Dave’s Logs

As a kid, sport wasn’t really represented in the realm of family activities. My dad not really the sport guy (must be genetic), except for Judo, which is not exactly your ideal father-son bonding sport. The occasional quality time was therefore spent mostly on two things: lego and train models.

Lego was the passion of my life, my only career inspiration at the time, still would be, if not for these damn high school orientation counselors.

Train models and all these cute little house models that go around, were my dad’s real interest, in true british fireplace&slippers fashion…

Unfortunately, far too frequent travels and moves always stood in the way of his grand project to turn one of the room in the decrepit family manor into a morsel of bucolic alpine landscape, complete with countryside train stations, small river flowing in the middle and of course, the perfunctory tunnel through the mountain.

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A few essential lessons learnt the hard way about getting on a short-distance European flight from London. Placed here for the benefit of those who might suffer from the same level of brain-cell degeneration and lack of common sense as yours truly.

• Obvious Point #1 Booking the last flight of the day, out of a dead-end airport is not a good idea.
• Obvious Point #2 Putting any trust in the airline claim that said airport is “within 30 minute reach of central London” is even less of a good idea.
• Obvious Point #3 Not factoring in a heavy Murphy coefficient when calculating the estimated time required by the journey to the airport, is a downright asinine idea.

Anyway, you get the picture…

This is the first time I miss a plane. ever. Well, except for last year, when I misread the day on my ticket and missed my plane by a full 24 hours.

This one was the first I could actually hear taking off from my arriving shuttle bus…

Just when I thought Tokyo might be an expensive choice of a city to live in, all I need to do is go back to good ole blighty to realize that 800 yens is a cheap price for a drink compared to the 10 quids you’ll have to cough up at your average semi-hip London tavern. And the worst part is not the price, it’s the sudden and sad realization that I don’t care so much about mindlessly spending in a day what I used to live on for a month less than ten years ago, in the same city.

Granted, that warehouse we occupied was mostly… “rent-optional”. and candles do not make for high utility bills…

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I am told that, were I to leave this page untouched for more than a few days, all you ritalin kids, invested with the attention span of your average lab rhesus monkey, would leave this oasis of hipness and insanely cool writing for the next happening spot in the blogosphere, expunging it from your bookmarks without ever looking back, you ungrateful sons of a jackal (I am also told that it’s bad manner to refer to your readers as the progeny of a desert carrion-eating pest, but I assume that, if you have been voluntarily subjecting yourself to my laborious grammar and approximative metaphors so far, you are of the masochistic kind, so I guess that makes it ok).

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