#oneaday Day 730: Foreigner

We fly home from the US of A tomorrrow. It's been a good trip but over far too quickly for my liking. Still, it will be nice to sleep in our own bed again, as the sofa bed we've been kipping on all week isn't the most comfortable thing in the world, to say the least. That and the idiosyncratic heating in the room we're in having two settings: "hot as the sun" and "freeze your balls off".

As much as I like America, though, it will be nice to get back to "normality", I guess. Haven't quite adjusted to the time change while we've been here, so going back home is going to be interesting. Either I'll be able to sleep normally, or I'll have to endure the mild annoyance of a completely screwed up body clock again. We'll have to wait and see.

Mostly, though, it will be nice to feel like I'm in my "home" country again. America is superficially similar to the UK in many ways (only a bit bigger) but every so often you're reminded that you are a foreigner in a strange land.

Try to find prepacked sandwiches in a supermarket, for example. Or decipher a menu at a Mexican restaurant. Or remember what the different types of eggs you can order at breakfast are (hint: it's not "boiled, fried, poached and scrambled". Or have a discussion about a kid's grade point average. Or… Well, I could go on. But I won't.

It's actually pretty interesting to see quite how different two cultures which speak the same language can end up. You say "tomato", I say "why are you shouting out names of fruit?", that sort of thing.

I'm sure you get used to it after a while living here. Perhaps one day I'll have the opportunity to get used to it for myself.

Dream on, eh?

#oneaday Day 124: Landmark

It's quite amazing what you find right under your own nose sometime. No, I'm not talking about that disgusting green mucous that dribbled forth from your nostrils when you had that really hot chilli earlier. I'm talking about the cool stuff in the place where you live — or in the places near where you live — that you completely ignore because, well, they're right there and therefore you take them for granted.

I'm specifically referring to London which, if you're paying attention, you'll know I'm currently sitting in. London is full of Awesome Stuff, yet if you work here, or spend most of your visits to our nation's illustrious capital hunting down job interviews, yelling into a mobile phone or attempting to cross the entire city without leaving a Pret A Manger for more than two minutes then you probably won't notice them.

I went to the Tower of London today. Yes, the one with the ravens and the executions and all that stuff. It's an impressive structure, and properly interesting to wander around inside, if only because it's a very old castle that is pretty much completely intact, although they don't chop people's heads off there any more. The Crown Jewels are pretty impressive, too — very sparkly, though a bit too bling for everyday wear, to be honest. And the coronation robe looks a bit like a pair of curtains.

The guided tour around the place — a thing I normally hate with a passion, as you inevitably get stuck behind a sweaty German tourist who is sixteen feet taller than you, has a chronic flatulence problem and no sense of personal space — was highly entertaining thanks to the Yeoman's sense of humour and entertaining mannerisms. He made the stories about various people having their heads chopped off interesting, and gave some interesting context to the relics and antiquities on display in the museumy parts of the tower.

From the equipment on display, we can conjecture that all previous Kings of England were tanking classes, thanks to their heavy plate armour, though many later monarchs favoured the flintlock pistol, including one absolutely massive one that must have been about eight feet long, thereby disqualifying itself from the "pistol" category somewhat.

Interestingly, there was also a P-90 "Personal Defense Weapon", last seen in GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 — and in StarGate, apparently. Oh, and a gold-plated sub-machine gun. And a jewel-encrusted pistol that was actually a working thing, confiscated by the police. Kind of awesome, even if it did actually kill someone.

So anyway, this rambling does have a point: if you live somewhere with something awesome (or near somewhere with something awesome) then for God's sake go and visit it. It's famous for a reason.

#oneaday Day 123: Going Underground

The London Underground is, like most subterranean metro systems, something of a mixed blessing. It allows you to quickly and easily traverse London without having to take your own life into your hands every time you cross a road, but sometimes I wonder if the very nature of the transport system makes it less efficient than it perhaps could be.

Take my journey to where I am right now, for example. (In a hotel overlooking Tower Bridge.) I had to catch a Circle Line train from Kings Cross to get here. In order to get from the platform where my train arrived into Kings Cross to the platform where Circle Line trains departed from, I had to walk for a good 10-15 minutes, including up and down a few sets of stairs and through a labyrinthine series of corridors that the Minotaur would be proud of.

It gets worse if you have to change lines somewhere. Not only do you have to walk all the way to the platform, you then have to get off and walk for another 10-15 minutes to get to the other line in the station, which is inevitably a very long distance away, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Earth.

And then when you poke your head back out above ground, you realise that the fifteen stops you've taken have actually caused you to travel less than a mile, and that you can still see your starting point from where you are sitting right now.

Despite all this, though, I kind of like travelling on the Underground. It presents a curious assault on the senses, the likes of which you don't get anywhere else. There's the smell, for one thing — and I'm not talking about the pissy scent of a tramp who has collapsed, possibly dead, somewhere in the station. I'm talking about that strange smell you get near the platforms. I have no idea what it is, and it's probably something unpleasant, but I kind of like it.

Then there's the sound. Underground trains make great noises. From the vwwwwoooooooo they make when they're moving to the clackity-clack of running over bumpy bits in the track (fear my technical knowhow of how the rail systems of this country work) to the unnecessarily plummy voice of the automated announcement system, there's a great combination of sounds.

Plus, if you ever get bored waiting for a train, you can always play the Which Rat Is Going To Get Electrocuted First game, the rules of which I probably don't need to explain.

#oneaday Day 72: Jam on Toast

The tail-lights of the cars in front of you brighten as they apply the brakes. Your collective speed drops. There seem to be an awful lot more cars around than there were a moment ago, and a few trucks, too. Your heart sinks.

Yes, you're entering a traffic jam.

At this point, you will do one (or more) of several things. You may suddenly wonder if you have enough music to cover the entire period this eventuality may cover. You may consider phoning someone at your destination to let them know you're likely to be late. You may decide that no, this jam couldn't possibly last for very long because it appeared out of nowhere, so there's no need to phone ahead, because you left the house with plenty of time to spare just in case this happened. You may emit a string of incredibly loud and offensive swearwords—this is considerably more likely if you're in the car by yourself and/or are an extrovert/sufferer of Tourette's.

Then you see the electronic signs warning you of the "recommended" speeds (or, if you're on the M25, the actual variable speed limit which you can be pulled over and/or caught on speed camera for.) You see it and you figure that hey, 40 mph may not be quick, but at least it's moving, right?

Wrong. What they don't tell you is that the "recommended" speeds are actually a cunningly disguised secret code. Fortunately, I have cracked it.

20mph – You ain't going anywhere for at least an hour and probably more like three hours, plus.
40mph – You will move, but very slowly. You will be lucky to break 20mph.
60mph – You will move at a relatively comfortable speed but will be lucky to break 40mph and will often have to brake suddenly for no apparent reason.
End of speed limit – Theoretically, you are allowed to drive at full speed now, but the volume of traffic coming out of the jam means that this will be very difficult to achieve for at least another half an hour.

People have developed various coping mechanisms in order to deal with the stress and frustration of traffic jams. You could shout and swear some more. You could turn your music up. If you're a Mercedes driver, you could weave in and out of lanes in an attempt to get as far forward as possible. And if you're an asshole, you could use the hard shoulder and/or filter lanes for junctions to "jump the queue" and get as far forward as possible by barging in. But if you do this, you deserve to be scooped up by a gigantic super-powerful electromagnet (which picks your car up, obviously, not you, unless you're a robot) and fed to an ant-eater which has been inflated to unnatural proportions via the ethically questionable misuse of SCIENCE! and which has developed a taste for cars—so much so that the giant form of the ant-eater has in fact been re-dubbed the car-eater.

So yeah. Don't do that. Sit and wait patiently. Because ultimately, no amount of screaming, shouting, swearing, lane-weaving or driving like a dick is going to affect the fact that there are hundreds of cars stuck in place, just like you. And until the day when all cars have a button that allows them to take off and fly away like the DeLorean in Back to the Future (when, if you think about it, we won't really need roads at all any more) there's nothing you can do about it.

So sit. Wait. Suffer with the rest of us.

#oneaday Day 58: Things To Do in a Traffic Jam

I like driving. It's fun. Whether you're negotiating twisty-turny country lanes, putting your foot to the floor on a motorway or simply contemplating the fact that you're actually sitting in a chair that is moving at 70 miles per hour (seriously, that's pretty mind-boggling when you consider the speed the other chairs in your life don't move at) driving is, for the most part, a pleasurable experience for those who enjoy using cars for the purpose they were designed for. (Obviously those who don't like driving or are scared of it are exempt from the above.)

There's one thing sure to spoil any nice drive, though: a traffic jam. They're a pain in the arse whether they come in the form of backed-up traffic over a narrow hump-backed bridge due to a lost sheep standing bewildered in the middle of a single-track road, gridlock in a town centre or one of those inexplicable jams that form on a motorway, force everyone to sit stationary for approximately 500 years then start moving again with absolutely no trace of whatever caused the jam at the front of it.

So that's why it's important to have a repertoire of entertainment ready. Those of you with kids will have probably played I-Spy to death. But you don't always have kids with you, and indeed sometimes you're all by yourself. So here is a selection of Things to Do in a Traffic Jam, with some suitable for solo play, others suitable for a party of disgruntled passengers to join in with.

Rev-Counter Roulette

Players: 1-car capacity
Traffic speed: Stationary
Danger level: Mild peril

Put your car in neutral or at the very least, push the clutch all the way down. Players take a moment to place their bets from 1-whatever your rev counter goes up to. (Obviously you need a rev counter to play this.) When everyone has placed a bet, quickly press the accelerator pedal as hard as you like (or not). Whoever bet the closest to the highest point your rev counter reached wins and gets a travel sweet and/or the opportunity to punch everyone else in the face.

Gangster Trip-Meter

Players: 1-car capacity
Traffic speed: Slow to moderate
Danger level: None

Agree a timeframe appropriate for the speed of the traffic. If it is moving a bit, five minutes. If it is going very slowly, perhaps ten minutes. Set your car's trip meter to zero and set a timer for the timeframe you decided. Place bets on what the trip meter will read at the end of the timeframe. Whoever bet the closest to the final result wins.

Optional rule: whoever bet furthest away from the final result has to remove an item of clothing, which makes the following game much more interesting if it's cold.

Master of Elements

Players: 1-car capacity
Traffic speed: Any
Danger level: Slim to none

Depending on the ambient temperature, set the car's heating system to whatever will be most uncomfortable and turn the fan up to full. If it's very cold, you may also wish to open all the windows. The first person to complain that it's too hot/too cold/too windy is the loser and gets ridiculed by everyone else and/or punched in the face.

Optional rule: Strip rules may also be added to this game. Depending on the temperature, this may be a benefit or a handicap.

Frogger

Players: 1
Traffic speed: Slow to moderate
Danger level: Moderate

Set yourself a time limit appropriate for the amount of traffic and the speed it is moving. For heavy and/or stationary traffic, use a longer time limit. In the time limit attempt to change lanes from the inside to the outside lane as many times as possible.

Warning: Playing this game will cause most other members of the traffic jam to think you are a complete dick. If you are driving a BMW or Mercedes, you can play this game without fear, as people will expect you to be driving like that anyway.

The World's Slowest Drag Race

Players: 1
Traffic speed: Slow to moderate
Danger level: Mild peril

Set yourself a time limit and choose a target in another lane. Don't choose a BMW or Mercedes, or anyone who is obviously playing Frogger, because they'll change lanes a lot. Start the clock and see who is further ahead at the end of the time limit.

If you're driving in convoy with other people, you can play this with the other convoy members. Passengers in the losing car have to perform forfeits such as getting their bums out.

#oneaday, Day 54: Travels of an Angry Jedi - Brick Lane

London is a city of many surprises. A lot of them are "oh, this part of our illustrious capital is a shithole", but surprises nonetheless. Today's excursion was no exception.

Following an event I attended which I can't talk about (yet) we were recommended to head to an area called "Brick Lane", with the assurance that "if you like curry, you can't go far wrong". I like curry, so it seemed like a sensible choice.

I wasn't ready for what our party was confronted with. Imagine, if you will, the Las Vegas Strip. Now imagine the street is only one car-width wide and one-way. Now, instead of casinos and strip clubs, imagine every single establishment on the street is a curry house. Now, instead of people in fancy uniforms looking for valet parking and/or prostitution business, imagine every establishment has at least one overly aggressive Asian gentleman outside offering increasingly ridiculous deals in order to get you to frequent his establishment. (The best we heard was 2 free drinks and a 95% discount, which led us to believe that even breathing in the food's fumes would lead to immediate food poisoning.)

It was quite an experience, the likes of which I've never seen anywhere else. The whole street was lit up like a red light district, with curry houses hawking their wares with increasingly outlandish neon displays the further down the street you went.

I've only gone and forgotten the name of the place we ate at, but it was quite good. We were recommended by someone who knew Brick Lane's idiosyncrasies to look out for two things: restaurants that were full, and restaurants that didn't have anyone hawking their wares outside. Sadly the latter was impossible as every place had someone outside badgering people with crazy deals and discounts that I doubt very much they would have honoured come bill-paying time. But the one we picked was pretty full the whole time we were there.

The toilets smelled absolutely awful, though, like a fetid stench-pit from the very bowels of Hell. Fortunately you couldn't smell them from the eating area. Probably for the best.

So there's your tourist attraction of the day. In London? Like curry? Don't mind being harassed by what are essentially curry-pimps? Then Brick Lane is for you.

#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!