As most of you who read this know, I go to Lancaster University. Lancaster is a small town in North West England, an hour away from Manchester and about an hour and a half away from Liverpool. It’s generally pretty quiet, being that its economy seems mostly based on students and old people. That’s not to say that there’s no families around, there are a few. It’s just that you can’t go into any shop without having to wait for old women to count their pennies or for students to decide how they’re going to destroy their overdraft.

There’s not really a lot to do most of the time, though its location lends itself well to getting trains out to surrounding towns and the countryside. One could feasibly go to the lake district for a nice little dander any day with half decent weather. That or head to Morecombe for some cockle picking if you’re feeling suicidal. I don’t mean to rinse Lancaster that bad because in all honesty I’ve had a great three years. Made some great friends, had some brilliant nights out and I’ve definitely had one toke over the line old friend. This is something I’ve become renowned for.

You can’t go to a small English university as loud as I am, with a thick but charming Northern Irish accent, a pair of pretty blue eyes and get wasted on a regular basis without gaining some kind of reputation. It’s like being the lad about town. In fact, a couple of years ago when I was heavier in both fat and muscle mass, there was little danger of getting into a fight. In my college bar at the height of business there was a bit of confusion about who was in the queue. Some guy was giving me jip and in turn, aided and abetted by alcohol my arrogance was spilling over into the realms of “Go fuck yourself, I own this bar”. Whilst he was getting scrappy and I was for going outside and punt kicking him through a glass window, his friend was grabbing him and going “Leave him dude, it’s not worth it. He’s a lot bigger than you and he’s Irish”. That to me was a victory. I was such a prick back then.

Anyway, I decided last night I would make a guide to the University on the blog. Just.. Not yet. I want to do one on the boat or plane on the way home from graduation. I want to be equipped with every experience before I tell people whether or not to come here for sure. What I do want to do is make a guide for those already at Lancaster and it’s not something I can do in one shot. I’m sure given a couple of days I could have a God damn dissertation written about the town and university. What I’m going to do now is make a comparison between town and campus. Here are six things I don’t miss about campus:

1) Porters - If anyone doesn’t know what a porter does, it’s basically the voice of authority for each college. Not the governor or principle of it, more like the policeman. These guys during the day walk around to check everything is in order or give you the parcels you were looking for. This is handy enough as they’re always there to sign for your package and there’s no where else to get mail.

At night, they can turn from day-time heroes to overzealous demanders of early bed times. That is to say that the very nature of their job is often a hinderance to students. No student ever wants to be told that they need to stop their party at 11 pm because other people might be trying to sleep. I understand that the noise needs to be turned down if people complain, but all too often I’ve been either fined, or told to go to bed by a balding middle age man who was never a student in his life.

In honesty there are cool ones, but its only in relative to the shit job they have to do. Being told to keep the noise down isn’t so bad when they ignore the fact you could be skinning up a fatty (hey, that happened once!) In town you have a lot more freedom, provided your neighbour doesn’t have a family and a job, you can get away with a fair bit of noise. In the case of the 12 Blade Street crew, we now have to keep our noise to a minimum until somebody buys the house from this guy. He is in fact a dick who writes far too many letters for noise we haven’t made in about a month. Trying to get the council involved is just not cool though.

2) Being told to tidy up the mess - In Pendle college, our entire flat got a series of money taking threats from the head of housing. This was all about the mess in hallways and in the kitchen that was preventing the cleaners from doing their work.
For a start, the only thing cleaners ever did was wipe down surfaces and mop the floor when there was already stuff on the floor. Rather than sweep up the mess, they just made a floor dirty by rubbing bits of meat into the ground with a mop. Then when they couldn’t do that, there were fines threatened of £80.

In town, you don’t have to deal with that sort of bullshit about hygene. You’re free to risk getting food poisoning from the stack of dirty plates you’ve accumulated in every room. When you have a dissertation to write, you kind of get used to having a mess in every room. I could not deal with false figures of authority telling me to clean up my mess or face a fine. When you’re sharing a house with friends, you can share the mess, not have to worry about it affecting people that should have no concern in your life.

3) Fire alarms - Oh how I grew to loath the fire alarms. In houses, I can deal with smoke detectors that whinge until you fan the smoke out of its way, but fire alarms that get out around a hundred people from their rooms at 3 am because the extractor fan doesn’t work and some cunt left the grill pan in the oven. Similarly in town if one wanted to go back to bed after a 3 hour seminar on a Wednesday morning, they could do so without being rudely awaked by a fire alarm they know works fine, but feel the need to test for four hours.

4) Poo days - This is the name given to those fine Spring and Summer days where some denizen of society decided to leave a manhole open, or I don’t know.. Send a dozen laxative dosed cows to take a dump all over South West campus. Whatever it is, it smells like the aborted foetuses of the queen of shit. Its like Bastard man unleashed his peduran in the middle of Pendle quad. Smells like bacon cooked in piss..

5) UPP - When I signed up to go to Copenhagen, I was under the naïve belief that the university would take care of my housing contract and for the third term, cancel my contract or at least let me off my rent. For months, I was worrying myself silly over the thought of being financially fucked in the middle of a Scandanavian country because I would have to pay the rent for a room I wasn’t going to be using. Luckily I ended up paying only £220 because some random goth girl needed the room for the guts of the third term. This scandalous manuveour was performed by the people that look after the halls of residences, not the university. UPP as you will learn from whenever they wake you up on a post-Carleton Thursday morning to change some random bit of shower head or light are a literal shower of bastards. I don’t mind the guys that fix things up, but the people at the administrators are absolutely useless whenever it comes to looking after the students. So much so that they should change the company name to Unidentified Profiteering Pricks.

I still lost my deposit despite the room being fairly good nick (okay, it needed a damn good clean but that’s about it) because they’re absolute twats. /Rant

6) College spirit - Okay, I’m going to qualify this. There’s a lot to love about college life. I love the social scenes that go with houses and halls on campus. I go down to Manchester Metropolitan to catch up with a friend every now and then and it’s just not the same. He’s sort of friends with his flatmates, but not like I was with mine, not even how I was with my other housemates. It’s not that he’s more socially inept from me, in fact probably the opposite, it’s just at Lancaster you’re not afraid to show your personality and we all have this feeling of being in it together. At other universities, they stick to their anonymity, finding it a lot more difficult to develop a good friend base. Part of this is the closeness of the college bars to halls, the competitions and an involvement in things.

Anyway, what I don’t miss is being awake at 3 am in the morning and some cunt’s still yelling “I’M PENDLE TILL I DIE!”. Mate, it’s Spring term, it’s about time you shagged your way around the different colleges to the point you shouldn’t be able to give any less of a shit. I’ll be honest, in the first week, I was the biggest college loving head case around. I caught on quick enough that it was a metric pile of balls and was neither funny or amusing unless you have the personality of a dead catfish.

However for every Conor Charlton there’s a twat who tries to start a fight outside of some club because he thinks his college pool team is harder than ours. Christ sake, leave me alone I’m trying to enjoy my drugs without you killing my buzz. Bowland pricks. I had to shake my head at everyone’s favourite balding 34 year old Lonsdale enthusiast as he was chanting his college nonsense in Holland. Bad times Skanky.

That’s about it for now. I feel you are now equipped with the relevant information to realize that there’s a load of shite you have to deal with on campus that you could do without. On the upside to campus, there’s the beautiful convenience of everything, the social life and well the proximity to Spar - Obviously as it is easier to obtain Spar Baguettes if you are on campus. This doesn’t need explaining, I’m not going to write another 500 words about how damn good the humble Spar Baguette is. Don’t be ridiculous, just check it out on face book - Temple of the Spar Baguette

Now I wouldn’t have done anything differently, but having your own house is great, try it some time.

For a special, overly intellectual treat, I'm going to upload the first draft of my first dissertation chapter. This first chapter is going to be totally re-written, so its kind of being kept here as a reminder of the many facets of the crack era.

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1986- 1990: The Crack Epidemic and the War on Drugs

Chapter one: Origins of an Epidemic

The ten year period of the 1980s was a complicated decade for US politics. The change of leadership from the relatively easy going Jimmy Carter administration to the hard line conservative cabinet of Ronald Reagan meant there would be a number of radical changes in policy and it could be argued that these radical changes had a radical effect on American society at large. Whilst Carter had aimed at creating a peaceful climate with the Soviet Union using the SALT talks and a period of detente, whilst he was lenient on recreational drug use and aimed to be resourceful on energy and environmental concerns, his successor on the other hand set out to destroy what he deemed the “Evil Empire” and the dangers of “Narcoterrorism”. Drug use for Reagan was an American problem that had to be stamped out, but in the 1980s the problem seemed only to grow. At the begining of the decade there were almost double the number of African Americans in American universities and colleges as there were incarcerated in State and county penitentiaries. Four years later, the statistics would reveal a drastically different scenario. The six year period between 1984 and 1990 saw a massive surge in the levels of street crime, drug addiction, overdose and homicide of many major American cities. The blame is almost always placed on the introduction of crack cocaine into inner city areas and whilst there were reports of the appearance of crack in Los Angeles, San Diego and Houston as early as 1981, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) recognizes 1984 to be the first year of "the crack epidemic". The crack epidemic saw a dramatic increase in the numbers of Americans addicted to cocaine. In 1985, the number of people who admitted using cocaine on a routine basis increased from 4.2 million to 5.8 million, according to the Department of Health and Human Service's National Household Survey. Likewise, cocaine-related hospital emergencies continued to increase nationwide during 1985 and 1986. According to DAWN statistics, in 1985, cocaine-related hospital emergencies rose by 12 percent, from 23,500 to 26,300; and in 1986, they increased 110 percent, from 26,300 to 55,200. Between 1984 and 1987, cocaine incidents increased fourfold[1]. This chapter aims to discover what this new drug was, how it emerged, even to examine the shadier origins of the “epidemic”.

Up until the late 19^th century, cocaine was used extensively fairly extensively in the United States, not just as an aid to recreational vices but as a pain killer and medicinal tonic recommended and prescribed by doctors. Toward the end of the century, its negative effects began to be recognized and the Pure Food and Drug act of 1906 was the first law to control the use of the drug and the health crisis it caused. It was finally legislated against in the 1914 Harrison Narcotic Act and after a series of problems (involving the arrest of around 3,000 doctors and spates of gang violence), use began to decline. It was not until the 1970s that cocaine would experience resurgence as a parlour drug for college students and young white professionals as a study aid or party drug. The drug became particularly popular in the disco culture, as usage was very common and popular in many discos such as the notorious Studio 54. The emergence of crack and the epidemic that ensued follows a slightly different path. The official DEA line points to the Bahamas, where the majority of cocaine was kept before it was transported to Miami. There, a huge glut of cocaine powder caused the price of the drug to drop by 80%[2]. As a result, drug dealers facing this drop made a "shrewd marketing decision" to convert the powder to crack, a smoke-able form of cocaine. It is easy to say why; crack was easy to produce, had a high level of purity, did not require needle injection (thereby avoiding a major route for hepatitis or AIDS infections), bypassed the danger of flammable liquids such as ether used to prepare the other smoke-able form of cocaine - "freebase" and it was cheap: a single dose could cost as little as $2.50. In comparison, powder cocaine was available on the street at an average of 55 percent purity for $100 per gram. Additionally, smoking crack allowed a large quantity of cocaine to be absorbed directly into the blood stream from the lungs and then to reach the brain quickly; the user typically experiences the high within 10 seconds. These factors made dealing crack highly profitable, the instant high and low cost meant that users often found the appeal irresistible and unable to control their use. Crack was not a new drug, its active ingredient is entirely cocaine, however it was a marketing innovation. It was a way of packaging a relatively expensive and upscale commodity (powder cocaine) in small inexpensive units. So package, this form of smokeable cocaine was then distributed on the street by young Latinos and African-Americans to a whole new class of customers: residents of impoverished inner-city, neighbourhoods. This made the sale of the drug very profitable for dealers and when Caribbean immigrants taught young people in Miami how to produce crack, South Florida became a principal area for the "conversion laboratories" used to convert cocaine base into cocaine HCl, the form in which cocaine is sold.

Big time drug traffickers such as “Freeway” Ricky Ross soon emerged, cashing in on the appearance of the new drug. For young black males growing up in LA like Ross, drug dealing served (and often still does) as a way out of poverty originally, he had began selling small amounts of inexpensive cocaine to finance tennis lessons, with which he hoped to gain a college scholarship. Unlike the other small time cocaine dealers around him, Ricky Ross’s story is by comparison slightly out of the ordinary. Thanks to a network of friends in South Central and Compton, Ross and his friend Ollie “Big Loc” Newell steadily built up a clientele that granted them more funds to invest in the drug. When Ross’s supplier, a Nicaraguan man called Henry Corrales introduced him to Danilo Blandon, his fortunes would spiral out of control. Within a year, Ross owned millions of dollars of real estate; houses, motels and several other businesses and when crack finally made its way onto the streets of LA in 1983, Blandon and Ross were able to corner the crack market with ease. Crack would take Ross a lot further than just his home of Los Angeles, but he was able to move past California’s borders, expanding his crack empire by selling hundreds of kilos on consignment, offering them to dealers on a “sell now, pay later” basis. By the mid 80s, Ross’s biggest problem seemed to be more in terms of what to do with the cash he was making, than actually making it. ''Our biggest problem had got to be counting the money,'' Ross said. ''We got to the point where it was like, man, we don't want to count no more money.'' Because of his rags-to-riches like rise, Ross has become an almost legendary figure but he admits the damage he caused to his own community made him far from a Robin Hood character some would wish to portray him. He admits also that his success was not solely his own doing. What granted Ross such success as a drug dealer was Blandon’s rock bottom cocaine prices. Where this cocaine was coming from has been the subject of a conspiracy that links the origins of the crack epidemic with the Central Intelligence Agency.

In April 1989, the senate subcommittee on terrorism, Narcotics and International Communications headed by Senator John Kerry of Massachussetts issued a 1,166 page report on drug corruption in Latin America and the Carribean. The subcommittee found that 'there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zone on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras supporters throughout the region.' U.S. officials, the subcommittee said, ‘failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua.’ The investigation also revealed that some 'senior policy makers' believed that the use of drug money was 'a perfect solution to the Contras' funding problems.'[3] The investigation was followed up in 1991, in a book written by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathon Marshall called Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America. The book illuminated the reality of the drug war. During the cold war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, significant elements within the Contras trafficked extensively in cocaine, supplying much of the North American market while the CIA, National Security Council, and Justice Department acted oblivious to the evidence. Whilst the book raised little media attention, it would be followed up by a series of newspaper articles five years later. After a year long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 examining the CIA/Contra drug running conspiracy. The articles raised a number of key questions: why Danilo Blandon was free and employed by the DEA, why Norwin Meneses despite openly admitting to have supplied Ross with the drug was never touched by the law in comparison to Ross, imprisoned for life without possibility of parole. Along with these questions, Webb’s Dark Alliance would make one stunning allegation which neither the Scott/Marshall book nor the Kerry report had dared to suggest: that this influx of Nicaraguan supplied cocaine had been the catalyst for the entire epidemic that had swept through city after city. What followed was a large scale retaliation from various major newspapers, (including an editorial note that said the story was wrong to imply CIA knowledge of Contra drug-dealing) doubting the merit of Webb’s accusation that the CIA was aware of the transactions taking place but did little to stop them. This was in part down to Webb’s failing to provide evidence that the Blandon-Meneses ring raised “millions” for the Contras or that Blandon was linked to Langley. Ironically though, it was the title and graphic of the story “Dark Alliance” and a picture of a crack smoker superimposed over the CIA logo that most strongly implied a direct CIA connection to drug dealing and titles and graphics are rarely the responsibility of the author. Whilst Webb would later come to agree in an interview that there was no hard evidence that the CIA as an institution or any of its agent-employees, the story of the government agency injecting crack into ghettos had taken hold. As a direct response to the controversy that emerged, the CIA conducted an internal investigation of its role in Nicaragua in relation to the drug trade.

The official statement of the report given by Frederick Hitz, the inspector general in 1998 found that “absolutely no evidence to indicate that CIA as an organization or its employees were involved in any conspiracy to bring drugs into the United States.”[4] However in Hitz’s testimony to congress, he revealed for the very first time that the CIA had a very special agreement with the Justice Department: The CIA did not have to report if its non-employee agents, paid or unpaid, were dealing drugs. In other words, “it was not just incompetence or lack of interest that led the CIA to ignore that their operatives were dealing drugs; it was policy. With the evidence weighing up on both sides, it is almost undeniable that the the CIA would have been entirely pro-active at preventing the flow of Contra drug trafficking. Whilst some DEA agents working in the area claim that they were granted carte-blanche, others confirm reports that drugs were being flown directly into CIA warehouses. However, as noted in a Congressional Report there is almost no doubt that the American intelligence agencies have a long history with working drugs traffickers. During the second world war, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the CIA’s parent and sister organizations cultivated relations with leaders of the Italian Mafia in order to keep in touch with exiled Sicilian Mafia leaders. The domestic goal at hand was to prevent sabotage on East Coast ports, whilst in Italy, the aim was to gain intelligence on Sicily prior to the allied invasions. For his wartime services, the imprisoned Charles “Lucky” Luciano earned a pardon and was deported back to Italy where he proceeded to build a vast heroin empire. In 1947, the newly founded CIA aided the Mafia power seizure of Sicily and sent monetary aid to heroin-smuggling gangsters in Marseille to assist in their battle with Communist unions for city’s docks, whilst in the early 70s a Christian Science Monitor correspondent reported that the CIA was ‘cognizant of, if not party to, the extensive movement of opium out of Laos,'[5] quoting one charter pilot who claims that 'opium shipments get special CIA clearance and monitoring on their flights southward out of the country.' At the time, some 30,000 U.S. service men in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. After a decade of American military intervention, South East Asia become the source of 70 percent of the world’s illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America’s booming market[6]. Perhaps this long history could be paraphrased best by Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit:

“In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA”.[7]

One could argue that the CIA’s use of drug traffickers to fight against the dangers of Communism was employed “for the greater good”. Or rather that in order to prevent the “Evil Empire” from gaining a foothold in South America and across the world, some less than reputable characters had to be employed and that shadier methods had to be relied upon. As much of American policies during the Cold War were based on Truman’s “Domino effect” (in that if one country fell prey to Communism, others around it would soon follow suit) the government may have regarded use of the Contras as a necessary evil. This is especially after the failure of the Vietnam war, the government wanted to avoid direct military intervention at all costs. However the war on Communism was conflicting with another of the US Government’s wars: “The War on Drugs”. First started in 1971, by President Richard Nixon, the War on Drugs is an ongoing controversial prohibition campaign intended to reduce illegal drug trade, in order to curb supply and diminish the use of specific psychoactive substances deemed harmful or immoral. The successive administrations of Reagan and Bush embraced the rhetoric and polices of the war, in the process committing vast new resources to the conflict[8]. It was to be a period of zero tolerance, indicated by the words of Ronald Reagan’s wife Nancy:

“Each of us has a responsibility to be intolerant of drug use anywhere, anytime by anybody.. We must create an atmosphere of intolerance for drug use in this country.”

If the CIA had been guilty of aiding the Nicaraguan CONTRAs bring in the "cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America...", then the American government could be accused of acting contradictory to both its aims of destroying Narco-terrorism and lowering recreational drug use. If the DEA wielded a sword, the CIA held an olive branch to the illegal importation of drugs into the United States and if the DEA were able to successfully prevent cocaine being delivered from South America, then the CIA would have a much harder time doing its job. With this in mind, it is not difficult to see how the crack epidemic emerged, with the abundance of a highly dangerous, highly desirable substance flooding the drug market of inner cities, drug use was inevitably going to rise. However, in dealing with such a recent history and one that is as controversial as the crack epidemic, it is important to treat the issues with a large degree of caution and sensitivity. When Dark Alliance was first published, a number of conspiracy theories quickly arose as to why the CIA had effectively moved cocaine into America. Ideas such as the CIA had deliberately set out to ruin black neighbourhoods with an influx of an addictive drug are highly unlikely and there is no substantial evidence for the accusations. As we shall come to understand in a later chapter, the war on drugs suffered a number of other problems than a contradiction of government policies but it is still worth noting at this point.

Although the main argument of this chapter was that elements of the American government may have had as much to do with the development of the crack market as the criminal drug dealers , finding out the origins of the drug, who supplied it and where it first began to be sold does not explain how or why levels of crime rose so sharply. It does not even establish whether or not the crack epidemic even took place; despite the statistics showing a strong surge in the levels of dangerous cocaine use and of street crime, one argument suggests that the problem took place only in the front pages of newspapers and in sensationalized news programs broadcasted on television. Also this chapter does not detail how or why media representations of the problem may have affected it. This is something that will be addressed in future chapters, along with the affect of law and enforcement and government policy upon both drug use and crime.

---

[1]National Institute on Drug Abuse

http://www.streetdrugs.org/pdf/Cocaine05.pdf

[2] US Drug Enforcement Administration 1985-1990

http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/history/1985-1990.html

[3] Eric Umansky History 101, The CIA and Drugs

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/1998/06/cia_side.html

[4] http://ftp.fas.org/irp/congress/1998_hr/980316-ps.htm

[5] Congressional Report: A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International Trafficking

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1998_cr/980507-l.htm

[6] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, chapter 7. Robbins, Air America, p. 128 and chapter 9

[7] Peter Dayle Scott & Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkely: University of California Press 1991)

[8] Bruce Bullington, America’s Drug War: Fact or Fiction?, The Control of Drugs and Drug Users: Reason or Reaction, Ross Coomber pg 108

If you've all read the last post, I posted it on a web forum sparking a minor debate. If you'd like to read it, it'll open up the argument and address the controversy of the situation:

http://bbs.zoklet.net/showthread.php?t=11290

I’ve been meaning to make this post because I’ve realized a slight problem with oxymorons and contradictions. They all have relevance!

Weird social query:
“Why is it that if a guy sleeps around that he’s a stud but if a woman does the same she has negative connotations put upon her: I.e. a slut, hussy, whore”

Now understand that this post is going to get quite controversial, by outlining my thoughts on this particular matter. By itself, the query illuminates an old hypocrisy and questions gender identities, but the way I go about it, I may have a slightly more radical idea.

The double standard statement to me is bullshit for several reasons.

Men like to get laid and biologically, males are meant to make sexual contact with a number of different members of the opposite sex. Women on the other hand are biologically meant to seek out the best male to father their offspring and protect them, sleeping around doesn’t factor into the natural biology of the situation.

However, since you can’t boil all of human psychology right down to what the animals do, it does give a good reflection on the matter from another angle. This is especially as we are (apart from dolphins and some form of monkey) the only animal to have sex purely for enjoyment and fun. In my eyes, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having sex. There are many benefits for both our minds (keeping our endorphins at a good level) and our body.

What I think is the problem is sleeping with people for the wrong reasons. Often when a woman sleeps with a guy, she’ll later deem it a mistake. Usually a guy only deems the event a mistake if he caught something, got the girl pregnant, he was in a relationship and did not mean to cheat, he was really drunk and she literally was an elephant that turned into a stalker, or her vagina tasted really -really- bad. I mean gag reflex provokingly bad. So bad that you’d rather inhale paint thinner vapours than catch a whiff of that cooch.

Sorry.. Back to sounding smart..

The reason I think a lot of women call a sexual encounter a mistake is that they were either one of three things; unprepared for the events that would follow, were having sex for attention or were just absolutely fucked on something at the time. For the first thing, there’s not a lot a girl can do. Maybe think carefully on whether she wants to sleep with the guy and what she hopes to achieve. If you think its because you’re in a relationship, think carefully and if the situation is slightly murky and you are unsure even a little, don’t hesitate to ask. Though please don’t give us too an awkward conversation, we can‘t operate on that level,

In terms of having sex for attention, this applies to the type of girl I deem a slut. The noisy fat girl who makes a particular effort to emphasize her large but probably saggy bosom is a particular example. You know the girl that wears enough fake gold jewellery to make Mr T. proud. This is usually the chav ladette stereotype, but it can often be just girls with no class. Think of the girls who French kiss their fellow female friends in the middle of bars. Are they doing that because they particularly enjoy the act? No. They’re doing it because they like to be seen kissing other women, so men can think “Oooh she’s a bit kinky”. These girls aren’t going to have sex with you because they find you attractive, they find anything attractive. These girls aren’t going to have sex with you because they are wanting to have sex for fun. They are doing it for attention. Because they don’t get enough love somewhere in life, they feel they need to make it up by whoring themselves out for attention - guys, when you meet a girl that wants to jump your bones at a club, think of how drunk the girl is and maybe whether or not she would be doing the same when you are sober. Don’t just think “Oh shit, this is my chance to get laid! Quick, man the cannons!”, stop thinking with your penis because its been a while. I’ve made the mistake myself and really felt guilty at a later date. I mean it seemed like a good idea at the time because I was on something and the girl was well up for it, but I could have done without the awkwardness that came about afterwards. The last thing you want to be is a regret. A guy that sleeps around with a load of ugly, irritating women is never cool. It doesn’t make you a “playa”. Respect goes to those that can charm good looking women, give them a good time and have sex with them without becoming a regret. Not just random pieces of dirt who have no self esteem. We’ve all had our random pieces of dirt, but they don’t teach us anything, so guys, stop going for the girl who covers up her screaming insecurities by being a slag. Girls, if you feel unloved, talk to somebody. Give your mum a ring, get some counselling or something.

I’m not saying there’s any problem with getting absolutely metrically banjaxed drunk. Well of course, there are problems, but whether you are male or female you should be entitled to abusing whatever beverage or substance you like. It’s the context of why you are getting that messed up that matters. If you’re doing it for a good time, or because it fit’s the situation then that’s grand. On the other hand, if you are doing it to cover up massive insecurities within yourself, or are doing it to self-medicate I.e. drowning your sorrows, then be careful for Christ’s sake. Chances are the situation can only get worse whenever you finally beat that hangover. It’s the same thing for having sex with random guys. It’s not going to make you a better person or fix all your troubles in life just because you have that attention. I know in both men and women, alcohol can affect our judgement and lower our inhibitions, sometimes mistakes this way can’t be avoided, but if you see a recurring pattern, think carefully on whether you want to keep on making mistakes and formulate some way to rectify it. Sooner or later the mistakes will catch up with you.

I don’t see a problem in a woman sleeping around. As long as she is careful, subtle and selective. In Scandanavia 60% of the women have sex on the first date and whenever you go to Denmark or Sweden you realize that these women are not just beautiful but to a certain degree cultured and refined. Rarely do you see a woman in a club dressed outrageously “slutty”, or a woman that becomes a target for the sleazy, slimey pricks because they know their lack of looks and personality will not prevent them from getting into the girl. It all comes down to self esteem. The women there don’t feel pressured (or at least not as far as I’m aware) into sleeping with a guy but they know what they want. Most women if they sleep with a guy may develop some emotional attachment, but Scandanavian women seem higher evolved. They can have sex without emotional attachment and know when they can trust a guy and whether they want to have sex. Sex is a big part of their lives and they have no shame about it, but they don’t flaunt it around just because “sex sells”. They aren’t stuck in our Victorian tradition of sweeping things under the rug because they’re a taboo, or abusing something because they are a taboo. They have a well thought out social contract. This way they don’t end up with tons of unwanted children. By this, I’m not saying they’re baby crazy. In fact quite the opposite, their birth rate is quite low and they don’t have a high teenage pregnancy rate. What I’m saying is they practice safe sex and despite having more sexual partners on average than British and American women, are selective, thereby lowering the chance of sleeping with someone and being a regret. Nobody ends up being harmed, betrayed or abused.

So what have we learned?

Apart from liberalism is a fantastic thing, a number of lessons that apply to both men and women.

1) Try not to get off your face and sleep around all the time. Your mum was right, it’ll end in heartbreak eventually.

2) Be secure, dignified and comfortable in yourself. Don’t do things for attention.

3) Be selective. Chose your sexual partners because you find them attractive for all the right reasons

4) Be honest. Are you in a relationship? Act however you want to in a relationship, but don’t say one thing for the sake of getting your hole. Don’t make the member of the opposite sex think like you value them as a boyfriend/girlfriend.

5) Have fun, but well thought out fun. You’ll end up with a smile on your face that isn’t going to be turned up side down into a frown because of regret.

At the end of the day, there are no mistakes. In life, we are all social scientists conducting experiments on a trial and error basis. It’s all in the 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration way of living life. You’ll learn something new, from one mistake to how to make another mistake. Know yourself without judging yourself too harshly. To get really zen on you (I’ve started going to zen meditation classes), whenever you are afraid, it is okay to be afraid. Just how you deal with the being afraid bit is that matters. Don’t necessarily think you were a coward. Just realize that what you have to do comes from deep within.

So thus concludes my rant. In a way it makes me entirely unashamed to be going through a dry spell. I can live without having a moral regret myself, or being a regret for somebody else. Though I will always wish I managed to have even a kiss from one of the gorgeous Danes whenever I was over there. Another time maybe. God damn I think too much.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing to inform you that I am absolutely disgusted by your service. Today I rang up to leave the service and the call lasted no less than thirty minutes. I was told the same offers over and over again and after consideration decided I had made the right move to leave 3. I repeated this to the "customer service agent" who was little more than a salesman, trying to bore me and "I am only trying to help you sir by finding the best deal." This, as you know is a complete crock of shit. His only job was to make sure that I did not leave the service and I am unsure as to whether he removed me from the contract. I told him countless times to remove me and in the end I had to hang up as I was running late. When I informed him of this he kept saying "Just one minute sir" and I repeatedly reminded him I didn't have a minute. I was put on hold several times and forced to endure the same songs over and over again. I have heard How does it feel, Amy Winehouse's Valerie enough times that I am sick and tired of them. Thank you for ruining reasonably well crafted pieces of music from the last three decades, I hope you are proud of yourself. By the way, if I am not removed from the service I will be proceeding with legal action. Good day to you.

Yours sincerely,

Conor Charlton

I was going to do a full post, but instead, I'm going to slip you a few hundred words that made it into a recent university magazine:


There it is, the last full day of being home. As I munch through a bowl of cereal courtesy of my parents extensive larder, I can only reflect on the last few hazy weeks. Apart from the realization that a thin layer sandwiched between a chunky base foundation of crunchy not cornflakes and an even thinner top layer of rice krispies supplement the flavours and texture of each of the other ingredients, I can’t really say much about those weeks away from Lancaster. I caught up with my friends from back home.. A lot. In the true Northern Irish sense of the word, catching up with friends means going for a couple of pints. A couple of pints that very quickly turn into five, to ten and half a bottle of whisky. Half a bottle of whisky to the 1982 bottle of Bordeaux Merlot that has been hiding in the cellar gathering dust for the last three decades. No wonder I don’t come to much of a realization over Christmas holidays..

That’s the thing about living back home, you can really take the piss with things in the house. And taking the piss usually has connotations of getting pissed. My parents might enjoy their gin, campari, wine and their beer, but the spirit cupboard is filled with untouched full bottles given by friend and colleague alike to my parents who are always grateful but generally disinterested in the hard liquor, so really it has to fall on me to drink to the generosity of others. How horrible for me! Just like everybody else though, drinking lends itself well to hunger and in chez Charlton, that’s never a problem. About three and a half years ago, I worked in Subway as (wait for it..) a “Sandwich Artist”. Now generally, that is the most ridiculous job title you could give to anyone short of “Waste Disposal Technician” for your average bin man, but I soon realized that being a Sandwich Artist isn’t like any normal job; it’s a vocation. If my calling in life is to make the best sandwiches in the known galaxy, then so be it. Armed with the leftovers of Christmas’s day dinner, I spent about four consecutive evenings layering turkey, ham, herb stuffing, meat stuffing, sausage meat, gravy, lettuce, mayonnaise, butter, bread and toast into various forms of sandwiches but there’s more. Even after the turkey had dried up and no longer fit for human consumption I was coming up with creative uses for leftovers. The lamb with the gravy and mushroom sauce: sandwiched. The chicken korma: sandwiched. The beef stew: sandwiched. Even the humble bolonaise found away into a double or triple tiered bread construct. Oh how I missed this.

After this realization, I can only conclude that despite most of my time having being devoted to getting festively fooked, I have achieved something in these few weeks. Even if it isn’t in even shaping the openings of my 9,000 word dissertation on the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Even if I spent more money than I earned doing temp jobs, working as a kitchen porter, washing dirty plates in dirtier kitchens. Even if I spent more hours in a dressing gown kneeling, rod in hand worshipping bare and buxom Goddesses at the feet of the pornographic altar that is my laptop than I did clothed and chasing actual women. I can say I achieved something with my holidays. I can say proudly that I destroyed a small part of my liver and even prouder still, I can say I created sandwiches fit for a king himself.

I'll keep this short. Frankly, Jeremy Kyle is on and its amusing me greatly. Vegetable pakoras and samosas in the oven, ready to be munched on.

It's been a good six or so months since I last wrote a blog entry, I have a couple of posts half conceived on my computer that are probably too late and too topical to give birth to. I haven't had much to say because it's kind of back on to standard life. Living in Copenhagen gave me something slightly out of the norm to describe and whilst I have cool adventures and happy moments in both Lancaster and Belfast, nothing seems too worth writing about. I can't really write a review of Jon Carpenter's ability to tickle and/or lick my balls as a forfeit for losing at foos ball or otherwise. I'm not going to compose a top five insult/comebacks from our house because too many of them involve parents dying from various forms of cancer. I'll probably do a post about Lancaster next term or in third, when its really close to leaving. So I can chronicle my three years there for real. Lastly, I've gone back to my style of saving every day stories over for my orating skills, which due to my slowness, and hope that I won't exaggerate a story, I'll often fuck it up, lack a decent punch line and generally just falter about nothing.

It is as I said to a friend "Man, I'd love to say I love your long winding stories that go absoloutely no where, but that would be a lie." Good rinse.

That sounds pretty negative, but if you've been around me, you'll know I'm often better at dropping a good one liner or punch line than a well put together story. I'll either use a semi-intelligent turn of phrase to use as wit or I'll play dumb, Irish, or Irish dumb. That being said, given half a chance, I'd still do three minutes of stand up if I saw the option going in a bar. I'd maybe only be half as funny as Dylan Moran could be in a minute, but I'd still be doubly as funny as that twat Alan Carr. Which brings me on to a good topic for this post. Talentless celebrities.

Alan Carr's comedic talents are grossly lacking. Maybe you could argue it is the evolution of classic British camp, but Frank Spencer and the Carry Ons were classic because they were classically trained, their acts had subtle nuances and clever physical movement to match their indulgence in catchphrases ("Ooh matron", "Ooh Betty!"). Alan Carr doesn't even have good timing. He just has a spastic grin and attempts to be a poor man's Julian Clary, or steal Graham Norton's routine entirely. Norton used to be funny too, then he just lowered the tone to a level that was just awkward. The man makes Chucklevision seem high brow now. Want to be a gay comedian? Gain a little (okay maybe about a hundred points of IQ) intelligence in your act and be Steven Fry. Don't be the gossip queen who fights over men with Gok Wan. Probably don't do a double act with he who is little more than an accent-with-a-beard Justin Lee Collins. Though Collins is more forgivable because he has a better energy and can put together mildly entertaining shows like "Bring Back Star Wars". At the end of the day, both men really need to learn how Bill Bailey, Franky Boyle and Ed Byrne are funny.

Another instance of talentless celebrities is Kerry Katona. She's like a more likable Jade Goody. God bless her lovable coke binging heavy drinking ways. God bless her appearances in the Iceland adverts and on Loose Women. Two marvellous contributions to society. Before you start to wonder, I'll tell you how she found initial fame. In a girl band of about five years ago called Atomic Kitten. Atomic Kitten can be remembered for none of their songs. Well apart from their bland cover of the bland Bangles song "Eternal Flame". That and they were big in Japan, but I reckon thats on part due to the name. They were probably presuming it was a musical act of a Godzilla-esque cat. In all seriousness, ever since experiencing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the giant robot loving Japanese have had a kind of fascination with atomic bombs. That and they are a big fan of cats for instance show a big breasted cat girl in an anime and you'll keep millions happy. Stick the Hello Kitty on a pencil case and you're guaranteed big sales, albeit to a certain degree world wide. Going back to Kerry Katona, if I could make my money from being an addict to various substances whilst attempting to be a parent to children and appearing on a series of reality TV shows I probably would. If I could be in a TV advert which would attempt to market frozen, warm in the oven party snacks to students and single mothers wanting to add some Iceland class to the gathering I probably would. Lets be honest, those snacks are probably quite tasty.

I had a few more instances of crap celebrities stored in my head yesterday, but since they've evaporated from my frontal lobe, I had to ask around. Suggestions we have are Heather Mills and Vanessa Feltz. Despite the fact I don't think Mills deserves that big a share of Paul McCartney's money, part of the idea of marraige is that no matter what it is for life and if you do split, you do have to split everything you have with the other person. That being said, I'd prefer if we don't see the one legged bitch for a good long time. I'd rather watch Australian stand up Adam Mills shower us with banter about his one footedness. Then there's Feltz. We've seen less of her over the years and no-ones complaining. We get concerned about the massive swings in her weight. She puts it on and then she looses it. Then she just becomes obese for years, but still has a how to lose weight guide out there somewhere. I could go back to Jade Goody, but she's just too easy. She has a perfume out, but really.. who wants to smell like her? She's got an autobiography (if she wrote that, I'll have my bottom ribs removed to perform autofellatio) but who wants to read about her? As found out whilst she was in Indian Big Brother (to make up for the fact she was being racist on British TV) though she is probably going to die of a tumour the size of a tomato. I'd almost feel sorry for her, but she's making the whole thing horribly dramatic - planning her funeral like a wedding and wanting people to cry, rather than have a piss up. To be fair, she never wanted to be liked and was herself, which sometimes is all you can ever ask of anyone. As I should say in this blog, cancer isn't a laughing matter, unless you reside in a certain fucked up house with a number 12 on the door.

Once more for Piers Morgan. So up himself that he'll probably shit out his own mouth someday. After being kicked off not one but two tabloid newspapers, he's gone onto judge talent shows so he can tell them they're shitter than he is. I don't think my repeated use of the word shit can really detail how shit he really is, I kind of enjoy the fact he's on television because it gives us a role model that we can be better than. Its funny, he has a feud with Jeremy Clarkson and even if you dislike Clarkson you can at least agree he's better than knee-cap-him-then-just-to-see-if he-swims-throw-him-off-Blackpool-Pier Morgan (see what I did thar?). He's just so painfully slimy.

Back to my life, I'm kind of looking forward to tomorrow. I love a good Christmas day feed. Hell, its me.. I love any given feed. I'd say I'm feeling festive, but I'm not really that bothered. My belief system being an agnostic one with a built in Christian lean, I can thank God for giving me his only son, but then thats all up to question. As Richard Dawkins put it, if I were born in Ancient Greece I'd probably believe in Zeus. If I were born in India, I'd probably believe in Shiva and Ganesh. Its just how I was raised and schooled that I do have the belief I do and that belief is doubted, but never the less built in. As for just an occassion to hang out with the family, its nice and all but I get bored. I get upset whenever my mum panics as she usually does about Dad either not doing anything to help out or the roasties getting a tiny bit burnt. She does like it perfect. There should be some good TV on tomorrow too. Father Ted Christmas special was on the other night and fuck me that was a mighty good show. Not that I haven't seen it about once a year ever since it came out (MCMXCVI I think were the numerals or 1996 to you and me), the timing, comic acting and script are unbelievable. Great slapstick is complimented by great spoken comedy and everybody is happy. Just don't watch it and think of me whenever Dougal does something dumb.

At the end of the day, whatever your religious beliefs are, I hope you all have a good, but safe Christmas. A lot of bad shit happens round Christmas (as often enough does a lot of good shit). Don't go drink driving because lets face it, there's enough of that already and two wrongs does not make a right, unless that right is a right turn into a ditch. Do get sozzled, just like I have over the last two weeks. Do learn to deal with the inevitable red wine, beer, cider and spirits hangovers. If you're anything like me you probably will mix them to get extra fubared, along with indulgence of many other things. Whilst none of my housemates are likely to read this, I know a certain Jewface who probably will. Read his Basque-region set blog after mine because to be truthful, its wittier, sleeker and shinier than mine. www.jewbao.blogspot.com . I reckon I should do a top 5 things to do over the Christmas holidays in a week or two, but until then enjoy yourself. Eat, drink and be merry. And for Christ's sake don't fall down an open manhole.

Arrrgh. I don’t even know what I’m writing any more.

Its been a good few weeks since my last entry to the blog and its boiled down to a number of things – mainly lack of time, effort and the fact that a few of the buttons on my laptop had to be ripped off because I got grains of dirt trapped under the keys. That meant I was left with these tiny rubber circles to press instead of a nice flat bit of plastic. When those circles happen to represent g, right shift and space bar, this becomes a particular chore, but I digress.

The lack of time and effort thing boils down to my job. Back at home I work in an inbound (that means I answer the calls, not make them) call centre handling customer support for Creation Consumer Finance. This is the company that lends you money to buy overly large televisions from Bennets and sofas from Land of Leather. I wrote an entire post on how the job is, but I’ve since discarded the old material and re-written, but I think I’ve got kind of a mixed response to it, which means I’ll have to write and re-write before I’m ready to tell the world whether or not one should get a job answering the phone all day.

I also have notes scribbled down on a dilapidated notebook on Copenhagen, coming back from it and whether or not it was a good idea to do so. In a lot of ways, I haven’t decided.

That’s the thing with going anywhere, whether you’ve never been there or that you’ve lived there all your life. Initially, the change of scenery is nice. You get a different mix of people too, which given your freshness means that you can be treated with a really warm reception. People have either missed your presence, friendship and company or they appreciate it because its new and therefore with a slight novelty towards it. Get a warm reception and you’ll get a warm feeling, you feel more confident, happy and settled in life. You treat everything with a renewed sense of wonder and you feel as if nothing could go wrong in your life. Optimism leads to more optimism, when things are going right in your life and you have this feeling of confidence things seem to go along with it.

That’s what it was. I was having a ball of a time, meeting friends, going out. Meeting new people, seeing new things. Watched the Incredible Hulk, played some card games, got drunk, got high.

The problem is, give a week or two and something to go wrong and you’re back to square one; at least in my experience.

Ever since I lost my bike key and my bike has been locked up to a bike stand, before being consequently stripped of half of its parts, things haven’t been that swell. Had the odd moment of greatness, but equally or perhaps more so there have been a number of crapifying minutes of my life I’d like to forget.

Now, there were a serious of things that f-ed with my happiness for a little while. First of all work started getting on top of me – I went through a series of days where I had to take call after call, that was fine until I lost the key to my bike lock. By the time I had even half a solution to removing the notoriously stubborn kryptonite lock (this is one of those metal U-locks where if you use it and your bike is stolen they will give you £1500, apparently). I also had a bit of trouble from a this bat-shit insane girl who I’ll talk about if you ever ask me.

You get the odd niggling problems as well. Take for instance today (this part was written last Wednesday). This girl who works in the cash office (to pass the time, e-flirting goes a long way) and I were e-mailing a little back and forth. Since she said she’d go for a drink with me I was starting to get ideas I was in there. Guess what though. I fall into the “Oh I have a boyfriend trap”. Not that I’m not used to it by now, every guy should, but it still sucks.

People always ask me what I think of Belfast/Lancaster/Copenhagen and I think I can only give one true response, something that applies to all of them.

They have their moments.

That is to say, from time to time, they can be truly amazing. Maybe you just have one of those days that are great, that makes you glad to be alive. Then you have a string of days that are kind of.. meaningless.

Those days when you’re in a call centre doing nothing. Its not that you would be doing anything with a day off, the weather might be bad wherever you are, so you watch your landlord’s DVD collection or Battlestar Galactica season one which your friend (thanks Matt) has lent you. That’s if your friends aren’t around. Otherwise you meet up and do a variety of activities that may or may not include the following:

Alcohol/substance abuse, watching movies, playing card games, doing sweet f.a. in a park.

It’s not so bad, but I’ve started to notice how many days just seem to blend into one another. I’d quite like to say I’m doing something useful with my time, but would I necessarily enjoy doing them? I don’t know. It’s one of those things that I need to do to find out. But to do them , I need to arrange them around my work schedule, which seems to be endless. This week, I will have worked around sixty-one hours.

Sixty-one hours.

There are one hundred and sixty eight hours in a week.

If I sleep roughly a third of that time, its fifty six hours.

That means I’ve got fifty one hours a week to do whatever I like with it. Should be enough really, to fit in some guitar lessons, muay thai classes or more card games, but somehow I haven’t found away to do it.

Seriously though, what should I be doing with my life?

From what I gather, most of my pals also seem to be working their proverbials off, just like myself, though perhaps not to the exact same degree. Often they’re skint because instead of answering bollocks phone calls during the day, they’re actually nursing their hangovers rather than riding them out in their places of employment. That’s the method of yours truly. If I’m half drunk from the night before in work, the whole day will pass a lot quicker. I’ll sober up quickly anyway. Being that my alcoholic consumption is almost entirely based on beer consumption rather than anything else, the worst I seem to get these days is just a groggy feeling, the odd sleepiness from lack of sleep or occasionally the feeling that I’m still drunk from the night before.

Sometimes that actually makes what might be a boring day a little bit more interesting.

Its not that I hate my job, its just that I really can’t be arsed with it half the time. I’m stuck with the Homer Simpson tendency:

“If you don’t like your job, you don’t quit. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the way, that’s the American way!”

Seems I’m living my life just like the overweight balding beer-guzzling, doughnut-digesting American cartoon character. Whenever possible, I’ll even try and catch some sleep at my computer controls. Though this never lasts that long, obviously I have to keep a look out for the discerning eye of the team leaders. Who whilst generally patient, easy-going and not thinking they’re better than the little people, still have a job to do. In turn I have to respect that. I don’t shirk on the work, its just I only do it because I have to.

Half the time, I can’t really dislike it. The further you drag me down to earth with the mundane, the more my head will go off into the sky with the arcane. Sometimes, I’m doing the obvious planning of what I’m doing later, sometimes its planning my destiny. On some level, they are one and the same.

Sometimes I question the morality of the job at hand. Like I said before, we’re acting as the middle between the finance company and either customers or retailers (depending on who’s making the call and the purpose of the call), often to give them information on their account, take payments or set up new agreements. However, there is another side to it.

As one friend put it, we’re basically selling money. As part of a company that handles credit and makes its money by applying very steep interest rates, we’re on a day to day putting people in hot water. If you fail to pay off your £1200 for your sofas, you can end up being as much as £3000 in debt to us. Now I can imagine, with the chunky thirty six instalments, that can be a bigger bite out of one’s pay-cheque than the repayments for the almost twenty grand of student loans many of us might have borrowed, people can have a lot of problem with their debts.

So, on the “no-its-not-morally-wrong” side of the argument, providing credit is the corner stone of the free market economy system. To improve one’s situation, anyone within the liberal system we live in can borrow money for the purpose of sorting out their cash flow. 95% of the time if you pay everything off in good time, it will work out well for you, but then there is that other five percent of the time.

It used to be a case that if someone rang in having failed to pay their debt by so much as a day and having incurred so much interest, I used to feel sorry for them, speak empathetically. Now, its not the case. I don’t so much as rub it in, but behave like an automaton. My answers become robotic and if you put them down on paper they would read like bullet points. Like I thought the other week, I’m getting gradually more evil working the job. Whenever someone rolls over the Special Offer Date and incurs this interest, I almost take a guilty pleasure in knowing that they have. Maybe I’m thinking in terms of the company that my job is more secure by the added money coming into the company’s account from the suffering customer. Maybe its knowing somebody else has made a mistake, one that I am believe I wouldn’t ever do in real life (three of my flat mates from second year will recall an epic drunken conversation on my birthday about buying things on credit, if you want a sofa, just save up and buy it was my bottom line). Maybe I’m just that sadistic that I’m taking pleasure in somebody else’s anguish. At the same time though, I do feel for the person that has had the bad thing happen to them. A lot can add up on a person, I don’t even know the circumstances of how they live (though if they tell me their sob stories, I’m actually more annoyed that they’ve tried to place all this guilt on me, as if I am personally responsible for their hardships and that I should bend over backwards to fix the situation).

Don’t you people understand your suffering pleases my cold dead heart?

There’s also the point that I wasn’t the one who actually sold the agreement. I didn’t advertise it, I didn’t mis-sell the agreement to the customer by telling them there would be no admin charge, no interest charge, no 3% surcharge for using a credit card to pay the bill off. In fact, it all boils down to the principle of free will. Who forced the customer to sign themselves into a contract? No-one, but their own drive for a better, more expensive and shinier sofa. It really annoys me whenever they rant and rave down the phone because they took credit out on a 48” LCD television as well and failed to pay it off within the year.

I’m the type of guy who takes pleasure in finding a bargain, takes pleasure in finding a freebee. Maybe its because I like the idea of saving for my future, or generally just so I can save my money for other things i.e. drinking and smoking. Those of you that know me may remember about half a year ago I purchased this 24” CFT television for a grand total of £16 off ebay. Not only was the screen grossly oversized in comparison to the one bed en-suite rooms of Lancaster university’s campus, but the picture quality was pretty good as well. It just looked amazing in comparison to the otherwise bare room. In fact, I think if you said to me

“Here’s seven hundred pounds, go and buy a big television,”

I would look the gift horse in the mouth. I’d question why not buy a half decent one for under £100 and save the rest for other things.

I think half of Lancaster will remember Mr. Loverstreet’s discovery of a giant television that was being thrown out that the Carpenter and I carted round to the ground floor of Block 28 and installed in Sean-joe’s room, in place of a scrawny (but serviceable) 14” television. Oh the FIFA we played..!

Now my point about this is not that I have an eye for bargains or that I think more ascetically than a bunch of idiots who ring up to give me abuse down the phone about excessive interest rates, but that the simple things in life need to be appreciated more. Try not to get sucked up into consumerism and the keeping-up-with-the-jones’ lifestyle that has people buy stupid shit. Or if you really need to, save up and buy it. The company doesn’t send out reminders that people need to pay off their bill because it shouldn’t need to. If you sign an agreement (and are handed not only a that says pay off this large amount of money we’re lending you by January, its your prerogative to make the payment.

Someone else said this about another call centre:

“I’m not a nazi, I’m just working in the gas chamber.”

In some respects, this one is no different.

But then, on the other hand you have four fingers and a thumb.

What I do like about this place, there is a bit of a cool mix of people down at the oul (this is a Norn Irish term meaning old, but really a term of endearment) office. From a bunch of slightly chunky but generally friendly and likable lesbians in their mid-twenties, to an ex-priest in training to uni students, middle aged housewives and eighteen year olds with limited life experience and limited education.

I got off to a good start with most people here. Many of them are as geeky as I am. I’ve played about half of the customer services department at chess and won, only to have a challenger coming from the underwriting department (this is where they credit score you to decide if we can trust you to make payments back on your hundreds of pounds). I’ve also shared and discussed comics, music, science, religion, films with a lot of people, finding out I share a lot of tastes with people.

You get the odd brainless person, who knows little more than the musical stylings of Cascada, hair extensions, shoes and Baracardi breezers, but they’re sometimes fun for even a giggle. I’m not going to act up like an emo child and say that they are so low on intellect and intelligence they are a problem with society, because that would be very short sighted and overly pedantic, judgemental and failing to enjoy the simple nuances of simple people. They are funny in a round about way.

So about Belfast then? Any good?

Its gotten a helluva lot better over the last few months.

For instance, one can actually enjoy a night out in Belfast and then with a carry out go and sit on the protective surroundings of a bandstand centred in the middle of a park at about three o’clock in the morning.

Clubs seem to be improving too, though with the credit crunch on the go, things have gotten a fair bit more expensive. £20 can still last you a night the way we play it though. Times are good. Except the green scene.

What started as a very promising few weeks in terms of what we could get our hands on smoke wise, things soon turned sour. After getting a hydroponically grown bag of awesome, there seems to be a new drought. Or a turn to five score bags (£25 for about 2 grams of sand blasted bud, simply marvellous. Sorry did I just blow up a sarcasm). We got an O between four of us of soap bar stuff, it did the job, but it hot rocked to be-Jesus and it just isn’t the same. Give me the pungent stuff that smells like a greenhouse full of miracle-gro and I’ll be happy.

From anyone else’s view it’s kind of clear what I need – either a girlfriend or a hobby. Even though I’ve kind of pointed out that since I’m working all day I have time constraints and need to relax, someone really needs me to take me somewhere where I take up rock climbing or martial arts or something. I should really learn to enjoy other things in life than getting stoned and playing card games. But you do whatever you enjoy. No point forcing yourself to do things you don’t want to do. Actually that doesn’t make sense, I’d probably never go to work.

Well I might.. just for my attractive female colleagues..

Life is what you make it. If I’m working too many hours, I bring it on myself. Days that seem meaningless will make the days that seem meaningful more so.

That’s about all for now. Catch you on the flipside

C-dogg (irony)