OFFICIALLYSCRIVNA

Now before you all have a go.. yes I am well aware of the sometimes ignorant and general stupidity of my words, but alas this is my blog and it should represent me... read on at your peril...

-- Start Rant --

So with a week off from work I'm having a lot of time to think about life and the way it should be going for myself, naturally it isn't already going in that direction or I wouldn't be thinking about it.

So what I want to do is travel, waste money, drink beer, have loads of stories to tell, meet interesting people, do fun stuff, live life really.

Then to the serious stuff. I'll need to fund this somehow, whilst I have plenty of cash laying about to support myself for a while, this is by no means a lasting supply, it will run out... then what? I need a sustainable way to travel and live a life of fun exciting stuff without seeing my bank balance disappear into the red and off the scale into infra-red or something.

So how do you make money whilst having fun and not selling your time for money? On this subject I am no expert however I do feel strongly that a person should never sell there life for cash, it seems silly, (I should know, i've done it for long enough) why should I be employed to work for someone, do my graft sell my time that I could be using to surf / ski / drink sangria and generally be young, why should I use that time to put money and new cars into my bosses life? I'll tell you what... I shouldn't, I therefore obviously need to find a way of not doing this, the obvious first step is to become the guy at the top of the food chain myself, does this solve the wider problem however? I've now just moved myself out of the rat-race, what about all those other rats who are now unhappy and working for me?

Well to be honest I just don't know, somebody at the end of the day has to be out in the fields picking the grain, or in the office answering the phone to some fat person in another office complaining about product xyz not being this or that.

-- Now the rant escalates --

Another thing that annoys me greatly in life is the government, i mean who do they think they are? They take my hard earned money in taxes and turn it into stuff i don't want, yes here in the uk we have this fabulously useful service called the NHS free healthcare for everyone, shame i'm young and healthy and don't need it, it's actually all the old people that use these free services the most, not me, tax them!

The NHS is prime example of waste, it's not a private company so nobody sees the need to cut costs or work more productively. There has recently been news articles slagging them off because they do not use technology enough, i mean what century are these people living in? up until recently, and i think they still do... they had paper records, yes records on paper in one specific surgery where all your lifes history was kept, great news if there is a fire.

So yeah, the government spends all this money on services that are half arsed and generally not very good. Why do they spend so much money? Because everyone has the government on, it's a well known fact that private companies abuse the government to get huge financial benefits, companies who lay roads and repair local council amenities are the worst. They all put in stupidly high prices so the government is forced to pay up, then they brought in this system where you have to bid "privately" against other companies for the job, this naturally leads to 2 problems, the first being shoddy work, no1 wants that and the 2nd being that the companies just talk to each other, decide who gets the job then all the others price themselves way out of the market so that company wins, still at a great price for them.

What can we do about this? How can we stop the government being ripped off and wasting money?

Well i recently heard that the government gives free day spa treatments to carers so they can go and treat themselves, my mum is a carer for her dad, she would still care for him whether she got a day-spa treatment every few months or not... why the wasted money here mr prime minister??

-- Turn back for your own safety --

The post office, here goes a proper rant. So a company that has been round for hundreds of years, i can't believe there are less letters and parcels being sent nowadays, the internet is this huge global shopping thing, where people buy products and they get posted to them, these products are big parcels that the postal office has always charged more for, they get delivered to the recipient and all is good. Sorry but how do you fuck that up? well they do.

On a few occasions recently i have been so underwhelmed with the services of my post office i've tried to get in contact with the chairman to give him a piece of my mind.

The 1st of such incidents, i get a note through the door saying they tried to deliver a parcel and i wasn't in, so i go to the sorting office to pick up my parcel, "oh we cant give you that one, it's not been processed yet" sorry, not been processed? it's a fucking parcel, go behind your little wall, its a box with my name on it, pick it up and give it to me, easy right? wrong!

The 2nd thing, i wanted to exchange currency at my local post office branch, great handy service, i want to get £150 worth of euros, now i don't carry £150 in cash around with me, i want to put it on my card, yet at the post office to put currency on your card you need to have photographic proof of id... now i don't have any at the moment as the police haven't given me my drivers license back yet (another long story about our shitty government i wont go into) so i cant get currency exchanged, but then i think, hang on, i can just get cash out from a post office like i can a cashpoint, so i do that, withdraw £150 from them and them use cash to get my currency, FUCKWITS! hello wake up - your. company. policy. is. fucking. stupid.

Now the last point on the post office, i recently sold an item on eBay, it's a computer and is worth about £600 i need it traceable online so i go to the royal mails parcel service, parcel force, fill out the forms, print the label, jobs a gooden right? Wrong! i drop the parcel off, i've got an online tracking number, i go to the website, try to find it... nothing, zilch, fuck all, so what's happened to my parcel, has it got lost in the system, or maybe i never posted it? Maybe it's a conspiracy, now what do i do? So i emailed them explained the situation, and got a reply apologising that they didn't come and pick the parcel up! They were never supposed to, the woman that replied to my email had obviously never read it in the first place, another classic example of piss poor customer service... oh... one more point, The post man came to our front door opened the porch just as i opened the inner door and instead of handing me the parcel he threw it on the floor at my feet, then looked up and said, oh, sorry... fucking moron, how dare you throw my parcel that i have paid to be delivered in one piece to my door!

AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGH they annoy me so much! why do we allow these arseholes to carry on? we should demand more from them! How can they be screwing it up so royally?!

-- End Rant --

I would also like to point out, I am not an angry person, I'm merely a person who doesn't just "accept" life, life should not be taken for granted and we should not accept the "norm" just because it is has gained that unfortunate title!

It's 4:30am... yes, in the morning and I am once again forced to get out of the comfort of bed and haul myself and a giant suitcase to the outskirts of London, yup, another holiday, only the fourth this year!

So we jumped onto a very peculiar mode of transport that's set to take us under the sea.. the Eurostar. Having never traveled by international rail before I assumed it was powered by some kind of Voodoo magic, however some people were out to prove me wrong and decided to cut the power lines on the French side of the tunnel and our train was forced to take a 3 hour detour around the French countryside.
Being no stranger to France I was unenthusiastically dragged through the spectacle of seeing absolutely nothing from the cabin window. Having driven through almost the entire length of France earlier this year I can assure you there is only 2 things in France, the first being those huge mountainy things at one end and the second of course being Paris.
I'd wanted to visit the world capital of Romance ever since I watched the hollywood blockbuster Moulin Rouge a few years back. This place of magic, mystery and most of all love has intrigued me and I was determined to discover its beauty for myself.

When we eventually made it to Gare du Nord, and with very little skills remaining in the mother tongue, we did the natural touristy thing.. point and talk loudly to our frog eating cousins. Conveniently for us the nice lady behind the counter played along with our stereotypical British role in the situation and we purchased a 3 day Metro ticket for 19€, while a little pricey it was totally worth it, the Metro is bloomin marvelous, especially when you're used to traveling on the antiquated London Tube. All weekend we found the Metro to be a superbly quick, clean and problem free way of traveling easily around the city.

Rachel had booked us into a very nice hotel in the Opera quarter of the city, why they call them quarters when there is about 10 of them I do not know, however the area is bustling with shops and fancy restaurants - we do like our food.

Our first official stop was the Eiffel Tower - my oh my - the queues were spectacular, we spent about 2 hours in total before we made it to the top of the tower, and I have to say, it's very tall! The view from the top was crazy, overlooking the entire city you can really see why it's such a popular attraction. One piece of advice, do not eat from the sloppy take-away at the bottom, the sausages, and I use that name very loosely were disgusting, how can anyone eat that stuff?

On the second day we headed over to the Musee du Louvre, again, that's pretty huge, built by some crazy French kings it's now home to the Mona Lisa where we went to bask in the glory of the most famous painting in the world.
Later that afternoon we took ourselves all the way up the Champs-Élysées to the Arch de Triomphe. Again, like a lot of things in Paris, this is pretty big, and joy of joys, the only way to the top is via spiral staircase. The view from the top at night was fabulous. Overlooking the city and with a clear view of the Eiffel Tower, it was a pretty special moment where many couples were spending precious moments staring into each others eyes.

Enough of that nonsense, we headed to a restaurant called Versuvio, looking out onto the busy street we enjoyed a bottle of Rosé and some of the best tasting food ever, and all at a very reasonable price.

On the final day of our trip we meandered around the city, Rachel managed to take us to the wrong Notre Dame church in some ghetto area of the city, thanks for that. We did eventually find the famous one and had a little wander around, it's very churchy, those of you who know me well enough will know too well of my dislike for religion. Why are these places of celebration so gloomy? There was a ceremony going on too, all fire and brimstone, worship our god or we will strike you down bitch! Well something like that anyway.

All in all we had a fabulous weekend, not sure if I'd go back again just yet, I've seen too much of France recently.