» PE Lessons

More strangely unathletic sports teachers
My school was rabidly obsessed with sports. Football, cricket, rugby, tennis, swimming, athletics, hockey, squash, cross-country...I'm sure if you'd volunteered to play something more exotic like polo they could have accommodated you.

The 'best' school rugby field was right in front of the school building itself, so someone turning up for their first games lesson might think there wasn't very far to go and this would be a bit of a cinch. Then, however, they'd look again and realise that in their infinite wisdom, the school had built the pitch in a giant natural basin, so as soon as there was the slightest drop of rain (not that rare an occurrence in the South East of England) the pitch would become waterlogged and stay that way for several days. So, it was off to the 'other' rugby pitches. These were always excellently drained, since they were located on top of a massive hill about two miles from the school. If they were in an indulgent mood the teachers would just say "Off you go" and wait for you to turn up, which meant you could walk there; if not, one of the younger sports teachers (the only ones with anything approaching physical fitness) would accompany you to make sure you ran every step of the way. We usually got to the top fields, in varying states of knackeredness, just in time to see the fat bastard head rugby coach arrive in his car and park right next to the clubhouse. The one time I saw him run was during a match, when the biggest lad in the year got the ball and belted off down the pitch with it. No-one else dared tackle this guy for fear of being flattened. Fat Bastard was not impressed with our display of British pluck and galloped towards us like a rage-infested rhino, screaming "Ye great bollocks!" in a manner that would have put Begbie to shame.

I also had the strange experience once of watching my head of music (large of gut and slap of head) ski down a mountain in Austria. Watching him bob and weave like FrankenWeeble made it impossible not to think of Dr. Robotnik.
(Sat 21st Nov 2009, 9:01, More)

» Call Centres

Got a call from a company in Yorkshire this afternoon wondering if I was a basic unit of matter consisting of a dense, central nucleus surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons
But I weren't atom.
(Wed 9th Sep 2009, 17:32, More)

» Call Centres

Paid thumb-twiddling
During the phase between leaving university and actually figuring out what I wanted to do for a living (which lasted approximately two years), I put in a shortish stint at a call centre in Perivale. Those familiar with West London will know that the tourist attractions of Perivale are its moderately reliable Tube station, its deliciously breathable air and its plentiful supply of roads. The office building housing the call centre was so remote it even had its own supermarket on site.

Anyway, I got hired by a Japanese electronics giant to man the phones during a marketing campaign they'd just launched for a new laptop associated with various business solutions. By "just launched", I mean "launched on the same day they overoptimistically hired the telesales team". There was thus a delay of around two weeks during which the customer base received, digested and got around to dealing with the marketing materials.

During these two weeks we received not one single call. Surfing the internet for SFW material got stultifyingly tedious by about the fourth day. We couldn't even indulge in the sole interesting pastime any of us could think of (going to the pub at lunchtime for a swift pint or five) because we had to take lunch in shifts "just in case someone does call". Add a ban on personal e-mails to the equation and you have a great recipe for how to drive someone stir crazy.

A couple of weeks after that things did pick up and customers actually started calling, but top management decided that things were going a bit too slowly and that we were to start cold-calling people. It was at this point that I left, since that wasn't part of the original agreement.

On the plus side there was a very cute American guy on the team and for a while there was some serious chemistry between us, so much so that I was very tempted to find out what it was like to sleep with another bloke, but in the end the combination of me not having my own place at the time and just being a bit shy meant that I chickened out.
(Fri 4th Sep 2009, 13:36, More)

» Hotel Splendido

Emmets Get Lost!
A couple of years ago, before bidding farewell to Blighty and shacking up together in France, the lady girlfriend and I decided to go on a long weekend’s tour of Cornwall. The weekend was all very bucolic and picturesque, and regularly punctuated by clotted cream teas, but involved a lot of driving around and changes of scene, so in true desert rally style we set ourselves distance objectives for each day. This also meant booking a different hotel for each night.

On Saturday night we ended up in Tintagel. Saw the Arthurian castle thingy; saw the Old Post Office and thought of Postman Pat doing his rounds in chainmail; and bought some fudge from wobbly grannies. All that was left was to find the hotel.

Of course, since we’d been driving around for the entire day and most of the previous day, we had less petrol than a tramp’s breath. Any hopes of Tintagel being a big tourist destination and therefore having all the amenities (such as a petrol station) close at hand were dashed when we realised that they obviously wanted to maintain the Olde Worlde cachet of the place and had therefore banned anything so new-fangled from within a ten-mile radius.

Luckily, being organised and all that, I’d saved the number for the hotel on my phone. I rang them up and the nice lady said “Oh, it’s dead easy to find.” This in itself should have set alarm bells ringing, but it was getting dark and I was getting hungry, so it didn’t quite register. She then said “You just take the road out of town, and at the first bend you’ll see a big sign. Turn right at the sign and we’re a few metres down the road.”

Thanks love, etc. etc.

There was indeed only one road out of town, so we parked in Tintagel's central car park and walked down it until we got to a bend. It wasn’t very far at all. On the downside, it wasn’t very much of a bend at all either. It was more of a kink, really. On the other downside, there was absolutely no sign to be seen anywhere. Behind us: the trudge back to Tintagel, and its one pub with no rooms free. In front of us: the vast, unfathomable, Stygian darkness of the road, with no pavement and no streetlights. One short discussion later (during which the prospect of pressing on regardless was flatly declined), we found ourselves back in the car park. It was at this point that my girlfriend started having a major panic attack at the thought of sleeping in a car in pitch darkness surrounded by drunken yokels and various slavering forest animals.

All seemed lost, until a group of chaps were heard returning home from a night at t’pub and were promptly accosted at full speed and subjected to the complete sob story. One of them knew the hotel and promptly drove us round: down the road out of Tintagel, stopping at the not very bendy bend, then turning right through what can only be described as a hole in the hedge gnawed for access by anorexic hamsters. Even with full-beam headlights this road was damn near invisible. We duly got to the hotel, way after midnight by now, and collapsed on the bed, the missus in a twitching and tearful nervous wreck and myself in dire want of a beer.

After an admittedly excellent breakfast surrounded by sheep (outside, not in the hotel dining room) the next morning, I couldn’t resist asking the landlady about the sign that blatantly wasn’t there.

“Oh yes”, she said. “Someone must have crashed into it and knocked it into the hedge. It happens a lot.”

Fortunately for her there was nothing immediately to hand that could have been used for throttling.

*** standard first post w00tage and heartfelt apologies for my massive schlong ***
(Fri 18th Jan 2008, 15:08, More)

» Gyms

Quality: very variable
I've been a member of seven different gyms in my life, as a result of moving around the place. Some random high- (or low-)lights that come to mind:

1. Fitness First in Purley, which halfway through my membership got taken over by a cheeky young cnut straight out of business school who had no interest in fitness. His first brilliant idea for attracting new members was to stand in the lobby and hassle existing members to extol the virtues of his emporium to their friends, in exchange for free pizza. Because people who sweat their guts out in an attempt to keep trim are obviously slavering over the thought of free pizza. He then hung a series of giant cardboard signs throughout the gym, at exactly head hight (for anyone over 6' tall, such as me). I had a gentle go at him, saying that someone could get hurt, and was gently and indifferently fobbed off. On my very next visit to the gym a sign fell on some guy's head, pointy corner first. I took great pleasure in witnessing the bollocking from the comfort of the juice bar. N.B. this was also the gym in which, returning from a slightly overlong hiatus, I forgot the respective weights of the differently-coloured discs, and loaded up a bar with much less weight than I thought I had. I thus heaved like a bastard to get it off the floor and smacked myself in the chest with the bar, sending myself flying onto my arse and almost landing in the dumbbell rack just behind me.

2. Muscleworks, Bethnal Green. The best gym in the world, in my opinion. Ronnie Coleman even worked out there, for fuck's sake. Regulars include The Whippet, who's about 6'7" and thin as a rake, and whose entire workout consists of suspending a full-body punchbag and kicking the shite out of it for 45 minutes; The Ambigously Gay Russians, who always spot each other *very* closely and who appear to work out in their underpants; and The Hippo, apparently a British powerlifting champion who easily weighs 150 kg and whose neck is wider than his head. I saw him walk up and down the rack of dumbbells one evening, warming up. His warm-up consisted of: pick up a big feck-off dumbbell; curl it about five times; collapse with exhaustion into a chair; breathing like a two-stroke motor; repeat. Easily the strongest bastard in the gym though.

3. Optiforme, Marcq-en-Barœul, Northern France. Run by a guy who placed second in a French national bodybuilding contest, and it shows. I'm sure Jean-Claude van Damme would look small next to this guy. This was the gym in which I was just finishing my workout when an incredibly hot girl walked in and started working out in the weights room (which normally is 99% male, as for most gyms). She was giving me the eye a bit so I did my damndest to impress her, but by that stage every muscle in my body was already knackered so all I could manage to do was flounder like a nine-stone weakling.

No-one's ever offered to sell me steroids, though. Maybe I don't look the type.
(Thu 9th Jul 2009, 17:10, More)