Geiger Counter
Mordor, or how I got back to France.
Grey. Well more dark grey actually. That was the colour of an enormous wall of clouds hovering over what I presumed was France underneath as the plane taking me back from Glasgow approached the other side of the channel. It was quite a pleasant flight down across Britain. The sky was virtually cloud free most of the time I had good views over the Scottish lowlands & Dumfries, the Lake District (where I was little under four months ago), Manchester (gave a wee wave to my Grandmother & the rest of the family who were somewhere in there), & the Peak District (had a very pleasant walk there a year ago). Things got a bit mucky around Birmingham, no surprises there, before it all cleared to offer a splendid vista over the whole of London & the south right down to Brighton & the channel. This enormous mass of clouds awaited us, lurking over France, or at least what I thought was France, it looked more like Mordor.
I think I didn’t get on the wrong plane, someone would’ve told me when they looked at my boarding card & the only other flight from Glasgow at that time was to London Stansted, unless the orcs had something else planned for us & hatched some dastardly plan to take us to a painful & undignified death. I thought about putting my seat-belt back on in case there may be a few beasts gliding in the darkness but the the little light switched itself on with an inviting electronic bell noise, obviously the captain was thinking the same thing as me, or at least I hoped so anyway. Every other person in the plane seemed fairly unaffected by the danger outside. Heck, there could’ve been beasts hovering just metres above us while they were carrying on with whatever mundane activity people do on planes.
Right, to survive in Mordor you need to hide from orcs because they’ll eat you, no, better still, run away & hide from anyone or anything, it’ll want to kill you or eat you, or both, at the same time. I need to run away from that big eye & make sure I don’t get seen by it. I also checked I didn’t have any gold ring with weird writing on it, no, didn’t remember packing it anywhere & the bloke at security would’ve told me seeing as he deemed it necessary to do the full scarecrow terrorist check (no, please don’t get too close to those parts, please! That was close, a bit too close to my liking). Now sure I didn’t have any artifacts that would interest dark lords or orcs (apart from my own flesh), I sat tight in my seat & waited for landing. The plane dropped altitude, released the landing gear & by some miracle landed on something, I didn’t know what, the mist was so thick I couldn’t see a runway. I got up, grabbed my stuff & walked off the plane & headed for the terminal through a damp, choppy wind, the kind of wind that makes your ears ache quite nastily. There was no sign of orcs or other bizarre & horrid creatures, just a few grumpy looking airport employees, maybe it wasn’t Mordor after all. I waved my ID at a border control officer who didn’t bother to say hello, then again orcs don’t really speak, they grunt. After waiting a long while for my bag to appear on those mad luggage conveyor belts (one day I’ll take a ride on one of them, it would be hilarious) I went out the door & headed to the place where the bus dropped me off the night I flew to Glasgow seeing as I thought it would be the most logical place for the bus to take people back to the centre of Paris. But to my dismay there was no sign of any bus at all, bugger. I asked some airport bloke who told me it was on the other side of the building, good job that the airport is not very big. I got to the place where the bus picked people up only to see two buses drive away, one half full, one completely empty. Oh bugger. Deeply disappointed, I went to the ticket office & asked when the next bus would leave (hoping rather too optimistically it would be in 20 minutes or so): ‘in one hour sir’, allow me to rephrase that: what time is the next bus leaving? ‘at 8:15 pm sir’ (it was quarter to seven, one hour’s wait? My arse, sounds more like a french hour to me). Now that was annoying, I was really tempted at that point just to ask him why couldn’t the empty bus wait a little bit longer for some more people & make a worthwhile trip which would actually make some money for the company. Some part of me just knew that there was no point, this guy was french & more importantly, a french person with something that I needed, so he’d be capable of coming up with incredible amounts of excuses (some not quite as true as others) to show he was right & I was wrong & it was time for me to bugger off. Welcome to France. Thanks mate.
I turned round to walk back to the terminal to grab a cup of tea & something to eat &, as I did, I saw a few other people who’d just missed the bus too, if only that bus driver had waited just ten minutes he could’ve saved some lives (or time at least)…but no, he probably thought to himself ‘I’ve got my schedule, my fixed working hours & the sooner I go, the sooner I’ll be at home to watch some more brainwashing drivel on the TV because I’m French & that’s how it works here & you people can all just sod off’. I took a peek at the sign with the taxi prices to Paris: 180 euros, I turned to look at the taxi driver waiting in his car (who didn’t even look like he was hoping to get a fare at all, he was just as blasé as everyone else), & I gave him a not-on-my-dead-body look, I’m not paying that for a taxi. Once I got to the café in the airport, I put my bags & my newspaper down to mark some territory before (much like a dog does except with the decency of not urinating in public) & went to order. I was on the point of getting somebody’s attention as I glanced back at the table just to check nobody had taken off with my stuff only to see that someone had, with my paper at least. I looked a bit further & saw a barmaid on a mission to put my paper in the bin. I ran over to retrieve my paper. ‘Excuse me, but that’s my paper I bought in Scotland with a free satellite map & it is definitely not going in the bin.’ (Wow, now that’s an incredibly french way of telling somebody that they’re wrong & about to do something beyond stupidity). ‘Comme vous voulez’, she answered, in an equally french manner. Ouch. I went back to queue for my tea.I asked for a cup of tea & was presented a wide selection of supermarket teabags & picked a standard Earl Grey while asking for a doughnut to go with it, all for 5 euros. 5 euros!? For bog standard tea & a hard doughnut? Heck, I could’ve bought a whole box of teabags & a whole box of doughnuts for the same price at the supermarket. I sat down, read the paper, ate & drank until it all became a bit boring, at which point I decided to get up & head back outside, in the hope the bus would come quicker. Which it didn’t & instead I got a cold, something I thought I was going to get in Scotland & of course I caught one when I come back to a country where it’s said to be warm & lovely all the time (according to the locals anyway). That’ll teach all those people who just said ‘To Scotland? But it’s cold up there, isn’t it?’ when I said I was going up north for my holidays while looking at me as if I was mad. No, it wasn’t really cold (I got lucky & came at a time when rain didn’t really decide to fall) & this Cold I’ve got here now is French.
The bloody bus finally did arrive & I did manage to get into the centre of Paris, nearly two hours later than planned. Well at least after all that fussing I knew I didn’t land in Mordor but definitely it France, even though sometimes I actually might rather be eaten up. (But France is still a nice place).
You’ve probably had enough of me & my banter by now, if you’re not already bored to death, but then again nobody forced you to read this & I thank you greatly for bearing with me for so long. Might be a few more stories & stuff coming on a more regular basis here, if I remember. Cheerio!
Radio Transmission
A small library of references which will tickle your cimematic brain cells & entice you into a witty recognition game. Video courtesy of EddBSmith (well, i presume so as i didn’t actually ask)
Neon Lights
This Channel is no longer Clear… from Aero Dynamik on Vimeo.
This is what happens when the computer no longer obeys to the mercantile orders of Clear Channel: the uncontrolled unconscious computer-bug generated graffiti. The machine transmits it’s vision of man’s orders & this time it’s decided to be rebellious. The machine has given to man something more interesting than man’s original orders, perhaps in the better interest of it’s own creator. The machine obviously also got bored of the usual Clear Channel messages & decided to deviate to liven things up a bit.
So when will the machine go All City…?
Radio Transmission
Thanks to some crazy computer programmers & fi5e for this video, anyone with firefox can surf the internet like a chinese citizen. Apart from the connection being a little slow (it is rerouted through china & back) it does reveal the real limits on surfing in China. Type in words like democracy or tian’anmen in google & then start clicking on links, you start hitting some soft spots… The connection is cut & you can’t reconnect for another 10 minutes….. cheeky buggers!! So much for freedom.
Get the plug in at chinachannel.hk
Doctor, it’s alive!!!
beep – beep – beep -beep – beep – beep – beep -beep
Now receiving a strong signal on the Elektro Kardiograph, Die Elektro Kardiogramm is born Doctor. After much hard work & concentration (well not really, it just popped out onto the computerscreen, slap on the elektrodes & you’re off! It just took time to finally sit down & press some buttons) my blog is now (virtual) reality.
Why such a title you may ask…. the Elektro Kardiogramm, an elektrik signal that shows life (or no life) at regular (or irregular) intervals on a screen accompanied by a series of strange beeps. Much like the title image, the Elektro Kardiogramm is a visual series of dots, lines, curves, blurs but it is without the unpredictable presence of clouds, an infinity of apparent randomness. Die Elektro Kardiogramm is also a tune by the Men – Machines Kraftwerk.
Maybe this is my Elektro Kardiogramm but more than a simple elektrikal presence, it is most probably going to be random in it’s content & in it’s owner’s life signs….
