London Calling…

In my last post, I mentioned I had about a dozen things to wrap up. Oh, how I mock myself for this ludicrously optimistic statement. I have what seems like several thousand things to “wrap up”, all in a rather short space of time. In retrospect, it appears I have the organisational skills of a rather stupid fish. Despite having known about this move for several months, I seem to have left most of the actual arranging of things to the last available 3 days, thus making my life a logistical nightmare of spectacular proportion.

People keep asking me if I am excited. Interestingly, the answer is no. 3 months ago when the move was approved, I was excited. I suspect when I touch down in Newark (only airport in the world that is an anagram of “wanker”, as someone pointed out to me) I will be excited. But right now it has not sunk in and doesn’t feel real. What does feel real is the burgeoning pressure of meeting everyone I want to see before leaving, and the increasing urgency of terminating all contracts and ensuring that I have transportation for all my belongings.

I am not excited, nor am I worried. This is by far the easiest move psychologically which I have made since moving down the road to live in a student estate for the summer of 2001. I already know where I will stay for a whole month, I have already been to the city and done a lot of walking, not to mention getting the hang of public transportation. I already know how to get to my flat, my office, and how to actually do my work. In my head, this is by far less daunting than moving to London, aside from the fact that it is rather far away

What I am is merely incredibly, stressfully, busy.

1. I am moving to New York in approximately 6 weeks

Yes, I have decided to leave my beloved London for pastures fresh, or in this particular case, pastures fairly smelly and a tad on the filthy side, but still pretty interesting. This move doesn’t mean I like London any less, I don’t. I love it here. But I am a firm believer in learning from experience, and I don’t intend to limit that experience to just one big city. So I’m off. If I’m not back in 2 years, avenge my death. But eh, email me and check if I’ve just moved to Asia first.

2. There is a reason I took the blog down in the first place

Recently this blog was gone, for about 6 months or so. The reason for this is that through an odd set of coincidences, people I work with became aware of its existence and location. Yeah, I know, I don’t care what people think, why does it matter, I am a great bit pus-filled hypocrite. Right.

Obviously, if I don’t use profanity in a professional email I am censoring myself. If I wear a suit to a meeting instead of jeans I am being fake. I work for a global company, owned by a big company, owned by a huge company, clearly I have sold out.

Of course I have bloody well sold out, that’s what having a job means. I sell my time and my abilities for a portion of my life and in return I get paid. I just don’t happen to feel bitter about it. During the time that I am doing that job, I do not behave in the same fashion as I do at home. In the same respect that I do not put my feet on people’s desks, eat sandwiches in a meeting, play guitar hero, or randomly lie down on couches, I also do not generally discuss my personal opinions or feelings in a professional capacity. Nor do I particularly want those to come up, because I don’t necessarily want to intertwine them with my job.

I get paid to do a job in a professional fashion, and I believe that one should give value for money or get a different job. Since I don’t currently want a different job, I choose to segregate my ranting from my working. I feel no obligation to excuse myself for the things I write here, but I also have no desire to be in a professional situation in which principle will require me to state this. I sell my attitude and my behaviour in the exact same way as I sell my time. My moral decisions are not for sale, matters of personal taste however are another matter.

Everyone sells themselves. The key is to sell yourself for lots and lots of money.

Actually, no-one is to answer that question. Except perhaps for the complete twat in the shoe shop in Camden who tried to sell me the aforementioned pair of shoes, or, more accurately, tried to buy me with said shoes.

In fact they were some pretty impressive boots. They had metal bits, laces, zips, heels, flames. They were incredibly comfortable, and easy to walk in despite adding 3 inches to my height. In fact, they are probably the best pair of boots I have ever attempted to purchase. But shockingly enough, they were still not worth whoring myself to some random shoe salesman. I am Dave’s blatant astonishment.

Should any would-be shoe-salespeople be reading this, however unlikely that may be, here are some useful tips which will help you sail through your coming employment-

• If someone wants to try on shoes, do not insist on personally fitting them on if they are quite clearly willing to do it themselves.
• Telling them they have beautiful eyes, while it has the potential to be charming, is nevertheless not pertinent to the sale of shoes.
• Asking someone you have just met out for a drink is both courageous and flattering, unless of course you simultaneously imply that there will be material gain associated, in which case you are in fact calling them a whore
• Refusing to disclose the price of a pair of shoes except in terms of a date with someone clearly not interested in you is not a lucrative sales tactic.

In summary, this general sleaziness led to me going next door and purchasing the shoes from someone who wasn’t oozing slime from every pore. Though at that point I was probably visibly angry enough to ensure a lack of any unwanted attention.

I am impressed by people with the confidence to ask a stranger out just because they, for example, like their eyes. Unfortunately I think this an incredibly stupid basis for being attracted to anyone, and would refuse on principle, even if they were Johnny Depp’s better-looking younger brother. Not that I am regularly hit on by stunningly beautiful people or anything. Essentially though, I see nothing wrong with it, as long as you take rejection well then good luck to you.

The catch is that you have to actually _take_ said rejection when it is given. Sometimes, “no” means “please go anally violate yourself, you disgusting fuck”.

Because you actually feel tempted to participate sometimes. I was tagged by someone to do something stupid, ie. to list five things people don’t know about me, and then tag 5 other people. In the spirit of general participation and momentary boredom, I’ll list 5 things, but I refuse to tag anyone. For future reference, very few things piss me off quite as much as unsolicited chain emails, but on the theory that I had to in fact read his blog to discover I was tagged, I will refrain from ranting about this one.

1. I have played Goldilocks 3 times, in various plays during my childhood. It is one of the reasons I dye my hair red.
2. I am allergic to most kinds of fabric softener, the majority of skin products, many types of make-up, and bubblebath.
3. I have an irrationally severe aversion to double-decker buses.
4. It makes me retch when people play with their chewing gum, I find it extremely physically disgusting.
5. I cannot get into an unmade bed. I will make the bed, and then get in immediately afterwards. I also find it irritating to be in a room with an unmade bed for long periods of time, and will actually ask if I can make someone’s bed if I am in the situation.

So there you go, amazing insight into my psyche, or random load of irrelevant crap? You decide! Because I certainly won’t be venturing an opinion.

Day 2

After the longest bout of sleeping I can get away with as an interloper in someone’s apartment, I drag myself out of bed with a plan for the day. The Plan: Get dressed from fresh clothing in luggage, dump luggage in locker at Heuston station, head back to the city centre unencumbered and meet Captain Pedantic Pants for lunch at the evil empire, then rendezvous with my darling Cheese for adventures in boozing. It was a good plan. I was quite proud of it. Unfortunately like many plans, it was doomed to failure from the first moments of its inception.

This inevitable doom was soon discovered when I went to retrieve some clean underwear and socks from aforementioned luggage. Which was not locked with my padlock. A singularly odd circumstance, which was soon explained however by the discovery that it was not my luggage. I am not generally prone to blind panic, but I had about 5 minutes worth of internal (and a small amount of external) screaming. All the gifts I had bought, all my clothes, all my clean fucking underwear, was quite clearly not in my posession. I rack my brain for possibilities, convinced that I could not have taken the wrong item at the airport, and I realise that I didn’t, I grabbed the wrong bag from the bus. In my half-asleep, in a hurry, on the phone state, I had reached into the hold and simply grabbed a bag the same size, shape and colour as mine, which was sitting where I had put mine before getting on.

At this point, I realised the following things:

• I am a fucking idiot.
• I had completely ignored my own “never make assumptions” rule, and am therefore also a hypocrite.
• I had no clean underwear.
• There was an inch long slit in the arse of my trousers.
• I couldn’t find the key to my own damn luggage.

After a couple of calls to the bus company, I located both my luggage, and the owner of the luggage I was currently in possession of, who was also rather distressed by the situation. I was slightly less than impressed by the fact that my luggage was back at Dublin airport, but the joy of discovering I could retrieve it now far outweighed the inconvenience. So I get dressed in my ripped trousers and used socks, and jump into a taxi, the driver of which indicated that yes, he was ok with having an adventure.

Out to the airport, where I deposited the mystery luggage and re-acquired my own, which was alas locked with the key I no longer had, presumably lost during the previous nights travel. So near and yet so far from a functional pair of trousers. Because of course, the split in the seam of my current pair worsened by the moment as I wore them.

So when I eventually got to google for lunch, avec luggage, sans key, the slit had grown into what could now be described as a rather substantial hole. I have never been more grateful to be wearing a long leather coat. Which I wore all through lunch, for fear of being arrested for indecent exposure, because I could have easily passed a fucking basketball through it at that point. Naturally, my dining partners were appraised of the situation, and highly amused by it, though they failed to come up with a means of opening my luggage when a leatherman couldn’t do the trick.

Back into town to meet Cheese, at which point I sit him down and explain to him that I need either 1) a way to open my luggage or 2) some pants. We agree that the purchase of pants is by far the easiest option, so we get the luas to heuston, dump the lunggage in a locker, and then go to buy trousers and alcohol, both of which we succeed at.

I head to the station about an hour before I have to, buy my ticket early, collect my luggage, and find a nice comfy seat on the train. At which point I reach into my pocket to sort through my change of various currencies, and find the fucking key to my fucking luggage. Fortunately at this point I am too tired to be fully impacted by how annoying this is.

About 5 minutes after the train starts to move I get a call from BigBro, to give me the heads up that he had just spent an extra 2 hours on the express, because a bridge had collapsed somewhere and there was rubble on the track. Resigning myself to never getting home again and forever wandering the roads of ireland with a suitcase full of christmas presents, I was pleasantly surprised when we reached the junction without incident, if a little slowly. All pleasantness soon dissipated however, when the last 30 minutes fo the journey took 2 hours, due to a signal failure about 10 minutes from home.

My sojourn on a motionless train was cheerfully punctuated by frequent phone calls from both the yank and my sister, who was roaring drunk, and I eventually arrived in Limerick at about 2am, at which point she and her (sober) boyfriend came to collect me.

In summary, it took me about me about 32 hours to get to limerick from London, and I spent £76 on flights, £30 on trousers, £40 on taxis and £30 on a train fare. Giving me a grand total of £176, and a total saving on direct flights of about £4.

Rule for happiness no 112: never buy anything just because it is cheap.

I like to think of myself as a logical person. Occasionally though, I have predilictions which might be a little too strongly held to be rational. One of these is that I detest paying a high fare for flying between London and Ireland, and will go to interesting lengths to avoid this. For example, when booking flights home for christmas I decided, to save money, that I would take a plane to Dublin instead of Shannon, and then take a train from Dublin. I only paid about £70 for the flights, and I would get to see some Dublin inhabitants, so I felt quite satisfied with my idea.

 Day 1

The day before I was supposed to fly, London lived up to a fine longstanding tradition, and coated itself in fog. Major transportation disaster, Heathrow cancels all domestic flights (in which for some reason, they include Dublin), and flights out of Stansted are delayed by hours, about half of them don’t leave at all, and so on. Charming. So I leave work at 5.30 for my 9.30 flight, get to the airport an hour later, check in, and promptly spend about 7 hours in a terminal. My 7 hours of deep boredom and annoyance is peppered with occasional spurts of excitement as we change queues and gates several times, however I end up spending about a tenner on wireless internet to keep myself from falling asleep like the people camping all around me.

Finally, at about 1am, we are getting on the plane. Which sat quietly on a runway for 40 minutes before actually taking off. To be fair, the fog is thicker than I was expecting, you could barely see 15 feet, and were it not for Ryanair’s blatant disregard for human life I probably wouldn’t have made it home at all unless I chose to swim the irish sea. So even at the time, despite the crap, I was grateful to just be getting home. Once we took off it was an even shorter flight than usual, and we landed in Dublin at about 2.40, at which point I grabbed my luggage, ran out of the terminal, and jumped straight onto a cheap bus to the city.

Once more I fought to stay awake, and was aided in this by frequent phone calls from the yank, who was of course still awake in Vermont. Aided and somewhat distracted, because when I finally exited the bus in Dublin, I almost walked off without my luggage, accustomed as I am to not carrying any. I dashed back to the bus and grabbed my suitcase from its niche in the hold just in time, and then spent about 40 minutes trying to get a taxi. Eventually, at about 4am, I finally got to the home of my good friend A, utterly exhausted.

After a bit of catch-up and girly chatting I was falling asleep where I sat, so stood up to go to bed, and discovered that there was about an inch of a split in the seam of my trousers, just at the arse. Relieved that I could switch them for something else in my suitcase in the morning, I disregarded this entirely, and collapsed into bed, regarding my longer-than-expected journey as all but complete, with the difficult part most certainly over. 

Hah.

They regurgitated me shortly after finding out that I once ate half a twinkie. Actually thats a massive terminological inexactitude ie. completely untrue. In fact I’ve just been really busy, mostly with work before christmas, and mostly with other things after christmas. And yes, before anyone asks “other things” does have a name, and no, I won’t be discussing him here. Anyone who would like to know about my highly unexpected, very sudden, and newly excellent romantic life, will have to ask.

First off, apologies to anyone who’s recent comments have failed to appear. This is due to the fact that when I don’t log in for a while and trudge through the spam comments, they build up to obscene amounts, and dedicated as I am to freedom of speech, I cannot bring myself to trawl through a thousand ads for online blackjack just to find someone’s contribution. On that note, here’s a tip : I automatically allow comments which come from a previously approved source. so don’t change your name or email address if you want them to appear straight off.

While I was off the radar I did some writing, so I’ll post a few things over the next while as I find them, even though they happened a while back. But in this post, I’ll give a brief summary of how the last few months have gone….

When I got back from South Africa I discovered that work had gone a bit crazy. We were short-staffed, and the place I had been working for in SA now began demanding huge quantities of time and effort. So the months leading up to christmas were, quite frankly, a bit of a living nightmare. I ceased to have a life for a short while, and spent most evenings in work. Not that I had anything better to do. Sadly, as a side effect, I had very little to write about, and even less time in which to write it.

Several things however did happen which I felt like writing about, such as the shoe episode, the intrepid drawn out journey home for christmas, my newly discovered ability to miss planes, the trip to Vienna (otherwise known as “How to lose someone else’s passport - a cautionary tale”), and my attempts to get a new mobile phone from Orange. These and other hilarious adventures will be brought to you as I bother writing them.

Oh, and I’m in love. Truly, no-one could be more surprised by this than I am.

Things I learned on my business trip to South Africa:

• 11 hours on an economy flight is a version of hell I find quite focused and intensive. Dante could probably not have captured this one to its full extent regardless of his brilliance and creativity.
• There is such a thing as a city with no river.
• Johannesburg is an ugly, sprawling, industrial parking lot of a place.
• The sun sets at 7pm south of the equator even in the height of summer.
  
• Monkey gland sauce apparently has nothing to do with monkeys, but no-one can tell me what it’s made of.
• Going from 33 celsius to 1 celsius is an experience I am not eager to repeat.

South Africa is odd. Now don’t get me wrong, generally speaking, I love odd. Things that are out of the ordinary are one of the reasons I enjoy life. Occasionally though, when I am in a place which could almost be like home re: language and food, I find myself slightly perturbed by the small but rather distinctive differences in culture. Like, oh, I don’t know, the free condoms in every toilet. That was a surprise in the building I was working in. More so because I took some before I realised what I was getting, and then it dawned upon me that I had both a packet of condoms in my hand, and no pockets, and was about to walk out of the bathroom on my first day as a consultant there. Hurray for establishing a reputation though.

I have never been ripped off so constantly, so many times consecutively, for being a foreigner. However, I didn’t care in the slightest for two reasons. These were firstly because it wasn’t my money, and secondly because it was still cheaper than any equivalent expense in London, usually by half. If a taxi-driver who would otherwise earn less than a fiver for his days work can make £30 because I’m a rich European, I have trouble summoning any hard feelings. I tend to buy into the philosophy of paying for something what I think its worth.

Having a driver for the time I was working was considered entirely normal, the fact that said driver wore a suit and opened doors for me was probably some sort of bonus, but certainly no-one seemed surprised. When I queued for the ATM, instead of standing the requisite, polite, 3 feet back, people tended to stand 10 feet back. We went for lunch in a different building, but didn’t have to walk outside, because all three of the company buildings had tunnels built between them on the 2^nd floor, which is a normal facility in Jo’burg should your company span such a distance. There are no pubs, only bars, restaurants and clubs. Every working individual with their head above water financially owns a car. Everyone who owns a car speeds.

There are no street corner shops, there is no real town centre. Everything sprawls out from the centre to accommodate the huge shopping malls which are the only safe places to go for shopping in Johannesburg. The food is amazing, particularly the steak. The people I met were great. A larger than usual tip I gave once actually caused a waiter to come up and personally thank me. Money means so much more there than it does here.

What really bothered me though, was the affirmative action policy that so many companies adopt. I suppose in a country so rife with blatant shameless racism I can understand the point, but two intrinsically wrong ideas do not make a right. On the whole, it was an interesting trip, and a fascinating place, but it doesn’t make the list of places I want to or would ever live in.

… a place as broad and blank as the future. Few people realise that the future is in fact here, it just has not been properly distributed yet.”

This is the beginning of a pretty and rather amusing chunk of prose which had been placed on a succession of signposts in huge letters on the way in to Burning Man. If anyone comes across a transcript of the rest I would love to have it, but can’t be bothered looking for it myself. The line above was the only thing I wrote down at Burning Man, hence my complete lack of ability to thus far write about any of the experience.

It was the best holiday of my life, without question. It was better than Sweden adventures, it was better than backpacking around eastern Europe, it was better than 2 months of lazy days at home with friends one summer. It was probably the best thing I have ever done, it vies for that title with moving to London, which I assure you is tough competition.

I will not be able to accurately or sufficiently describe BM. Partly because it defies explanation, partly because I saw but a fraction of what was there. It is impossible to see everything, but also impossible to be there without getting involved in a hundred different things, and getting caught up in the atmosphere. I am about as far from a hippy as you can get, but I found the whole thing intensely beautiful. This is what I learned…

Pre-requisites: Do you in fact know what the hell I am talking about?

Burning Man (www.burningman.com). is an art festival, started by a guy called Larry Harvey in the 1980s on a beach in SF, which has grown in size and reputation ever since. It is now held in the open desert in Nevada, and firmly promotes freedom of expression and radical self-reliance. Nothing is bought or sold at Burning Man, you bring what you need to survive the harsh conditions, you bring your art, or you build it, and then on the last day everything burns. There are no spectators, only participants. The back of the ticket reads “By attending this event you accept the risk of serious injury or death”. They are not exaggerating.

Lesson 1: Survival in the desert

You need food, you need water, you need enough to survive and more. You need to wash things, you need to cook, you need a stove. You need to be able to protect yourself in the day when its 50 degrees Celsius outside, and at night when its freezing cold. You need to drive 2 foot long rebar stakes into the ground to keep your tent from blowing away in the sandstorms, you need goggles to see in them, and a mask to breathe through unless you want your lungs full of dry dust.

You have no shower, the nearest toilet is a ten minute walk. You can leave no trace, so you cannot throw away dirty water, or garbage, everything must be kept and removed when you leave. Dust from the playa, an ancient lake bed completely devoid of life, will be in everything you own, eat and drink for a week. Your hair will matte with the dust on the first day. Your clothes will be dirty immediately you step outside. You will be dirty all the time, dust will stick to your skin, and when you clean yourself it will be with baby wipes.

You must constantly drink water in order to stay hydrated, you must eat enough nutrients to keep your body healthy. You cannot. Be. Sick. You must be able to walk where you need to go in a huge camp, you must learn to navigate said camp. You must be able to live in incredibly close quarters with whoever you are camping with, you must never fall asleep in a tent during the hottest part of the day or you will wake up horribly nauseous and drenched in sweat (I learned this one the hard way). You must only eat, walk, or be in the sun before noon and after 6, before your water supply gets hot, or after it cools again.

That isn’t even close to all of it. I didn’t think I could do it. Or rather, I knew I would, but I thought it might make me too miserable to enjoy anything. In fact it made everything ten times more amazing, because I knew I was doing it in the face of what I had previously considered the edge of bearable. When we drove out the gates of BM on the Monday after the burn, I felt like we had won, that I could do anything if I could do that and still be as incredibly, perfectly happy as I had been. I was sorry to go home.

Though I freely admit that the roast beef sandwich I had in Gerlach shortly afterwards was probably the best thing I have ever eaten in my life.

Lesson 2: Playa etiquette 

This boils down to two simple rules. Leave no trace. Don’t fuck with anyone else.

Granted the latter could be given a very broad variety of interpretations, but only once during the week did I witness anyone being what I would deem unreasonable, and that was when we were leaving. With the exception of those two stipulations, Burning Man is an environment of astonishing freedom. It was filled with a vast majority of smart and interesting people, and a minimum of annoying tree-hugging hippy crap.

You can walk around wearing anything, you can walk around wearing nothing. Regardless of gender or physical attributes no-one will so much as look at you funny, though if your outfit is good, people will certainly look. There is zero stigma attached to any degree of nudity. It is considered completely unacceptable to proffer sexual commentary or overtures to someone just because of how they are dressed or not dressed. In the entire time I was there I never heard or saw one person do this.

Gifting is a common occurrence, people frequently give away absolutely anything, from pee-funnels for girls so they can urinate standing up, to hats, to grilled cheese sandwiches. It is perfectly ok to accept these gifts and make no return, they are gifts. People give away only what they wish to, there are no debts entailed by such a gift and no obligation. Occasionally people offer trade if they need an item, no-one ever asks for anything for free. No-one begs, and if they cannot get what they want they live without it. Frequently people who offer to trade are simply given the item they seek regardless, but this is beside the point.

Things I was given while there include chocolate ice-cream, an apple, a kiwi-fruit, a red pepper (you have no idea how good that was after 5 days in the desert), a grilled cheese sandwich, Earl Grey tea in a china cup, a ginger biscuit, pancakes with maple syrup, skittles, beer, rum, vodka, more rum, several mysterious cocktails, more rum, lollipops,  condoms, graham crackers, peach juice, crackers with chorizo sausage and cheese, some really odd Portland version of Guinness (apparently), a pee funnel, pink hair, a small fuzzy green friend, Gatorade, more beer…. and so on, and so forth. Oh, and cheese in a can. But that was more an attack than a gift really.

It is considered normal and forgivable at BM to completely fail to turn up at an appointed time or location, since it is practically impossible to walk down any given street without becoming involved in a game, party, experiment, or on one notable occasion, tea and biscuits.

Leave no trace is the really hard part. That means don’t drop a piece of paper, don’t spill water, don’t stub out a cigarette, don’t piss outside, don’t throw up outside, don’t drop food. Its all considered MOOP - Matter Out Of Place, and irresponsibility for yourself and your posessions is very bad form.

It is considered the height of stupidity to ask someone for drugs at BM unless they are a reasonably well-known acquaintance. Black Rock City becomes the 3^rd largest city in the state of Nevada for one week, and is most likely responsible for justifying half the budget of the Nevada State Police, largely due to the huge quantity of drug busts that occur there. Undercover cops are everywhere, and anyone who does not know this is very quickly informed.

Random observations:

This wouldn’t work anywhere other than where it is. Anyone who goes to BM must be extremely independant and self-reliant, or must find a group of people prepared to be that way on their behalf. We did things the hardest way we could have done them, and I don’t regret that in the least. We made some mistakes, but overall we did pretty well. Burning Man isn’t a gift economy, a gift economy is based on need. On the playa everyone assumes you have what you need, all that they could give you is something for pure enjoyment.

The feeling of complete freedom is like nothing else. I have felt free before, I generally feel in control of myself and my (for want of a better word) destiny. But this is something overwhelmingly strong. When you look outside your tent you see the desert stretch out in front of you, when you look up at night you see a clear desert sky, with no reminders of what the rest of the world is like. I don’t think I have ever felt so completely happy as I did in a dusty tent, covered in dirt and suncream, eating peaches from a tin. I would totally survive the apocalypse. Certainly if it has the occasional grilled cheese sandwich in it anyway.

It has always bothered me slightly that modern everyday life is so easy, not because of the lack of effort involved but because I might never know how I would manage if it were hard. I don’t want to be addicted to buying NineWest shoes or having my shopping delivered. No matter how accustomed I might become to things which could be considered luxuries I want to know that I can go back to the desert, live on tinned tuna and sweetcorn, and have the time of my life. Its ok to make life comfortable, its not ok to need things to be that way.

What we did at Burning Man:

So I finally get round to what actually happened, setting the scene being a key aspect. What did I do at Burning Man? Ok, here is a list, in vaguely chronological order. I have probably left out half of the stuff we did/saw, but you can get the idea at least.

• Drove to the desert through the night, set up camp at 5am, or rather 2.30 and beyond Hope.
• Met our neighbour, Cowboy Karl, who was a real cowboy
• Put up the tent, an education in hammers, rebar, broken poles and the Nevada dawn
• Changed and went exploring, walked straight into white-out
• Survived dust storm, continued journey through centre camp, got soaked by water truck, saw several dragons, the Thunderdome, Death Guild, Spike’s Vampire Bar, Arctica
• Stopped at Camp Campington, who gave us gatorade and fuzzy things
• Went to Quixote’s cabaret, where my friend Dave (who I met on a bus) was camped ·        
• Met random people, got misted with water several times, were given ice-pops·        
• Swung on swings at High Strung, met Thaddeus P. Thordenfelt the third·        
• Made it back to tents, fell asleep for 5 hours, woke up at 5pm drenched in sweat, sick as a dog.·        
• Drank vast amounts of water, recovered, Roni threw up and decided not to go out. I went to the cabaret, which rocked, and then stayed on and drank ridiculous quantities of rum in order to be like Captain Jack Sparrow. Logic may have been flawed at this juncture
• Ran after shiny art car, got a bit lost, kept forgetting who I was talking to.·        
• Rule for happiness (new addition) – never accept fungi from a man in a dog suit.·        
• Got a lift back to the tent on some crazy bike-like contraption driven by a guy called Firefly·        
• Ate crisps, forgot about crisps, ate more crisps. Got laughed at by Roni for forgetting about previous crisps. Slept.

This is really not going to work, this entry is already impossibly long and I have gotten through exactly one day, even with bullet point form. So here is a selection of some of my favourite things from the remainder of the week…

• High Strung, a really fantastic camp from Portland, Oregan. Big wooden structure made by an incredibly cool dude called Thaddeus, holding up about 10 hammocks and some funky swings. Incredibly sweet, funny, clever americans who took us in during the hottest part of the day.
• Quixotes Cabaret, crazy gits from London and all over Europe who made a stage tent out of a tank parachute and some scaffolding, and brought copious amounts of rum.
• Spike’s Vampire Bar, which held pole-dancing classes during the day and welcomed amateur performances every evening.
• Kuub, a swedish game which basically involved throwing sticks at rocks, during which I accidentally cheated and Roni nearly amputated one of my legs.
• Awesome contact jugglers, poi spinners and staff spinners.
• The Rainforest and the Pants Cannon
• The giant Cactus which helped us navigate home each day
• The speakers shaped like massive avocados at the Tool Camp, which played Tool all the time
• Dance Dance Immolation. Like Dance Dance Revolution, but you wear an asbestos suit and helmet, and if you miss a step, they flamethrower you in the face.
• The Serpent Mother, a metal sculpture with a jet of fire in every scale.
• The massive swing near 3.30 and Chance which was incredible fun, especially if you were pushed around it by some english maniacs
• The Waffle, a huge thing made of 92 miles worth of lumber, that looked like an upside down woven basket and held hundreds of people and a huge sound system.
• Damn Fucking Texans, a bar with an insane chick who traded drinks for spankings with a table tennis bat.
• Desert vodka!
• The Burn - saturday night and the burning of the Man, followed by possibly the best night out I have ever had.
• Watching the Waffle burn in a huge bonfire on sunday night from the top of an RV.
• Suddenly looking up on Thursday night and seeing more stars than I thought visible from earth
• Meeting some of the most interesting, fun, and entertaining people I have ever come across.
• The biggest fire-dance I have ever seen, surpassed by nothing in either skill or scale.
• Being there with Roni, best person I could have gone with, who laughed at the same thing I did every time, never acted like an asshole, and put up with my constant whining about not having any cheese.

That is about all I can say without going on for a further 10 pages. So I’ve done exactly what I thought I’d do, and completely failed to describe BM in any meaningful way. I don’t think such would have been possible anyway. All I can say is, try it. Survive the desert, burn the man, and have the time of your life. I’ll definitely be going back, and next time I’ll be better at it.

This post is to say that I’m alive, and have returned to civilisation. Or at least to america, which is an approximation of civilisation, but has better food. Some of which I feel strongly compelled to eat right now, having just spent a week on a diet of things that come in tins, and an appalling lack of both meat and cheese. Posts about what I have just experienced will follow when I am back in London, and no longer starving, dirty, spaced out, boiling hot, freezing cold, or drunk. I have been at least one of these at any given moment for the last week, and it has been the best fucking holiday of my life.

Later kids, I’m off to Haight-Ashbury for pancakes…