Avoiding nuisance in Newcastle 02-06-09

I have chosen to spend Tuesday 2nd June 2009 in Newcastle upon Tyne, which rhymes a bit. This formerly great city clings to such northern objects as conspicuous flour mills in the town centre, phone booths pasted with adverts for films that no longer exist and sad little allotments. I am concealed within Holiday Inn Express in an almost deserted lobby watching a tedious NDubz video with some beer-drinkers in tatty and ill-fitting Great North Run tshirts and a smart, nervous looking man who is slowly coming to the realisation that he is hideously overdressed and likely to be followed home by someone or something.
Newcastle features a football team and although it is 9 days since they were relegated I can still see a morbid gathering of filthy, abandoned souls mourning the event, either curled up in a mess of ale cans and half-eaten chips outside the stadium or draped like broken corpses across steps and other concrete objects in the immediate vicinity. The council should do something about that.
They do good sushi here. I had 24 pieces 6xSalmon, 6xPrawn, 6xCrabstick and 6xTuna +1Asahi. The chef was of average ability in the art of juggling eggs and catching them in his hat, but I felt I could have taught him some superior jedi egg-handling moves if he had bothered to ask.
I went to bed at 23.25 last night and got up at 4.39am, exactly 6 minutes ahead of schedule and my alarm, which adds further weight to the theory that I have a miniature alarm clock in my head that measures time not in seconds but in fear.
I took a Cooper’s car to the airport. This new limo-driven lifestyle very much suits my style and ego, although I have noticed that I am required to make polite conversation with the drivers. I have deduced that the way I should make conversation with my limo driver is slightly more upmarket than the way I should make conversation with someone back home who is cutting my hair. Nevertheless the exchange is equally likely to meander towards a mutually apathetic conclusion.
My customer here is Wellstream, a relatively interesting company that is noted for making pipes which carry oil around under the sea, or what they might call ‘a wide variety of offshore fluid transportation applications’. This justifies my standing in corridors looking at explanatory posters which show boats operating amidst shoals of truly enormous fish. Amusingly they are located right next to Byker Grove- though as I recall, in a curious oversight the makers of that program never had the courage to explore this potential gripping, locally-flavoured, global-energy themed plotline.
In a slightly embarrassing slip I just performed some seated, upper body-only dance moves to the Black Eyed Peas’ Boom Boom Pow and then realised that the smart, nervous man was watching me.
Last night some shocking new images related to the Piñata scandal came to light. In one I appear to be riding the abused animal bareback, chained to its fractured horn by a pair of fluffy pink handcuffs while gamely inserting some kind of decorative pole between its hind legs. I remain confident of coming up with a plausible explanation.
In a totally-unrelated thread Gemma received a pink birthday Piñata last night which was somewhat tougher to break open than we had expected. I only had minimal time to buy it, wrap it up, write words in the card and all that preparatory stuff so I didn’t really manage to have cellotape or a ribbon to hand. This provided me with an opportunity to experiment and I found that the flex of the battery charger that comes with a Sony DSC-P235 Digital Camera is an almost perfect reusable solution to the task of tying the gift wrap around a present. Meanwhile this was a functional piñata, containing not only sweets and pink handcuffs but also a tube of Colgate. I had failed to allow for the beating the piñata would receive though, and in the event some of the toothpaste had dribbled upon the minstrels, giving them an After Eight-like taste.
We went to a Thai restaurant too and had it to ourselves, a situation I find very relaxing compared to the horror of a restaurant full of rival diners all glaring competitively at me. I managed to completely fox the waiter though, in one of those situations where they misunderstand something you say and you can never quite bring yourself to put them right, and end up telling outwardly-spiralling lies to paradoxically maintain the integrity of your message. So he thinks I live in Twickenham, just a couple of miles from Beaconsfield, in some kind of commune with many other IFS consultants and their families, and that Gem is a live-in slave, related to some or most of us, and that I pay £800 a month rent, equivalent to £100 a week.