Halcyon days

Well a week's gone by already since my duck was broken, my blog virginity taken. A week used to be such a long time and now i just blink and another one has gone by. What happened this week? Well not much but eventful enough. I didn't work till Tuesday as there was a national holiday last Monday so apart from the wife not talking to me till Friday (a regular occurrence, she has a temper that usually rages for 2-3 days depending on the offence!) it was a standard fare week.

Pool night was Thursday and i won despite not really feeling too good. Why was i rough? Well Weds night Korea played the Ivory Coast and beat them 2-0, the game was Played in England though and didn't kick off till 11:30 local time, so i went down to the local to watch and to cut a fairly long and not too exiting story short ended up being refused entry to a night club at 4am... good job really!! Why did we get refused? well not because of any naughtiness (this time!) and purely on the colour of our skin! Yes, even after 20 minutes of negotiation and banter the manager made it clear that we were not getting in because we were white and not Korean. I accepted this pretty well but Keith (Canadian, pretty drunk and unused to blatant discrimination) was pretty livid, let's just say that Kofi Anan got his fair share of mentions... Ah, it all adds to spice of life and it's not my first time being on the recieving end of racism, i spent a few years as the only English lad in an all Welsh school! So, after the fun died down, we headed home and had a swift pint in the 'Jap bar' as Keith wasn't talking to Korea!

Anyhow, to diverge a little or to return to the original theme of weeks flying by, the year was 1983, British summer time and school holidays that lasted for ever and ever and i lived on a road called Beach road. It was a half mile straight stretch of road that led to, yes you guessed it, a beach. Not just any beach but 7 miles of beautiful white sands hidden behind a mountainous range of sand dunes. The town was, and is Harlech, North Wales and is probably the place i would most consider my home, it's an amazingly picturesque and spectacular part of the world, the beach is looked over by an ominous and looming sandstone Castle and a mile further inland the mountains and Valleys conjour images of Lords of the rings. The castle overlooks everything, including an 18 hole golf course and was constructed on a great outcrop of rock by the English in the 1500's i think. Look away from the mountains and out to sea and there's a peninsula across the bay, all in all i can't think of anywhere else as beautiful in the world when the sun is shining and the temperature creeps up over 25c. It has in fact been used in a few movies, from Carry on up the Kaiber in the 70's to Richard Gere's White Knight in the 90's.

1983 was a particularly hot and hazy summer and i was all of 9, going on 10! Somehow we had (the we being me and a friend called Jason Jones, not the last JJ to get me in trouble!) a huge inflatable tractor tyre inner tube. The thing was monstrous in size, probably more than twice my height and took up a fair bit of road in width. We used to roll it down the long straight road, holding up traffic and startling bewildered tourists along the way. As the road ends it becomes a path that runs through the dunes and the tractor innertube took a fair bit of maneuvering but i think we spent at least a week doing this every day and never tired of rolling it all the way to the sea, getting in and on, playing for hours, drifting way too far out to sea to be safe and generally inventing fun as we went along, as you do at that age!

The days would last forever, don't ask me what we ate, drank or even how it was afforded. Long long days from when i opened my eyes all full of excitement of what the new day might bring and what new games we could invent for the gargantuan inner tube (It's downfall finally coming after we heaved it up to the top of the highest sand dune we could find and launched it down the hill only for it to veer off course bouncing and bounding spectacularly and bounce straight onto a fence post catching a nail and whooshing, losing life all the way until it limped onto the 11th green of the golf course, RIP!). After all the fun of the day, every day, i would drift home tired and fulfilled with the days excesses... ah youth eh! I was by this stage pretty much independent of parentage, my mother was in Saudi Arabia divorced from my father who was down the pub from opening till kicked out. I could always find him and always manage to con a few pennies for a snack or junk. Anyhow, that's a whole different topic. I just amazes me now that one week can fly by in the blink of an eye and i'll have done nothing.

Back on the topic of luck, Me and JJ (no, not Jason, pay attention!) were shopping in E-mart yesterday and she needed a new umbrella. I'm wincing just at the memory as she must have opened every single umbrella on the display! I had to walk away in the end before lightning struck me or some other natural disaster scythed us down in our prime. It didn't but i'd already counted 8 umbrellas opened as i sidled away to a safe distance. I wondered if we were gonna head over to the mirror section and smash a few but thankfully we got out alive. Weird how different things are considered unlucky in different cultures, we have the ladders, black cats, broken mirrors and the umbrellas indoors. Then there's new boots on a table, and numbers 13 bad, 7 good. Asia in general fears the number 4 as it represents death and unlucky is cutting your nails at night, eating seaweed soup or shaving before an exam. Sitting on the threshold of a door is particularly bad apparently!

So where did i get to on the week, drunk Weds, won the pool Thurs, Fri night we hosted and a friendly game of poker at home which JJ was winning until my workmate Tony took a dodgy re buy when we were all far too drunk and took down most of the pot! Then it was Saturday and i did as little as possible and that's it, my week done, flown by, gone in a blink. Wasn't it great when the days lasted for ever and the sun shone and .......