Crackerwax

As you may have noticed from my recent tweets I’ve just spent most of today sitting in airports and scooting up and down the country in a jet.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, when I say scooting up and down the country in a jet I don’t want anyone picturing Led Zeppelin groupie molestation style craziness or any fighter pilot nonsense.

No, no. I mean getting on a flight at the crack of dawn with other earnest young business men to fly to Edinburgh and then getting back on the reverse flight later that day.

Nothing even vaguely cool. Regardless though it’s not the jet bit that’s of interest, it’s the airports.

When Obi-Wan Kenobi (you might know him as old Ben) says: ‘Mos Eisley spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.’, he’d clearly never been to East Midlands Airport at five in the morning.

Fuck me! I’ve never seen such a bedraggled bunch of scummy, fake Louis Vuitton toting, Crocs wearing, inbred half wits.

Every single one of them off to the sun to get shit faced, shag other equally unattractive bottom feeders and return home crawling with STDs, happy that they’d had a splendid time.

I’ll say it again because it bears repeating, it was five in the morning. Five in the morning and I saw people drinking Guinness.

I counted three hen parties and two stag do’s. I’m sure there were countless others it was just that I couldn’t help but notice the stag do’s because of their ‘Boys On Tour’ rugby shirts and the hens thanks to their ever so tasteful penis shaped deely-boppers.

There was also a birthday party flying out to Malaga. They were lovely. Over the strains of Metallica’s latest opus I discovered that Angela was ‘shagging her man’s best friend’, that her sister thought (in a sing song voice) she was going to get caught out and that ‘her Mam had give her £150′.

Remember that I heard this over the Metallica that was playing through my headphones. I could hear these people discuss their private lives over the sound of heavy metal. Classy.

What does it say about society that when I was called to board at 06:40 I had to ask people to excuse me to get through the queue for the bar?

Good grief, I like a drink but who in their right mind wants to drink Heineken for breakfast?

The night before Andy and Lou’s wedding saw myself and Andy at a loose end in New York. Consequently we ended up in Live Bait drinking beer. That was until we discovered the joys of frozen margaritas. In pints!

Nice!

They love taking your photo on cruises almost as much as the freaky looking inhabitants of the floating holiday camp love having their photo taken.

At every turn there’s some hack with a digital camera snapping away at the unnaturally happy cruise folk as they stand there lapping it up, grinning like they’re Brad Pitt at Cannes

I swear that all these photos were on public display on board the ship, ready to be purchased by the unfortunates pictured. Unbelievable.

Anyway, look for yourself.

Oh and by the way, the couple in photo three were both wearing wedding bands. I don’t know what point I’m trying to make by saying that but, hey, each to their own.

Congratulations to Andy and Louisa on their most magnificent wedding.

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More pictures will be coming soon.

If you have any pictures of the wedding that you would like posted then please email them to me at photos@crackerwax.com

After having spent about twelve seconds lying in the sun yesterday, I awoke this morning to find that, seemingly, in the night I had caught fire.

My body was the colour of molten rock, the sheets had my outline charred onto them and judging by the amount of pain I was in, I’d had a layer of skin removed.

After spending a few moments considering my options, I gingerly got out of bed and crackled my way to the bathroom.

What greeted me was not pretty (not that it is normally but you know what I mean).

There is a moral to this story. That moral is wear sunscreen. Lots of sunscreen.

I don’t have sea legs, this has been exhaustively established by my inability to eat, stand up or in fact function in any manner at all whilst on this ship.

Hopefully this situation will improve as I munch my way through a bunch of antiemetics but right now I feel like shit.

Bleeurgh.

So we’ve made it onto our cruise ship and it’s full of fat people and stupid people. Still it’s a break from the norm and who knows I might even get a tan.

I’ve been reminded by a couple of things today, that in the event of an emergency it won’t be any of my actions that will cause me to die, it’ll be other people. I’ll tell you for why.

At 16:30 today we had the mandatory ship evacuation drill. There were three rules.

1. Keep right at all times.
2. Go to the muster station printed on your life jacket.
3. Don’t put your life jacket on

Fairly straight forward, no?

Still, what did about 50% of these chunky, brain dead bastards manage to do?

That’s right, scramble about the corridors in any old fashion headed for the first muster station they saw, with their life jackets on.

For fuck’s sake people it’s not difficult, just follow the instructions, they were clear enough.

I fear for my safety in the event of a proper evacuation, everyone of these bloody idiots will panic and start waving their flabby arms around and the whole system will fall apart.

God help us all.

I didn’t realise quite how big the Paul Day statue, The Meeting Place at St Pancras, actually was.

Look at it, it’s huge.

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I really don’t see why everyone made such a fuss about it I think it’s beautiful.

As Paul Day said:

All separation involves a suspended moment when one wonders is this forever?

I like that. The statue is fantastically romantic and it fits the new St Pancras perfectly.

I’ve been to Singapore a couple of times. I didn’t like it much, it was way too hot for a pale Jock like me.

However the one redeeming thing about Singapore was that when it rained, it rained. This particular mind numbing piece of footage was taken from the 15th floor of the Singapore Sheraton, on a Tuesday if I recall.

In 2003, while doing a bit of web testing, I accidentally booked myself a trip to New York. That’s not a joke by the way, that’s more or less the way it happened. Click, click, click, credit card details previously stored, bingo you’re off to New York.

So anyway, I booked it on Saturday and flew out the following Thursday. It was a great few days away from the stresses of work and as I went on my own I could do exactly what I pleased. Obligatory photos follow.

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New York is a really cool city, being able to buy an MP3 player at two in the morning and then go and get a slice of pizza and a beer is just awesome! In fact it was so awesome that I got married there only four years later.

If you’ve never been, go now you won’t regret it.