#oneaday, Day 50: What Happens in Birmingham, Stays in Birmingham

Like a low-budget T-Pain, I’m on a bus. Well, technically a coach. The National Express of Divine Comedy fame, no less.

I’m on my way to Birmingham to meet up with Twittery-bloggy types @Bungiesgirl and @WhatGracieDid, which is all terribly exciting. Taking a previously-online-only friendship to that “next level” is always an exciting step, particularly if it means having a “mini-break” of sorts, to sound all Bridget Jones for a minute.

Birmingham has, on more than one occasion, been the venue for meetups such as this. In my years before Twitter, I used to contribute to the Times Education Supplement forums (and indeed met my wife there). Many active members of the TES community were in the area, so it was a good central place to meet.

One thing that always strikes me when going to places like Birmingham, though, is that I can’t imagine them being seen as “tourist” destinations, even though I’m sure plenty do flock to places other than London every year. Think about when you’re going on holiday—if you’re having a city break abroad, you’ll generally tell people that you’re going to Paris or Rome or New York or Toronto or wherever and people will know where you’re on about. I often wonder if people in other countries know any UK cities other than London.

“Oh yes,” they’d say. “We’re having our honeymoon in Birmingham.”

Well, firstly, there’s a marriage that’s going to get off to a rough start, and secondly, it just sounds strange. What is it that makes cities such as San Francisco, Berlin or Milan so special that they’re internationally known? Or is it just that living in a particular country causes you to take it for granted?

#oneaday, Day 41: Hotel Dusk, Dawn and Day

I love hotels. I’m not sure what it is about them, but if I have the opportunity to stay in a hotel, I always enjoy it. Perhaps it’s just the novelty value of “living” and sleeping somewhere different for a little while. Perhaps it’s the whole “being waited on” thing. Perhaps it’s the incessant politeness of the staff, even if you’re staying at a relatively low-key establishment. (Well, usually.)

I imagine that staying in a hotel semi-permanently in a sort of Alan Partridge manner would quickly get tiresome, but I do know that I certainly never tire of short breaks where I get to have a little place all to myself in relative privacy.

I think part of the appeal is wondering what goes on behind closed doors. The somewhat juvenile side of most people would probably be listening out for people having sex and giggling like an idiot, but it’s not just about catching people doing the dirty. Who are the people behind those doors? Why are they here? What possible reason brought them to the same place that you happened to be at the same time? Is there some dark purpose at work? Should you go and talk to them? (Probably not. And if you do, steer clear of the term “dark purpose” as it tends to freak people out.)

Another part of the appeal is the simple opportunity to sleep somewhere else. Your own bed sometimes gets boring. And while most beds follow the same sort of structure (flat bit to lie on, possibly with something to stop your head falling off at one end should you inadvertently decapitate yourself in the night) it’s remarkable how different some beds can feel from one another.

Take the bed in the hotel I’m currently in, for example. It’s pretty comfortable, and a lot “springier” than I’m used to. I got to sleep last night at a reasonable time and woke up early feeling pretty refreshed. Compare and contrast with my bed at home, in which I suffer from terrible insomnia and typically wake up some time around noon, possibly having woken up once around 7am, been unable to move except to text or tweet and then promptly passed out again. Is it just the bed that does this? Or is it other environmental factors? Probably a combination of all of them.

I look around a hotel room and it often makes me wonder about other guests. Are there other people staying in this hotel long enough to make actually using all the drawers and wardrobe space worthwhile? This specific one has bookshelves; does anyone turn up to a hotel with enough books to necessitate the use of bookshelves, particularly in this age of the Kindlenookreadotron? And why are hotels one of the few places left in the world that still have CRT TVs?

My delight at hotels even extends to virtual depictions of them. I vividly recall by far my favourite level of Duke Nukem 3D being the hotel level. And I enjoyed Hotel Dusk on DS a great deal, for obvious reasons. No One Lives Forever had an excellent hotel level that involved some very precarious rooftop sneaking, and although I still haven’t got around to beating Gabriel Knight 3, its initial setting of a hotel was appealing, even in all its low-poly anti-glory.

So hotels are great. A home away from home, surrounded by strangers. A place where you can be whoever you want to be for a few days, and no-one will know any different from the day you check in to the time you check out.

Just remember to hang the thing on the door if you’re planning on getting naked and the maids are doing their rounds, huh?

#oneaday, Day 328: Hi, America

Hai, America. You know, I’ve been looking at you for a while and I thought, you know, you’re kinda cool and I wondered if you’d, you know, like to hang out some time, maybe, and get a coffee or something. Cause, you know, I, like, think you’re pretty cool. And stuff.

I’m serious! I like your food. You sure know how to do a good breakfast. It’s a breakfast worth getting up for in the morning. Sure, a typically British bacon sandwich is all very well and good, but there’s little that can beat a stack of pancakes, some waffles, some French toast or indeed the wonder that is Eggs Benedict, which I discovered the other morning after spending the night with you.

You know what else? And this is going to sound a bit weird, ’cause I wonder how many people compliment you on this, but I think your bread is awesome. Sure, you can get fancy-pants bread from fancy-pants bakeries in the UK, but your everyday sort of bread, the sort that you make everyday toast and sandwiches from? That’s functional at best, dry and sawdusty at worst. You make me appreciate a good sandwich. And I like sandwiches at the best of times. But you make me appreciate them more. I like that.

You also seem to have the art of the takeaway down to a fine art. We Britons of Britainland believe that we are the masters of the Chinese and Indian takeaways, but I can honestly say that I think yours are better. Your Indian curries are creamy and smooth and delicious, and your Chinese meals are full of flavour and they come in those awesome little cardboard boxes with the lids that are a good shape to eat the food straight from with a pair of chopsticks, instead of those foil trays with the cardboard lids that are always way too hot to put on your lap.

Since we’re being honest here, I don’t like how you use the word “an” before words that start with an “h”, which isn’t a vowel, and you spell “aluminium” wrong, not to mention your seeming aversion to the letters “u” and “s”. Also, as our beloved comedian Eddie Izzard says, “herb” is pronounced “herb” because “there’s a fucking ‘H’ in it”.

But you know what? I don’t care. I can accept your flaws because they make you more colorful (see what I did there?) and interesting. I can accept that you use the word “momentarily” different to the way I do, and I think it’s charming. All your sweet, nutty bread and pancakes and Hollandaise sauce on eggs and love of good coffee and ability to put free Wi-Fi hotspots in places other than Starbucks just make me think that, you know, you’re pretty sort of kind of cool and I think it’d be, you know, nice if we could, um, spend a bit more time together. If you know what I mean.

#oneaday, Day 284: M25? More Like… Hell… 25?

There are many famous roads in the world. The Champs Elysees in Paris (or however you spell it… I have no idea where the accents go and also have no idea how to type accents on my netbook). That really dangerous road they drove along in Top Gear. Yungas Road. I knew that and totally didn’t Google it.

But there’s one road you won’t find in the tourist guides, but it’s a well-known road to British motorists. It’s a name which strikes fear into the heart of motorists from Land’s End to John O’Groats.

It is the M25, the Devil’s Road, also known as the London Orbital. For the uninitiated (or American) amongst you, this is a motorway (freeway) which runs around the perimeter of London (capital of England) and goes round and round and round and round. In theory, this sounds like fun. Who doesn’t like driving laps around things?

Unfortunately, the M25 is the single most frustrating road in all of Britain to drive on, largely due to the fact that despite it being (sometimes) one of the widest roads in Britain it is also one of the fullest. Particularly if they’re digging it up. Which they always are.

Couple this with the inexplicable “variable speed limit” section (“You must drive at 60! Now 50! Now 40! Now 60 again! Now 70! Go wild! Oh! 50! Got you! SPEED CAMERA.”) and you have a road which is infuriating, frustrating and capable of producing some of the most creative expletives on the planet.

Particularly if you drive on it at rush hour, as I did tonight. And Rush Hour on the M25 lasts for approximately six hundred years and features a time distortion allowing six hundred years to take place in the space of a single day. You could read War and Peace in the time it takes you to get from Heathrow Airport to Staines at rush hour.

So fuck the M25. Fuck it right in its stupid ass (somewhere around the Dartford Tunnel) and find another route. Seriously. If you need to go from somewhere north of London to somewhere that is in a different compass direction from London, then for God’s sake avoid the hell out of London. Because for all its good points, London and its surrounding suburbs hate cars. HATE them. They want them to die. And they think that everyone who drives a car should die too, or at least pay considerable amounts of money for the privilege of driving a car.

Which is probably for the best, given that without the various tolls and “congestion charges” in place, London would be more backed-up than an old, constipated man’s bowels. I mean, more than it is already.

This has been a Public Service Announcement on behalf of the Highways Agency, who also think you should fuck the M25 in its stupid ass, which is why they keep smacking it with hammers and diggers. In, you know, an attempt to, like, get at its ass. Or something.

I don’t know. A 2.5 hour journey took me nearly 6 hours tonight. So my brain is addled. I think it’s time to drink Cherry Coke and scrounge a satay chicken skewer. Good night!

#oneaday, Day 240: Making your Mark

It’s odd (and not a little morbid) to think about the things that you leave behind that people might remember you by. Those little marks you make on the world, whether they’re physical marks scrawled on a toilet door with permanent marker pen, mental marks left in the mind of people or now, technological marks, too.

There’ll always be a little trace of me left in Southampton thanks to largely-pointless but fun geotagging app Gowalla. When I first downloaded said app, there weren’t many people using it but I liked the idea of it. Go out, walk around, “collect” places. If nothing else, it was a nice way of building yourself your own custom tourist map of a place.

So on more than one occasion, I went out for a walk with the specific intention of creating a bunch of Spots around Southampton. This became something of an obsession, with the vast majority of Spots around the city centre being created by me. General way of telling: if it has a lengthy and slightly sarcastic description, or is the kind of thing you wouldn’t find on a typical tourist map (such as “The Pedestrian Crossing That Makes The Funny Noise”), it was probably created by me.

Now, as pointless as Gowalla is in many respects, there are many reasons why it’ll always hold a fond place in my heart. Firstly, as I say, it’s been my way to leave my mark on Southampton. I “found” these places and tagged them the way I wanted them to be tagged. This means that Greggs on East Street will forever be remembered as “fine dining for chavs”. At least until they realise and ask politely for the description to be changed. Which, let’s face it, they probably won’t.

But the second reason is that my wandering around, creating these spots, marking my territory (as it were… albeit with less piss than is usually implied by that phrase) caused me to meet one of my dearest friends from that city. She happened to use Gowalla, stumbled across some of my sarcastically-described Spots and decided that the person who tagged Greggs as such was someone she’d like to get to know better. So we progressed from stalking each other via Gowalla, to tracking each other down on Twitter, to chatting on Twitter, to finally meeting face to face. It was one of those random instances of chaos theory at work, where one little choice made slightly differently would have meant we’d never have met. And, given what was going on in my life at the time we met, and how much she helped me through that difficult time, that would have made things go very differently for me.

So I’m certainly glad that I’ve left a “mark” on a few places over time, be it physically, emotionally or technologically. Because you never know when those marks might lead to something great, even after you’re gone.

#oneaday, Day 232: The Big Smoke

I spent the day in London today. Primarily for a job interview, but I also had the good fortune to run into one George Kokoris and one Mitu Khandaker. Well, all right, we’d pre-arranged to meet. But “had the good fortune to run into” sounds so much nicer, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the actual reasons I was in London are fairly unimportant for the purposes of this entry. I want to talk about London itself.

London is simultaneously one of the most English places you can be, and one of the most un-English places you can be. Many people who come to visit England begin and end their visits with London. Many of them don’t even get outside the city limits of our capital. Which is fair enough; there’s plenty to see there, after all.

But the city has a unique character all of its own that isn’t replicated anywhere else in the whole country. Sure, there are other big cities, but none quite have the same feeling as London.

It’s a combination of things. Not all of them good. First of all, there’s the fact that everyone’s always in a hurry. Everyone has places to be, things to do and people to see that are far more important than whatever it is you’re up to at the time. As a result, God help you if you dare to stand on the left-hand side while you’re on an escalator or travelator, as you’ll probably end up with someone physically pushing you out of the way, as I witnessed happening to another person earlier. And it’s not as if charging down the escalators saves you any more than one or two seconds at most.

Then there’s the traffic. I have a complete phobia of driving in London. I’ve only done it once and have absolutely no intention of ever doing it again. I’m not sure entirely why that is. Again, it’s probably an aggression thing. See a light turn amber in preparation of going green and almost immediately horns start beeping and other drivers start getting impatient.

But on the flip side, there’s the curious little hideaways that the city offers. Just today, near Waterloo, we wandered down an innocuous and borderline scabby-looking side street only to come across a little row of three lovely restaurants bordered by some gorgeous trees and bushes. Stepping into this restaurant was like escaping reality for a little while. The noise of the city was gone, and we were in a land of Thai curries, Lionel Richie advertising Walkers crisps on the TV, and a selection of R&B and soul from the last twenty years. Most peculiar. And an experience that can’t be replicated easily anywhere else.

Somewhere else, somewhere near Regent Street (and I can’t remember where, so stop hassling me and stuff) there’s an awesome American barbecue and grill place that is pretty much a place where they give you an enormous plate of meat, some implements with which to eat it and the possibility of some bread and/or fries, and then it’s up to you how to deal with it.

Then there’s the theatres. Scattered around the place, there’s hundreds of shows to see, things to do, stuff to enjoy.

It’s a bombardment for the senses. And it’s utterly exhausting. But I think, today, I came to appreciate it a little for once. Perhaps it was sharing it with other people. Perhaps it was having a sense of purpose for being there. Or maybe it’s just one of those changes in my outlook. I couldn’t say.

Just remember, though, if you’re visiting England or the UK in general, we have a whole lot more to offer than that bustling metropolis!

#oneaday, Day 158: Executive Lounge

Day of firsts today. My first press trip. My first visit to a developer. My first bit of freelancing for a large and well-known video games website. My first trip business class.

Actually, “business class” might be stretching it a bit. Since FlyBe only appear to fly to Scotland in aircraft best described as sheds with wings, “business class” means you get to sit at the front. Oh, and you get a voucher for a free drink and a free snack. However, you don’t appear to get another coupon for the return trip.

You do, however, get to use the Executive Lounge, which offers moderately-comfortable seating and free food and drink. It’s quite nice. Yes, that’s “quite nice”. As in, if I’d had to pay for this trip myself, I wouldn’t have paid the extra.

Yes, this was also my first fully-expensed trip. Nice.

Anyway, I won’t be talking about the thing I went to see today, at least not until I have written the articles I have to write about it. But suffice to say it’s very good, the demo doesn’t really do it justice and it’s a hoot in multiplayer. So you should buy it when it eventually comes out in a couple of weeks.

My flight home has been delayed. This means extra time for free stuff. I’m just starting to feel a bit sleepy now so will probably get a brief bit of kip aboard the plane. Though I’m not counting on it.

#oneaday, Day 71: Token Entry

Will shortly be boarding my flight back to the UK so am posting something now to… well, have something posted, to be perfectly honest. Missing a day because I’m asleep over the Atlantic? Laaame.

I said pretty much everything I needed to say post-PAX yesterday but I’ll just reiterate that this was a supremely awesome time for everyone – yes, Sam, better than Kaos and a kebab – and I hope we can all do it again sometime very soon indeed. Maybe next time those people who weren’t able to cone this time will be able to join us too.

For now though, boarding will shortly call and my battery is low. So I will bid you all adieu and see you back on the wrong side of the Atlantic.

TRANSMISSION ENDS.

#oneaday, Day 67: Pre-Flight Checklist

[I appeared not to have published this at the time. Here it is, for what it’s worth.]

Well, I’m shortly off. I have the travel jitters. I’m not nervous about the journey itself – I’m quite happy travelling – but I have those last-minute jitters where you’re convinced you’ve forgotten something. And, being me, as my wife will take great delight in pointing out to you, I probably have forgotten something. But I have underpants, socks, T-shirts, shirts, jumpers, gloves, a scarf, a toothbrush, some deodorant, some shampoo, enough wires to make a terrorist blush, a Nintendo DS Fat (old-school fat, not XL), a Sony PSP, games for both, an iPhone, a Nikon DSLR camera (with its memory card in it), an Asus netbook, my travel documents – plane e-ticket, boarding pass, coach ticket to get to the airport in the first place (leaving in one hour), odd US security form, passport, details of where I’m actually staying, cash… Anything else?

If so, I’m going to have to live without it. Or pick one up there. Because I’m not packing anything else!

Currently syncing my iPhone (well, clearing some space on it, anyway) and then I do believe I’ll be ready to go. Even with time to pick up some breakfast on the way! How cool is that? It’s super-cool, that’s what it is.

Anyway, the next post on here will either come from Heathrow Airport (if I get bored) or Boston, MA. See you soon!

One A Day, Day 20: >LOOK

Hill Top

You stand atop a gently-rolling hill that is fairly featureless aside from a few bramble bushes, some small, dead-looking trees and, just next to you, a small stone monument.

There is a wooden bench here.

I’m in the Great Outdoors, specifically the New Forest, though the bit I’m in right now isn’t very foresty. After the week that was, the peace and solitude is just lovely. There are very few people here, and the ones that are here are the type of people who politely say “hello” to you as you pass, even though you’ve never met them before. They also have dogs with names like Gladstone and Horatio.

It’s striking to me, sitting here now, just as it was when I went to Lepe Beach to take those photos the other day, that there isn’t a game out there yet which has got “the great outdoors” right. Games like Oblivion, World of Warcraft and numerous other open-world adventures and RPGs have tried, but none quite capture this feeling of peace and solitude. (Perhaps because wherever you are in an RPG world, you’re only ever a stone’s throw from something that wants to kill you.)

Actually, to say that no games have pulled this off is inaccurate. The games that do it best are interactive fiction titles, they of the complete lack of graphics and the only minimum system requirement being an imagination that still works.

Up here, I’m particularly reminded of Andrew Plotkin’s “A Change In The Weather”, the only game I know of where your final confrontation is with a thunderstorm. Of course, right now it doesn’t look like I’m going to have to race against time to prevent a rickety old bridge from being washed away, but the atmosphere is the same. Peace. Quiet. No-one but you. And definitely no needy, whining, squabbling children, stick-up-their-arse inspectors or faux-concern headteachers.

Sitting here, you can say “sod off” to the world, and no-one can do a damn thing about it.