Prince Paddy V. Stevo

Prince Paddy’s daily excrement is ALWAYS worth consulting. But today I get a mention for my small part in what will be Gl1tchgor3’s eventual total world domination, i.e., for persuading Nottingham Fopp to stock a copy of their masterpiece, Gearball. Read more here.

Back from Hamburg

Dazed, disappointed, demoralised I’m back in Nottingham. I got off the plane at B’ham international yesterday with the same feeling of anticlimax and weariness you always get when you’re arriving back somewhere you don’t particularly like. Thankfully I’m going to be in Glasgow for just over a week this Thursday which ought to soften the blow a bit. Hamburg was really really great, hence the gloominess at coming back here.

Actually in the end it was the people I met there (and one in particular) who I missed, more than the city, amazing as that was. I wonder why it is that I have to actively search for people who I resonate with, and that they tend to live in other countries.

But, like I said I also loved the city itself. I adored the style and pace of life, the architecture, the views; but most of all I was amazed at how liberal the place was: it was as if in Hamburg people could be trusted to do what they wanted . There were no turnstiles on the subways, ticket inspections were rare on trains and buses– and yet the whole public transport system was still viable. People tended to pay for tickets, their sense of civic responsibility prevailed. Also, folk seemed just as drunk in Hamburg at night as in any city I’ve ever been to in the UK, yet the threat of violence, the sense of antagonism and foreboding that hangs heavy over British city centres at night, was largely absent there.

Anyway, I am planning to put up the photos I took on my flickr site, the link will be up soon.

Reverend Spook Quote

‘its always ur friends who fuck you over… no one else knows how.’

Me in Front of the Binnenalster

The Hamburg Diaries 1

So I landed in Hamburg around 2pm HamB time and shit was not good today to say the least – in fact things began to fuck up and seriously so as soon as I left the airport (where for some reason caricaturish sweaty heavy metal fans were lying scattered everywhere like debris, is there some conference on?) I wont go into too many details on what happened yet, maybe later, but it cast a pall and I was decidedly gloomy for most of the day. Arms crossed, mostly sat immobile like a stone back turned to my two travelling companions during waits at train platforms, or sat in buses.

I mean it’s the first time I’ve really been abroad abroad, i.e., somewhere where I hadnt the barest grasp of the language at all. But the novelty of seeing everything written in ze German wore off pretty quickly and made me feel even more isolated from my environment than usual — though to their credit pretty much every hamburger i approached knew enough English to make me feel ashamed for knowing fuck all German.

My mood was raised, and not just my mood, on the train to registration, where sitting there like the miserable fuck I was I noticed the young blonde in the seat across the aisle had her blouse unbuttoned to just below her boob. But — and get this! — she wasnt wearing anything underneath her blouse! And fuck, her breasts were so shapely, just fucking ideal in fact. For the ten minutes I sat almost literally drooling (if not from my mouth then…) and staring at her beautiful round bosom, praying to God for a shift in the fabric so I could get a glimpse of nipple, I forgot about everything that had happened previously, all the shit that had happened this week, this month. I was transported! Hallelujah. This pretty girl, so radiant and precious in her sexuality, so unashamed about showing her titties to me, to the fat old man sat next to her mumbling, to the couple opposite me, became my hero… Alas, I had to alight too soon and lost my proximity to this wondrous creature, but I wish I could have said a few words to her, like “I love you” or rather “Ich liebe Dich

But anyway, got to my accomodation and was back to being a miserable cunt again. It was then I decided to do both my back and knee in by walking down Sieker Landstrasse and Rahistedterasse for I think it was approximately two hours. I got me my air, I got me my space and I got clean well mannered German streets, almost empty on Sunday Evening.

And contemplating the events of the day the words my dear Prince Paddy left me on this very blog spun around in my mind: “…Accept that some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue.” I thought about the lessons I had learned from watching The Dark Knight after having been primed by Paddy to view it specifically as an allegory about Chaos and Order, and the futility of the attempt to reign in the forces of darkness, of chaos through the imposition of good/law. It helped me come to terms with things a bit better than I had, a massive improvement on my earlier petulance anyways. Two weeks to go, doood.

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