Decorum

Did you come here expecting a self indulgent rant about the state of society? Then come on in! Take a seat. No, not like that! Sit up straight, hands in your lap and be quiet while I'm talking. Goodness, you people really have no manners, do you? Well actually, chances are that you're sat there silently as you read this anyway so I won't accuse you of being rude. The rest of the world, on the other hand, might as well sprout legs and take a running leap into the Sun itself. The following takes place between 18:47 and 19:47 on whatever date it was yesterday...

As it stands, I've more-or-less accepted that people are idiots. By that I mean, even though I don't see the resemblance other than the fact that I'm ginger, people (or "idiots") seem to be obsessed with comparing me to him what plays the ginger one in the Harry Potter movie franchise. Apparently the fact that I wear rectangular glasses, have a lack of facial hair and sound slightly more Scouse than my movie-making doppelgänger seems lost on people. They might as well approach me with 'Hey, has anyone ever told you that you're ginger?' Not only is this completely fucking pointless, but it gets even more excruciatingly boring with each mention.

For example: Imagine an elderly man in a wheelchair. Now let's see some sample conversation. Well, I say conversation... it's actually the words of Joe Public.

'Hi there. You know, has anyone ever told you you're old and immobile? Just thought you might like to know; wasn't sure if it'd been brought to your attention before.'

Naturally, living where I've lived, and where I currently happen to be residing in a limbo state right now, the folks have no decorum. If there is, in fact, a Pleasantness Fairy scattering her Peace, Love and Harmony Dust across the land, I can't help but shake the feeling she forgot about this place. Either that or she took one look at us and thought she wouldn't even bother wasting it on us for all the difference it wouldn't make. As I embarked a train with the sounds of an iPod deep in my ears, I happened to walk past and sit a few "sets-of-four-seats" away from a group of young females. You can imagine the type: Scouse, about fifteen years old but look like 10-year-olds trying to look like whores. I imagine myself as a better person to them for even though I bear such thoughts about them, I've not physically shouted them out in the public domain, in close proximity to them, speaking as if they're not actually there. They, however, did. Even though I had musics in my ears, the loudness of a typical dumbass will always overcome it. Of course, I had to mute the bloody thing to gauge the full extent (or rather limited range) of vocabulary that such idiots are able to use. You may think 'Why would you mute the music but still have earphones in to spy on what people are saying? That just makes you seem worried', but unless you've grown up where I've grown up and developed what I can only call "Harry Potter induced paranoia" over the last ten years then I'll probably answer you. Much to my surprise, my suspicions proved true as, at the moment of pause, miniature whore number two spake the words: 'He can't hear you, he's got earphones in'. This is not a good example of decorum.

For example: Imagine, once again, our elderly man in the wheelchair. He has a somewhat disfigured face and a hearing aid in each ear. Commence the words of whores.

'Heehee, look. Freaky old man. Urr, his face is all wrong. Oi! Freaky old man! Freaky old man? Hellooo? Oi! Heehee, freaky old man! Ey, freaky o- Oh, he can't hear us, he's deaf. Ah well, hellooo?! Freaky old man!!!'

I'd been contemplating whether or not to stop for Chinese food on the way home and the idiot whores had pretty much confirmed my decision. (By the way, sorry I keep referring to them as "idiots" and "whores", but in honour of the subject matter I'm choosing to lack creativity and force a limited vocabulary on myself. It's Hell.) My endeavours in a local Chinese takeaway didn't do much to boost my already flagging self esteem. After deciding upon my dinner of the evening, I waited patiently for my turn. In comes a couple and the Keeper of the Chips approaches them. In any normal, civilised situation, where manners and decorum exist, this couple would turn to me and say something along the lines of 'I'm sorry, this gentleman was here first'. Instead, I obviously forgot my whereabouts, being on that side of town (where it's even worse, if you can dare to put your brain through imagining) and instead the couple's response was a heavily Scouse-ified 'Eeerrrm yeah, twenty portions of chips, large, pleeeease, and eeerrrm a pie dinn-, no, three pie dinners, an' a can o' dietsss cokkhh, pleeeease.' (That wasn't actually what they ordered, but it's what I imagine they did because my brain was too busy saying 'bastards cut in front of me' *hypothetical shocked face*). Furthermore, the Chinese lady behind the counter went on to deny my existence by asking for orders from more people behind them. I'd suddenly become not just invisible, but non-existent.

For example: Imagine, again, the deaf elderly man in the wheelchair with his "freaky" face. The Chinese food merchant thinks on the job.

'Right, who am I going to serve next? Someone who's already here? Oh, no, what a freak old man he is. I don't want to serve him, he could infect me with weird-face or immobility or something... I WANT TO LIVE, DAMMIT! Oooh, people just through the door... "Can I take your order please?"'

After finally getting the food I wanted, I proceeded to power walk home, thinking things couldn't get any more preposterous. I noticed an annoying spot in my direct line of vision all of a sudden and went on to find that a fly had decided to land right on the right lens of my glasses. Even the flies have no manners here.

For example: Deaf elderly man, wheelchair, face falling off. Internal fly thoughts.

'Wizz-wizz-wizz, ooh I'm a fly. What a wonderful life it is for a fly. Gee, I could do with a rest. I think I'll go and land somewhere. Somewhere glassy and shiny, yes that'll do. I'm in the mood to land somewhere shiny. Hey, over there, that looks quite shiny. On that old guy's face. Looks like his eye, though. Nah, can't be his eye, it's halfway down his fuckin' face. Think I'll go and land on it.'

I intended to flick the fly away, but I'm not sure if it was a lack of accuracy or my outrage at the state of humanity itself, but landing on my glasses was the last thing that fly would ever do. My inaccurate flick resulted in it not being flicked away, but all of its internals being flicked across the lens, resulting in me having to waste more effort in wiping the damn thing clean.

Anyway, I ate the Chinese food, watched TV, stayed in bed all night and now I'm telling you here that I have much more respect, compassion and sympathy for abnormally-looking elderly gentlemen in wheelchairs.

A House Of Optimism

Have you been injured at work? I haven't, although I do come away from the place suffering aches and pains after constant hours of manual labour. Maybe it's because I've been away from the glamorous world of discount retail for just over nine months and I've gotten used to lazy weekends filled with freedom and me time and doing whatever the Hell it is I want to do. Mostly nothing, but it's been nice to have the option. As of two days ago, however, I've been back to the fluorescent light emporium for the purposes of trying to have money as a student who doesn't know any better, and for each of those two days, I've left the place and come home feeling like my spine's had a run-in with a baseball bat and my feet have been stabbed numerous times by a croquet mallet... and I don't even know how that would work. I suppose I never noticed the life-diminishing pain and agony before because I'd simply "gotten used to it", but now it's nine lazy months on, and I've got a lot of pain to make up for.

If you've ever worked in retail, you'll know the feeling. You'll know how your place of employment is essentially a soul-crushing factory line disguised as a house of optimism. "Good morning, and how are you this fine day, dear citizen?" beam the faces of the company. The voices of the masses, however, often seem gruff, confused, loud, and every fourth word is 'fuck'. That last one was even picked up on by another customer, who I assume "isn't from round here" and noted what a lovely town this is where 'every word is a swear word'. True story. Maybe it's just prevalent where I'm located, which would make sense since, after nearly a year away, I'm suddenly seeing how the rest of the country sees the Scouse accent. Honestly, the amount of 12-14 year olds who've been about this last weekend with mouths and voices and words-that-don't-really-sound-like-words-but-rather-a-continuous-stream-of-noise has been immense; half of them sound like they've just eaten Cilla Black, John Bishop and Sonia for breakfast, washing it all down with 57 cigarettes and a kazoo. The sad thing is I'm still able to understand fluent Scouse.

Fortunately, I've not had to deal with the typical, monolexical attitude of some. You know the ones, the ones who approach from behind unannounced and throw a single word at you and leave you to interpret the rest of the sentence.

"Crackers."
[internal processing... calculating question... *BING*]
[smooth calm female voice: "Could you tell me where the crackers are?"]

Thank God they manage to pick the word signifying the thing they're looking for. Imagine if they approached me armed with just the word "Could". My poor brain would probably get stuck in an infinite loop and explode right there and then in the middle of the shop floor. The soothing female voice would go into overdrive. "Could you tell me where the could you tell me where the could you tell me where the could you tell me where the could you tell me where the could you tell me where the could you tell me where the could y-" *BRAINSPLAT* [bing-bong] 'Clean-up on aisle two, please'.

I do hope, however, that one day someone will approach me with "Mouthwash", therefore I'm justified in assuming they were just simply telling me the title of their favourite Kate Nash song. I could do shifty-eyes and lean over towards them as I give my response. "Wuthering Heights". The confusion in their face leads me to realise what I've actually said. I need to pick up the ball I've just dropped. I let out a forced chuckle and pat my adversary on the shoulder as if lightly batting them away. "Oh-ho-ho! I got it wrong, didn't I? That's Kate Bush, isn't it? God, I am a silly-moo! Ah well..." I wipe a fake tear from my eye "...you win, thanks for playing though, I had a great time."

That one could probably also work with "Foundation".

Beansprouts

Remember when I told you three weeks ago about my recent vacation in Germany? Well there was just so much stuff I had to talk about I can't believe I've missed some out. It largely centres around the E.coli epidemic that was going on over there and the time I thought I had it. I didn't really have it, I'd just eaten far too much cheese, chocolate and ice cream (although not all at the same time, that's just ludicrous!) so my diet went all wibbly and my bum bum felt like a fucking warzone. Lying down on the cool tiled bathroom floor seemed like a good idea at 3am in a panic-ridden state of "oh my God, I'm gonna die here tonight", fearing that I'd crap so hard I'd end up flushing my very life and soul down toilet never to be seen again. Cool tiled floors are never what they seem though. They are, in fact, not cool. They're fucking freezing. I even needed to lay a towel out on the floor to act as a buffer between body and temperature-not-best-suitable-for-body. I don't think I fell asleep there but I might've well done for about half an hour. But hey, when you're in a hot room in a hot country with only the bare essential underclothing on and feeling like you want to undress more but don't wanna leave a trail of blood and innards all over the place, you kind of want to go lie in a cold room for ages until it passes!

I don't think I had the evil disease, though, and it was probably just paranoia kicking in, and I believe this for one reason: during the entire trip I didn't see any beansprouts at all. This even displeased me in a Chinese restaurant one night where the all-you-can-eat buffet lacked one vital ingredient. "God, you'd think they'd have some beansprouts," Jamie muttered stupidly to himself, the dumbass, before eventually remembering that Germany's supply of beansprouts was under intense investigation during this time for putting people in hospital. The thought didn't come to his mind straight away though, like a lightbulb coming on, but instead was more like a fluorescent tube light that flickered for a few seconds before blinding him with the stupidly obvious realisation. I think it was the fact I was in a Chinese restaurant that threw me off. They have the same things in Britain as they do in Germany which is weird because they specialise in food from China and my internationalism-scope-er-ometer must've malfunctioned for a few seconds.

I learned to use chopsticks for the first time though, so it wasn't an entirely horrible trip.

80 Kilometers-An-Hour Auf Der Autobahn

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I finally have the time to do this. Then again, I always had the time, but I now have the notes and the willpower to do this. But first, let me cast your mind back a wee bit, for this post isn't supposed to have been this late. Instead, the day is Monday the 13th of June: the weather has been fluctuating between scorching summer heat and dreary miserable rain, the Paris episode of The Apprentice hasn't happened yet, and I'm still twenty-one, and yesterday night I arrived back on English soil after a week of visiting relatives in northern Germany...

We've all seen it. That one person/couple/family/group of morons in a public place you just seem to see everywhere you go. The people who complain about the way things are run in plain earshot of the crowds of randomers, the people who complain about the way things are run in plain earshot of the staff who are just there to enforce the rules, the people who complain about their seat on public transport not being the seat they wanted, the people who complain about the fridge being set to 4°C instead of 3°C therefore destroying the optimum integrity of milk... the people who complain about, well, just about anything as though the world should be run according to their own personal standards and not by any pre-devised regulations that have already been constructed for the convenience of the masses of people what make up the general public. Yep, we've all seen them. But at the start of this trip, Manchester Airport played hosted to my parents being the centre of attention, whilst that younger guy in the glasses who's stood with them - yeah, him, the one with his head in his hands - tried my best to remain as normal in keeping with the rest of the public as possible. It's very rare for me to act normal and I refuse to have my chances ruined by the folks when every little thing that could possibly go awry, does.

I would just like to take the opportunity to say that I am not, of course, slandering my own parents here, but merely exaggerating an undesirable situation for pseudo-comic effect. (Just in the event that one of them happens to read this and thinks I'm saying bad things about people I know on the Internet for all the paedophiles and axe-murderers to read, since they are the only people who use the Internet anyway.)

So yeah, I became one of "those people", you know, the group of people who make a scene in public, and you know you shouldn't stare at them, but you so desperately want to. Luckily, two hours sat in the seat at the very back of the aircraft with your face stuck in a random book managed to calm my paranoid mind of 'everyone looking at me'.

T-Mobile were the first to welcome me into the country, notifying me of the extra charges on my phone if I were to ever use it during this week. Surely though, one text message should be enough. When it takes them six texts to tell me (over the course of 40 minutes - by my calculation, one message every 6 minutes and 50ish seconds) of this necessary information, I've never felt more likely to hurl my phone onto the Autobahn, or call up the head at T-Mobile and tell them that I'm aware I'm currently in Germany and quite frankly I don't care about the tiny changes to the cost of my phone calls, although incidentally, such a phone call would've probably cost me dearly. However, for your reading enjoyment/pleasure/frustration, I present to you a typical text message alert from the first night:

T-Mobile welcomes you to Germany. It now costs (ever-so-slightly higher price tariff than normal) per minute to call, (same again but can't be arsed typing it all out and feeling slightly more creative than to simply copy and paste) per text message. To use the Internet on your phone, you will need to purchase Euro-Boosters, which will grant you 20
           PAGES
            OF
             ANNOYING
              TEXT
               MESSAGE...

And so, onto the first night, and through some 'legally grey-area' complication, we were able to receive British TV over there (which, a little later in the holiday, prompted my mother to be branded a holiday 'spoil-sport' for a whole thirty minutes as we "didn't come all the way to Germany to watch Emmerdale") meaning that an extensive range of English-language films were on offer to us. Unfortunately, since the flight was delayed by about an hour, it ended up being closer to 11pm when we arrived at our lodgings, rather than "just after 9", and by 11 o'clock there's barely a decent film showing on normal telly. Ultimately, we ended up settling on Schindler's List, quite fitting if we visited Germany in the 1940s, but it's been around 70 years since the happenings of the Second World War, Hitler and the Third Reich, and all those Jewish containment camps, and somehow I can't help shake the feeling that time's moved on. Oh well, being one of the only open-minded people in my country (it seems), I'll just have to be lumped into that category of ignorant English pigs who still lord it over the Germans about how we beat them at international war and football tournaments. Thank God the Eurovision Song Contest isn't significantly popular, or else we would've felt their wrath this time last year when Germany romped to victory and the UK finished dead last. However, since Schindler's List goes on for six-and-a-half hours (well it doesn't really but I imagine that's what it feels like) and it already being well after midnight before the little girl in the red coat showed up, majoritatively we resigned to tiredness.

They have Ikeas in Germany. Bit of a redundant statement; they have Ikeas everywhere, just like they have McDonald's, petrol stations and grass. But I was somewhat surprised considering I've never been to any Ikea in the UK before so the whole thing was just as special as I imagined. Mainland Europe's most cutting-edge furniture designs all housed in a gigantic building with foreign language descriptions of each product, store section and emergency exit sign. My mother, in a bout of forgetting which country she was even in, did that thing what propa inglish peepul doo, engaging staff and customers alike in super fast paced English conversation only to be met with blank looks from the German population. Luckily, she never resorted to the football-hooligan's guide to speaking foreign languages, wherein every word is spoken in PLAIN... ENGLISH... ONLY... LOUDER... AND... SLOWER... thus forcing the recipient into understanding you or running to the nearest telephone to alert the authorities that people are shouting gibberish at them and they don't know how to contain the situation. The best part was when my Deutschland-dwelling sister, who needed to kit out her living room with flat-pack furniture, bought too much that it all had to be done in two trips, thus leaving myself and mother with a mini-mountain of dismantled coffee tables and such. Asking Customer Services to keep an eye on the purchases while we waited for our second-journey to pick us up wasn't such a bad idea. However, a bad idea was approaching them with a "'scuse me love, spoken English, complex query, blah blah blah", which left the poor old woman behind the counter making muted excuses for going in the back room and subsequently returning with another employee who tentatively asked in her best English if we were the arrogant bastards who needed assistance. Naturally, she didn't know the English words for "arrogant bastards" but proceeded to help us anyway, leaving me to ponder if the whole spectacle could've been avoided if only my mother had opened with some variant of "Entschuldigung, können Sie Englisch sprechen, bitte?", or a simple "Sprechen Sie Englisch?", or even a semi-distressed, panic ridden "ENGLISCH SPEAK-IDY? NEIN?" whilst containing the urge to smear excrement all over the walls.

Already I feel like I've said far too much on Ikea, but the ride home is where all of this has been leading too. See, the second-journey ended up overloading the back seat of the car with boxed goods so much that, legally, at least one of us should've stayed behind at Ikea for another hour or so. Being English, none of us could be bothered with such a situation and thus a novel seating arrangement was improvised on the spot. This largely consisted of three adults and one infant sitting in the car as normal, but with the other "adult" half-crouched in the backseat cavity where the legs go, half sat on the window-winder-downer spike thingy. I tell you what, on the big list of life experiences, I never thought I'd be able to check off "contort self into cramped backseat of car, somehow, with arse almost pressed against window whilst doing 80 kilometers-an-hour auf der Autobahn". Apparently we would've also been driving on the right-hand side, which would've been even more disorienting but luckily I was staring at the floor for most of that half-hour. The whole thing also led to another life experience being ticked off, "exit a car by backwards roll".

More stuff happened during the week but I apparently didn't care enough to write them down; it seems nothing could top the Ikea day, but judging by how long it's gone on for, it's just as well I have not much to write about. That is, except for what I would like to Christen the new and improved German National Anthem: 'The Quarter-to-Eight Song'. Except it's apparently not specific to quarter-to-eight, but specific to quarter-to-any hour. Typically, we're used to clocks chiming every fifteen minutes but with a special chime on the hour, every hour. It's the same in Germany, except the tower clock in the town chimes on the hour, at quarter-past and at half-past. But every forty-five minutes past, the chimes and bells break out in song. Apparently quarter-to-twelve is the new midday in Germany. I haven't had the chance to research this because it's the 13th of June, and I only got back into the country last night, remember.

Anyway, that's it, that's the highlights apart from the gift-set bottles of Jägermeister and complimentary Jägermeister-y shot glasses I got for a decent price in Hannover's Duty Free stop, as you're on your way out of the country. I can predict lots of good times drinking all this Jägermeister and I'll never get sick of it. I'll never become ill from drinking too much of it, and I'll not post anything on the 30th of June saying otherwise.