Dag 1687: A day in the life of an explorer

I decided to spend this Bank Holiday monday doing a bit of exploring. Specifically I decided it would be a good idea to try an find a new species of caterpiller.

So, after many hours of dedicated exploring in extremely difficult and dangerous terrain, I finally came upon that elusive new species I had been dedicating my whole life to finding.

I had brought my collection of scientific instruments with me so I was able to photograph and take full measurments of the specimin I had tracked down. As can be seen, this is, to date, the largest caterpiller ever found.

The specimum is over 6 and a half inches long

As I journeyed further into the wilderness I found an even larger one eating a small tree.

I had to move on quickly after taking this in case I was attacked!

Based on my calculations this caterpiller will most likely turn into a new giant species of butterfly with a wingspan of at least 3 feet. It will feed on medium sized mammals, such as dogs and cats, and it will also be poisonous. In fact the entire nation could well be wiped out before the end of the year.

So be afraid, be very afraid.

But don't have nightmares.

Dag 1637: It's That Time Of Year Again

Yes that's right, it is the season where most (if not all) of the British Minimal Synth Societies have their annual conferences and social get togethers.

So last Wedneasday members of the Harrogate Outlying Villages Minimal Synth Society descended on Blackpool for a short meeting followed by the rest of the afternoon free at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.



Yet again, we had a 100% member turnout, which was fantastic to see and just goes to show how populer this musical genre is becoming in the UK.

Dag 1379: ...a dot in the shark

Close to me, Sweden 2001

dag 1218: I wish I was here

Just back from my latest trip to the land of the midnight crayfish so here is the low-down.

You may remember that last year, and also each of the previous years, I had problems that almost, but not quite, caused me to miss the flight so this year I though I would take precautions. Rather than risk getting stuck in traffic I thought it would be a good idea to spend the night before the trip in one of those hotels that provide parking into the cost of your room. That way it wouldn't cost much more than the parking at the airport and we would be able to get to the airport earlier than usual without having to get up quite so early as usual. What a plan - you get benefits from both ends and it doesn't even cost too much. How could anything to wrong?


I had never used one of these stay and park hotels before so I didn't really know how they worked so I did a bit of investigative journalism first. It seems there are a number of different option depending on the hotel chosen. Some let you park on their site while you are away, while others arrange for you to park at the airport, but the cost is met by the hotel. Some take your car off you when you check in to the hotel and you don't see it again until your return. This last one wasn't any good for me as I wanted to be able to leave our dirty closes from the day we checked in in the car so we didn't need to take them to Sweden in our luggage.

I managed to find a website that searched all the hotels around Manchester airport so I entered the date of the night we wanted to stay and it came back with a choice of 3 hotels. One of them was 10 miles from the airport and didn't look very nice in the picture, another one was not as far away and was called a "county house" hotel and had a nice looking photo of the exterior. The final one didn't have a picture, but sounded ok and was in the same hotel group as the country house one. After thinking about it for a bit and discussion it with other interested parties the general consensus was that the country house one sounded the best bet. There was a coach that would take us to the airport and bring us back and I was sure the parking would be nice and secure and away from dodgy areas if it was in the grounds of a country house hotel.

Unfortunately by the time we tried to book the country house hotel was booked up so we looked a bit more into their sister hotel, which was actually only 3 miles from the airport so a much closer location. The website for this hotel didn't have a picture of the hotel exterior, but it had some interior shots and it looked very nice inside. There was no mention of how frequent the coach journeys were, but as the hotel was so close to the airport it looked like the journey wouldn't be much more that around 10 minutes so we should be able to get up at a decent hour and get to the airport with plenty of time to check in and get some breakfast before boarding the flight. So we booked the room and everything was ready to go.

If you read last years report you will know that a few days before the flight out the booking I had made disappeared off the website and when we got to the check in desk we found we didn't actually have a booking. I didn't want this to happen again so I checked the website each day leading up to our day of departure and the booking showed up each time so it looked like that was all ok, so what could go wrong?

The only other thing I could think of would be that I would forget to take something important. There weren't many things I needed to remember and the full list was:
Swedish money - I had some left over from before and had managed to accumulate more at Christmas and my birthday.
Passports - Obviously we wouldn't get very far without these.
Directions to the airport hotel - just to be sure as I had no idea where it was.
Flight booking reference number - just in case the booking ended up getting lost at the very last minute.
Vouchers - SAS had sent us some vouchers for free food and drinks on the plane (very nice of them).
Bulbs - we needed to buy some replacement light bulbs for a light we had bought in Sweden.
Camera charger - last year I forgot this so couldn't take as many photos as I wanted to.
Disk case - containing a selection of DVDs to watch in the hotel room.

We had bought the light about 6 years ago. It was a flat board with about 20 tiny bulbs in it that hangs on the wall and , I may add, looks really rather nice and quite unusual. It came with a load of spare bulbs, but as I hadn't thought to remove the ones that were already fitted before packing it in the suitcase, they had all been squashed and destroyed during the flight home. I had, therefore, had to fit almost all the spare bulbs the first time we used it. So the following year on our trip to Stockholm I had needed to buy some more spare bulbs from the shop were we bought it. They only had about 10 spare bulbs as they had stopped selling that particular light so I just bought all the ones they had. Since then the bulbs had gradually failed and been replaced. Each year I had tried to find more, but never managed it. We even tried to get a local electrical company to see if they could get hold of them, but they failed to locate them anywhere. About a month before this trip we had to use our final spare bulb - if any failed now we wouldn't be able to replace them. About 2 weeks before the trip another bulb failed and a week before a second bulb failed. I still had the packet from the spare bulbs so I needed to make sure I took it along with one of the dud bulbs to make sure we could get some more spare ones. I kept reminding myself each night when I looked at the light that I need to get the bulb packet and a spare bulb and pack them carefully and take them with me.

As we got nearer the trip I began to fell a little uneasy. I couldn't really put my finger on what was causing this unease, but I remember mentioning it in an email to the proprietor of Cloudhands at some point.

The day of departure finally arrived. I was to travel to work in Leeds by train and would be picked up after work so I could drive straight to the hotel. We needed to get there as quickly as possible so the kids, especially the youngest, didn't have to wait too late for their dinner.

About half an hour before I was due to be collected I call a call to say that my wife thought she had forgotten to pack the DVDs. It wasn't the end of the world, but I nipped out of the office to see if I could find anything decent and cheap in Virgin. I managed to get a copy of series 1 of New Tricks for a reasonable price, which was good as we had only started watching this program in its second series and had been really enjoying series 3. So far all was OK.

I got picked up around an hour later than originally planned so I needed to put my foot down. The journey was pretty fast and smooth and we soon found the hotel quite easily.

When it came into site I realised why there was no photo of it on the website - it looked like some ageing concrete clad tower block in much need of knocking down. As we unloaded the car I noticed a group of about 6 hoodies on bikes watching us and didn't have a very good feeling about the place at all. Still there was nothing much we could do about it so we want inside to check in. There was 1 person at the desk and a queue of people waiting to check in. I looked around the lobby and into the bar area and restaurant and noticed that everything looked old and in need of replacement. Eventually we got checked in and I was asked to move my car up a ramp into their car park once we had got our stuff sorted out in the room. We went up in the lift and found our room. The photos of the rooms on their website looked clean, bright and newly decorated. Our room looked dirty, dark and very much in need of a complete redecoration including new carpets and new furniture. The room was also unbearably hot. The double bed looked about 2 inches wider than a single bed and the kids bunk bed looked home made.

I went down to move the car and also find out about the frequency of transfer couches. There was sill a queue at reception so I went to move the car first. I drove up the ramp and looked for a space. I found one and noticed that there were signs all over the place stating that this is not a security car park and people should not leave anything inside their cars. This is something that wasn't mentioned on their website (or at least if it was I hadn't spotted it).

Back in the hotel I saw more signs warning people not to leave anything in their cars and was given a coach schedule. It seemed that the coaches only leave once each hour and take 45 minute to get to the airport. This seemed a bit strange when the airport was only 3 miles sway, but then I realised that the coach goes to the airport via the country house hotel that belongs to this chain, which happens to be further away than our hotel.

By this time I was wishing we had managed to get a room at the country house hotel. I noticed a big sign advertising the hotel as a suitable venue for wedding receptions and I wondered who would ever consider having a wedding reception here.

Looking at the coach timetable I realised that we would have to get up at 06:00 the following morning in order to be ready to catch the coach that would get us to the airport at around 08:15. We may as well have stayed at home and driven in the following morning as we were still going to have to get up really early and we would have had to sleep in this dump.

The night was hot and hardly anyone got much sleep and we were all pretty much shattered when we finally got ready the next morning.

There were quite a few other groups of people waiting for the same coach as us so it took quite a while to load it up, and then we set off for the country house hotel. The coach turned down the drive and I noticed that there were cars parked on every available bit of verge and grassy area. One of the first cars I noticed had its front side window smashed. I was beginning to feel a bit relieved that we hadn't managed to get a room in this hotel. There were even more people waiting for the coach here than at our hotel so it was some time before we set off for the airport and the coach was now full. We then had to wait for the drop offs at each of the terminals and, of course, it stopped at our terminal last. I found a trolley, piled all our cases on and headed of for the SAS check in desk. The airport seemed crowded and when we got to the familiar location of the SAS check in desks we found that they were no longer SAS, but some budget airline. I pushed the trolley into the main check in desk area with a growing fear that maybe SAS had changed terminals since our last trip, but fortunately I found their desks round the corner. They didn't seem to have as many as they used to have. I wondered if this was due to the increasing market share of the budget airlines encroaching into the traditional airlines market.

There was quite a queue at the desks but fortunately my SAS Eurobonus gold status had been extended for an extra year so we managed to get checked in nice and quickly with none of the problems we had last year.

We then headed down to the passport control where we saw lots of people chucking bottles of water into big plastic bins. We had brought 3 large bottles for the kids and so these went on the bins with everyone else's. We were told we could buy more once we got through passport control, which no doubt would cost at least double what we had paid for these ones - what a waste of money.

Once we got to the x-ray machines the jar of baby food we had brought with us was packed so we had to open that and eat some, presumably to prove it wasn't poisoned. They then told us that the bottle of perfume in the bag would have to be thrown out. This was almost full and had cost about £50. It was quite obvious it was perfume as you could spray it and smell it, but for some reason it was not allowed on board so in the bin it went. I had forgotten about these newly introduced security measures that were introduced just before we went to Spain last year. Personally I fail to see what good these new restrictions do. We could quite easily have drunk from each water bottle to prove it was Ok and spraying the perfume onto our skin and allowing the guard to smell it quite easily proves what it's contents are.

Once all this was over at last it was our chance to get some breakfast, or at least that was the plan. All of the tables were occupied and there was a large number of people balancing trays loaded with breakfast walking round hoping they could catch somebody about to leave and grab their table. We queued up for ages bought some over priced breakfasts containing under cooked bacon and joined the seat searchers. We managed to find one and ate our now cold breakfasts. We had also brought some replacement bottles of water, but in the rush to try and get finished quickly to enable somebody else to have our table we managed to leave them only realising once we had boarded the plane.

So we hadn't had the same troubles as last year, but we still boarded the flight feeling pretty stressed, although as before once we got up in the air the stress began to go. Freddy slept for the whole flight and the other 2 kids kept themselves quiet and busy so we could have a glass of champagne and make a start on reading Prime Time by Liza Marklund.

As we touched down in Arlanda Airport I was feeling pretty contented. I would be spending the next 6 days in Sweden. I knew the time would fly by but just now at that time it was the beginning so I had it all to look forward to.

A couple of Swedish Birds

Dag 959: Andalucía when will I see you?

When it is snowing out again.

I have recently returned from my annual trip to the Spanish Lourdes, which explains why there has been a distinct lack of postings on the old Critical Mass for a while.

A week before I flew out it was announced on the news that due to a foiled terrorist plot people would no longer be allowed to take hand luggage on board flights into and out of the UK. Instead they would only be allowed to take tickets, passports and money provided it was in a clear plastic bag. We were informed that this was likely to stay in place for some time. To me, it seemed like a knee jerk reaction that would do little to alter the likelihood that any particular plane might get attacked, but would most likely cause a lot of distress to many passengers; who could end up having things they would normally have taken in their hand luggage stolen from their suitcase after checking them in.

I spent the next few days posting letters of complaint to the BBC “have your say” topic about the new security restrictions. I would normally put a link in at this point, but this particular “have your say” topic has disappeared from the BBC website for some reason.

Anyway, by the time I came to travel the restrictions had been reduced to something a bit more sensible and I was able to take my laptop in my hand luggage and the plane didn't get blown up and all was well with the world. Apart from the fact that I left my zip up sweat shirt in the overhead locker due to the stresses involved with making sure we didn’t forget everyone else’s zip up sweatshirts and other belongings.

Booking the hire car had been a bit of a balancing exercise. We would have a lot of luggage so needed to fit all that in for the 2 trips between the airport and the apartment, but apart from that the car would be little used and a small one would fit us all nicely. I could have rented a Clio for about £200 pounds or a Ford Focus for about £260. So, did I want to pay an extra £60 in order to have a less stressful time packing the car on 2 short trips? I decided not, so I went for the Clio.

On arrival we were actually given a Fiat Punto and upon locating it we noticed a man trying to pack his luggage into a Ford Focus in the parking bay next to us. He was complaining that he had a Ford Focus at home and had got all his luggage into it with no problems on the way to the airport, but it wouldn't fit into this one. Each time I have visited Spain I have been surprised that the boot space in my hire car has seemed smaller than I would have expected it to be. My theory is that hire cars in Spain are actually built with smaller boots that the same car would have if it was not destined to be a Spanish hire car. So far I have seen no evidence to refute my theory so it must be right. I had the usual stresses trying to get all of the luggage into the car again, but as always, I finally managed to squash it all in. All of the passengers did, however, end up with various bits of luggage and push chairs etc. on their laps. But 20 minutes later, after turning left at the BMW garage, going under the cable cars and past the lighthouse, we were parked outside the apartment and we didn't need to worry about packing the car again for another 2 weeks and a day.

Once the car was unpacked and the electricity, gas and water turned on we always go en masse to the supermarket to do our main shop of the holiday (after that I just go on my own each morning to get what we need for the day). I always like shopping in foreign supermarkets so this first supermarket trip always gets me a little giddy. One of the things I notice while in Spain is how we get ripped off in the UK with the cost of cans of pop. A can of Sprite at home tends to cost 50p or higher. In the Spanish supermarkets they cost 31 Euro cents each. That is around half the price we pay. Also while we are on the subject of Sprite I should also add that Sprite bought in Spain tastes different to Sprite bought in the UK. They both taste good, but the Spanish version tastes better than good. The first time I ever saw Sprite was on a school trip to Athens and I really liked it. When it became available in the UK some years later I started drinking it, but it never seemed to taste quite so good as it had in Greece. I guess they must have changed to formula of it in the UK to make it taste more like what us Brits think lemonade should taste like. Well, personally I would rather they didn't do things like that. If a drink that used to only be available in other countries is introduced to the UK it should be left exactly the same as it was in the original country. If they want to change the taste, they should give it a different name and make it be a different drink. And while we are on that subject, I hate the way that the UK will start importing a foreign type of beer and then suddenly they stop importing it because they are now brewing it in the UK instead. Only now the UK version of the drink tastes nothing like the original version. It never taste as good once they start getting brewed over here so stop doing it - you stupid breweries.

Fortunately for now I am able to get real Lapin Kulta brewed in Finland from Beers of Europe and I can get real Baltika brewed in Russia from www.tesco.com. Thanks to Paolo and the Blue Blazer in Edinburgh, I have a Baltika glass (which I keep in the freezer), but I don't yet have a Lapin Kulta glass. Does anyone know here I can get one from? Email me at the usual address (and just putting Finland down is not an acceptable answer).

Right so back to Spain – a place in which, I am reliably informed, the rain stays mainly on the plane. Once the shopping was done and we had unpacked everything the holiday could start, and I could sit in my favourite place on evening 1 of the holiday.

My favourite place in Spain

Back in the dark, dank and ominous opening few months of the year the staff of The Cloudhands Weekly Expectorant presented me with a radio controlled shark as a birthday gift. I had decided that the best thing to do with it was save it so I could give it its first airing (and dunking) in the pool in Spain. Although I didn’t know at the time, this was to become known as Operation Chorizo, and I am pleased to report that Operation Chorizo was a complete and resounding success, though, unfortunately, the video evidence was lost due to operator error. And, I don’t just mean that one session of shark footage was lost. Footage was taken on 3 separate sessions and none of it survived, due to what is sometimes referred to as Klum Sithum Syndrome.

Now, I may not have driven over any lemons while in Spain this time around, but I did discover the delights of ITV3. This enabled me to watch an episode of Taggart pretty much every night before going to bed and meant I only ended up watching one of the many DVDs I took with me. You may recall from a previous post that I planned to watch Steget Äfter one night on the balcony and that is exactly what I did. The film was thoroughly enjoyable and sufficiently different from the book to make it count as story in its own right. Books generally have far more happening in them that can be fitted into a 90 minute film so invariably bits have to get cut out and in this case a whole key feature of the book was changed which enabled the story to be easily converted into 90 minutes and also removed a part of the book that would have been quite difficult to have on film – namely a man dressed as a woman that no one realises is actually a man until it is too late (I hope I haven’t ruined the book for anyone).

I watched thw DVD on my laptop, on the second Saturday night of the holiday while sitting on the balcony in my favourite position (see above - I should add that it isn’t really a balcony as it is on the ground floor, but I don’t know what else to call it). I had a few glasses of Absolute vodka with Sprite and then a Salame pizza from Papa Luigis along with a glass or two of cava. I should add that while I was in cultural nirvana watching my highly intelligent production (in Swedish with English subtitles) the others were in the apartment dumbing down to the culturally inept “How do you solve a problem like Maria” or whatever it’s called.

Other holiday highlights included the now ubiquitous lightning tour of Fuengarola Zoo followed by the forking out of money for overpriced toys (that I’ll probably never play with again after the holiday) in the gift shop.

a big cat

The hot suny weather was only interupted for a couple of hours one day by the appearance of a bit of mist, but as you can see it wasn't enough to make us fret.

look at those shores

We carried on the tradition of sticking to the same restaurant for every meal out (namely La Dispenser in Cabopino) until the last day when we had lunch at Giuseppe’s (also in Cabopino) instead. I had a very nice burger with barber queue sauce, though it was a little under cooked for my liking so I shall be asking for mine to be well done next time we eat there.

The only other thing to report on is the in car music. We had a bit of Shirley Clamps first CD to bring back memories of our first trip to Spain and we had a bit of Shirley Clamps latest CD, but for the majority of the time it was Snö by Eva Dahlgren that compelled itself to be played. The CD has grown on me exponentially since buying it, it is simply one of the best CDs I own. I didn’t want to play it on the trip back to the airport as there was a risk that I would forget to retrieve it when we returned the car so we listened to Shirley Clamps Favouriter På Svenska and true to form I forgot to retrieve it when we returned the hire car.

Still, I consoled myself with the fact that I could easily order another copy, but I would also be providing the next renter of that car with the chance of hearing some music they might otherwise never have got to hear.

I have been back at work for a couple of weeks now and it now feels like an age since I was soaking up that Spanish sun. Peter Hammill is playing in Gateshead in a few weeks time and I would like to go, but I haven’t dared ask yet.

Farmer John wants you louder and softer.

Dag 907: Paris on principle

There seems to be a new craze in the town of blogland at the moment and that is posting stories about trips to Paris. Any blog worth its salt is currently beguiling us with tales of bravery, resolve and triumph in the face of adversity from Paris. I'm not going to let the fact that I haven't been on any recent trips to Paris stop me from getting with the program. So here is the story of my school trip to Paris from arouand 1980 (give or take a year or so). No names or places have been changed to protect the innocent.

I was about 16 or 17 at the time and the night before we were due to set off for Paris I went to a disco at St John Fishers School in Harrogate. I have no idea how I came to be going to it as I didn't know anyone at that school (or it’s sister school St Aidens). I also can't remember who I went with, but I do remember that during the disco a girl called Harriet came up to talk to me and we ended up dancing together until the disco ended (so I probably didn’t spend much time with the person I went with – sorry).

I asked if she wanted to see me again when I got back from Paris and she said she did, so suddenly I wasn't as excited about going on the trip as I had been the day before.

I can't remember which airport we flew from, but it was probably Leeds/Bradford and I do remember that we landed at Charles De Gaul airport in Paris. I was a bit of a hippy back in those days and quite liked a band called Gong who had a number of French band members so I had already convinced myself that I would be bound to able to find a shop that had some Gong bootlegs in stock – there’s nothing like setting your expectations ridiculously high before a trip somewhere is there?

We collected ourselves and our bags together at the airport and piled onto a couch that would take us to our hotel. Once we got there I remember that it seemed more like a block of apartments than a hotel. The room I was assigned to was actually 2 rooms (you had to go through one to get to the other) and the first room had 2 single beds and the second room had 1 double bed. The bedding didn't match on any of the beds and the furniture looked like it had been bought from a junk shop. There were 4 of us in these 2 rooms so we decided to have a rota system so each of us only had to share the double bed once (or something - I can't actually remember how many days the trip was for).

From here on it all gets a little hazy. I can't remember the exact order that any of these things happened, but they all did happen, so I will list them in no particular order. No doubt other things happened too, but I either can’t remember them or don’t want to remember them.

We had a trip to the Palace of Versailles. I had a song by John Cale called “The Hall of Mirrors In The Palace At Versailles” so I was a bit more interested about this trip than I would otherwise have been, but not much. I seem to remember having a hot drink in some café somewhere as part of this trip and it may have been raining.

We went on a trip to some church that was up a hill and the roads were cobbled. I bought a hot dog in a French stick with mustard on it. It was the first time I had eaten one of those things and I enjoyed it very much.

On one of the coach trips the coach took us through the main red light district. We were all fascinated and gawped at all the prostitutes.

There was a group of girls from a school in Bath staying at our hotel. We got friendly with them and I got friendly with a girl called Daphne who had a big jumper with a banana on it (like the Velvet Underground album cover) that her Gran had knitted for her. I remember she slept in our room on the last night and I let her sleep in my bed while I slept on the floor - I hadn't forgotten that I was meant to be seeing the girl from the disco again once I got back home and wasn’t about to be unfaithful to a girl I wasn’t yet going out with.

Me when I was a bit of a hippy in Paris

We went to the Pompidomp Centre and there were various buskers and street acts going on outside, which I found pretty cool. I saw a French hippy with a really nice multi-coloured striped hat on and I tried to ask him where he got it from, because I wanted one just like that, but he couldn't speak English and I couldn’t say much in French so I had to give up none the wiser.

We wanted to get some booze to drink in our hotel room one night so I went out and successfully procured a small bottle of Pernod in my best French (which wasn’t saying very much). I then tried to by a bottle of Lemonade and could only manage "Je voudrai un boitaille de lemonade pour to take out" which just brought me a blank stare. I can't remember what we ended up drinking with the Pernod.

The Hotel didn't do food at night, but it did do breakfast (as far as I remember). All our other meals were eaten at the Moulin Rouge restaurant and we paid with vouchers we had been given when we checked into the hotel.

One night I was looking in a shop window and I noticed a man dressed as a cowboy standing next to me. He had very tight jeans on and he had something that looked like it may have been a truncheon inside the jeans going down one leg almost as far as his knee. I was pretty sure it must have been a truncheon – I certainly wasn’t about to hang around to find out.

A couple of guys went into a strip club and got fleeced by being made to buy an extortionately priced drink each and to make matters worse they reported that the stage was empty for the whole time they were in there.

By the end of the trip I felt pretty pleased with myself because I had learned all I needed to know about buying and using underground tickets in Paris.

That is about all I remember apart from the fact that I didn't manage to find a shop selling Gong bootlegs, but I did find and buy a couple of official Gong albums that I didn't already have.

Dag 863: The case of the metallic case

Once upon a time I booked some plane tickets for a trip to Sweden, using my air miles, a year in advance. When you use air miles you still have to pay the tax and this particular airline charges your credit card, for the tax, a couple of weeks before you fly rather than at the time of booking. There was a slight problem here because my credit cards all expired before the charge would be made so I picked the one I wanted to use and made a mental note that I would need to ring them once my new card arrived to ensure they had the correct details when it came to take the tax payment from it.

The only flights I had been able to find that I could use my air miles on had been Manchester to Stockholm via Copenhagen. I would rather have had direct flights but I'd flown via this route a few times before and Copenhagen has a very nice airport so I wasn't too bothered.

A couple of months later I got a call from the airline saying they had changed the time of the connecting flight so I would no longer get to Copenhagen soon enough to make my connection and could I book a different flight. There didn't seem to be any convenient alternative, but then she said "do you need to go via Copenhagen or would you consider a direct flight?" I said I would be happy to take a direct flight and the booking was changed accordingly. This was pretty good, apart from the fact that we now would be staying only 4 nights instead of 6 - but it would at least mean that we didn't spend so much money on the hotel. Which, I then reminded myself, I hadn't booked yet. The last few years we had stayed at the Scandic Hasselbacken Hotel on Djugården. It is in a nice quiet location next to Skansen and various other places the kids (and I) like to go to and it is also next to a ferry terminal so it was great to have a few drinks in the patio area in the early evening before taking the ferry to one of the restaurants in Gamla Stan. Each previous year we had booked direct with the hotel but this time I was determined to try and book online through one of those websites that gets you discounted rates. Over the following weeks I checked various websites, but most didn't have a decent way of specifying how many kids you had and how you wanted them to sleep (i.e. cots, foldaway beds etc). The ones that did let you say how many kids you had kept coming back with "This exceeds the maximum occupancy for this hotel", but I knew it didn't because we had stayed there loads of times before. I decided to put this off for a while.

I then thought it was time to look up the booking on the airline website to make sure it was still in order. I went to the "my bookings section" and there in bold letters was a single booking for a return trip from Manchester to Copenhagen. My heart sank as I clicked on it to open it up, but in the details it said Manchester to Stockholm so it seemed ok, so my heart rose again. I rang them up, just to be sure, and they reassured me that the booking was from Manchester to Stockholm, and as I had acquired more air miles by then I decided to upgrade the outward trip to business to make up for the fact that it was going to be a shorter trip than I had wanted. (I should add that it is impossible for any trip I make to Sweden to be long enough).

Time passed and my new credit card arrived so I rang up again to explain that when I had originally booked the flight my card had a date that would expire before it would be charged so could I give them the new expiry date. They asked if I still wanted to use the same card, so I said yes and just gave them the new expiry date.

Now it was time to try and book the hotel again. I had another few weeks of trying to book online, but then decided to give up and book directly again. So we rang the hotel only to be told, "sorry we are fully booked at that time." We asked to be put on the waiting list and then had to think about another hotel. We had stayed at Stallmästaregården before which was in a fantastic location by a lake with loads of grass for the kids to play on and a decking area by the water to have drinks on, but it was not in a good location for visiting all the places we liked to go, so we really needed to find a different one. The main criteria was:

1. central location
2. outdoor space for the kids to play
3. somewhere to have a drink outside before dinner

The Hasselbacken seemed to be the only one that matched all three, with Stallmästaregården matching numbers 2 and 3.

So, we not only couldn't find a perfect hotel, but there was also the possibility that we wouldn't find any hotel at all.
When I was working in Sweden the sales manager for the client we were working for used to stay at the SAS Radisson Strand hotel which he rated very highly. We had walked passed it on loads of previous trips and thought it looked nice so we rang them up and they had a suite we could stay in. We booked it in the hope that The Hasselbacken would come back to us as this room was about twice the price we had wanted to pay. It only met number 1 in the above criteria, but it had a lounge for the kids to play in, it overlooked the water, was extremely central and just round the corner from NK, which is one of my favourite shops in Stockholm.

It got closer to the day of our holiday and the Hasselbacken didn't phone, but I began to look forward to staying in a waterfront suite in the Radisson Strand hotel.

We were due to travel out on a wednesday and the sunday before I logged into the website to check my booking status. Sure enough there was the Manchester to Copenhagen heading so I clicked on it and then the browser froze. I waited for something to happen and eventually it came back with "no booking found". I tried going to a different screen and coming back to this one, but it would no longer display the "Manchester to Copenhagen" heading. I tried logging out and back in again, but it just said "you have no bookings".

I began to wonder if I had accidentally clicked on the cancel booking button when I tried to view it.
I found their booking number and phoned only to get a message saying "we are only open monday to friday". There was nothing to do but wait for monday, but as this was a bank holiday I wasn't expecting to get hold of anyone, and sure enough I didn't. So it was now Tuesday (the day before we thought we were going to Sweden, I had checked the website loads of times and it just said "no bookings found". I rang them up and they said that the booking was absolutely fine, nothing to worry about and we don't know why it isn't showing up on the website. So I could relax again.

The next morning we got up very early because the last 2 years we had nearly missed the flight due to being stuck in traffic on the way to the airport.

The flight was at 10:00 and we drove into the airport grounds at 08:00 - loads of time.

The first thing we notice is the sign listing the terminals. My wife asks which one we are going from. Oops - I am used to flying from Leeds Bradford which only has 1 terminal and I had completely forgotten that Manchester has more than one. I remembered that the terminal we went from before was not on the ground floor and there was a ramp up to the door for cars to use. I drove around and saw a ramp going up by Terminal 2. Ok then, that's that one sorted ok we are flying from Terminal 2. I followed the road sign to Terminal 2 long stay car park and drove in around 08:15. At 08:30 we were still driving round looking for a parking space and so were about 10 other cars. At 08:45 I was about to drive the car onto a bit of pavement and park it there when a car pulled out of a space and I zoomed into it before anyone else could spot it. Next job was to get everybody out of the car and get us and the cases to the bus stop which had a bus just pulling up to it.

We tried to make it, but the bus drove off just before we got there. I looked at the sign and it said the buses travel every 15 minutes. I was beginning to feel that familiar feeling of their being a possibility of not making the flight.

15 minutes went by and 2 buses drove into the car park. The first on said Terminals 1 and 3 and the second said Terminal 2. Both buses drove around the entire car park at walking pace before coming to our stop. We clambered onto the second bus with all the bags and push chair etc and I said to the driver - SAS go from terminal 2 don't they? "Nope, they go from terminal 1 - you should be on that bus" he said, pointing at the bus that was just pulling away. I said that I guess they must have changed terminal as last time we went it was from terminal 2 - I remembered because it had a ramp. The driver told me that they hadn't changed and both terminals 1 and 2 had ramps. I thought we were going to have to get off and wait another 15 minutes for the next bus, but the driver said he would drop us off at the station which was near terminal 1 and we just needed to go on the moving walkway.

He did this and we finally rolled up at the check in desks while they were still open, though we had wanted to get some breakfast and feed the baby before boarding the plane so we were far from relaxed. Fortunately as I have a gold card we could join the express check in queue and hopefully make up a bit of time.

Even though I had been reassured that our booking was ok, I was still a little worried that there was something wrong with it due to it not showing up on the web site, so it was a big relief when, after handing my Eurobonus card over to the check-in guy he started printing off stickers to go on the cases and sending them off down the conveyer belt. Once they had all gone he asked me for our tickets. I explained that I had booked these on an e-ticket so didn't have any. He replied that the booking showed that we had been issued with paper tickets and we needed to give them top him. He suggested that maybe they had been left for us at the ticket desk so I went and joined the queue there. By the time it was my turn there were only a couple of people still checking in at the desks. I asked if there were any tickets for me to collect, but there weren't. I gave my booking reference and the lady looked it up. She said there was an e-ticket assigned for a 10 month old baby, but nothing else.

I explained that I had booked them online a year ago and had been rung up to change the booking and that it had disappeared from the website, but that I had been re-assured that everything was ok.

So a phone call was made and then I was told that my credit card had failed authorisation so the tickets hadn't been issued (apart from the baby one as this was completely free). I couldn't understand this, so I gave my credit card to the lady who spoke on the phone again for a bit and then said that the number of this one didn't match the number of the one that they had used. I seemed that when I had given them the new expiry date I had forgotten which card I had originally used and so the new date didn't match that card. They tried it again and this time it went through and the tickets were issued.

By now everyone had finished checking in and they said we must go straight to the plane (gate 25) - thus no time to feed the baby or buy any duty free.

We raced off and joined the back of a monster queue through security screening. I noticed there was a little door manned by a man which seemed to be some sort of express screening line. I asked if we could go through and he said ok so we raced through, raced past the booze shop and raced on towards gate 25. We rushed past gate 23 which was half way through boarding and stopped at gate 25 where people were just sitting around waiting. After a few minutes of this there appeared to be no immediate prospect that people were about to start boarding so I decided to run back to the shop to get a couple of bottles of Verve Cliquot (2 for £40) which we would certainly need that night to recover from the stress endured this far.

As I ran back past gate 23 I noticed the last few passengers going onto the plane. That must be the Copenhagen flight I thought to myself.

I got to the shop picked up the dual pack of Verve Cliquot and joined the queue at the till. There was 1 till open with 1 lady behind it and about 5 other members of staff standing around, presumably making sure people aren't pinching stuff. The queue seemed to move very slowly and finally there was only 1 guy in front of me, He had a bottle of expensive looking cognac. "Can I have your boarding card please" she asked him in a very slow voice. He handed it over and she waited a bit and said "Were did you get the bottle from". He pointed to the area where booze is extra cheap, but only for people going outside Europe. So now I had to wait while she showed him where he should have got the bottle from, but thankfully he decided he didn't want to pay that much so it was finally my turn. She served me in the slowest way possible as my stress levels increased.

I ran back to gate 25, but slowed down as I got there because they still hadn't started boarding. By now I was panting and my mouth was completely dry and in desperate need for some water, and I also needed to go to the toilet. I looked to see were the toilet was and noticed that the sign by gate 25 said Copenhagen. I looked back to gate 23 and it said Stockholm. I looked at the boarding cards, but they did say get 25.

We raced back to gate 23 just as they were starting to call our names over the tannoy system.

As we boarded the plane we wondered if something was trying to tell us that we should be going on this holiday at this time.

Te flight went very well and I was felling much better when we landed and left the plane. My usual excitement of being in Sweden had returned and I no longer cared about anything outside of my Swedish bubble.

We went to the conveyer belts and grabbed our bags as they came off. Eventually we had all but the big silver metallic one and no more bags were coming out. There was a big metallic case on the belt, but it looked nothing like ours apart from that. It had bigger wheels that ours, it had stickers and labels on it, where ours had none and it was a different shape than ours.

When out case was weighed it had a heavy bag label fixed to the handle so I wondered if it might need to be collected from the outsize luggage area. I went over there but it wasn't there and I asked at the lost luggage counter if it would come out somewhere else if it was heavy, but they said no it would come out on the normal belt.

I went back to the normal belt, but our case still hadn't come out and the other metallic case was still there.

I decided we had better go to the lost luggage section and my wife said she thought someone must have taken our case instead of their own one. I thought they must have been pretty short sighted to have done that. My wife decided that as this case contained all here stuff, if it didn't arrive we would be going straight back home on the next flight. We got to the counter and I reported our case as being lost. My wife mentioned that she thought somebody may have taken out case instead of their own as there was a single metallic case left on the belt. The lady asked me to go and get it so she could put out a call in case they were still inside the airport. At this stage we began to worry about the fact that we had not put our name or address on our case.

I arrived back at the belt and noticed our case was standing next to the wall opposite the belt. I grabbed it and raced back to the desk. All was well so we went to find the taxi rank feeling at one with the world. And after I managed to conduct the whole taxi getting transaction in Swedish I felt even more at one with the world. In fact I have never felt more at one with the world than when I am in Sweden, so you could say I was actually feeling at one with Sweden.

The hotel was great, the view from our room was fantastic, and the remainder of our holiday was great.



As well as visiting the usual places:
Junibacken
Skansen
Aquaria Vattenmuseum
Grönalund
NK
Solo (for my jeans and t-shirts) - interesting review here
Sally's Bar
we also went on a boat trip to Fjäderholmarna, where we hadn't been before, which has a great pirate ship for the kids to play on, really nice views over the water to other islands and also a fantastic workshop with all sorts of amazing wood carvings. We had a really long chat with the guy who made everything and he gave me a tiny bit of wood that had come from the handle of a Viking axe that had been found buried in the mud under the water at the edge of the island. I could quite happily have spent the whole day on that island.



We also got round the missing hotel criteria by visiting a bar by the waters edge near the bridge to djurgården that had a big grassy area for the kids to play on and a place for us to sit right on the waters edge. We went everyday and ate there on the last day before heading back to the airport.



I have noticed on few visits to Stockholm at around this time of year that students celebrate their graduation by piling onto the back of lorries decorated in branches and driving round dancing, waving and screaming at passers by. It looks a lot of fun - I wish I had graduated in Sweden and then been driven round on the back of a lorry wearing a sailors hat and drinking and shouting at passers by. I wonder if I could do a similar thing in Harrogate?



Even though it was now more than a couple of years since I had been to my Swedish classes in Edinburgh and I hadn't had that much chance to practice, I felt that I had managed to speak much more Swedish on this trip than any of my previous ones.

We also managed to solve the mystery of the metallic case on our return to Manchester Airport. As we watched our metallic case come towards us the guy standing next to us grabbed it off the belt. I told him it was my case and he then said he had done exactly the same in Stockholm the previous Wednesday, and sure enough along came the other metallic looking case that had been left on the belt by itself at Arlanda Airport. Once he had reclaimed his proper case we got chatting and found he and his wife also visit Sweden every year.

I won't even bother going through the hassle we then had getting from terminal 1 back to the terminal 2 long stay car park.

Dag 452: Gruppbokning

With less than 24 hours to go, here is the latest news from Scotland:

The current weather prospect is:
friday - 17° full sun
saturday - 15° light rain
sunday - 18° sunny intervals

First drink (or two) in Stockholm will be in the Ice Bar at 18:45 (it was the only free slot, but we will hopefully make it in time).

Things I have to remember:
bring passport (currently in my inside jacket pocket)
bring kent ticklets (they are currently in my laptop bag, but I won't be taking that so I must remember to take them out)
check with Adrian whether he thinks I should use the internet check in facility and check in this afternoon (you can do it 22 hours before the flight - do you want a window or an isle?)
bring my printouts of flight bookings and hotel booking ref numbers etc.
if there is anything else I need to remember I can't remember what it is to put it on this list, which means I may still not remember it tomorrow - so we are stuffed!

Also a lot of these Stockholm bars seem to like you to dress up a bit in order to get in and I haven't got any particularly decent clothes with me. I was going to buy some on Saturday, but that won't help me for Friday night.

Dag 451: this night wounds time

In just two short days time Adrian and I will be heading off to Stockholm to see Kent and do some other stuff that will result in a fun weekend for all concerned.

I have been monitoring the weather situation and as per usual the forecast changes several times a day. The current prognosis is:
Friday 27th - 19° and full sun (this morning it said 16° and full sun)
Saturday 28th - 19° and sunny intervals (this morning it said 16° and full sun)
Sunday 29th - 20° and light rain (this morning it said 23° and full sun)

So friday looks like having the best weather at the moment, but as we don't arrive until around 17:30 we won't be able to take full advantage of it. I am hoping that when I look again later this afternoon it may have improved again. But I guess it will all be different when I look again tomorrow.

I have been trying to cram up on my Swedish by listening to only Swedish music and watching Swedish DVDs over the last few days. I watched the original Norwegian version of Insomnia (which isn't as quite as strange as it sounds because it features 2 Swedish detectives so there is a fair amount of Swedish being spoken in it) and last night I watched the first 2 hours of Den 5:e Kvinnan so I've got the remaining 2 hours left for tonight. It doesn't have english subtitles so I've been watching it with Swedish subtitles to help me link up the sounds being heard to what is written down but they don't leave the subtitles up long enough to read them. So if the person responsible for those subtitles is reading this, please make them stay on the screen a bit longer for the next one you do.

On thursday night I shall probably watch Sprängaren again as its not only good, but resonably easy to follow what is being said and they keep the subtitles on the screen for long enough.

I am really looking forward to the plane touching down at Arlanda and my first steps on Swedish ground, it always gives me a goose pimply/hairs standing up on the back of the neck type feeling.

So Adrian, where do you fancy having our first drink on friday evening? Shall we go to the coolest bar on Stockholm (I will probably need to book a 45 minute slot) or maybe one of the highest bars in Stockholm or one of the apartment loftest type bars?

Adrian and Dom: going out in Stockholm whatever the weather.

Dag 411: min svenskt har inte blivit bättre

Its now about a year since my last Swedish lesson and every day in every way I feel I am forgetting more and more. If anybody out there wants to write to me in (simple) Swedish it would be most welcome and I will reply to the best of my current ability - which isn't saying much. That way I may be able to start crawling back up the slope of Swedish knowledge that I am steadily sliding down. Maybe I should try doing my next post entirely in Swedish.

Next month I will be visiting Sweden again and (as always) this time I want to try and get by using as little english as possible.

Once upon a time my posts seemed to revolve around a single theme or story and often contained a number of in jokes that no one other than me would even notice were there, but lately my posts seem to be more of a list of disparate statements.

Here comes my latest list of disparate statements:

Last weekend I collected my new Smart car. It is red and silver and I very much enjoyed driving it from Yorkshire up to Edinburgh last monday. I have fitted my Blaupunkt Stockholm cd player that I bought about a year ago, but never got around to fitting in my old Volvo. I have also installed an ICE iPod thingy that allows me to listen to my iPod in the car, but as the cd player is such an old model it doesn't fully integrate so I don't get the title of the current track being displayed on the blaupunkt display. Next I will be getting some better speakers.

About 12 years ago I had a fairly basic home recording studio setup and used to spend most of my time writing and recording songs. Ocassionaly I would add some singing to the songs, but only when the house was empty and I would never let anybody hear the songs with me singing on apart from the fact that I once sent a tape with 4 of my songs with singing to a magazine called Home and Studio recording. The tape was eventually reviewed and I was pretty pleased with what was said, although it wasn't exactly a glowing review. The last pieces of music I recorded was about 8 years ago and I still have a copy of those last two (instrumental) tracks on my iPod, but most of my recorded output is currently lost. Recently I have been regrettingb the fatc that I haven't played any music for such a long time so when I drove my Smart car up last Monday I brought my old Korg Prophesy with me and this week I ordered enough stuff to be able to start some simple recording onto my apple powerbook. If it goes ok I will bring a few more bits of kit up here and expand my setup. Things have moved on alot since I was last doing this sort of stuff. I can remember when Yamaha brought out the first sub £10,000 cd recorder and recording to hard disk was unheard of back then. I'll let you know how it goes.

Yesterday Evening on my way home from work I spent one hour in HMV trying to decide how to spend some of the money I got from selling my old Volvo, which I no longer needed because I had bought a Smart car. I picked up various DVDs and CDs, but kept putting them back. I had a wallet full of money and could have bought a whole stash of stuff, but I kept thinking if I spent all the money then I wouldn't have any left. In the end I bought the new cd by Tori Amos and the Smiley's People DVD, and thats all. I could have spent about 5 times as much as I did, but for some reason I didn't. The other ground breaking think that happened in that HMV shop was that I bought the first non scandinavian cd I had bought for a very long time (at least 2 years).

Day 329: A temple in the sky to climb up to

Adrian and I booked a holiday to Crete. I think we tried to get a few more people interested, but it ended up with just the two of us going. We got a special deal whereby we knew we were going to Crete, but didn't know whereabouts in Crete it would be. We tried to get an even more special deal whereby we wouldn't even know what country we would be going to, but they wouldn't let us as we would have been able to find out what country it was once they gave us the flight number.
We arrived at the airport and got onto a coach. It drove around for a bit and then dropped us off outside a hotel. It was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. It had a shop next door a beach over the road and an oil refinery on the beach. About 10 to 15 minutes walk down the road there was a restaurant. It was all a long time ago so the following will be full of inaccuracies, but rather than speculate I will tell it as I think it happened:
- On the first day we went swimming in the sea which was rather rough. We swam out a little way and then tried to swim back to shore. It took about 3 minutes to swim out and about and hour or so to swim back. The first one back had to help the other to make the final bit. We were completely exhausted.
- It didnt take us long to spot a couple of very fine looking German girls so we hung around a bit near them in the hope we might be able to get chatting with them, but our hopes were dashed when one night walking back from the restaurant we saw them walking together hand in hand.
- One day we rented a moped, only they had run out of mopeds so we rented a motor bike instead (Adrian tried to negotiate us getting it for the same price as a moped would have been). We took it in turns to drive and went to visit the palace at knossos which was half way around the island. We had a real laugh walking around that place and taking amusing photos.
- On the way back from Knossos we saw a dead bulldog in the road. It was upside down with its legs sticking straight up the air and it looked like it had been inflated to quite a high pressure.
- We sent a few postcards to people that were hilarious, or at least we thought they were (can't remember what we put in them though).
- Adrian took a photo of me by the water and I had my special swimming trunks on.
- I decided I wanted to by some local cigarettes (because I always think it is cool to get things that you can't get back home). I went up to the kiosk and said please can I have some Greek cigarettes. They didn't speak god English and wanted more info from me. I said I want a mild sort of local cigarette. They perked up at this point and presented me with a packet of cigarettes proadly baring the name "Milde Sorte".
Needless to say they tasted foul. I ended up smoking HB soft pack for the remainder of the holiday. They were cool for the following reasons:
1. you couldn't get them back home
2. they were in a soft pack
3. they actually tasted pretty good
and of course all this meant I was pretty cool too. (..and to all you kiddies out there "Smoking is not good and not cool. It used to be cool when I smoked, but it stopped being cool around 10 years ago when I gave up". So don't try it at home.)

The rest of the holiday remains a mystery. I can't even remember what the inside of my room looked like or whether we had seperate rooms or shared.

Day 328: Crete it was then....

Adrian and I have been on 2 trips to Greece together. The first one was a school trip to Athens. I don't remember too much about it, although Adrian's comment follwing my previous post has brought quite a few bits back to me. The main things I remember are as follows:
- Yes I may have bought a watch on the plane on the way out there (I remember thinking about buying it, but I had an idea that I was talked out of buying it at the last moment as I think it would have cost me all the spending money I had on me plus I would have needed to borrow some off Adrian - but that could all be nonesense as it was a very long time ago and my memory is not what it used to be).
- It was very hot in Athens and a great deal of money needed to be spent buying drinks.
- We went to see the Temple of Poseidon which pleased me as I had an album called "In the Wake of Poseidon" by King Crimson and that produced some sort of link. I have realised over the last few years that I really like it when things link up like that. It could be because I am bad at making decisions so the process becomes so much easier if the choice can be linked into something I already like.
- I had a jacket that was a quite striking shade of green and some sunglasses with blue lenses.
- I bought a number of records (including Vital by VDGG and Music for Films by Brian Eno).
- Instead of sleeping in rooms in our hotel we had camp beds at the ends of corridors, but they still had doors that could be shut.
- One night I got so fed up of being bitten by mosquitos that I got my pillow and started hitting it against the walls to try and kill as many of the little buggers as I could. Next morning the walls were coverred in red splodges and so was my pillow case.
- I think we went on some sort of boat trip.
- We found out that a British 2p coin could be used in the space invaders and night driver machines.
- At some point we ended up on a coach with a school trip of Welsh teenagers who kept singing the sames song over and over again. The song went along the lines that every where they went people wanted to know who they are, so they told them they were welsh, and went on to add that in actual fact they were very very welsh and found that every where they went people wanted to know who they were etc etc... After a few hours of this Adrian sang a version of the song with slightly different lyrics and was promply punched in the shoulder by the welsh girl sitting behind him (she obviously fancied him).
- On the flight home we had the whole plane to ourselves so we could lift up the chair arms and sleep lying accross the 3 seats and also eay as many breakfasts as we wanted. I ate several.

In the next thrilling installment I will tell the tale of the Cretan mission as remembered by Björk Bjiggler.

Day 266: How I Got You To Love Me

When I was working in Sweden in 2000 I used to visit the local CD/DVD shop quite often in my lunch break to see what the average hip young Swede was listening to. I noticed a cd called Hagnesta Hill by a group called Kent that seemed to be making its way up the charts. I was particularly struck by the cover and even though I had never heard anything by this group and didn't even know what sort of music they produced I ended up feeling compelled into buying it just because the cover was so good.


Eventually I bought it, and remember having mixed feelings when I first listended to it. I really liked the first song, but wasn't so sure about the others. But I persevered and it grew on me bit by bit. I'm glad I did as I still regularly play it - in fact I listened to a few tracks from it today while on the treadmill at the Gym, until the treadmill suddenly stopped going round about 3 quarters of the way through my program, so I went and had a sauna instead.

Since buying Hagnesta Hill I have bought most of Kents other cds. I think they have got better with each release and their last one (Vapen och Ammunition) is one of the best cds I own. I have bought quite a few Swedish cds since working there as it has helped me with learning Swedish and keeping it current as I don't get much chance to practise it these days. The trouble with liking Swedish Groups is that they don't tend to play in the UK so the only way to see them is with a trip to my favourate land, but that is not possible as often as I would like. In fact the only concert I have been to so far in Sweden is Sting, who last time I checked, wasn't a Swedish Singer. That reminds me that I haven't written about that weekend yet - I'll save that for a different blog entry.

Anyway back to the main story. In the last few years I have manged to see Roxette in Brussels, Björk in Brussels and The Kings of Convenience in Glasgow and Edinburgh. So, of these only Roxette is actually Swedish and they sing in English. The list of groups I really want to see include: Eva Dahlgren, Marie Fredriksson (solo not with Roxette), Shirley Clamp, Lisa Nilsson and Kent. When I was working in Sweden I noticed that an album called The Best of Marie Fredriksson came out and got to number 1 in the charts and I also noticed she was going to perform a big outdoor concert in Stockholm, but at the time I didn't know who she was and hadn't heard any of her songs so I didn't bother going. But the concert was later released on DVD so I bought it and really regreted not going. On a later visit to Stockholm, Kent played a concert but I was unable to go as I was there on a short trip with my familly and on another ocassion Lisa Nilsson was playing a concert right next to our hotel at a venue called the Cirkus, and again I wasn't able to go. This Lisa Nilsson concert also came out on DVD so at least I was able to see it second hand.

But, and here we finally get to were all this rambling on is leading to, a couple of weeks ago I got my usual weekly email from BiljettDirect Ticnet to find out that Kent are doing a tour of Scandinavia next year and tickets were going on sale on monday 22nd november. So that monday I went straight to their web site and went through the process of booking them to find that only customers living in Sweden were able to book the tickets online. If you wanted to book them from another country you needed to ring the line. This caused me to break into a bit if a sweat as on the one hand I could use it as an oportunity to practise my Swedish, but on the other hand I felt sure I would make an idiot of myself by getting into a situation were I couldn't say what I needed to. So I kept beginning to dial the number, but then stopping as I chickened out. By lunch time I thought I had better just get on with it so I went outside, away from prying ears, and rang the number. I was presented with a message saying all the lines were busy, but I could book tickets by visiting www.ticnet.se instead and was promptly cut off. That was no good because I couldn't book the tickets at www.ticnet.se.

So I kept trying and getting the same message, but eventually in the middle of the afternoon I got a message saying I had been placed in a queue. Now my heart began really beating fast as I was listening to the lift music in the background - at any moment someone was going to answer the phone and I was going to go "umm.....". Eventually the fatal moment came and someone answered the phone. In the panic I didn't hear a word of what she said, but I managed to come out with "Kan Jag köpper två biljetter för Kent i Stockholm nästa mij?" and then added "Jag bo i England". She seemed to understand the general drift of what I said and came back at me with a string of Swedish, of which I managed to latch on to the single word "skickar" which means "send". So I came back with "Kan du skickar dem till mij?" and the responce was "Ja" so that was the first bit of the transaction done and dusted. By now I was in a real panic about how to procede so I said "Kan du taller Engelska?" and she replied "Ja" again so my final bit of Swedish was to say "Min Svenskt är inte så bra" to which she replied "I thought you Swdish was very good" which made me feel really good, but deep down I knew I had bottled it.

The remainder of the transaction was performed in English, but I ended up with 2 tickets booked for Saturday 28th May. The only complication was that I could not pay by credit card I would need to transfer the money into their bank account in Stockholm. I remembered that I had had to do this for the Sting concert I went to and knew it involved filling in complicated forms at the bank that usually involed havaing to go back to the bank a second time as I didn't have all the corect information with me the first time. And true to form, that is exactly what happened this time. So the money is currently in limbo between my bank acount and that of the ticket agancy and I am hoping they won't decide I'm not paying and re-sell the tickets before the money gets to them.

All that remains is to find a travelling companion, and that may already have been resolved by Adrian, who so kindly accompanied me to the Sting concert mentioned earlier.

Day 36: Little fluffy clouds

Have you noticed that the minute your plane flies through a cloud all hell breaks loose. It starts suddenly dropping, the wings start shaking as if they are about to snap off and you find it hard not to spill your drink.

Have you also noticed that when your plane lands the air hostess always says "please don't unbuckle your seatbelt until the captain turns the fasten seatbelt light off", but the minute the plane stops you hear clicks all around you because just about everyone else has taken theirs off before the captain has turned the fasten seatbelt light out. I always leave mine on for a few minutes after the seatbelt light has gone out, just to make a point.

Have you also noticed that if you are sitting by the window of a double seat and someone sits next to you, they always put their arm on the joint arm rest as if it belongs to them. They are also usually fat aswell.

Day 31: Hot or Goatee?

On monday night instead of shaving off my weekend stubble I thought I would leave a goatee shaped bit of growth. It is still intact today, but I will be flying home for the weekend today so whether it will still be in place on my return next Tuesday is another matter. Al may have missed a once in a lifetime oportunity.

I saw the film Magnolia earlier in the week. I thought it almost qualifies as a film that would change your life, but not quite. I didn't really understand what was going on at the end. But I had a quick look on imdb and after reading the discussion section I realised that I now did understand and yes it probably is a film that could change ones life (if you let it).

One of the themes of the film was coincidence and it reminded me of when I used to work in Sweden. I flew via Brussels and I used to notice a distinctive white building near the runway as the plane took off for Arlanda. I thought the building might be the Brussels office of Sun Microsystems as it loked very similar to their building near Stockholm. Anyway, a few years later I got a contract based in Brussels working for Sun. On my first day I took a taxi to their Brussels office, but it wasn't the building I had previously noticed and it looked nothing like their building near Stockholm either. I was informed that I would be working on a client site near the airport and low and behold it turned out that their client had the building I used to notice when I took off for Sweden each monday morning and I spent the next 9 months working in that very building.

Holidays are funny, aren't they?
I go on holiday to Spain next week. I'm looking forward to it a lot since I haven't had much in the way of time off recently. On the other hand, all the things you need to do to get ready to go on holiday really annoys me. As is turns out, my corporation tax was overlooked by the director of my company (idiot!), so I'm having to chase round and essentially guess the number of 0's on the cheque. The next stage is to go to the Post Office to pay the cheque in. This actually works out okay since I also have to renew my road tax, which still seems to be the only thing on the planet that you still need to go to the Post Office for. They will also only accept cash for this. You will also get your baws booted with heavy shoes if you don't get it in time. (It's an automatic fine these days, generated by the DVLA database - none of this getting caught by an observant plod). So, and you'll excuse me if I ignore the slight inaccuracies about applying by post, using a debit card, etc, given the year, the technology and the fact that everything else can be done over the phone or Internet, why on earth is this still the case. Let me just point out again. The fine is generated by a computer database of people who haven't got their road tax in time. Ergo, the database exists. So, someone please explain to me the point of the piece of round paper which needs an expertise with a scalpel only the greatest brain surgeons posses to get out it's square container?
/rant
Oh, and to the initial point - gotta get clothes, haircut, currency, find passport, worry about weather, worry about terrorists and learn Spanish while covering the end of year company books, pay bills, and deal with general life.
Bollox