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Thursday, 1 April 2010 - West Bromwich

So yes, West Bromwich, home to about 140,000 and plopped right next to Birmingham some 200km northwest of London. I've been working here for the last week but due to the piss-poor weather I've only had a couple opportunities to actually get out and see some of it. Fear not, there's not a lot to miss.		This is the main road heading through town - charming.		And this is the centre of town, full of people wandering around who are clearly unemployed, probably because they're unemployable to put it nicely. Charming.

So in a nutshell, this place is a hole - a fact openly admitted by the locals with who I'm working at the moment. The pigeons sure seem to like it though...		...as must folk on a (very) tight budget. Everything I saw cost at least £2.49, so I'm not sure where the 89p items were.		Breaking headline in the West Bromwich news: the Wing Wah got fined.

In need of some meat? Go see the meat master.		Gay and in need of a mop-chop? Go see Yogi for a fabulous trim.		I'm guessing he goes to Yogi's.

Are you a winner in need of the Internet? Go to the Winners Internet Cafe.		Are you a cunt in need of some chicks' clothing? Go to Kunti's.
Well it wouldn't be women brothers would it.		In need of a sign complied by a three year old? Call that number - it's written twice so you can't miss it.
West Brom also has a football (i.e. soccer) team that played here the other night, and this was the traffic chaos that ensued. My hotel overlooks this area, and that traffic didn't move for a good hour or so hehe. And they lost the soccer. I'm stuck working here until at least the start of May unfortunately - joy.

Friday, 2 April 2010 - Bring on the chocolate!
Hell yeah! I'm throwing the bike in back of Katie's work car and we're heading to Snowdonia for the long weekend - a huge national park in the north of Wales. The weather is forecast to be typically Welsh, so I'll no doubt come home wet and covered in mud - awesome! :)

Monday, 5 April 2010 - Mud!

Lots of chocolate, lots of mud and two huge mountains later, I made it back to London late this afternoon. I was hoping to have the photos sorted and up by tonight but the bike took a good two or three hours to properly clean and service and so forth (it got totally punished) so they'll have to wait. In a nutshell though, Snowdonia was awesome, the mountain biking was awesome, the weather was awesome, I'm awesome, and that's that for another Easter hehe. Now back to reality, which for me means back to West bloody Bromwich.

Thursday, 8 April 2010 - Llanystumdwy (that's actually a Welsh place name)
All the photos and stories from Snowdonia over Easter are here, enjoy :)

Friday, 9 April 2010 - It's on, bitch!

Well that's me back from another week in glorious West Bromwich with work, and while I was there it's all started to heat up in the wonderful world of British politics. I don't really follow politics, especially here - they're all a bunch schoolgirls the way they carry on at each other, but a general election has been called for May 5th so the boxing gloves are off! This article, or more specifically its photos of which this one is an example, had me pissing myself albeit an April Fools joke: "In an audacious new election strategy, Labour is set to embrace Gordon Brown's reputation for anger and physical aggression, presenting the prime minister as a hard man, unafraid of confrontation, who is willing to take on David Cameron in 'a bare-knuckle fistfight for the future of Britain', the Guardian has learned." - hahaha! It goes on: "Following months of allegations about Brown's explosive outbursts and bullying, Downing Street will seize the initiative this week with a national billboard campaign portraying him as 'a sort of Dirty Harry figure', in the words of a senior aide. One poster shows a glowering Brown alongside the caption 'Step outside, posh boy,' while another asks 'Do you want some of this?'" - ahhh that's good stuff. April Fools or not, there is an element of truth in it :)

Saturday, 10 April 2010 - To the north

Earlier this week Britain recorded its warmest day since last October - 18 degrees or something pathetic like that but at last it looks as though Spring is on its way, and may actually arrive by summer time hehe.		As per usual I made the most of the sunshine by getting out on the bike, and as per usual I didn't have a route in mind and so just picked a road and followed it. This one headed right through north London.

It didn't take long to find some action: this dude drove straight up the ass of a SUV full of suits who were all busy playing on their phones with their Bluetooth ear pieces.		Then his punk mate turned up and it all started to kick off. But the cops arrived, it all calmed down, and got very boring.		Further up the road a ways the local black evangelists were also out enjoying the sun, doing their bit to spread the God thing around to people who weren't paying any attention, except me to take photos.

Further up the road again I think I found Jewville - there were Jewish folk all over the place and they were all wearing these groovy hats.		Mmm, fluffy.		Evangelists, the Jews, whatever this place is - clearly north London is a very religious place. It's also a shit hole.

By now I was miles away from where I'd started in central London, still heading north. Traffic aside (there's a lot of red cars here I've just noticed) it all started to become a little easier on the eyes.		Even the hair styles in this part of town were more interesting.		You could almost describe it all as 'funtastic', though I wouldn't. Eventually I got all the way out to the M25 which is a 188km orbital motorway encircling Greater London, by which point it had become overcast (as always) and I turned around and went home. And so ended another 60-something kilometre ride :)

Tuesday, 13 April 2010 - What an utter joke!

The Catholic kiddy-fiddling Church has come out and forgiven the Beatles on the 40th anniversary of their split for their "drugs and blasphemy" - give me a goddamn break! The Catholic Church is all over the news right now for their blatant ignorance and piss-poor handling of the large number of their priests going around and performing some rather unholy acts on children over a prolonged period of time. And to add more fuel to the fire, the Pope's right-hand man, Cardinal Kiddylove, has today come out and said homosexuality is to blame for this and not celibacy. The gaping hole in that argument is that these priests have been romping girls as well hahaha! And yet despite all of this, the Church has the audacity to come out and publicly forgive the Beatles for merely smoking some plants and speaking a few choice words. Unbelievable. I'm sure the remaining Beatles and their fans feel much better about themselves now that the child sex abuse Church has bestowed their forgiveness upon them - that must really mean a lot.

Friday, 16 April 2010 - To Edinburgh, hooray!
Fuck yeah, I'm going back, though only for the weekend but better than nothing. Working in West Bromwich at the moment means a £140-return train from London per week (paid for by work). However, a return train to Edinburgh from West Brom is only £100, so work said they'd pay for me to go up for the weekend in lieu of the train to London since it works out to be cheaper for them, so sweet as! It's a good thing I'm taking the train and not flying up. All UK flights both in- and out-bound have been grounded since early this morning due to volcanic ash from an Icelandic volcano drifting over British airspace and parts of Europe, and at this stage it looks as though they'll stay grounded until at least tomorrow afternoon. Good stuff!

Monday, 19 April 2010 - Back from Edinburgh, boo!

So yes as I mentioned I Friday, I was back in Edinburgh for the weekend! Karen, my mate from Glasgow although now living in Edinburgh, played host for me over the weekend. She got back from five days in Norway a few weeks back, and picked up on their cooking while over there and stole some recipes. First up - the "best soup in the world" hehe, and breakfast was pretty impressive too though I didn't get any shots of that (I was too busy stuffing my face). Norway - still on the to-do list!		Like it or not, no trip north would be complete without at least a few hours in my old foe Glasgow, Edinburgh's ugly neighbour some 80kms to the west where I spent the first nine months of my working days in the UK (seems like a long time ago now). This is looking down Buchanan Street, bustling as always. Although I really did used to hate this friggin' city with a passion, I must say it's actually grown on me a little. For starters, the night life is something else, and spending so much time in places like West Bromwich and Kidderminster and so on, well let's say I don't think of Glasgow as being the anus of the country anymore hehe.

And it must be said that Glasgow has a lot of class hehe...		And style - I'm rather a fan of the one-leg-up one-leg-down look myself ;)

There's always something random happening along Buchanan too - this dude was playing with his balls...		And these dudes who look like they should be riding Harley Davidsons were going nuts on the drums!

This was the best that Edinburgh could muster along Princes Street hahaha!		Glasgow has character, but Edinburgh has the looks. Left is Scott Monument along Princes Street, and right looking up at the Old Town on the other side of Princes Street Gardens - gorgeous!

The Burgh by night: Edinburgh Castle...		The top end of the Royal Mile (completely dead)...
And the views from atop Arthur's Seat - nice! I was really wanting to hire bikes on Sunday but the weather saw to that so it didn't happen :(

Tuesday, 20 April 2010 - Well that makes perfect sense to me
"Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes." That's Islam for you. Full article here.

Wednesday, 21 April 2010 - Stranded, in West Bromwich!

As per this BBC News article, the skies over Europe are all a buzz again as all flight restrictions have been lifted after almost a week since volcanic ash from Iceland covered our skies and grounded everything. My hotel here in West Bromwich has been full of Kiwis in tracksuits this week. I got talking to some of them this morning. They're a New Zealand secondary schools soccer team who've been competing in a tournament over here, but are currently stranded as a result of the flight restrictions. To add insult to injury, they're stuck here, in West Bromwich hahaha! My condolences. At least I'm getting paid for being here!

Friday - Sunday, 23 - 25 April 2010 - 80kms, the 80s, the evening before and the morning after

Friday night, home from working another week in West Bromwich (two to go), and hadn't been out on the bike in two weeks so I was dying to get it out of my system! A quick 20km-hoon throughout central London, dodging people, playing with traffic - awesome ;) In Piccadilly Circus I arrived in time to see the cavalry arrive and bust some geezer for punching some other geezer leaving him lying on the pavement, and down Oxford Street these boys were out in their toy - nice!
Saturday at noon, and goodness me it was warm, sunny, and it stayed that way all day! I can't stress enough how rarely that happens here! This is west London round the corner from my flat looking a song...		And this is somewhere in east London, looking typically shit.
East London does have some really nice parks though - odd. Most of the time they're full of crack addicts.

Plenty of canals around too, also often full of crack addicts. I was tempted to follow this for a while but this time next week I'll be doing exactly that in Bruges, Belgium - hell yeah! I'll bang on a bit more about that later in the week, but for now my plan was to just head east through the heart of the ghetto, try not to get stabbed, and just see what I could find as I've never really dared venture through here before hehe.

At one point I turned a corner and was sure I'd just teleported to India or Pakistan or something. Seriously I was the only person there without a dot on their forehead.		Well except for this lot. Every white guy in sight was crowding around outside this pub hahaha!		I got handed a thingee about Mr Malik here, candidate for mayor of east Londonistan, which had more wordage dedicated to his company, K.M. Legal Advisory Ltd., than it did to his actual political goals. Dodgy.

Wow, that is one incredibly unattractive building. Looks like one of those Magic Eye things - squint and you'll see a pigeon taking a crap or something.		Few semi-interesting umm, erections I guess you could call them, about the place and all of them decorated with a bit of the ol' graffiti.

A while later I ended up in Barking, a suburban town some 15kms northeast of central London. I nearly hit a lot of people here - the concept of a footpath and a road is apparently still foreign in these aprts.				Hmm those skanky white girls sure do love the black guys, and those black guys sure do love the skanky white girls ;)

Hell I wouldn't be parking my Skyline around here!		With nothing terribly exciting happening in Barking, I continued on and ended up in Upminster, some 27kms from central London and about as far northeast as you can get before leaving London altogether. Again, not a lot here either. I must say, despite Greater London's massive size, there really isn't a lot to see outside of the city centre. So with that conclusion, I headed back into town.
Hahaha! The British general election is just a couple weeks away, and the gloves are off! I can't stand the way all these idiots do is squabble like school kids, but these are pretty funny hehe.

Hehe, adverts on the back of buses for car insurance. On the way back into town, I was approaching a busy three-lane intersection with short queues of traffic in all three lanes at a red light. I was coasting up the centre lane (to head straight through), and suddenly some wanker came up from behind me on my right, cut right across in front of me and slammed on his brakes to join the left-turning queue, which forced me to swerve just to avoid him! Why the hell he couldn't have come up my inside (not a gay joke) or just waited a couple seconds for me to get out of his way I really don't know, but needless to say this really pissed me off, and as always I decided express my displeasure by kicking the shit out of his side-mirror as I went past him. Well that pissed him off too, and he pulled out of the left lane and proceeded to chase me hahaha (not the first time, won't be the last)! The problem for him though is I'm a bike, and I can squeeze into very tight spaces (also not a gay joke) where he can't, e.g. between queues of traffic. So he ended up at the back of the right-turning queue about four cars back from the front while I ended up out the front of everyone. Not being able to get to me, he yelled something out his window which I couldn't understand. Lights go green, I go straight, and after originally joining the left-turning queue, he was forced to turn right hahaha - fuckwit! So yes, the images in these adverts here are pretty accurate ;)				Coming into central London, and in the distance there you can see the largest dildo factory in Britain.

So after 82kms and a spot of the ol' road rage (and after hitting another dumb-fuck pedestrian along Oxford Street), I met up with some folk getting their picnic on in Hyde Park.				Some of the chickies were planning on going to a 1980s-themed club in town tonight, and had been shopping in Camden for some 80s goodies.

Home, shower, dinner, and round to a mate's for a few while the girls fluffed about putting their faces on over the course of a good couple hours.				After busting out more than 100kms in less than 24 hours on the bike, I wasn't up for a night out on the lash but I was up again at 4:30am for this - the ANZAC Day Dawn Service in Hyde Park Corner in front of the New Zealand War Memorial. Very sombre, and much yawning was had by all.

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