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Monday, January 2nd, 2006
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6:26 pm - Welcome to 2006
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where in the hll did 2005 go? Especially the last month!!!!
Spent the first few days of december soaking up the christmas markets in Berlin. There was Gluhwein, strawberries dipped in chocolate, hot chocolate with shots of orange liquer, kartoffelpuffer and dry cold weather to beat the band. It was great to get away and chill out, and come back feeling all christmassy even if we didn't manage to get a tree for the flat.
The rest of the month was a blur of dinners, parties and drinking. Highlights were definitely the tequila fueled team night out, the reindeer at the Norwegian christmas bash and the whole london dungeon experience.
Truly bizarre to have a christmas party surrounded by statues of ghouls, ghosts and scary creatures. On a similar note white wine is now banned from my drinks repertoire.
Back in rainy old belfast now (and have een since before christmas) I'm beginning to regress and have started acting like Kevin the teenager. Heaven only knows how I'll be acting come next monday morning.
I'll definitely needa holiday after this few weeks.... Post christmas I have so far been to
Dudalk
Donegal
Dublin
and on Wednesday I'm for Derry
and no, its not a tour of place names beginning with D
Off to the pub........................
current mood: wrecked tired
current music: Norah Jones - One FLight Down
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| Sunday, November 27th, 2005
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6:20 pm - would the gentleman about to attempt sliding down the handrail...
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...of the escalator please not do that, you will hurt yourself"
"And could the gentleman trying to take a photo of it, please turn off your flash"
--London Bridge Station last night
Quickly followed by a call for inspector sands to go to the control room, and according to urban legend thats a fire alarm somewhere in the station
weird end to a fun but crazy evening. I never thought I would go to see a Japanese Jazz band, and I would have thought it was less likely to see a white rapper with a Japanese Jazz band.
The jazz cafe is pretty cool though, and I will be back
More on the weekend later
current mood:  relaxed
current music: The Frames - Your Face
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| Wednesday, November 16th, 2005
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2:47 pm - me, procrastinate, never (well almost)
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A long time ago on this little page, I decided that my mood could be described the the phrase
procrastination is the new carpe diem
2 1/2 years later it is still true, more or less
current mood: content
current music: Tom Petty - Into the great wide opne
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| Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
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10:23 am - ice cream in a casino
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and other long stories.....
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| Thursday, October 20th, 2005
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6:06 pm - w00t
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So after a massivley busy week, the need for some quiet time presents itself so I have worked out the following schedule
Saturday: Brighton
Tuesday: Cork (which means I will miss 2 spanish classes in a row)
Thursday -> Monday: Home for a few days
The prospect of flying to cork and back on the same day is making me tired
Good thing it's G&T time
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| Thursday, September 29th, 2005
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5:31 pm - flighttastic
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It seem's I've grossly overestimated my number of flights so far this year.
Judging by this post back in May I had done 10 flights..
This was
3 returns to london (jan,feb and march)
1 extra london bound flight just after the new year
1 return to warsaw
and the weekend in question another return to belfast
Since then...
2 returns to belfast (u2 and home for a week)
1 return to zaragoza
I have a funny feeling there was one more weekend in belfast somewhere but i think it was jsut wishful thinking.
The planned flights for the rest of the year are
1 belfast-london pair
trip to berlin
and the single flight this side of christmas
so the magic number is actually going to be... 20
hmmmm maybe i should plan a trip
current mood:  tired
current music: Belle & sebastian - I'm a cuckoo
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| Tuesday, September 27th, 2005
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7:42 am
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phone is playing up again.
Someone out there doesnt want me to have a v3, I don't appear to be getting sms or voicemail notifications.
sigh
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| Tuesday, September 20th, 2005
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10:09 pm - cotton wool brain
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getting over a nasty cold (the mad lurgies)
but I had my first Spanish class tonight which was fun, but I can't get my head around e and i
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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| Sunday, September 18th, 2005
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11:41 am - Toto, I guess we're not in kansas anymore
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With everything thats been happening at home in the last few weeks, there have been a million articles, news reports, editorials and interviews. Each one blaming something random for the rioting. This by Tom McGurk in The Sunday business sums it up I think
North heartland's unionism belongs in a trailer park
North heartland's unionism belongs in a trailer park
18 September 2005 By Tom McGurk
Last Saturday night the unionists of Belfast treated us to an evening of truly surreal proportions. Outside City Hall, thousands waving Union Jacks were part of a live BBC broadcast of the last night of the proms. They sang lustily. Donegal Square echoed to Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory.
Meanwhile, not a mile away in North Belfast others had also hoisted the Union Jack and were aiming automatic gunfire and blast bombs at their Queen's soldiers. Imperial sunsets are inevitably bizarre but who could have scripted this one?
To readers of this column, the loyalist riots in Belfast will have come as no surprise. The endemic political and social crisis in the loyalist heartlands is something we were considering long before it finally made last week's headlines. Here is a community in self-destruction mode. A community whose leaders seem utterly incapable of understanding the new political realities in the North.
The imposition of equality of citizenship on the old colony makes for painful learning; unionism is fast running out of people to blame for its own collapse into sectarian anarchy.
As the smoke cleared across North Belfast, the bombast of rhetoric about law and order and paramilitarism and arms and violence we have been hearing for years from political unionism emerged in a whole new subtext.
In the face of the attempted murder of police officers, widespread anarchy, robbery, intimidation, arson, looting and carjacking, not a single unionist political leader could bring himself to utter a single word of condemnation. The Orange Order press conference that followed the riots left one gasping at a display of utter hypocrisy.
For many years, some of us have known about the deeply dysfunctional political and sectarian psychosis at the heart of loyalism. Perhaps the only consolation to emerge from last weekend's performance is that the rest of the world now knows it as well. And, as has been his wont for years, the moment the reality of Paisleyism's panaceas emerged in its true colours on the streets, the Big Man was nowhere to be seen or heard.
It is important to understand just how different this riot was from the traditional Belfast riot scenarios in order to understand the dimensions of the crisis that unionism is now facing.
Days before the march erupted on the Springfield road, a source in Belfast told me the bush telegraph was indicating that loyalist paramilitaries would use the parade ban to provoke a major confrontation. Their preparations were already well advanced and their rationale was two-fold.
First, under increasing pressure in their own communities due to sustained criminality they needed a device to reemerge as “protectors'‘ in those communities. Second, and most remarkably, they are seemingly deeply disturbed by the notion of IRA weapons decommissioning.
Over and beyond the wider politics of the North, the self-defence role of the IRA in Catholic communities has been understood for many decades. Such was the implicit sectarian nature of partition, the lives of front-line Catholic communities - particularly in Belfast - have always been held hostage to fortune by loyalism. Any perceived change in the wider political status of the Catholic community and they were liable to get it in the neck. It was precisely this historical, Pavlovian response in 1969 that induced the birth of the Provisional IRA.
Last weekend was, at one level, an exploration by loyalist paramilitarism into new post-IRA ghetto politics. Would the PSNI be able to protect nationalist areas, and, equally, might a sustained attack shake or undermine the new IRA position?
The PSNI also was well aware of the new subtext and perhaps this goes some way to explaining the Orange leaders' accusations of heavy-handed police tactics. Importantly, given the reality of ghetto politics in the North, the fact that the PSNI was so effective in a post-IRA ghetto confrontation is one of the few consolations to come out of the battlefield.
What was also singularly different about this riot was the careful planning and the extent to which violently anti-social elements in the loyalist communities used it as a cover for their own criminality. The widespread incidents of armed robbery, the removal of a cash machine, the looting of shops and even the targeting of carefully selected business premises - perhaps with a view to subsequent loyalist paramilitary business - suggests that this wasn't just a spontaneous reaction to a march ban.
Perhaps the most significant implication for unionism in the long run was the signals from their heartlands last weekend that the paramilitary gangsterism now dominant in these communities had eclipsed elected political representatives.
Now the unionist political obsession with an IRA on ceasefire over the last decade, to the exclusion of any consideration of the threat of loyalist paramilitarism, has exploded in their faces. Who couldn't argue now that loyalist paramilitaries actually represent the greatest threat to their own communities?
In the face of this eruption of sectarian fury and civil anarchy, the DUP and UUP now look like players without a plot. From the beginnings of the peace process, their agenda was to resist any attempt at fundamental change in the hope that, sooner or later, the republican agenda would collapse under the weight of its paramilitarism.
Now, to their utter dismay, that hasn't happened and with IRA decommissioning. about to utterly change the face of Northern politics, political unionism is up the creek without a paddle. They can, of course, continue to refuse to come on board politically, but perhaps some may even consider the consequences of that decision, given the social crisis their own communities face.
With its vicious sectarianism, its educational and financial failure and its dysfunctional inability to seek an objective critique of its crisis, heartland unionism is now most reminiscent of an American white-trash trailer-park. Loyalism is now synonymous with poverty, dysfunctionality and social breakdown.
Somebody has to do something to save these people from the hellish logic of their own prejudices. It clearly isn't going to be political unionism as currently constituted.
current music: simple Minds - Belfast Child
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| Friday, September 16th, 2005
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9:44 pm - overdue
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So it's been a while since there was a proper post, but to be honest it's firday nigth and i can't be assed. So the condensed version is....
Got sick, felt like hell then went home to my mammy for a while. Headed to planet Donegal and chillaxed on the edge of a continent for a few days.
Attended a rather excellent fancy dress party at Sineads to which I brought my new rubber chicken (he's called George, after the big giant head, pics to follow). He unfortunately took a dive out of a top storey window, but he's fine now.
Got back to London (god I hate and love easyjet in equal measure) Sometimes I think the extra £60 would be worth it to fly a real airline and then I remember no real airlines fly direct to belfast from london any more.
Hell of a few weeks, as I posted earlier Timbo abandoned us, many embarassing photos by giblet, squish and others with more to follow from the man himself. The place is too quiet now!
Disappeared to Wales for a long weekend with Sinead, tip town town with mad teenage packs of drinkers and great shopping (only one new handbag and no shoes so am being good)
Edging into the stage of exhaustion where tiredness becomes the default after being uber relaxed at the weekend. Early start in the morning as I take a trip on the National express (The Divine Comedy++) to Canterbury. Should be fun I hope, although the lurgies that are being passed around the office are threatening to hit me next.
SOre throat, runny nose, stuffy head.... i feel a hot whiskey coming on
current mood: tired
current music: Green Day - Give me novocaine
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| Friday, September 9th, 2005
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7:32 am
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Just about to hop on a bus, then a tube then a train for my first trip to Wales.
current mood: walestastic
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| Thursday, September 8th, 2005
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7:23 am - My my my
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"My, my, my it's a beautiful world.
I like swimming in the sea.
I like to go on beyond the white breakers,
where a man can still be free.
Or a woman if you are one.
I like swimming in the sea.
My, my, my it's a beautiful world."
current mood: as good as it gets
current music: colin Hay - Beautiful world
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| Sunday, September 4th, 2005
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12:03 am - The weekend starts here
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Still need to post on sunny belfast, and other random things.
This time next week I'll be in Cardiff
Busy enough old week, with Timbo's leaving party (missing you already you old git) and a bash in vibe bar last night
Saturday night in the flat, with the sopranos beckons....
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| Wednesday, August 31st, 2005
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10:07 pm - updatetastic
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a long and tourtured update is long overdue, but in this heat it will have to wait
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| Monday, August 22nd, 2005
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12:40 pm
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At this point I think I'll need a holiday to recover from the holiday
knackered and it's the brat's birthday tomorrow
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| Tuesday, August 16th, 2005
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12:21 pm
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Heading west for a while. Jumping on a flight this evening to sunny belfast for some much needed time with the 'rents and old buddies
Hoping to head to Donegal for a few days as well
Life is good
RM
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| Sunday, August 14th, 2005
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2:56 pm - someone's got their thinking cap on
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So BA cause havoc at heathrow with strikes and then BE send out this email....
lybe. in the know 12th August 2005
------------------------------------------------------------
*CHECK IN'S OPEN, FOOD ONBOARD AND 20,000 SEATS AVAILABLE THIS WEEKEND!!*
Stranded by the Worlds Favourite Airline, left hungry and fed Up?
Don't let your weekend go to waste, check out Flybe now!
Flybe still have thousands of seats available this weekend with some
great deals to fantastic UK and European destinations available.
With over 100 routes Flybe offer a perfect antidote to your
legacy airline woes!
Avoid the Heathrow scrums and knock on delays - enjoy the
hassle free experience of flying to Europe from Southampton.
Fly now to a selection of sizzle and party destinations in
Spain, France or Ireland, all only a short train journey or drive
from London. Alternatively catch a great UK weekend break from
Gatwick to Belfast or Channel Islands.
Onboard enjoy Flybe's Deli in the Sky food and drink range,
with full stocks available!
Very clever indeed. Am loving the description of british airways as a legaxy airline
flybe++
just a pity they fly in tiny little scary plaes to belfast
current music: Jeff Buckley - Grace
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1:11 pm - Only in Belfast...
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could they describe a hole in the ground as....
"One of the features of the Belfast skyline in recent months has been the huge hole in the ground dug to accommodate the Victoria Square development which is due to open in two years time.</>
Sigh
I guess with July over, slow news days are bound to happen
Heading back on Tuesday for a week or so, should be fun
current mood: busy
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| Friday, August 12th, 2005
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9:57 am - That Friday feeling
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Actually have a phone line in the flat now, so adsl should be around 2 weeks away.
I can't understand why it takes so long to flip a switch in the exchange
Totally loving the new place more and more, and having no tv is strangely liberating
workie time for now though, sensing noodles might be in order for lunch or dinner
current mood: getting things done
current music: Spiritualized - I think I'm in love
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| Thursday, August 11th, 2005
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8:41 am
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I walked into work this morning in less time than it used to take to get the tube from sunny clapham. Cantered over tower bridge in the sunshine. I think today will be a good day
current mood: ready to work
current music: They Might be Giants - Birdhouse in your soul
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