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!

Operation Overlord II (or three middle aged idiots go to Normandy)

I haven't written for ages and I have no excuse. I've just been very lazy. I got back from Shangers ages ago and since then I've been doing mostly nothing, which I confess, I have been thoroughly enjoying.
I got shat on twice by albatrosses. You've seen the picture of the first one but I got dive bombed again in Red Lion Square. This one was reasonably solid with a "miniscus" of calcified slime that landed with an audible thump on my right shoulder, up there near where it joins the neck. Once I'd cleared the solid debris I left the dried miniscus up there as a sort of lucky poo-brooch. I will undoubtedly win the lotto today (10 million big ones my friends. Friend. Rollover.). I haven't got a picture of this new poo. Frankly, for all but the keenest bird shit fancier, once you've seen one bird shit on someone's shoulder, you've seen one more than you wanted to see in the first place.

Anyway I tell a lie. I have been up to something.  Me and two mates went to Normandy to visit the invasion beaches. I think it's something men do when they reach a certain age and they start to wonder if sitting at a desk, a'tapping away at a computer laptop, going to meetings with shitheads, fuckos and bellends and dealing with the day to day inconsequential bullshit that is advertising (and let's face it most of what passes for "work" these days) is, in any way at all, a noble way of living. You reach an age where the glamour of sitting on your fat arse thinking up stupid stuff, getting drunk all the time, having meaningless sex and playing with crayons, starts to pall and for once in your life you start to think of something other than your own hedonistic, solipsistic pleasures.
So we seek to empathise with brave men who did something corageous, noteworthy and terrible. While we test ourselves against nothing more dangerous than a moron in a suit armed with nothing more deadly than a fucking stupid opinion, they tested themselves against the terrible fear of violent, painful and imminent death.
And, not unsurprisingly, we find ourselves lacking. Just my opinion of course. Oh and Samuel Johnson's (who wrote English Literature's most emminent work, namely the first ever Dictionary of the English language) who wrote "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea."
In the thankfully fleeting moments I have been able to get even close to putting myself, albeit only mentally, in the boots of these men; boys really, I have been terrified.

Bit serious wasn't it? Back to the fooling about.
Dan and Giles are both married with children and I have no concept of taking responsibility for anything. A heady mix of potential stupidity when we are released from the day to day grind of talking bollocks, trying to sound like you know what you're talking about and dealing with "life."
That's right my one reader, we got completely pissed on the first night. The whole night got off to a weird start when the waitress at our chosen restaurant was cross-eyed. Normally you can deal with this by gazing intently at the eyeball that is gazing at you. She, however kept swapping which one she was looking at you with. Sometimes in mid sentence. I think she was doing it on purpose. Needless to say I quite fancied her. Of course we got terrifically over excited (not about her, about freedom) and the scores were thus.
We each had 7 pints of pissy French biere and an equal share of two bottles of vin rouge. We got back to the hotel at 3AM. A good 5 hours past our bedtime. Here's pic of me the next day with one of the hotel's early residents.

He looks a lot happier than I do. I am so hungover here, that my hair was hurting.

I've done the lottery today.

I pretty confident I'll win it. So everyone start being nice to me or you won't get in the will. Why so confident? I'll tell ya. I got shit on by a bird. Not a nut-eating wren or a little berry-nibbling peewit. No. A fucking great ocean-going, seafaring, fish guts-eating, ice cream cone-stealing, seagull/albatross bird.

I estimate the shit was loosed from Angels 25 so it had easily reached terminal veocity well before it reached me and had started to break up. I think I glanced its final approach in my peripheral vision (I have excellent peripheral vision) and it seemed to make a whistling noise as it shot past my ear. Anyway part of it (a satellite portion of shit) hit my neck, but the mothership of shit hit my shoulder with a splatting noise. Another quite small satellite portion of shit struck my thumb and via the action of steering my car, was transferred onto the steering wheel of my car.

Anyway. All this is incredibly lucky so by tomorrow, according to the estimate on my ticket, I will have 10 million big ones. I think I'll splash out on a new cricket bat.

Look at my daft face all upset.

And so we say farewell again.

That's right. I'm off home again. It's been 6 weeks. Hasn't time flown? Good job too because instead of muttering "get out of my fucking way" to Chinese people who block the pavement, I have begun to say it out loud, relying on their inability to speak English to save me from a punch on the conk or a bunch of fives or a kick up the breadbasket.

This is where you can get your boobies tattooed

This complete indifference to other people takes the form of this type of encounter. I will be walking down Shanxi Lu to work in the morning. There's a sort of cafe on the way and people gather there to get breakfast. This takes the form of crowding round, barging people out of the way and trying to get served first. Anyway this crowd spills out onto the street, narrowing an already narrow pavement further. A roadside tree narrows it yet further an there's a railing so you can't skip out onto the road to avoid the bottleneck. So what your looking at is a gap slightly narrower then a person through which every pedestrian on that side of the busy street must pass.

What happens is this. A person walking steadily along in front of me, without stopping, moving smoothly (admittedly at the annoying speed Shanghai people walk - called the Shanghai Shuffle - it's too slow to stay behind and too fast to overtake easily) will automatically choose that very spot to stop and....... and..... do nothing! They don't want food, they don't want to tie their shoelace, they don't want to fish their mobile out of their pocket, nothing. They just want to look at air or something. People here seem to have a 6th sense about what would be the stupidest, most inconvenient, selfish thing they could possibly do and then do it. Pavement wankers.

One of China's picturesque homes

It's uncanny. People walking towards you will veer across the pavement to obstruct you. Once you know this of course, you can use it to your advantage. Whenever you walk around the key thing is to imagine what surrounding people could do to inconvenience you the most. Drive their bike at you, park their car on the pavement, drive their taxi at you at full speed then slow right down to a crawl so that you can't cross the road, veer across the pavement, just walk straight at you, stop suddenly, yell alarmingly.. any number of things. Whatever it is will inevitably happen but because you have thought ahead, you have already mapped out a route to get round the obstruction. When you outsmart them, they find it REALLY annoying. Ha!

A crane down by Nanpu Bridge on the Haungpu River. Honestly it's pu this, pu that. And, you've guessed it, pu the other.

 For example I must use the lift to get to the ground floor of my apartment block. When the lift reaches the ground floor any Chinese peoples waiting for the lift there will just charge on regardless if there is anyone trying to get off. It has been necessary on occasions to stand aside to let them in before you can get out. Not anymore. As the lift nears the ground floor I stand directly in front of the doors with my nose 1cm from the lift doors. So when they open I am right there in front of them blocking the door. It gives them quite a fright and makes them really cross that they haven't been able to get in anyone's way.

Anyway. As many a traveller has told me, it's important to embrace the customs and traditions of the peoples one is visiting. So I've given up being polite. When in Shanghai, behave as the Shanghaiese do. Barge through, never stand aside, never give an inch.

Yes yes. It sounds like London. But it isn't. It's worse here.

Recently there was a hoo hah about a young girl who was knocked down and then ignored by passers by. It surprises me not one jot. Life is cheap here and no one gives a fuck about anyone else. It is just a race to get rich and embrace all the worst excesses of Western culture.

That was cathartic. I was drinking a beer called Dead Guy Ale last night which may go some way to explaining the vitriol.

The more things change...the more they stay the same.

In The Kangaroo, you are allowed to chalk slogans, bon mots and witty aphorisms on the walls and ceilings. In the old days (last April) when I was here last and before the great Kangaroo Fuck Up (KFU) when they renovated it up, the walls were permanently adorned with all sorts of rubbish and in my mind, all the better for it but, as everyone knows, whatever I think is automatically wrong.
Anyway I was having a lonely pint in there on Friday (actually not so lonely because the barmaids have started talking to me now) and I happened to glance at the ceiling. When you're by yourself in a bar you often find yourself looking in places you don't normally look. Anything to entertain yourself. Anyway I was rewarded for my curiosity with this excellent piece of erudition.

Dutch/ Belgian graffiti on the ceiling of The Kangaroo. The circular object is a ceiling light.

It's not so much the font he's used, the kerning or indeed the sentiment behind his observation that is so interesting. It's the fact that given an empty space and a writing instrument, a bloke will always default to drawing a jizzing cock (a little known fact is that the earliest cave paintings were of jizzing cocks - archeologists hide this fact because they don't want to let on that our earliest ancestors were basically giggling neanderthal knobheads  - Homo Knobheadiens is the missing link. It's not missing at all it's just largely hidden in shame).
However I don't think this is drawn by a British person.  Why? Read on.

Number 1: The name Chris Van V sounds distinctly Dutch/Belgian and those guys don't like to mix.
Number 2: The "jizz" is a sort of.....well I don't know how to describe it.... all wrong. Anyway a plucky British bloke would have drawn a dotted line, curving at the end to show the effects of gravity.
Number 3: The balls are too well drawn The artist has given them perspective. That's a no no. Just two big Mickey Mouse ears drawn with one sweeping line is the British way.
Number 4: No crinkly hair emanating from the balls. Whilst not mandatory, if not under time pressure, a British bloke will usually add 2 to 4 crinkly "hairs" as a kind of artistic flourish. Such as Picasso might do.

Shanghai taxi service

Someone at my apartment block booked a cab from the guys down at BJ taxis. Having seen the driver I don't think I'll be booking them for my trip to the airport. If you know what I mean (and I think that you do)