A lot of people saw Johnny Chung Lee's amazing head-tracking demo on YouTube a couple of months back, but I thought this was even more amazing. And yes, I found this via his appearance at TEDTalks. So sue me.
Blimey. It seems an age since Reno. We left town as soon as we were able, and put The Car through a big test right away - up and over three mighty passes over the Sierra Nevada, past Lake Tahoe, and back into California for the Yosemite National Park. Despite stopping to gawk at an amazing wild fire near Walker, CA., we got to Lee Vining, the gateway town for Yosemite, a little earlier than expected, so we took a detour to Bodie. Bodie is a former gold rush town, long since abandoned, and now left as a ghost town and state park. The last three miles of the road up there were unpaved, and, I suspect, driven a little too fast. When we returned to the car, we only made it over the first hill before the engine cut out. We couldn't see anything obvious, so I jogged back to fetch a park ranger. He had no better idea, so we called the AAA for our second tow in 24 hours. We had an hour or so to kill, but the eerie scrub lands of a ghost town at sundown proved a far more pleasant place to be stuck than Reno - by the time Shelly from Lee Vining had shown up only the mossies had disturbed our peace.
It was too late for a hotel - Lee Vining gets full pretty fast - so we camped out in the car, feasting from the fridge at the local Chevron garage. We hadn't been too concerned about the car this time - it was probably something very simple - and sure enough, by morning, the mechanic was able to get us on the road simply by finding the fuel cut-off switch (buried deep in the boot under bags and carpet) which the vibrating road had triggered. We skirted Lake Mono and made for Yosemite. The park is awe-inspiring, particularly the valley, which features kilometer-tall granite cliffs, a 200 metre waterfall, and about as much verdant beauty as two tired Englishmen could stand. We pressed on, lunching at the Mammoth Falls ski resort before taking on the trip we'd been dreading making in The Car - down out of the mountains, back towards the Nevada border, across Death Valley, and up to Vegas.
We had agreed to cross Death Valley at night, so no pictures, I'm afraid, but it made for a far more memorable trip. For starters, there was no-one else there - we saw a few bikers crossing the other way as the sun went down, but the sky was darkening as we made the main valley floor and we were undisturbed until we made the other side. At midnight it was 45 degrees C, an absurd temperature on a cloudless night, and we walked out across the salt pan to the lowest point in the 'States (and the Western Hemisphere), Badwater, at -85 metres. In the sky was Saturn, so bright that it cast our shadows on the hexagonal salt crystals, which with the immense, echoing valley walls and the utter dryness of the air, helped complete this surreal of moments.
A long drive out of the other side (via the always-amusing Parhump, NV) and all of a sudden, Las Vegas was on the horizon, glowing, blazing into the desert night. I popped Elvis on the CD player (thanks for the CD, Jenn!) and cruised onto the strip. I was in my element - and yes, shitheap though it is, The Car gets a LOT of female attention - but it was 4.30am, and Ed was too knackered to enjoy it, so we headed downtown to the budget motels of Fremont street and our first bed since Reno.
Daylight and Vegas really don't mix. For one, it's absurdly hot, but mostly it just doesn't have the crazed, wild-eyed explosion of neon, drunkenness and stupidity that sells it so strongly as a city. I took a laundry and internet day, and returned to find Ed waking up just before sundown. We hit the town, drove, walked, fluttered, but for some reason failed to engage with the Vegas vibe. Perhaps it was sobriety, but for some reason the place never really clicked. We popped into a dozen or so big casinos and a handful of the smaller ones, but by the time we wanted a game of poker, most of the poker rooms had closed. Yes, it was 4am on a Monday morning, but still, this is supposed to be Vegas, right? Still, my main reason for even going to the city was the cruise down the strip, and however many times we did that, it just did not get old.
Bright and early, then, out of town, for a meandering cruise North around Lake Mead, being tourists for the day. The Grand Canyon was the eventual target, but we had to spend the night in Kanab first, where we ate astonishingly well after a long day in the sun. We made the Canyon by 10am the following day, our longer route to the North Rim being rewarded by the relative solitude of the experience and views unfamiliar from photos that tend to be from the more developed South side. It took me a while - conditioned, perhaps by overfamiliarity and expectation - but by the third drive and trek to the rim, I finally got it, and it was quite overwhelming. It was the wind, I think, that did it - whipping along the 130 mile canyon, hot, then up into our faces as we perched dizzyingly on the edge.
The Zion National Park was our next stop - and was somehow even more inspirational. A tight gorge carved out of sandstone, but unlike the Grand Canyon, this was covered in trees, far more varied in colour and erosion style, and had a road cut right into the side, making for an incredible drive. We scrambled up a cliff on Checkerboard Mesa to watch the sun go down before kicking on again into the Navajo nation and our next adventure.
The Car, by the way, was handling all of this magnificently. We are putting in two or three 150+ mile trips a day, and since Lee Vining, we haven't had a whimper out of her - which made what happened next all the more amusing. We'd hit a Navajo town called Kayente over the Utah border, 20-odd miles from Monument Valley, which I wanted to see at dawn. We'd done a lot of driving that day, were knackered, and realised that we hadn't eaten. No restaurants, so we only had fast food to choose from. I'm still not completely sure how it happened, but one second we were pulling into a drive-thru, and the next, Ed (on his thirtieth birthday, no less) had spun the wheel left and we were sliding off the road, nose and driver's side first, into a six-foot, sandy ditch. We were lurched up at a sickening angle, and with no chance of shifting The Car. It was just bizarre. I clambered out and jumped the four feet down to the ground, checked that we weren't spewing fuel, and started laughing immediately. After snapping a few photos I walked into the Burger King.
"Can I help you?"
"Yes," I replied, "do you have a truck?"
The Navajo Nation PD showed up. Ed was on edge - he had possibly, after all, just totalled The Car - but I just could not stop laughing, taking photos, horsing around with the policewoman, and generally having the time of my life. If this were to be how the trip ended, at least it would make for a good story - not to mention a hell of a journey back to the nearest city. I wandered off for some food to stop the police from searching me for drugs, and by the time I'd got back, a passing motorist had rigged us up for a tow. A heave and a yank and a tug and a press and a push and we were out. Incredibly, only the frame had been scratched - out precious fluids were intact, and if anything it seemed to have straightened out the alignment of the front axle.
Ed was now laughing as hysterically as I, so, far too late for accommodation, we trundled up the road with our Sonic double cheeseburgers to find a quiet spot near Monument Valley to lay up in the car. It was warm, so we left the roof open and dozed under a million stars. A mistake, as it turned out - a dust storm in the night coated us, The Car, and crucially, its CD player in a gritty film of sand.
So, the current list of things that have gone wrong with the car stands at:
And still I love it more...
Oh, and a quick note on food. On the whole, we've eaten fairly well. On the most part we eat one American-sized meal per day, and snack on fruit and cereal bar the rest of the time. It is the land of calorific plenty. Breakfast tends to be the immovable feast, and this morning I decided that I'd been too long without a cup of tea. The problem with tea in the US is that they bring you hot water and some teabags - clearly useless, if you're drinking black tea. I gently pointed this out as I gave my order, and got back... a cup of very recently boiled water and a very happy-looking waitress. I apologised, but politely suggested, and then insisted, they just let me make it myself in the kitchen. I gave a short tutorial to the clearly uninterested kiitchen staff - boiling water onto the bag, folks! - and sure enough, came away with the best tea I've had since Heathrow. My adventures with waiting staff continue. I keep asking for smaller portions, and they keep staring at me as if I had leprosy.
Back to the trip; Monument Valley is the classic Western backdrop - wide open scrub land punctured by colossal wind-eroded mesas, buttes, and chimney stacks of rock. Roasted red by dawn, nothing blows the cobwebs away like it. A few dozen miles further, we saw yet more iconic geology - the Mexican Hat balancing rock and the stunning Goosenecks.I write this from the only internet cafe in Reno, Nevada, which is by far the nicest place in the city, for it offers a link to the world outside its miserable city limits. The only other places of business I have seen are tattoo parlours, auto title loan sharks, sex shops, strip joints, wedding chapels, divorce firms, second-hand car lots and the tackiest, most desperate and low casinos.
But how did I get here? And why haven't I left yet? Well...
My last entry saw me having just arrived in Eugene. We were staying at Diggy's place. Diggy lives with a guy called Adam, a funny and good-natured local kid, and has a girl called Maddie come round and help with the cleaning. Both in their early twenties, and West Coast through and through, they proved a great laid-back foil to Diggy's occasional intensity, and made for a great pair of guides to local living. For a few days we just hung out - I managed to watch the Champions' League final, took in a local jam band with Maddie, and met Jim's landlord, Paul, who was kind enough to lend Diggy his raft, a six-man inflatable, for a spot of fishing. One night, we four boys hiked out to a local hot springs near Cougar Dam, and bathed naked under the starlight. What a place!
We also followed up a lead on a car, which turned out to be The Car. More on that later.
First, though, we were off to the Sasquatch Festival, a two-day concert at The Gorge, in Washington State. Ed was feeling the pinch after San Francisco, so Diggy and I went alone. We stopped at my friend Jenn's in Portland (a two-hour drive up the freeway), who, after a night on the beers and playing pool in the hipster Belmont district of her city, and even longer sat up singing along to Beatles songs to my guitar, decided to come with us. Bright and early, then, we were away, for one of the most amazing drives of my life. Highway 84 follows the Columbia river out of Portland... no, wait... The Columbia River. It needs the capitals. It's gigantic - we clocked it as exactly a mile across one of the bridges - and has carved a deep path through the local rock. The 84 follows its sweep along the Oregon side for around 100 miles inland; then we cut over a high pass to meet the river as it snakes north into Washington state and beyond. The high pass, at around 150 miles, took in forests, lakes, rivers, high plains, badlands, you name it - and all linked together with smooth bends that made Diggy's Landcruiser a great way to travel.
The concert ground is out in the middle of nowhere, but kids had driven from all over the North West, Mid West and Western Canada to be there. I didn't see why until we made it down to the main stage. Set in front of a natural ampitheatre holding around 20,000 people, the stage left its back open to the most spectacular view of the Gorge beyond. Miles across, and up to a mile deep, this made for the most spectacular backdrop to a concert you could imagine, and the bands did it justice. First up were The Long Winters "out of Seattle", who gave country-tinged rock a good name and boasted one of the better frontmen I've had the pleasure to see. Easy-going, funny, charming, all blonde hair and aviator shades, he reminded me of a dozen great rock singers - and sounded uncannily like Michael Stipe. Manu Chau played the sunset set - I've been a fan for years, and it was wonderful to see him move a crowd that I suspect weren't that familiar with his stuff. Next up were Arcade Fire, and the Canadian ten-piece laid down a truly great set. Collossal amounts of energy, great performances, and killer tunes; Diggy commented that it was the best set he'd ever seen from a band he didn't already know about - and Diggy has seen a LOT of concerts. Bjork closed the show with a spectacular explosion of sound, light and costume, but we were knackered from the drive and headed back to the tent.
Jenn and I wanted to make a move the next morning, which pissed Diggy off, as he wanted to see the Dandy Warhols. After we dropped Jenn off in Portland, Diggy and I had a bit of a row about it, but it was all over and vented by the time we got back. Diggy can be a difficult customer at the best of times, but for a handful of reasons, I guess we'd been headed for a fight, and it was good to have it settled.
The Car was waiting. I'd been driving around with Maddie, and a lady in a second-hand car lot had mentioned a white Mustang convertible that her sister in law was selling. We'd gone to see it, and it was clearly in bad shape, but I confess, I was just taken in by it. It's an '87, undeniably not one of the better years for the marque, but what the hell - a Mustang convertible is a Mustang convertible. We knew we'd need the brakes and tyres fixing, but the engine seemed solid enough, and we picked it up cheap - in retrospect, far too cheaply. We'd left it with Bruce, Diggy's mechanic, before taking the weekend up at The Gorge. Now it was back at Diggy's, having miraculously aquired a puncture, but otherwise looking OK. Ish. The repair bill had extended to include a new radiator, tie rod, battery cable, and oil filter. No matter - we set about cleaning her up. Ed went for the imperfections in the paintwork on the boot where an abortive attempt to fix a spoiler had left bullet sized holes, and I went for the deep clean. It had been sat open in a farmer's yard for a while, and it took me about 15 hours to get the filth out, but when I did - boy, did she look pretty. Washed, waxed, polished on the outside, shampooed, vacuumed, scrubbed and polished on the in; I don't think The Car had been this clean since she was new. It was a glorious Memorial Day; Ed and I working non-stop on the car, Diggy, Adam and Adam's girlfriend Tamara drinking Pina Coladas, wearing hawaiian shirts and prepping the raft.
We took the raft out an hour before sundown; Adam and Tamara were wasted to the point of falling over, so Ed and I took the paddles (Diggy took the Landcruiser back - the raft didn't seem stable enough for more). We did pretty well, and though it was pitch black by the time we got home, we took in an exceptionally pretty stretch of river, with a couple of gentle rapids and a plethora of local fauna to keep things interesting. After clambering up the steep bank to Diggy's house, I cooked our hosts a farewell meal of bangers and mash (chorizo and italian sausage on a puree of potatoes, bacon, onion, garlic, mustard and parmesan under a blackberry and port jus, for my London friends). Most of the next day's light was spent finishing up the car, and suddenly we were off. Diggy was short of cash ("flow", as they call it out here) so it was only Eddie and myself on the way down to Vegas. Fond goodbyes were said, and off we went.
We'd only gone thirty miles before the first of the car problems started; smoke started pouring out of the engine, and the steering was distinctly for the worse. We limped over to the side of the road, feeling slightly screwed. We had AAA and third party insurance, meaning we could be towed, but damage to our car was our own responsibility. Amazingly, however, we happened to have broken down outside the best possible house in Oregon to do to. A big, grease-stained guy ambled up - Matt - and offered to have a look. We pulled it round to his garage where eight vehicles in various states of repair sat, including a dune buggy he'd just been racing through Nevada. He jacked the car and had me turn over the engine. Sickening red arterial spurts arced out from the engine. "Shut it off!" he cried... then: "Hmmm..." then "I can fix this." He janked out the power steering hose and inspected the valve, before removing an o-ring, hammering it back into shape, replacing it, and topping it up. A miracle. We thanked him - he wouldn't even let us give him a beer - and headed back on the road. More miracles, it turned out, would be needed later.
Before that though, a glorious night's driving. I was high on caffeine and adrenaline, and drove for nine straight hours, covering 500 miles of backroads into California before crashing out in a cheap motel in Alturas, CA. Dozens of lakes and mountains dotted the route - I know its a cliche, but America is simply huge, and so much of it is untouched nature. It's not like the UK, where the land has been toiled and shaped for a thousand years - Oregon in particular is utterly beguiling in its untrammelled beauty - and our route was going to take us far from the interstates and further from the cities. The next day, yesterday, was where the problems started, and our remote route started to be problematic. Ed was driving - and I'd like to blame him at this point for all that follows - when The Car started smoking again. The power steering levels were fine, though, as was the brake fluid, the oil, the radiator... and yet drips were coming thick and fast... from, it turned out, the transmission. Bugger. We were in The Middle of Nowhere, Northern CA, and knew that if we let the fluid empty, the transmission would be screwed. We found the dipstick, topped it up with power steering fluid (the best we had) and limped on to Quincy, CA, but it was too late for a mechanic, and we stayed the night.
Next morning, I woke to an empty room, and the phone ringing. Ed had taken The Car to a mechanic on the other side of town, and had Some Bad News. New transmission needed. $2000 and 8-10 days to fix it. The Car, and possibly our entire trip, was fucked.
Through my natural optimism, I told him that this was clearly nonsense; that when the fluids were up, the gearbox worked just fine, that this guy was a backwoodsman, and that we just needed to find someone who knew about transmissions. The next mechanic over cautiously gave us hope along those lines, and we decided to make for Reno. We only made ten miles of the seventy before the leak gave way entirely; we limped to the nearest garage with a phone (having had no mobile coverage since leaving Eugene) and called for a tow to Reno. The guys at the garage recommended a transmission specialist, and before long a guy called Lee turned up to tow The Car into town.
Rich at A-1 Transmissions gave us two options; either it would cost $1800 to replace the transmission (which would put Ed out of the trip entirely) or we might have gotten away without damaging it, and only have to fix the leak - a few hundred at most. Tired, pissed off, and worried, we took off for a motel and brooded for the rest of the afternoon. We did take in a couple of hours worth of Reno, and discovered it to be the most miserable city either of us have ever visited, and I include every hick town in South America, Central Europe and the West Midlands in that assessment. We finally escaped the main strip and ate a burger at a pool bar, swinging between misery, wild optimism and mild self-loathing for being such mugs as to buy The Damn Car in the first place. Eager to spend little, we walked back to the motel and slept fitfully.
This morning, however, bought good news. The transmission, it turns out, wasn't damaged, although a new pump seal would have to be put in. Rich discovered the problems with the starter were serious, though, and replaced it, along with the torque converter and two u-joints on the rear drive shaft. $800 all-in, then, but right now that feels like a blessing. And in fairness, aside from the engine itself, almost every moving part in the car has now been fixed or replaced, so I'm reasonably confident that The Car has given us the last of its major suprises.
Ah, who am I trying to kid? But, boy, she is pretty... what can I say? I think it's love.
Today, then; Yosemite Park - then overnight round there somewhere, followed by an evening drive across Death Valley and, The Car willing, we'll be coasting top-down down the Vegas strip an hour after sundown on Saturday...
PS If anyone needs it, my mobile out here is 001 (415) 412 9174
Sod the title. Greetings from Oregon, from where I write having spent five of the most interesting days of my life in San Francisco...
Ed and I were met at SFO by Diggy, an old friend of ours from West Virginia who we knew six or seven years back in London. We'd helped him out when he was dumped by a girl and left stranded in the UK, and had become fast friends - this, I got the impression, was to be payback. Diggy's car had died, so he'd taken the bus from Oregon - a longer journey than our eleven hours from Heathrow. We picked up a crappy Chevvy HHD rental - a "mid-size" - and headed into town. We met an old friend of his for lunch - CJ, a wrinkled, leathery old hippy with a solid career in pot farming, a sideline in independent movies, and a giant pair of sunglasses that hid his wild eyes from the low San Francisco sunshine. After a cruise around the city we checked into a motel on Van Ness and Broadway and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge. I drove across, wide-eyed, taking in the bay, and felt like we'd finally made it to San Francisco. Over in Marin County, we drove up to an abandoned gun battery site and watched our first Pacific sunset overlooking the city.
We ended the night in Shanghai Kelly's, a famous old Irish bar on Polk that would later form basecamp for Diggy's Bay to Breakers (B2B) crew.
After a 34 hour day, Ed and I slept well but woke early. I went for a run (running every day I'm out here is the goal - have you seen what these guys eat?) while Ed pulled together some shopping and Diggy slept off the night before. A spot of shopping and a cruise around town was enough to persuade us that we needed some serious rest before the approaching madness of B2B weekend, so we headed out of town to a motel in Pacifica, a quiet settlement 20 miles south of SF on route 101.
A couple of days kicking around the beach catching up on sleep (and taking some more runs) meant that the evenings and San Francisco were ours for fun. Diggy introduced us to one of his old army buddies, a special forces medic just back from his fifth tour in Iraq/Afghanistan. Mac - a muscular, primal, good-looking Bostonian - seemed a good guy, but also a bit damaged from war (he'd just lost his cousin to an IED in Afghanistan) and was finding it hard to adjust to civilian life. His wife and her friends seemed a world away from his experiences - they worked in financial services and at Google - but nonetheless, we were all in it together for the B2B weekend. I tried to meet up with my friend Lindsay, whom Joe, Sam and I had met on a wild night out in London with her friend Amy a year or so ago. Sadly, we both had extremely drunken friends to deal with (Ed, of all people, had gotten out of the car to be sick, then decided he didn't want to get back in before running off into the night...) so we didn't make our rendezvous.
Next day we did, though. It was Saturday, the day before B2B, and we were heading into to town to check in at the W, one of the best hotels in town, which would act as our base for the weekend. Diggy was paying - his elder brother Tom was joining us, and I think Diggy wanted to show off how well his construction business has been going.
A little about B2B; it's primarily a race, from the bay side of town (downtown Embarquadero) to the wind-lashed wilderness of Ocean Beach - hence Bay to Breakers. The runners, though, are only a tiny part of it. The majority of the 100,000 are very much in it for the craziness that San Francisco is famed for - as this video shows (note the salmon at 2'40'', a group that run the race "upstream" every year. This year they were accosted half way by a group of bears that picked them off around mile three...). Diggy and his friends from Shanghai Kelly's - Mac and his hard-drinking fellow Irish - do the race in kilts every year. I'd picked up a few on the internet so that Diggy, Tom, Ed and I could join in.
First, though, was Saturday's Oyster and Beer festival down on the Marina. The guys were already in their kilts so I joined them, but - teetotal for this trip - I swiftly fell out of place with all the drinking. Ed was sleeping off the night before back at the hotel. Thankfully, the music and the oysters were excellent, and Lindsay was on her way in to join me. I took part in a little violent dancing (something between rugby and dodgems) to the Dropkick Murphys before giving the guys the slip and driving Lindsay out for dinner in her home town of Mill Valley, a perfect little slice of wealthy, liberal California nuzzling onto the North side of the Bay. It was only on the way into the (excellent) Chinese restaurant that I remembered I was still in my kilt, but no matter - I was with a local girl, and in any case, it's all about how you carry it off. She made sure we went into her town square for coffee later, looking, I expect, for a touch of notoriety - how many girls bring a kilted Brit into town on your average Saturday evening in Mill Valley? - so everyone had something to gossip about.
Sunday was B2B - we four kilted up and stepped out of the W onto the route. The young, creative and beautiful of San Francisco were on their very best form - such energy, such colour, such abandonment - and I felt myself really falling for the city. It started at 8am; by 11, everyone was wasted, and by noon there were casualties on every street corner. One of the guys had dropped too much acid on top of too much booze and had freaked out. Diggy had to take him back to the hotel and chill him out. All the while Ed and I were up ahead, missed the ruckus, and so took in the rest of the 12km walk ourselves. And there was much to see - a sound system or a band on every block, hundred of floats and shopping trolleys pushed walkers, kegs and PAs up and down the city's startling hills, while naked people, cheerleaders, aliens, pirates, Elivii and countless others boogied on towards the beach in a riot of colour and flesh. When it came, the beach was amazing; the biggest waves I'd ever seen crashing over the beautiful walkers - only the fittest had made it all the way.
We picked our way through the debris back towards town looking for an after-party. In the scrum to remove his friend from the race, Diggy had left his bag in their beer trolley - which was later abandoned to the streets along with his phone, his house keys, his cash and his stash; when we returned we found him pacing around the room, distinctly unhappy. We showered and declared a mission - to track down the rest of the group (who were passed out in hotels all over the city), and find what we could of his stuff. Four hours, three cars, two hotels, five walkers, two bars, six homeless people, two cops, two cleanup crews and three sincere arguments with a satnav later and we'd recovered both his phone and, amazingly, his smokes. It meant we'd missed the afterparty with Lindsay and her "dozen single friends who are just dying to meet you guys", but victory was nonetheless sweet, and we meant we'd seen the city in a way in which we never otherwise would.
Yesterday we checked out early and drove North, first swapping rental cars, then taking a walk around Muir Woods, a redwood forest bequeathed to the nation by a guy called Kent in the early 1900s. Before long we were on our way out of California into Oregon, to Diggy's place in the woods, a giant wooden house with a glass side that looks out onto the Mackenzie River which flows only ten paces from his back door. We're off fishing this afternoon, then off for a night out in Portland before getting set for the long drive to the Gorge at George and the Sasquatch Music Festival at the weekend.
The Drumaville consortium that own and run Sunderland AFC had long been rumoured to have Sean Mulyran involved as a silent partner: it's finally become public knowledge. Mulryan is a property developer, and a VERY rich man indeed. I can think of a couple of reasons you'd want to keep something like that quiet, but it can only be good news if it's true. Bring on the billionaires!
Oh, and the Belgians know how to make a protest vote interesting.
Blimey. I've never been on a rugby tour before. My club, Kilburn Cosmos, were invited to play in a tournament in Vilnius which, as I'm sure you know, is the capital of Lithuania.
Tour rules mean that I can't let you know a great deal about our exploits; though whatever your imagination can summon - as to what 27 rugby players might get up to over three days in a town where beer is about a quid a pint - will almost certainly be tamer than the reality. Needless to say, I managed to injure myself; a cracked rib, a broken hand (I think, anyway - I'm off to hospital as soon as I've posted this and had a shower*) and a meatily bruised and neatly cut eye. My shoulder, though, held up to playing, and what a joy to get back on the pitch! I've been out all season with that shoulder, but there was no way I was going to go all that way and not test it out. I'm still not as fit as I'd like to be, and I'll need to bulk up a little, but I'd forgotten just how much fun it is to... well, run into people, screaming, ball in hand... ;)
We were undefeated, incidentally; drawing two games (5-5 and 7-7) and winning the last one by 40-odd to nil; not bad, considering that the games were less than half an hour long each.
Sadly, I didn't get to see much of Vilnius, but that which I saw was great. It's a compact city centre, but architecturally impressive - from a gigantic classical cathedral on the main square to some deeply funky new skyscrapers on the other side of the river - and it's obsessively tidily kept - it came across as being really rather propserous. The Lithuanians we met weren't exactly a respresentative sample of the population, but we had a laugh with a few of them - and the rest were really rather tolerant, considering...
[CENSORED]
... x-ray. Anyway, I've got finish some writing off tonight, wash my filthy clothes, then I've tomorrow to turn around and... I'm off! To San Fransisco! In 41 hours! I can't believe it!
* 3am update. Nothing broken!
We've only gone and done it. One year ago, in Brazil, my brother and I were speculating about what might happen if the Quinn/Drumaville takeover were to go ahead. Our club, remember, had been royally splintered in the Premiership that year, and we were seriously worried about another relegation, down to the third division (League One, or whatever). What if it were to go ahead? What if we were to pick up a top class manager, and start putting a run together? Not in our wildest dreams did we imagine how well it would turn out. To win 5-0, already promoted, away from home, on the last day of the season, and to steal the title from Birmingham in the last five minutes; well, it's the stuff of legend. I wrote a long and emotional thank you to everyone at the club on the SMB messageboard. Have a read if you want a good laugh at my sentimental side.
Moment of the season? Carlos Edwards' screamer last Friday. End to end in nine touches, all but sealing automatic promotion in the last ten minutes v Burnley. He's going to be a handful in the big league next year.
Well, well. All that scraping around in the pubs of South London seems finally to have paid off. Play/pause took its first step into a wider universe with a corking first night at Lowdown, underneath the Albany at Great Portland Street.
My man Tom took a cracking set of pictures. Have a look. As you can see, the place was rammed with pretty young wasted things who wanted nothing more than to get sweaty and dive around like loons. Sam and I could not have asked for a better night. Some lovely blagger/blogger even came along to review it for us. Aw. Thanks!
Oh, and on the topic of pictures, it was Joe's flat-cooling party on Friday - and the theme was Sci-Fi and Superheroes. You really can't go wrong with fancy dress.
I got the National Express up to Sunderland yesterday. It's the first time I've taken the bus in a long time, and, you know what, it wasn't that bad. I had a bit of drama getting on it (an exasperating tale of lost reference numbers, jobsworthiness and repeated sprints across the Victoria station coach bays), but they've really improved the buses these last ten years. Anyway, the reason I'm up is that tonight, I'm going here to see the Arctic Monkeys. And I can't wait. The overnight coach back to London will be less fun, I expect, as will tomorrow's work day, but saying as I'm missing Glasto, it'll be worth making the effort to get to see them.
Oh, and one more thing; a great interview with Roy Keane in yesterday's Observer.
He has built a team with character. Sunderland's record of scoring late goals this season is unrivalled and speaks well of the personality of the team Keane has assembled. Either that or it suggests a fear of coming back in to a dressing room and facing Keane having failed him.Having him and Quinny at the club still (a year after the Drumaville takeover) feels like a dream. I remember being in Brazil this time last year, speculating with my brother about what might happen if Quinn was successful, and brought a top manager in with a big budget. I don't think either of us dared think it would have gone this well. Top of the league with three games to go, having won 14 of our last 17, undefeated, playing fast, powerful, passing football and scaring the shit out of both the opposition and the Mags - this is a great time to be a Sunderland supporter.
"The Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky has told the Guardian he is plotting the violent overthrow of President Putin from his base in Britain after forging close contacts with members of Russia's ruling elite."Hang on, wasn't this the guy that was trying to buy West Ham a couple of years back?
Media Sports Investment, a company registered in London whose backers are unknown, took control of Corinthians and soon delivered the £10m signing of Argentina playmaker Carlos Tevez and the league title.
When MSI head Kia Joorabchian met the West Ham chairman Terence Brown in May to discuss a £70m takeover of the club with a further £200m promised for investment, Berezovsky was reported to be involved.
So, somewhere he was involved in the Tevez and Mascherano deal too. He seems a very interesting fellow. :) It's nicely timed with Radio 4's Book of the Week show I've been listening to on the way to work this week, which has carried extracts from a series of contemporary books on Russia. This is the listing of the one I heard this morning:
In Blowing Up Russia Alexander Litvinenko accuses the successors of the KGB of being involved in the Moscow apartment-block bombings in 1999 which were blamed on Chechen rebels. Litvinenko’s outspokenness about his KGB past and his subsequent imprisonment meant he had to flee Russia and seek political asylum in Britain. On 1st November 2006 he was poisoned with a lethal dose of Polonium 210.
Litvenenko was an awful writer but you can see why someone might have wanted to do him in. He was, as you may know, very close to Berezovsky.
The other extracts are from Anna Politkovskaya’s last book, A Russian Diary, and Andrew Jack's Inside Putin’s Russia, bookended by two from Martin Sixsmith's The Litvinenko File: the True Story of a Death Foretold, which refers to the oligarch as "the king of the exiles". It will be fascinating to see how appropriate the imagery turns out to be.
Putin does not seem like someone to cross, and while Berezovsky, it is rumoured, can look after himself, he has now moved from mere calls to revolution to what must be a highly provocative and open position of leadership. At least he knew well enough to steer clear of West Ham...
From today's newspaper:
Up to 200 teenagers from across the country trashed a family house while the parents were away after their daughter advertised a party on MySpace, police said today.Revellers caused £20,000 of damage to the £230,000 property after the invitation for the Easter Monday celebration was posted on the popular site as a "Skins Unofficial Party" - a reference to the controversial Channel 4 series which featured scenes where a teenage get-together got out of hand.
Partygoers allegedly urinated on the mother's wedding dress and children's clothes; stole cash and jewellery; ripped light fittings from the ceiling by swinging on them; stubbed out cigarettes on the carpet; vomited throughout the house and barricaded the back door to prevent neighbours from intervening.
Some days the news is full of terrible stories., and some days, you just have to laugh.
