ALBANIA

It's been a while hasn't it? Another year has whispered past and now it is Spring 2010.

Things are fairly copacetic, to use that funny old American word (meaning broadly OK) between me and the missus. We came back from a trip around Albania and Northern Greece yesterday - narrowly beating a complete shut down by all UK airports due to a huge pall of Volcanic ash in the atmosphere. Bloody Icelanders again!

The trip was surprisingly successful. All sorts of variables could have gone wrong but they never did. Every hotel was found, was OK. No-one was nasty, ripped us off or even laughed at us. We weren't stranded at remote border crossings, unduly soaked with rain or afflicted with food poisoning. Most importantly, the Albanian solo expedition was really stimulating and not in the way one might fear such as hinted at in movies such as Liam Neesons 'Taken'. (The bit were Liam tells his daughter on the phone 'You will be tak-en!' just before she is forcibly abducted by Albanian sex traffickers of course became the catchphrase of the trip).

We left our Greek hire car at Ioaninna as one isn't allowed to take rentals across the border. Then bussed to Kakavia which is the crossing point; as with all third world type interfaces (America/Mexico springs to mind) it is dead easy going out and very slow coming back. There's a long walk through litter to the other side and it all looks a bit vague about how one proceeds from there... But then hey! Here's a taxi driver and in return for 40 euros walks us straight through customs apparently saving us 40 euros in temporary visas and then drives us about 40 miles over a mountain range straight to the entrance of our chosen hotel, the Brilant, in Sarande. Our suite with twin bathrooms, multiple balconies and plenty of sofas, marble, etc is way fancier than anywhere else we will stay on the trip and costs 60 euros. Even then I'm still not quite sure about this country. We go for a walk in this funny little resort town which although it doesn't have a proper beach is still being turned into a sort of Eastern version of Benidorm circa 1972. I'm definitely edgy because the place seems to be falling down even before it's been finished, there's lots of rubbish, stray dogs, sewage smells, funny little men carrying AK47s and gangs of youths who make our UK feral hoodies look like extras from Wind in the Willows. I'm braced for screeching gypsy beggars to surround us with big sheets of cardboard and all that good old holiday paranoia and... Nothing. We are completely left alone by everyone. Weirdly, there are no beggars, panhandlers or even weary Africans selling knock off DVDS. I start to relax. All we have to do is score some food that my vegetarian 14 year old son and fussy, nearly vegetarian (but hating vegetables and fruit) 13 year old daughter can handle. I start to tense up again.

Tomorrow is Calling...

WTF as Johnny would put it. It's Midnight at the end of another half term holiday and I feel fucked. Have drunk loads today and don't feel that drunk. Me and the missus had one of those typical sessions where she painstakingly told me how everything in the world was shit; how crap I was at everything; how awful everything was for her. I'm quite used to this. I go along with it, express concern, apologise again and again (but not too obviously as that messes things up - contrition has to be quite subtle). Anyway, after half a day of this, interspersed with me cleaning and tidying I just flipped. I started kicking the hell out of a cupboard in the kitchen then went outside and whilst howling like a banshee demolished our piles of recycling (nice middle class Southern England touch, eh?). Smashed my fists into walls. Banged my head against dustbins. The full loony Monty. Q came out and told me not to be so ridiculous, think of the children etc.

Then it was time for our family sunday lunch. Inez my youngest was sobbing - she'd heard everything. Johnny my 14 year old who is now wiser than I'll ever be just looked sad and wary. That was a fun meal. I apologised as best as I could. The old spiel about how sometimes you have to go a bit mad in order not to go completely mad fooled no-one: They just think I'm mad. It's funny because in the general scheme of things I think of myself as really very sane. But it just goes to show, stir in 12 years of a rubbish marriage and 2 days of continuous nagging and moaning and Whoomph, anything can happen. I know how those mad hubbies feel when they kill their spouses/children/other road users. It is like there is a terrible in-balance in the world and it can only be put right by destroying things which are important. I swear that if someone turned up with a gun and shot me when I am in that frame of mind I would not mind in the slightest. Maybe this is how the Moslems in the news feel all the time?

Anyway, I bought Inez SIMS 3 as a small consolation for the Day Her Dad Went Mad. The Marianne Faithful picture? A naive fantasy about a time when it was OK for women to be good looking pleasers and not bloated ex-junkie pensioners bitter about their rotten choice in men. God, she looked good. Corrupt yes, but hey, that was the 60s.

Buy High, Sell Low - Stock market trading for prats

Some of you who have perservered though this blog may remember me talking about the stock market and me toying with the idea of CFDs. Contracts For Difference. These are like bets on whether a share, commodity or a whole market will go up or down.

Well, I tried these and it was just as awful as my stock picking experiments. My first gamble, I mean, informed speculation was to try 'Shorting' London Stock Exchange shares. This company had just been chucked out of the Footsie 100, had been collapsing in price for months and all analysis indicated that they were stuffed. I 'sold' these shares on the assumption that they would tank further, on a gearing of 10 to 1. I.e £500 invested would bring either 10 times that much profit. Or that much loss... Natch, within a day of me taking this position the price of this previously defunct company had spiked up by 50%. Yowsa. I was looking at £2500 instant loss... Except that I was so incompetant buying the CFDs that I had only exposed myself to a tenth of what I meant to. Phew. Only a £250 loss. Inspired by this I then bought long on the Footsie. American and Asian markets had gone up wildly the day before, everything looked good; what could go wrong?

The Footsie then went down 100 points straight after me making my purchase. Another £500 loss. Cautiously, now I try and call what the market will do, WITHOUT actually investing any money. I have been wrong EVERY single time. I am now wondering if my ultimate money making idea would be to try and simply do the opposite of whatever I think is a good idea. That is what they call contrarian investing I believe. I'll let you know how that works out....

48 and shagged out.

I'm 48 years old, 49 this year and I feel fucked. As I write, my right ear is bunged up with snot from this cold which I've had for 2 weeks. The inside of my arsehole is pinned back with rubber bands; fired helpfully there by a doctor to try and cure my latest bout of piles. This in turn has given me killer wind and what seems to be like an IBS stomache - I feel like shitting all the time, and am... My hair is now really thinning out big time. I've cut it right back to try and be honest but the overall effect is still "CHEMO BOY: YOU FOOLED NO-ONE!" I've got varicose veins which this doctor demonstrated horribly by tapping my shin while I held the 'valve' by my groin. I could feel the valve wobble which is a giveway that it 'leaks'. Agh. I've not been able to walk properly since. The thought of blood oozing and pooling inside my limbs as my arterial system falls apart is demoralizing and crap. The operation would involve stripping my veins out like so much rotten spaghetti and I wouldn't be able to do much for 2 weeks. I'm trying to put this off. I thought you bloody well could cure them with lasers! But as the doc put it, it is not as though they're simply going to shine a light on you from the other side of the room. They cut holes in your leg, then shove the freaking laser inside you. Agh, again.

My sex drive has wilted and sex now just seems like this ridiculous thing that teenagers and the working class do. I'm not even trying to do it and the missus just thinks it's me being nasty to her. If truth be told, 13 years of being told that I'm sexually selfish, greedy, inconsiderate and frankly not that bothered about whether anyone else apart from me gets off hasn't helped. She denies it, but effectively Q has been saying I'm shit in bed for years. Nearly all of our really bad rows have been about bad sex (the wrong time, the wrong sort, the wrong feelings, the wrong wrongness) and I guess bit by bit my libido has simply thrown up it's hands and surrendered. Don't get me wrong, we still do it, but it's very much just occasional charity sex, where if I was allowed to, I would fall asleep afterwards for a couple of hours. Of course, our regime of housework, talks, childrens homework etc makes this absolutely out of the question.

I remember when sex used to be fun - for me at least. I'd think of it as like a meal, something to look forward to, something that made you feel good. Now, if I think of it at all it's just with guilt, sadness and regret. Guilt that I'm so bad at it, sadness that it seems to be over mostly for me and regret that I fucked everything up. And without sex, one really is cruising towards death. All that is left is the boredom and the physical decay.

Wah-hey!

Full of Shit

Does your partner ever leave notes lying around for you to find? Mine does, although the children may have seen this latest one before me. It read:

I don't know if I can keep loving you. You are so selfish and full of shit.

This is a fairly typical comment from Persephone; what is rarer is the fact that is written down. Makes the sentiments more official, harder to deny. I'm full of shit and selfish; there, I've admitted it, I'm ready for my therapy group. ' Hi, I'm John and I am...'

The thing is (here it comes; the justification) I don't have any friends or hobbies. I don't have demands that I insist on having met; like blow me now, feed me now, mend my clothes, be like my mother but without the guilt. So I'm not sure about how I'm selfish - it's probably mental selfishness. Deep down inside I like the idea of a woman who is bright and also wants to fuck me. Is that selfish or just unrealistic?

As for being full of shit, I'm always admitting my many shortcomings in a sincere fashion. If someone thinks of a new one I hadn't thought of I'm only to happy to take that on board as well. I think the shittiness aspect is probably that I don't hate myself. Early on in my life I figured that most people don't really like you, not consistently anyway, so you better rely on yourself. I might be wrong here, but I think most women are insecure and they don't like the people they are with to be kind to themselves. I don't mean kind by buying presents, lap dances or wasting money on really stupid gadgets like a electric cider pourer. I just mean kind, inside.

The War to End all Wars

No, not my marriage; our trip to the graves and battlefields of the Somme, Ypres, Paschendale. We went this half term for 3 nights as some sort of themed break. As someone pointed out, when your children are younger you take them to EuroDisney, as they get a bit older then it's the turn of that World War 1 'circuit'. The killing fields of Sassoon, Brooke, Owen, celebrated in a never ending pageant which is by turns moving and exploitative. Let's face it, the tourist boards of Northern France and Belgium don't have much else to offer apart from the senseless slaughter of nearly all the healthy young males in Europe 91 years ago. In some places, the Ypres Flanders Fields museum for instance, this is tastefully done. In others, The Hill 62 Bar/Coffee shop/trench/museum/experience as an example, the tone is money grabbing, sick prurience.

At No 62 a fat loathsome specimen takes your money (25 Euros for a family of 4) close to a sign informing any relatives of dead soldiers that it is not possible to visit the museum or trenches free of charge. You then enter a large room filled with War junk... and pictures. Photographs on the walls and in banks of old What-the-Butler-Saw machines showing war porn. Men and boys with faces blown off, intestines hanging out, maggots coming out of their rotting eye sockets. Simply tons of this stuff. You then step into a garage filled with tons of rusting ordinance, obviously scavenged from neighbouring fields which leads to the fat mans back garden where he has created a trench system with old barbed wire and corrugated iron sheets. When we were there gangs of Belgian schoolkids were shrieking about in the mud and I didn't get the impression that anyone was building up to a 2 minute silence.

This was one of those revelatory times when you are reminded that bad shit should never be used for the purposes of gratuitous entertainment. Car crash videos, porn, 9-11 documentaries and any private pay-as-you-go war musuem. All of them should be avoided.
Subsequently sticking to the official trail, I would reccommend the big German war cemeteray near Ypres. With its trees, black marble blocks and weeping dark stone figures it conveys far more effectively a sense of overall loss and mourning. Us Brits seem to love this stuff. You can go to the most obscure, off the beaten track cemetary, and you will always find at least a couple of British registered cars parked up nearby and some geeky father/son combo stomping around in walking boots. Train spotting became too recherche - now we collect war graves!

If it helps you plan where to go, I would say that Belgium is friendlier, cheaper and has better food than France. And everyone speaks English there.

Sex - Oh God

Fucking is fucked again. I've got a great anti-sex combo going at the moment which comprises:

1. A totally crap filling in my mouth which feels like I've got a golfball wedged in my top molars.
2. Killer Piles. Something I thought I'd sorted a couple of years ago has popped out again. When something is wrong down there, everything is wrong down there.
3. Queenie has informed me that sex is now simply a trade between us. I shag her; she gets something in return. Money, white goods, childcare when she goes away somewhere. I previously had thought that as a married couple we shared and co-operated but I am in fact simply a cog in the market economy.

Hell. I suppose most wives are defacto prostitutes. If you don't enjoy sex then you become a sex worker. Men get off , women don't, take it from there. It's made me think about how crap I am at sex. When you're younger you don't think about that (well, I didn't anyway). All you think about it having sex, never mind riffling the pages of the Kama Sutra. All those girls/women who never made much noise when I did it - what were they thinking? That old cliche, the shopping list? Some sort of sense of duty; this is just what one does?
When a woman did appear to have an orgasm it was quite startling and a real turn-on novelty. Queenie used to have them all the time back in the old days when I was unreliable, feckless, unfaithful and completely selfish. I used to be disturbed and jealous, so powerful were her feelings. As I committed more completely to her, and tried to do what she wanted in bed, her arousal grew less and less. In that classic man-woman way, she loved me more in the beginning, then as I loved her more, she loved me less.

She would deny this of course, but it is true. She says that things have got worse because of the damage done through the years. I'm not sure it isn't simply a combination of tiredness, old age and simply not having to put on a good show.