lives in a world of his own"IT:
"Many pieces of work were promised but nothing ever appeared so in the computing part of the exam he received no marks whatsoever"Art:
"Christopher's work is dreadful and his approach to it is infantile"Bah! What do they know! If the shit they had been trying to teach me hadn't been so god damned boring and irelevant to me, maybe I'd have put some effort into it. Who gives a shit about Ethlered the Unready? Not me! And if I did, I just get a book out from the library or look him up in wikipedia or something.
Another interesting thing I found was a note book which I think must have been from about 2001, where I'd gotten my friends to fill a page with a list of words, just whatever came to their heads at the time. It is a very interesting look at the kinds of things going on in my friends' heads at the time. In fact to be honest, most of it is rather too revealing for me to share here, but compare and contrast some edited highlights from Phil and Jane...
Jane:derive
pyschogeography
situationism
crisps
gin
drift
neo-plastisism
neo-draconsim
cosmopolitan
urban
sausages
Phil:breasts
tits
melons
boulders
baps
bazongas
handful
mammaries
ship
battle
guns
Last but not least, Tim Howson's incomprehensible list, which I've photocopied because I found it impossible to transcribe:
Wednesday, August 23, 2006 10:40 PM
Time for another in my growing collection of pictures of Phil asleep at parties. Sadly I had one too many G&Ts last night and so didn't feel up for Snakes on a Plane this afternoon. Aah well.
Sunday, August 20, 2006 9:18 PM
You have to feel a bit sorry for the news people today, what with this plane terrorism business. Essentially, nothing happened. Yet the fact that nothing happened is in itself big news, even bigger when you consider that something
might have happened, but didn't. There is no way of really knowing what didn't happen, so the media have had to spend the whole day asking what exactly it was that didn't happen and how big the impact would have been had the thing that they don't really know what it was that hadn't happened, happened. Was it genuinly something that didn't happen? Or was it, as many people suspect since the whole Forest Gate affair, nothing that didn't happen, or I suppose to look at it another way,
nothing that
did happen? Only time will tell, but I tell you this, having listened to the news on the radio, I learnt absolutely
nothing.
Thursday, August 10, 2006 6:53 PM
I present to you here the first in a multi-part series about things I wouldn't know about were it not for the fact that I was vegetarian.
This one is so secret that I fear that I may actually be killed by the vegetarian brotherhood for revealing it. You know Scotch Eggs? A boiled egg wrapped in sausage meat wrapped in bread crumb? You know how it sucks seven kinds of balls? Well the vegetarian version made by Holland & Barrett is not only the best re-creation of an meat based snack every made, it is also the best snack EVER! Full stop! Period! End Of! And I'd be prepared to fight anyone who disagrees with me. But nobody will disagree with me after eating one. It really is a mass produced work of art. Christ knows what it's made of. Egg, obviously, and bread crumb, but the grey matter in the middle is anybody's guess. Some sort of soya based protein I'd imagine. Either way, genius.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006 10:58 PM
If there's one show that shines a light on the gulf in quality between UK and US drama on TV, it is
The Shield. It's an astonishingly good show. Everything is top notch, the script, the acting, the direction, the camera work; why can't we make shows like this in the UK? Why don't UK tv producers even
try to make shows like this? I mean, the other day there was a trailer for a UK drama set in a fucking Royal Mail sorting office.
Seriously! This followed by a trailer for a drama about some fishermen. For crying out loud, get a grip telly people! How jaded with life and the industry do you have to become, how many ideas must you have gone through and had discarded before you say, without trace of irony
"I know, let's make a drama about people that work in a sorting office, sorting letters. And here's the good bit, once they've sorted the letters, they deliver the letters. Do you see?".What on God's green earth made somebody go
"Yes, I think that would appeal to people, there has been a dearth of shows about people that sort letters in recent years. Here, have literally million pounds of license fee payers' money."Why didn't somebody step in and say
"Are you fucking kidding me? Are you out of your mind?"Anyway, sorry, I descended into a rant there. I was talking about The Shield, wasn't I? I finished season 5 last night, and the ending was just stunning. It is so rare to have a show that gets better and better with each season. How they can continue to keep you gripped after 45 hours of telly without resorting to the hackery of 24 is beyond me (and I say that as someone who loves 24).
The DVDs are criminally cheap, about £11 a season, so go and buy them and enjoy.
Monday, August 07, 2006 6:12 PM
