Tuesday 24 February 2009

Update

I write this blog sitting in my friend James's room in Bristol having been made to go out drinking in a Casino till 5am: a backwards step in my training has occurred. I had hardly been drinking till last Friday, however, going to visit my old Uni buddies in Newcastle is not a good idea if you want to continue a path of temperance. It's pretty safe to say that the fact Gazza is an alcoholic and from Newcastle is not a monumental coincidence; more of an inevitability. I'm the worst person in the world at saying 'no' to my pals hence the reason I went up to Newcastle, spent money on drinking and the horses (aka lost almost all my bets) and then after doing a gig in Bristol last night couldn't resist the orders of my friend James 'the imbibing bison' Gibb. He is 23 years of age and still drinks like a 14 year old supping on a bottle of 'White Lightning', desperately trying to seek the approval of other equally socially awkward adolescent gimps.

On a more positive note, the compere at the gig last night introduced me as Chris 'buff' Martin, so perhaps aesthetically I look in shape even if currently I don't feel like it. I now have less than 3 weeks till the Bath Half Marathon so I definitely need to stop getting on the smash and start getting on the track- that should be on the back of a 'No Fear' t-shirt.

The comedy night line up is sorted. We have Russell Howard and Jack Whitehall from the TV plus loads of other top notch rib ticklers, including myself (hopefully I'm not going to let the side down). So if you want to know more about this google 'Stand Up on Everest' and book tickets for 9Th March. It should be a cracking night for one and all.

yours guiltily...

Thursday 5 February 2009

Dartmoor Weekend 30Jan-1st Feb








As BJ, Kirt and I progressed smoothly down the tarmac gateway that is the M4 I knew that it was going to be a mirth filled weekend. Not just because of the company but because BJ handed me a piece of paper with the Bloomberg top 25 funniest names in the world: my personal favourites are Donna Bumgardener, David Moron and Dario Diklik. Incidentally I'm not swearing, I'm simply quoting people's names. If you consider these to be swear words then you are in fact deriding the innocent people who live with these names every day of their silly named lives.




We arrived in Dartmoor late Friday night despite the Sat Nav's best efforts to thwart us by sending us to a field. Just a field. Luckily we bumped into Kiwi and Glenn who were also lost but had the foresight to bring printed instructions of how to find the Dartmoor centre we were staying at. Without them we would have genuinely had to drive into a patch of vegetation and shout the names of our team mates and hope for the best.

The weekend was a real cliched male team bonding experience. It turns out that no matter whether you're 22 or 32 it is inevitable that somebody backside will try and show off in front of a room of other males and generally your audience will oblige by giggling like little school boys. We seemed to only talk about hackneyed male experiences, which I can't really divulge over the Internet as it would possibly lead to me being locked up or at least cautioned by the cyber police. Let's just say we joked about rambling and walking!

Between all of the churlish behaviour we managed to do some walking...actually walking. I managed to 'break mine boots in', which is the technical term for wearing some boots. It's a needly aggressive and euphemistic expression: I prefer to tell people that 'I popped their cherry'. We ambled around the moors and tors for most of Saturday, which must have been just under 20 miles.I would have loved to have taken in the picturesque Dartmoor scenery but for some meteorological reason which I don't fully comprehend, the land was caked in mist. The range of conversation during 8 hours of walking with different people is phenomenal: you go from one conversation to someone about their job to anopther one with someone else about the funniest name for a pornographic video. Eclectic, best describes the day; maybe smutty.

Sunday was also great fun as we split into 3 teams and got ruthlessly competitive like greyhounds chasing a stuffed rabbit around the baron moors of Devon. The challenges involved carrying 20kg fertilizer bags up a hill, carrying cooking equipment then making fried eggs up a hill, running up a hill dressed as a gorilla (I pulled the short straw on that) and carrying buckets of water from ages away...over a hill. The general theme was doing tiring stuff on hills. Having been comfortably in the lead after the first 3 challenges we choked like all British athletes and ended up tied with the other teams. I guess you could say the overall winner was team Hillary! You could then also say that I'm a cheesy man who needs somebody to dip some bread on my fondue like body to remove that stench of melted Jarlsberg.

No ranting this week. Just thought I would thank James Peterson for his organisation of the weekend, although he could have done something about the mist; at least we missed the snow storm, so well done for that. On that note, I think it's hilarious how in the current economic climate where 90% of the population are desperately grasping onto their jobs and trying their up most to save their pennies, that that same percentage of people looked out their windows and thought, 'I definitely can't go to work today because it's a bit snowy'. Special thanks go to London's bus drives for legitimizing everyones' excuses for bunking off. My faith is restored in humanity.

Peace, Love, Save the children