Hamburg Hamburg Hamburg

I've been here quite a lot over the last few months. I tend to fly out on Monday mornings. To do this I have to wake up at 5AM! I ask you. Anyway I stay out here until Thursday and then get the plane home in the evening. Then I do nothing all day on Friday.
So all in all it could be a lot worse.
So, rather like George Clooney in his madcap aeroplane film Up In The Air, I have developed a routine that gets me to the airport, through customs and onto the plane, quickly, efficiently and keeping contact with other human beings to a minimum.
I think we all know that airports are full of idiots. They mill around, stop suddenly, often hurtle, stand on moving walkways and block thoroughfares with their stupid luggage. Airports are, of course, a magnet for wheelie baggers. Wheelie baggers are all, it goes without saying, bastards but here are the worst ones.
Novice wheelie baggers:- They have either not been on holiday much, are very old or very young. Either way this is their first time with a wheelie bag and it shows. They have no driving skills and, despite its weight and the fact that it is actually attached to them via an arm and a hand (one of Mother Nature's most noticey of bodyparts), are completely unaware that they are dragging something the size of a hill behind them.
Child wheelie baggers:- Usually a tiny girl wheeling a pink wheelie bag just big enough to keep some air in. These ones are noisy, incredibley slow and completely unpredictable.
Camp wheelie baggers:- Usually businessmen. They are often of a stature I would refer to as dainty. They wear expensive suits and have the latest kit. Their wheelie bags are the size of a laptop with an extendable, slightly curved stick to pull it along with.
"What's the problem with them Andy, ya big homophobe?" I hear you ask.
"If they're dainty and their wheelie bags are small, they should be fine." You go on to opine.
Well you have a point. But what gets my goat is that
a) They could just pick the bloody thing up and tuck it under their arm.
b) We're in an airport. They're camp. Do you see? It's an impossibly glamorous place. Pilots in uniform, shops with shiny things in, heavenly scents and unguents, duty free iPads, lounges and and the possibility of sighting someone off of X-Factor. That's right. They don't know if they're coming or going. You can't blame them but they're wheeling all over the place, stopping abruptly, shrieking, darting hither and thither, Tweeting, Facebooking and generally getting in the way.
Anyway, I've gone off on a rant.
Print your boarding pass and fold it in half four times so that the QR code is on the outside. Put this in your passport. Put your passport in the back pocket of your jeans.
Ruthlessly edit your luggage until it all fits into a shoebox. I exaggerate of course. Just don't take much stuff and what little you do have put in a ruck sack. Leave all your coins at home. Have your toothpaste etc in a plastic bag at the top of your rucksack.
Get the Heathrow Exp. Walk all the way to the front. Most people just jump on at the end nearest the conkcourse, so if you take the trouble to stroll onward for 2 mins you get the whole of the front of the train to yourself.
Have a kip.
Jump off at Terminal 5. You will be opposite the Exit. Walk to the lifts. There will be a melee of cretins here from the train but they don't know where they're going so you should be able to jump into the lift before one manages to stop the door closing with their arm. like one of the quicker zombies you sometimes see in a zombie film when a potential flaw in the plot can only be averted by one of the zombies being significantly faster than every other zombie in the film.
Out of the lift like a jackrabbit. (to be conktinued...)

Spag Bol

Hardly anyone has been asking me what my recipe for my Infamous World Famous Spag Bol is. People who have tasted it have reported that it is:-
"The best Spag Bol I've ever tasted!"  - Liz's brother.
"My best one yet!" - Me.
"Goes down a real threat." - A person.

So I bring it to you here.
Ingredients:

500g of minced beef (Lean. Not lean. Who cares? Not me that's for sure).
1 onion about the size of a large apple or a normal sized onion.
1 carrot. Get one of a size that you feel uncomfortable having in your basket in case anyone thinks you're planning to use it as a dildo.
1 Beef stock. (Use a cube, liquid, one of those stockpots or the posh stuff from Waitrose's. Again I simply could not care less).
1 pot pourri. Not pot pourri. I mean one of those little tea bags full of herbs that you drop in...what are they called? It's like pot pourri. I want to say "salad garnis" but it's not that either. Anyway you know what I mean.
Red wine. Just pour some in.
1 large can of chopped tomatoes.
1 small can of chopped tomatoes. (Sometims I get 1 small can of plum tomatoes. Why?
By mistake. The bloody cans look the same - it's ever so annoying.)
Some galic paste out of a tube of garlic paste. (See below)
Some tomato puree out of a tube of tomato puree (The trick with these last two items is to look in your cupboard before you go out to buy the minced beef, to see if you already have some. This avoids one of two things happening.
a)You cook everything and then find you have no tomato puree/garlic paste and then have to go back down to the bloody shop you were in 20 minutes ago.
b) You buy some then when you come to cook the Bol, you discover you already have three fucking unopened bloody tubes from the last three arseing times you went Spag Bol shopping without looking to see if you had any - Just look, is all I'm saying).
Some Mushroom Ketchup. Don't question it. Just do it. This is the secret ingredient.
1 some olive oil. Just olive oil. It dosn't get more complicated than that.
1 sugar. Takes the edge off of it.
Spag.

Method

Look in the cupboard for a frying pan and a big saucepan. Place them on the hob.
Switch the radio on. My preferred station is Radio 4 Extra.
Take your jumper off. You're probably going to be losing your temper later so you don't want to be overhot.
Maybe crack a beer open, maybe not. Depends.
Get the onion, take off the outer layers to a depth of about one more than you really wanted to. Cut it in half. Then chop the bastard into really small pieces. Use your knife to move this little pile to the side of the breadboard.
Peel the carrot. I use a carrot peeler. May as well.
Cut it in half and then chop that orange bastard into tiny pieces too. That'll teach it a lesson it won't forget. You may find the little pile of chopped onion interferes with your smooth knife action. It can't be helped.
Pour some olive oil into the large pan and turn on the burner. Scoop all the little bits of carrot and onion into the pan.
About 3 mins later pour a bit more olive oil into the frying pan and turn on the burner. Open the packet of minced beef and tip it into the frying pan. Remove the little bit of paper from the bottom of the minced beef - Ponder for a minute how tempted you are, to sink your teeth into the raw minced beef. Snap out of it.
Break the beef up and fry the fuck out of it.
Worry that you should have started cooking the beef 2 mins earlier as the onion is starting to go a bit brown.
Turn the heat up on the beef and really let it rip.
When there are no or not many pink bits of beef left, tip the beef into the saucepan.
Relax. That's the worst bit over.
More or less just tip all the remaining ingredients into the saucepan. In these amounts.

Red wine: Start pouring then stop. You will have not put enough in. Pour in some more then put the bottle of wine down. Then pick it up and put a bit more in. That will be the exactly the correct amount.
Garlic paste: Think to yourself how much you like garlic then start squeezing the tube. When you think you have put in a bit too much Stop. Perfect.
Tomato puree: Just go for it. Squeeze it in there. Until the Bol goes red.
Mushroom Ketchup: You can over do it. Say this to yourself as you pour. "Not too much...bit more...bit more... that's it."
Sugar: About a teasponful. You know. Just to take the edge off of it.

Put the lid on the saucepan (You will find this lid either in a different cupboard than the pan or a cupboard you've never noticed before).
Pop it on the smallest burner on the hob and turn the heat down. Cook her for as long as you want. She just gets better and better the more you cook. She is not a cruel mistress and will reward you for patience.
When you have watched something about World War 2 on the History Channel, pop out and give her a stir. After Scrapheap Challenge, pop the kettle on. When it's boiled pour the water into ANOTHER saucepan and put in some Spag. No need to put an amount here, you will find that you will naturally put in way more than you can actually eat. Add a pinch of salt and boil the bejesus out of it for 10 mins.

Serve.

New computer. Mac or Asus?

Asus of course. Slim, light, two USB ports, three other ports that I don't know what they are and, most importantly, not a Mac.

And to top it all I got it cheap. Apparantly there is a superficial error in the finish. I can't see it though.

To don't list.

I bet you've been wondering what I've been up to these past few days. I'll tell ya. Not compiling a "To Don't" list. I really must get around to writing a list of things I really must get around to never doing. I thought of writing a book called "100 things not to do before you die." But then I simply changed my mind. Why? Becaue I'm too damn lazy and, frankly, I'm not sure I could keep it down to only 100.

So far I haven't thought of a single thing to not do so I'm going to look around me and find inspiration in my surroundings. Not entirely unbelievably I'm in Nero's again. No work this week, so it's lying on the sofa singing "I got plenty of nothiiiiiiing....and nothing's plenty for me," practising cricket in the park, having a picnic and doing things with my noooo computer.

Anyway. Casting my eyes around the coffee shop and noting what my fellow human beings are up to, I present to you, a start on my "To Don't" list. Now let me see...... what's that horrible noise?....ahhh yes....
1) Don't talk nonsense loudly in an American accent and without leaving any pauses for your friend to get a goddam word in edgeways like a daft bint or something.
2) Don't be an annoying 6 year old kid with specs, pissing about, flapping your hands and being a general absolute bellend next to a grumpy 48 year old bloke writing a "To Don't" list.
3) Don't join a social network. No one's actually doing that here I just thought of it and put it down. And before you go getting all, you now, internetty, this is my "To don't" list. If you don't like it write your own.
4) Don't walk out of coffee shops assuming you are the only person on the planet and you don't have to look where you're going, when, in reality, you are in one of the most crowded areas of one of the most crowded cities in the world. If the altercation I have just witnessed is anything to go by, sometimes you'll bump into some other cretin, who is also assuming they are the only person on the planet so they don't have to ...blah blah blah, so on and so forth.
5) Don't be female. I have great respect for women. I mean how do they fit in all the things they have to do every day. Talk, take boody ages to choose a sandwich then, when they are about to pay for it, go back and change it for the same flavour sandwich but just a different one (Anna!), turn the simple act of paying for comestibles into a Sissyphean, accessory- assault course involving  being completely unprepared to pay for your coffee, despite having had to pay for your coffee many times before and then having to embark on this exhausting rigmorole.

Unzipping the handbag, searching its Tardisian bowels for your stupid purse, finding the stupid purse, unzipping the pocket devoted to notes, changing your mind, zipping it back up, unzipping the pocket devoted to coins, fishing out a really lot of loose change, starting to assemble exactly the correct amount from this motley collection of coppers, Euros, a hairclip, crumbs and a hair bungee (or whatever they're called - the elastic rings with stray hairs trapped in its rapidly-perishing rubber embrace), getting to within 2 pence of the correct total then realising you haven't got the right amount, pouring it all back into the pocket, zipping it back up, unzipping the first pocket and fishing out a tenner, handing that to the barista, accepting the change, putting the fiver back into that pocket, zipping it up, unzipping the change pocket, pouring the change into that, zipping it back up, throwing the stupid purse back into the handbag version of an event horizon, without a thought of starting a system where it always goes into the same place so it's easier to find next time, picking up the coffee, remembering that you haven't had your "free coffee" card stamped, putting the coffee back down, unzipping the handbag, searching it's cavernous interior for the stupid fucking purse, unzipping the purse, unzipping the pocket you have reserved for "everything under the fucking sun," locating the card, handing it over, getting it stamped, putting it back into the compartment reserved for "everything under the fucking sun except, you know, coins, notes and other stuff," hoying it back into the handbag version of a tear in the very fabric of time itself, re-pick up the coffee and depart.

6) If you're a planner in an advertising agency, don't use the term "Glocal" as a way of getting round having to ask the creatives to write yet another global ad, then on being asked how this is different to "Global," smile and explain patiently that everyone knows global ads are crap so the client doesn't want a global ad. They want a local ad that also appeals to everyone else on the globe. I shit you not.


By way of changing the subject and calming down a bit. Here is some DIY I did.

This is a wooden bathmat I made myself by buying a square of decking and sawing off two of the wooden slats. As you can see the space between the bath and the wall is too narrow for a conventional bathmat so I had to improvise. These are the instructions.
1. Buy a wooden square of decking £8
2. Saw the slats off.
3. Be pretty bloody pleased with yourself.

Hamburg. Zwei (two).

I'm back in Hamaburg again. Came back last week and I'm out here again this week. Not much to add apart from it's a bally sight warmer out here than the last time I ventured into Euroland. Last evening I was sharing a Duckstein or two with Rob (bloke I'm working with)  sat outside a bar in Hamburg's equivalent of Crouch End. Which is itself London's equivalent of a place inhabited by hippy dippy, yoghurt crunching, middle classes.
In a T-shirt. If you did that in London's Crouch End you would be in a wet T-shirt. Which for my one American reader is because it hasn't stopped raining in Britain since they declared a hosepipe ban. My mother really took this ban to heart and threw away her hosepipe altogether. Why? Incase they discovered it and locked her in jail. In her head the hosepipe was the horticultural equivalent of "drug parapenalia" and damning evidence of wrongdoing on her part. So we destroyed this, in my opinion cirumstantial, evidence of her not using her hosepipe by hoying it into the tip. "Better safe than sorry when dealing with the hosepipe police" is, was and always will be, her motto.

Anyway look at this photo advertising a show by two famous German comedians. Here they are taking the mickey out of Chinese peoples by adopting a face that is frowned upon in the UK. And China. But not Tibet. Anyway I bet it's a hell of a hoot.

All this toing and froing between Hamburg, Shanghai, London and Hastings has awakened in me a visceral hatred of an object and its users. Here is a picture of it below. *Shudder*




Look at this massive bellend. Man up. It's the size of half of a medium sized dog. Or a quarter of a large one. Or an eight of a lion or....you get the idea. It's small is all I'm trying to say.

On my flight over here a business man was trying to fit a wheelie bag into the overhead lockers. The bag would have fitted in, just, if there had been several factors in his favour.
1) He hadn't been a enormous douchebag (American for fucking idiot).
2) No one else on the entire plane had also wanted to put hand lugage in the overhead bin.
3) Everyone else on the plane hadn't also been a fucking idiot.
4) He hadn't been last on the plane and everyone's hand luggage was already packed in tighter than a nun's fan belt.
I settled back to watch the show. There's nothing I like better than seeing a wheelie bag user in distress. It's not an admirable characteristic but I make up for it by being hilarious (I bloody am), having a large number of amusing faces to deploy, being able to imitate almost any foreign accent in the world, having a big nose and shouting loudly when people only ever call me on my mobile when I am driving. Honestly - I only have to engage 1st gear to go from pariah to most popular man on the planet. (I often wonder if I am in the Thrueman Show and people only do things when they know it will most annoy me but that's a paranoia for another post.)
Anyway. He tried shoving - No joy. He tried moving back and forth - No joy. He tried a pitiful look at the stewardess - No joy. So he had to resort to the one thing he didn't want to do. Moving other people's stuff about to try to make room. It was like trying to do a massive 3D jigsaw puzzle, while a plane load of people and one grinning idiot looked on, while trying not to be a bellend but in reality being a bellend and while wanting desperately to shout "GO IN YOU FUCKING STUPID CASE!" ie. impossible.
Eventually his exertions resulted in someone else's case popping out, that person standing up and shoving it back in and the stewardess finally doing her job and taking the fucking stupid wheelie bag and hurling it out the window. Actually stowing it away somewhere (and hopefully kicking it for the entire journey).
Right. Back to work. Bah.

Hastings: A critique.

The English Channel in all it's winter fury.

In the imaginary league of top 10 places begining with Ha, what could top Hamburg? I'll tell you. Hastings. It could but it doesn't. Nestled down on the south coast betwixt Rye and America it stands, a once proud and popular seaside resort, it has now gone right down the shitter and is home to nothing but seagulls, people with tracksuits and tattoos who smoke fags and a really nice hotel called The Swan House Hotel or somesuch name. How do I know this? Because I just went for a weekend away there with Liz Baines. Who the bloody hell is liz Baines? My girlfriend, that's who.

Yes my one reader, I've only gone and got a girlfriend. How? Some people ask. The truth is I don't know but rest assured booze played it's alchemic role. That's correct. When I met her she was completely drunk as a lord and I can only assume that the drink had, in her head at least, transformed my face (a normally unlovely collection of ill-matched, so-called features) into an approximation of something not hideous. Et voila! Girlfriend. Good old booze.



Skimming stones. This was a niner. Look at that stance. Low centre of gravity, good follow through, eyes on the horizon. A group of German youths nearby tried to emulate. Needless to say, when it comes to bouncing objects across the surface of the water, we British are de best. If you know what I mean. And I think many of you do.



Anyhoo, we went to Hastings on a road trip and stayed for the weekend. Activities included lying down, lively debate in pubs, fish and chips, a 10 mile walk along the cliffs, a "99", lying down, a game of Pirate golf, eating thai food in a bookshop, lying down, throwing stones in the sea, a lively game of spoof, lying down and observing the town of Hastings and it's denizens.



The Hastings Pirate Golf Tournamet 2012. I wasn't really taking it that seriously. I was pretending. For a joke. Ha ha ha ha. Like that.



The 12th hole. A par one. Basically if you got the ball into the skull's mouth it rolled down a pipe and popped straight into the hole.



Yes. After three days spent mainly asleep in a town I've never been before, I am now an expert on Hastings, its peoples and its ways. 

All Hastings is divided into two parts.

1. The Old Town

2. The rest of it.

The Old Town is full of ancient beamed dwellings and old fishermen's cottages. It is very nice and if the hotel was anything to go by, the houses can be lovely. The rest of it is home to a mixture of gaudy amusment arcades, crap pubs, the sea, some faded grandeur, a smell and the kind of chain shops you find in every High Street the length and breadth of the land.

It is home to much of Sussex's unemployed, which was a bit of an eye opener. It must be frustrating being unemployed (having said that, I am currently sitting in Nero's on Theobaldy Road in the middle of the day and I'm fucking liking it - but of course the circs are diff. Diff circs.) but being unemployed in one of Britain's shittest towns rubs salt into the wound a bit. The uniform is track suit, snarl, a fag and a baby. If it weren't so stereotypical it would be tragic. Anyway this heady mix of the unemployed, bikers, stag dos, hen dos and visitors intent on having a great time makes for a lively Saturday night. The screaming went on well into the early hours.

Compared to Hamburg it's.....errrmm..... well it's errrmm......no, they're so different you can't compare them at all. You can compare Hastings to some of the fishier parts of Shanghai and it gives a good account of itself.

So to sum up in four words:

Great. Smelly. Golf. Hat.

Guess where I am?

Me outside a WW2 flaktower/air raid shelter

Hamburg! Home of the careful driver, more Italian restaurants than you can shake a stick at and Eva's burger. Which ironically contains chicken instead of ham (beef).
Allow me to explain.
I'm here for work and, for various reasons which I won't bore you with (but are in turn frustrating, alarming, bewildering, Tutonic and hilarious) it's been pretty busy. So I've only managed to see 28% of what Hamburg has to offer. This includes the Reeperbahn, so as far as many people are concerned (you know...sex people), I've seen 100% of it. The Reeperbahn contains shops selling things called "dongs" and contraptions that seemingly suck your fanny inside out
Anyway. What is my analysis of Hamburg, its ways, customs and peoples?
It's peoples are indistinguishable from British peoples. I was expecting them to barge around taking up the pavement and invading everyone's personal space. I couldn't have been further wrong. The evidence of this is that I found myself being able to stroll around without muttering "get out of my fucking way" under my breath. In London I do this all the time. In Shanghai I just announced it out loud, relying on their lack of English to prevent me getting a roundhouse ninja kick on the conk.
Not only that, you only have to look as if you are thinking about crossing the road, for traffic to screech to a halt and wait while you a) wonder why the traffic has stopped b) get cross c) realise they're waiting for you and finally g) start crossing the road at exactly the same time they decide you're an idiot and set off again.
And they all speak English.

Hamburg contains the largest Italian community outside Italy. Why? I don't know. Simple as that.
What that means is that a square entitled Grosseneumarkt, not 20 yards from where I am staying, contains no fewer than 8 Italian restaurants. And as any of my three friends will tell you, I am a big fan of pizza. Though if the truth be known it's cheese but...you know....pizza is about 50% cheese, so you can see my point.
Though if you come to Hamburg on a weekend, have breakfast at the restaurant perched alongside a lake called the Binnalster. You pay about £12 and there's a buffet system where you can eat as much as you like and go back for seconds, thirdfs and fourfths. Don't have the raw mince. Just don't.

Where I live. Nice.

I have mainly been eating (by that I mean almost every night) at a bar called Thamers. Who's specialite de la maison is Eva's Burger. It is a chicken burger and it's bloody delicious. I don't know what they put in the special sauce but the girls seem to like it. Heroin I expect because it's very moreish. Anyway. I normally accompany this with a pint or two of Duckstein, a sort of dark lager. So a typical dinner for Andy B consists of a chicken and two ducks. Ha ha ha ah ah ha ha ha ha.



Eva's burger and a Duckstein

Anyway I'm back tomorrow and I'm moving flat the day after that. Pretty busy. What I'm doing is teeing up the fact that I won't be updating the blog for a while.  As if you care.

Auf Wiedersen!