Absence of Technology

Pip! Fssst... Oh dear, the television has just exploded. Shit. I'm gonna miss Coronation Street in half an hour. Oh wait, I just remembered, I don't watch crap telly. Phew! Still, the television going bust is not what you want in today's modern society of Hotel Babylon, Ugly Betty and Lilies (only some of these I watch by the way- my TV life is not as proactive as some). I just hope World's Wildest Police Chase videos comes out on DVD quite soon, I'll miss the last three episodes.

In my house, we don't have broadband. In my house, we don't have Sky HD. In my house, we don't even have an iPod docking station. We seem to be stuck in 2002. And that means the hurt of England's world cup catastrophe, the boredom of Ferrari dominating F1, and the pain of S-Club 7, is still rife.

After the controlled explosion that sent acrid smoke throughout the house, our beloved (actually, I hated it. It didn't have teletext) 1985 Sony Trinitron 20" television had eloped to the world of broken televisions. Otterspool waste dump, to be precise. That's right people, since last Monday, we have been crowding round a TV that predates me and scart leads. Thank God for RF adaptors.

Now however, we are all huddled around my mothers first television: a 1987 colour portable 13" Ingersol Television system! Yet again, it predates me and scart leads, and doesn't even have a remote or teletext. The origin of this TV is actually my bedroom. Losing this has the added side effects of no PS2. Sigh.

The one thing right now that I would like more than a Digital-SLR camera, the latest MacBook computer, Broadband, iPod docking station, Sky HD (with RF adaptor: Ingersol is scartless remember) or tickets to see Liverpool against Sheffield today, is a modest (not asking for much here) 26" Panasonic with double scart and built-in Freeview. Price tag: £499 ($899?). Live a little dear parents.

I'll never be as happy as this pair

In other news, the allotment season has started again. That means regular (twice weekly) trips down to our squalid patch of land to plant potatoes and chard (yuk :-§ ). My usual job is to remove chunks of broken glass that seem to mysteriously accumulate on our soil. I am convinced our neighbors sprinkle it on our plot when we're not there. Last year was just the start. Now its time for full scale mass production of oddly shaped carrots.

Break! What Break?

Although its name does not specifically imply a holiday, you would naturally assume that 'half-term' was some kind of break from the continual grind of arduous college life. Nope. Here in Liverpool, our tutors have been specifically informed by the governors of the school to lay on as much work as possible to keep our tired little minds churning away throughout the whole of February.

In reality, half-terms were designed by the government as a means of cost cutting across the country. Some distant and probably now deceased Chancellor of the Exchequer was told by the equally dead Prime Minister to save money on Education. My bet it went something like this:

"I have a cunning plan, Prime Minister," chuckled the Chancellor hysterically.
"What's that PM-wannabe?" answered the Prime Minister.
"We will send all of the children home once a term, and call it 'half-term'! That way, we can set them lots of work over the holiday. They'll still be educated to the same standard, because teachers these days are just like having none whatsoever and then we'll save a bundle of money. Less teachers to employ, less utility bills to pay, schools can be rented out for rock concerts and WI days and we'll have more money to spend on invading other countries," the Chancellor rabbled on, some drool coming from the side of his mouth.
"Brilliant, I like it Chancellor," smiled the PM.
"Now can I be Prime Minister?" he pleaded.
"No," scorned his nemesis.

So, to sum up, I have the following work to complete over the week:
Business Studies coursework (approx. 3 hours)
Business Studies exam revision (approx. 2 hours)
English essay (approx. 2 hours)
Read Of Mice and Men for English revision (approx. 2 hours)
Geography coursework- all of it! (approx. 5 hours)
Physics Challenge revision and practice papers (approx. 3 hours)
Physics coursework (approx. 2 hours)
Additional Maths revision (approx. 2 hours)
Teach myself Chemistry GCSE and complete coursework -teacher is downright lazy- (approx. 5 hours)
Biology homework and revision (approx. 2 hours)
Citizenship homework, coursework and revision (approx. 2 hours)

Total learning/revision/coursework time: 30 HOURS

Divide this by 9 days and you get 3 hours and 20 minutes of work each day. It might not sound like much when reading this. Then you have to introduce the fact that I have to collect a 6 year old brother from school each week-day (his half-term was last week) and cook the God-damn diner. It suddenly becomes a whole different affair. I have only just found enough time to write this post in between boiling potatoes and watching my sole 1/2 hour of television a day. Perhaps the tutors never considered that we might like to relax somewhat before the real manic build up to exams starts. I am dreading it. I felt completely emotionally drained last year after taking just 2 GCSEs early (French and Maths). I cannot wait until the summer, breezing down the open road - to the job centre. I still intend to continue with A-levels next year but really need a job over the summer to finance an Digital-SLR camera. We all have our financial targets. Jingo's is nearly three times mine. He is gaging for a £1,500 Apple MacBook Pro. I already have a laptop but he already has a decent camera. Does this mean he will have to work triple shifts down at the local Tesco? As long as I don't have to its fine by me.

Adverse Conditions

School's out and half term is in full swing. Yesterday, my cronies and I ventured out to the vast white expanses of Sefton Park - the largest park in the city (I think). Me, Pask, Dave and Rich met at the latter's 'cosy' house (squalid damp flat, to be precise) and busied our selves constructing spheres of ice from the frozen precipitation around us and throwing them in the direction of the other members of the congregation.

Unfortunately (possibly fortunately) Jingo and Nick couldn't make it. Nick was jetting off to some distant country to contribute to climate change and Jingo had some kind of dentist appointment. There is a 24 hour appointment reschedule allowance. Use it next time.

Then Robin, the perennially late one, arrived to a volley of flying ice smattering him in the face. He tried to retaliate but there was not much snow in the middle of the road where he was walking. That'll teach him to use the pavement. Eventually, once his face was blue and blistered he greeted the new arrived, grabbed a football and strode off towards the park, only a matter metres away. And to think that once rich, Victorian merchants and their families had the park all to them selves, surrounded as it was by lavish mansions. Now these great edify to the past have been bulldozed to make way for Richard's seventies communal commode. He even pays for his electricity by pay-as-you-go top-up card, and has Sky TV but no washing machine.

Anyway, the park was completely deserted. There was literally no-one around except our little group. That may have something to do with the fact that there was 45 degree sleet pelting into the ground at Mach 2 and it had been likewise for the past four hours. Perfect!

You may assume intentional sarcasm if you wish, but actually it was the most fun I've had since inventing sliced bread. The conditions were absolutely horrendous. We split into teams of two and three and defence seemed to consist largely of pelted muddy ice at the opposition every time they came forward with the ball. Robin correctly identified a turd in amongst all the mud and inquisitively covered it up with a large mound of snow. Richard inquisitively announced that it looked like a large penis. We all applauded his imagination.

Then in an ironic twist of fate, Robin slid in hard to get the ball, and perfectly took out the long, hard pointy thing that he had built to warn unsuspecting footballers of the dangers underneath. Somehow, and I'm not quite sure how he managed it, he avoided to get any of the excrement onto his clothing. He took it all in the back of the head instead.

Such an issue is not really something to joke about although I did enjoy a jolly good chortle while writing this. I say, steady on old chap.

All in all, it was a bloody good afternoon in the park although my right shoe was completely full of ice and grass. My body mass must have at least doubled with all the compacted snow in various pockets and up my sleeves, not to mention my saturated trousers.

To add to all the glee, only two hours before, I had successfully bartered with the woman in a camera shop and saved 1/3 of the price of a memory card for my camera. Always go to the older staff, no matter how ugly and decrepit they are. These people are more likely to be managers who will have a bit of flexibility when it comes to wheeling and dealing.

Taster Sessions

With A-Level choices imminent, our school decided to lay on some 'taster sessions' to allow the students to sample some of the subjects on offer. I haven't really got much of a clue about what I'm going to be in the future. When someone asks me "What do you want to be when your older", I reply "Undecided", and let their opinions waft over my unconscious self.

First up was Chemistry. This was one of my many considerations, albeit a more serious consideration than, say, French. As you might expect, the teacher brawled on about how Chemistry is everything and when the world ends, all the chemists will be called upon by God to join him in the garden of heaven, and all the artists and historians will rot in the cesspit of hell. Did I mention he was a psychopathic creationist - teaching a science?

Second was ICT. There are two options here, IT or Computing. IT involves the general sort of questions and applied knowledge and creating problems and solving them etc. Computing involves programming and spawns many new computer nerds into our universities every year. These are the sort of people you see in a darkened room with 4 different computer screens covered in code and binary like something out of the Matrix. Neoites I call them.

After break in which I had a sausage wrapped in a slice of toast with brown sauce that taster like hand cream, a half-hour of Geography followed. I have always liked Geography, although now it seems like we won't actually learn anything new. The tutor told us we would study plate tectonics (done in 3rd year), tourism (done in 4th year), ecosystems (also done in fourth year) and farming in the UK (just finished it last week). What he should have said was: "GCSE? You're sorted mate. Don't bother coming back."

The next session to follow was Economics. I am currently taking a Business Studies GCSE and this sort of follows on from that. What we were told was that universities favour the more traditional subjects, and Economics is apparently one of them? I though the sciences, languages, Geography, History, English and Maths were viewed as being traditional, but not Economics? The teacher told us that he teaches with great knowledge, passion and with a true love and desire for the subject. This made all the girls laugh hysterically and flutter their eyelids. He merely smiled, but with a distinct twinkle in his eye. Maybe it was the fluorescent lighting.

Finally, Physics was attended by many students. The teacher told us that he would not lie to us. He told us that half of us were probably better off walking out the door right now, waffled on about quantum theory for a bit, showed us a video on You-Tube that he downloaded about people falling off roundabouts and gave us a poorly photocopied sheet on the subject.

Bonus. Now it was time to return to our final normal lesson of the day: IT. This lesson last thing on a Friday afternoon has traditionally been a sit-off where no work is conducted whatsoever. Alas! A cruel plan to dig boredom into our small little minds. "A meeting with the deputy headmaster and careers adviser in the school chapel?" How they got permission from God to talk about money and salary in his own bloody house I'll never know. They droned on for around 40 minutes about the importance of making good combinations of choices and not just doing things because your friends are. Personally, I would be glad to get away from some of my 'friends' once in a while to avoid their persistent nagging, stabbing and crude jokes based on other people's sexuality (usually mine).

So in conclusion, not quite sure what I'm going to be doing with my time on this mottled lump of rock hurtling around the sun. Maybe I'll be a professional blogger. Or maybe I'll get a life.

Read Jingo's account of the taster sessions

Lord of the Litter: Fellowship of the Syringe

T'was the first Saturdaye of t'month and that could only mean one thing: picking up other people's crap. Yup. Litter picking was upon us again. Me, Jingo and Robin set off into the thick swirling mists surrounding Princes' Park in Liverpool, armed with bin bags and the aptly named 'litter pickers'. We had a tough record to beat. Last time out we scored 2 condoms, 12 beer cans, 1 syringe and a managed to completely fill about 2 bins bags to bursting point. This time Robin hoped one of them wouldn't burst all over his foot.

Where as last time we excelled on the contraceptive front, this time we floundered. I found the only sexually related bounty of the expedition: one single, lousy durex wrapper. However, what we lacked in this department, we made up for with over 20 cans and bottles (including two wine bottles, one medicine bottle, ten cans of white light and assorted broken glass fragments (none of which ended up in my foot this time).

Jingo decided to dress in old jeans, an old jumper but instead of the obvious choice of old shoes, chose new, white trainers. Why? Ask him, not me. I attired sensibly for the occasion, also with a pair of much envied gloves.

The catalogue of calamitous events lengthened when Jingo trampled on a bed of newly planted daffodils towards the edge of the park. He assured me: "I'm sure they'll grow back."

After the tiresome yet CV boosting afternoon's main activity. Jingo and I checked out the job opportunities at the local Tesco store. We queued for about 20 minutes at the customer service desk as some old woman was trying to get her pension or something. The lady directly in front of us wanted a taxi to cart her elaborate and heavy purchases home, but no-one at the desk knew of a taxi number. I stepped forward boldly and brandished my Sefton Taxis business card, complete with calendar on reverse. Both women smiled and thanked me and the customer servicer called the number on the card. Since I was about to ask for a job, I could already feel the brownie points flooding into me. The number had expired.

She returned the card to me with a grimace that would have melted stone. Fortunately, my face is not made of such material, otherwise I would be enduring the deplorable British hospital system by now. The fact that a face made of stone is no cause for concern in the NHS anyway makes you wonder whether they would respond to a melted one either. Dissatisfied at me for some reason (I mean, its not like I work there or anything), the woman with the shopping lumbered off to get a bus home. Feeling depressed and embarrassed, I let Jingo do the talking, but he failed to secure us any position whatsoever. That's the last time I let him get me a job. We were told that there are usually several openings over Easter and should come back then.

Check out Jingo's alternative side of the day's events.