Stray Mailer - 17/3/03

That sound you can hear is Hardy watching the footy
on the cable tv in the living room, while Ross is
probably pottering with any of his five computers
as he sets up the apartment's local area network.
I'm in here tapping away on the broadband Internet
connection and listening to the student radio
station back in Christchurch through their webcast.
This is my new flat, in Edinburgh. An old stone
tenement right next to a huge park pretty much in
the center of town. Soon Hardy'll swap places with
Adine, an Irish girl, and I'll quietly murder the
cable tv.

I was in yet another antiwar march last week. Yeah
yeah, blah blah. But I swear to god, at one point a
traffic light turned red, and we stopped, and a pro
Palestinian march crossed in front of us, and then
the light turned green and we moved off again.

There's something wrong with Ireland, and it's only
really apparent when you compare it to Scotland. If
you have an Irish employer they're going to be
completely psychotic, or a landlord, or almost
anyone behind a shop counter. They have the 'well I
sure showed him' gene, whereby to give anybody any
slack, ie customer service, makes them feel weak.
But the Scots, Jesus Christ, woe behold you if you
pull out a map in Edinburgh coz you're going to be
beating the buggers off with a stick as they rush
to see if you need help.
Even the beggars and children are ok, in Ireland I
felt like either group would quite happily stab me
for fun if they thought no one was watching.
Ireland is sometimes called the Italy of the north,
because the people are meant to be fairly laid
back, but by all accounts that was referring to ten
years ago, before they got a little bit of money
and went completely silly.
But damn the west coast is beautiful.
And a large fraction of the best people I've ever
met were there.

And yet Ireland has the good reputation.
Scotland's where it's at. Come to Scotland.

Edinburgh is now my favorite city on earth. It's
compact and funky like Wellington, architectural
like Prague, floral as Christchurch, cozy like
Galway, and cheap like London (in the sense that
things like groceries and transport don't cost much
but rent and going out will require a second and
third mortgage, respectively.) And you can
definitely tell that Dunedin is it's sister city.
The locals have the same problem as the Dutch in
Amsterdam tho, huge flowthrough foreign population.
Not quite as much as Hamsterdamage's sixty percent,
but high enough that if you randomly stop people on
the street to ask directions, as I've had to do
many many times, you'll get nothing but apologies
for not being local.
The only two annoying things I've noticed so far is
that one: clusters of streets will all have the
same name, ie stockbridge road, stockbridge street,
stockbridge avenue all joining off each other in
the suburb of stockbridge. And two: landlords here
refuse to pay rates, so the tenants have to. Which
as I say, makes the rents a little steep.
And you hear car horns a lot, but it's only ever
someone beeping hello to their mates as they drive
past.

A while back my sensei smashed my head into a
hardwood floor with his knee and made my ear a
little infected.
Just before I left Aussie that infection, which
flares up every couple of years, but only in
Australia for some reason, spread to my tonsils.
This I fought off by gargling salt water, colloidal
silver and vodka, separately, and so the bug
retreated into my sinuses and entrenched itself in
my eyeballs.
There's a time and a place for western medicine.
In Ireland (Christ, I've got to start bitching
about America again, controlling myself on that has
just made me switch to paying out Ireland, very
undeservedly) In Ireland I was looking at paying
maybe eighty euro to see a doctor and getting some
antibiotics, or about nz$160. Here it cost me six
quid for the script and the checkup was free.
But the stuff I got consists mainly of wool fat and
kerosene - I shit you not - which means it's
insoluble with water, so rather than drops it's a
kind of . glue, and the only way for me to apply it
is to smear some on my finger and poke myself in
the eye.
Yes, even more fun than it sounds.
And then they have the nerve to say 'for external
use only.'
This tube is going to last me at least a year, and
you musn't ever ever not complete a course of
antibiotics. It's amazing after twice daily eye
pokings how sensitive my eyeballs now aren't.
That'll be helpful when I get my goat's eye contact
lenses.

Last year the fifteen years and running Beltane
festival, celebrating the transition into spring,
drew a crowd of over fifteen thousand. This year
the council has decided not to support it anymore
and they're facing the same insurance hassles as
the rest of us, and I'm going to be in it.
It's a shame that more of the little operations
around the world that are being put out of
commission by public liability insurance don't
choose to go the way Beltane will this year, and
keep operating, completely outside the law.
I'm not sure if I can or should say too much about
what's planned, because to date it largely isn't,
yet, but from some of the ideas put forward and
from watching the video of last year, I'm looking
forward to something completely hysterically
insane.
I'm in Fire Point, one of (five?) elemental points
that the (May Queen?) and her procession pass
through to symbolize the passage through the
underworld and out of winter. Definitely the best
point to be on, coz we get to play with fire. My
other choice was to be a Blue Man, who beat the
crowd and performers with sticks, for their own
protection. But with no crowd this year.
I was thinking that for my costume I'd make myself
some flame retardant brown furry pants with a
little bob tail; get some cloven boots and a pair
of little horns, and some goat's eye contact
lenses, if I can find them.
Fun fun fun.

See, I've got time for all this coz I still aint
got no job. I finished my portfolio cdrom today and
tomorrow I'll push my way into every single
graphicy place in greater Edinburgh and hit them up
for some employment.
Furry pants aint free, and I've less than a pound
in my pocket. Which I borrowed.

I went to a weekly car boot sale that takes up a
whole floor of a car parking building and got
myself a bowl, a duvet, the lion the witch and the
wardrobe for a total of 85p.
Felt like I was in Russia.


Mmmmmm, life is good. Cool flat, good friends
(wherever you are, you know who you are), beautiful
city, good music (I've downloaded about thirty
hours of mp3s so far), no money but that's ok, free
trains, and I'm finding that the shorter I make my
fire staff the better I am with it, to the point
where I'm thinking up one that actually takes up
less space than the flame coming off it. If I can
somehow make one of zero length I'll theoretically
pass through every point in the universe
simultaneously and become god.

Daniel.