Well this has been a long time in coming and since the last time I posted anything I have a new job (well one new job and a new version of an old one), and a new baby. I say "new", she’s almost one so that’s a good indication of how long it’s been.

In a nutshell, no more law firms, no more Milton Keynes, hello to a great new job, some working from home, decent hours and no more suits. That’s right. After 15 plus years as a slave to ties, cufflinks et al I am now free to walk into work looking like the suburban 40ish tosspot that I am. That involves casual dress of the middles class i.e. suede dark denim and untucked sensible shirts. As much as I’d love to think that I’m still cool (note assumption that I ever was) the sad reality is that I’m not, and am getting less so. Ah bollocks to it, I am embracing fart-dom.

As for the nipper...well she is small, blonde, looks like her mum (thank god) and is an angel. It’s a tedious repetition by new parents, but my daughter is so beautiful. I am all of those tedious made-for-tv movies in one big fat cliché. Its great though, and lack of sleep, smell-of-poop/sick, and poverty aside, there’s no downside I can see yet. Give me time though, pessimism is a patient mistress.

Anyway, today I am frantically trying to find a new laptop. I say frantic as with the information overload of the internet I have no idea what I want or if what I choose is in fact shit. I’m all for a facist state of electronics (unless I’m rich) with one TV, one laptop, one car and bugger choice and free will. It would make life easier for us awful paranoid “what if?” types who see only the one-star reviews on Amazon.

Or I could just sod it and buy an Apple 17” Macbook and be poorer but happy. I hate choice. I’m bad at it.

Anyway, lunchtime over, I’m back off to work. Hopefully I will find a laptop and be able to keep this up.

Yeah, like that was what was holding me back.

Later peeps.

Return of the Transplant Kid.

I actually thought I’d forgotten the password to this thing and lo and behold I had. IT being what it is, it took delight in pointing out it had a better memory than me and voila – here I am 15 months later updating my blog to an audience of zero. Ah well, I find myself ever so amusing and so that will do for now.

I don’t have the courage to admit that I failed practically ALL of my resolutions – apart from the fags. They are well and truly done for good. Don’t miss them. See ya. Etc etc. I even have started to hate smokers so my conversion to the dark side is almost complete. Bill Hicks would weep. Were he not dead.

So…40.

It was pretty special. Mrs T and I went to California, had a ball and made it to best restaurant in the world number 2# “The French Laundry”, where Thomas Keller and his gang of uber-polite chums made me and Mrs T very very happy. The food was, to quote MTV “the bomb”. As was Cali. Sun, sea, sand, wine, scenery, the lot. One day baby…one day.

So now, here I am. Nearly half way into 40 and well… the wheels came off for a bit but I’ve glued them back on. Life is a lot healthier. No booze, no fags, no salt etc etc 20kg lost in 2 months and powering onwards and downwards.

I decided on no resolutions this year, and bearing in mind how few of last years got done, all I can really do is carry them over and see how we go.

So from 2008 we have:

- try and kick the ciggies down to maybe 5 a month; (sorted)
- make it to Italy with Mrs Transplant for a couple of weeks; (again, Cali did the trick)
- see the Lakers in New York with Steve; (on the cards)
- poker in Vegas with the fellas; (less likely)
- New bathroom (God I hate it); (please god – it’s still awful)
- one or two others not for public consumption. (no memory of these…)

I’ll add

- try and post on here more often;
- relax man… everything is going to be OK;
- see more of the olds;
- and the chaps;
- make Ferran Adria my slave for one night;
- more poker with the LPM gimps.

Will I make it? Lets see how we go.

Here it comes...

Like a big looming thing it came - 2008. Yes, even the most mathematically challenged can perhaps work out 68 +40 =... yes, that's right. Crisis time. Official middle age.

I was beaten to the punch by my mate Dom who was 40 on the 26th of December. He seems quite calm about it, although with having had a year where he survived some fucking awful brain disease I imagine 40 is a bit of a cakewalk.

I intend to drama mine up like a drag queen on speed. Although my plans to spend a fortune at the super-poncy best restaurant in the world (and I always wonder who it is that decides it) El Bulli have been scuppered. Would you believe that a sneaky look on their website last month revealed that they are already fully booked for 2008. They suggest trying again in 2009. Sarcastic feckers. Burger King will do fine for me, fella.

So. No New Year's resolutions. They seem a bit unseemly for a man approaching 40. I mean, if you haven't got the will to do it by now, using another new year as an excuse seems a bit lame.

What I do intend to do this year is:

- try and kick the ciggies down to maybe 5 a month;
- make it to Italy with Mrs Transplant for a couple of weeks;
- see the Lakers in New York with Steve;
- poker in Vegas with the fellas;
- New bathroom (God I hate it);
- one or two others not for public consumption.

The country is a bit wet, as you'd expect for this time of year. Still cute, and still not missing London too much. The house is keeping us pretty happy. We has the inlaws (both types) over Christmas, as well as a full 10 seater poker game and stil we managed to survive. What are the odds? Coupled with a new capacity for feding random scroungers we also have two massive TVs to perch in front of.

I know.

Consumer society man, ain't it a killer?

Right, time for some tea, cake and the papers.

If you can be bothered to read this, please leave me a note that you have and I might be a bit better in updating it. Maybe.

Later, you monkeys.

Lonely is the hunter.

So, here I sit, fresh country air blowing in through the window, sound of the ducks, quacking away in the background, Sunday roast drifting its tempting whiff up the stairs and only vague Monday Dread in my soul.

We’re house hunting at the moment. Us, and it seems, ever other middle income Yuppie couple in the area. Houses fly off the rightmove like free cider at a pikey convention. If we thought London had spoiled us, we were right. Selling in North London is only a case of opening the window and whispering to your other half “shall we put it on the market?” before a feeding frenzy of thick tie-knotted, Hoxton fin'd “geezah” boys start ringing your doorbell promising you the contents of Pandora’s box if you’ll sign with them.

North London estate agent is the Great White of his breed. He exists to do one thing – sell. That is all. There is no defect that he cannot talk around, no box room he cannot sell as a “study” no postage stamp of cat-shitted grass he cannot tell you is a garden. You are meat. He is hungry. They work in a small pond full of fat fish and they will market, sell, and gift wrap their gran if it gets them their 1.5%.



Why you end up hating them is not because they are like that. You can’t hate Mother Nature, or evolution for they are just the result of those unique processes of development. What you hate them for is that essentially, these days, they do fuck all. Houses, in London, in certain areas, sell themselves. Our flat, god bless it, had “issues”. We were expecting a good few weeks of colon spasming tension while moody city types (essentially us, but younger) sniffily looked at our carpet in disdain, before offering us 10p and half a stick of gum for our life’s investment.

No.

We had over 7 offers in 12 hours. Madness. Only discretion (and a desire not to be sued) stops me from describing the bizarre lengths that the buyers went to to talk us round. They needn’t have bothered. When they accepted our re-offer we were too busy planning how to spend the cash that their faux-gratitude would have been spent elsewhere.

But here we are again, dealing with estate agents. Except this lot are, well, to be honest, a bit crap. Not so much Mike Tyson against Steve Hawking in comparison to their London counterparts as Mike Tyson against a wet flannel.

This lot when showing a house do the following, (all of which I would regard as estate agent cardinal sins):

- say NOTHING during an entire viewing;
- when asked about a feature, say “dunno” and then sneak off;
- turn up 30 minutes late and have no excuse;
- when asked “isn’t the paint a bit peeling” agree and say how awful it is.

They could not sell water to desiccated camels. Either they don’t care or are thick as two short ones.

Thanks god most of the places we’ve seen fall into either the “stunningly overpriced shithole” or “so nice It’s probably gone already”, so these gonzo brained geeks don’t have to even try to do their best to “sell”.

In other words we’ve seen nothing we like or can afford yet.

But at least we know we could make it as estate agents in Hertfordshire, if could ever face having our haircut into Hoxton fins.

Until next time, that’s not a water feature, the cat’s got a weak bladder.

Round, round, get around, I get around...

"as it once was..."

Getting around in London is probably the most democratic thing about the place. No. That’s not strictly true. It does throw up £1million houses next to scuzzy blocks of flats every now and again i.e. World’s End’s proximity to Kings Road, but that aside, cash is king in the capital. Don’t believe me? Try asking the Big Issue sellers or the beggars at Liverpool Street or Cannon Street in the rush hour. The commuters just zone them out. Poor? Smelly, Begging? You might as well not be there. I don’t know why anyone would ever waste a wish on being invisible when they could do it by being a beggar in the City.

Social ranting over.

Transport. The great leveller. You’re stuck with two real choices: Tube or cab. No-one in their right mind gets the bus if they can avoid it, especially now they’ve done away with Routemasters. London buses are miserable places. Too hot in summer (the only time when the heaters are ever used) and stinking of sweaty bodies in winter, they also attract the sort of wildlife that means in some areas, you take your life in your hands. Me? I always liked the bus. You got to see so much of London, it costs sod all, and I always liked the colourful company. But it does lack a lot of the patrons that the Tubes and cabs get – the middle class (if it exists) or rather the workers. The Tube can see everyone from MPs, to actors, to TV minor celebs to crack dealers, buskers, bankers, lawyers, coppers, chavs, and tourists all mixing together in their awestruck wonder of the Tube. Because it is wonderful. I miss it a lot. The feeling of the city above you, the random gusts of wind, the buskers, the ghost stations, the whole feeling of a life in London under London.

Now I have my car.






I can drive to work. For an ex-Londoner this is a considerable shock. No-one drives to work in London. If you get in a car to go to work in London you’re either a cabbie or a chauffeur. Parking, traffic, congestion charge – all that nonsense. But now, I can get up, get into my new car and be at work, 30 miles away, in 40 minutes. I even get the chance to get above third gear. My life in my car deserves its own post. All I’ll say now is that I like those intervals in my day when I am alone with my car. I can discuss politics with Radio 4, laugh at the bad music on Radio 1, mock the chromosomally retarded presenters on 3 Counties Radio (“Asylum seekers are all scum!”) and play my own CDs as loud as I like. I miss the Tube, but I love my car. I’m sorry about my carbon footprint, planet earth, but I love my car.




Anyway.

Until next time. Don’t walk on the grass, cut it.

My canal

Great god! Thats a huge canal!

The green green grass

It's practically the first thing any of our visitors mentions. We now call it the "C" word.

No, not cancer, or a naughty word that will see you next tuesday.

Worse than that.

"Country".

OK, a lot of them say things like, "oh it's so rural". Or "God the air's so clear here". Or in my more honest friends' summations "it's a bit f*cking green isn't it?". It's as though living in central London and it's suburbs has rendered anything without an "0207" dialling prefix part of some massive field with smock clad shepherds sucking straw and breeding with their relatives all day.

"It's only bloody Hertfordsire" I want to scream. It's not as though we've moved to Yorkshire, or Somerset or somewhere miles away from anywhere. Our town even has that perennial hallmark of all reasonable sized towns, marking them within some marketing department's demographic as fair game for cheap beer and crap food- a Wetherspoons. Like one of those faux tribal tattoos peeping out from the too low jeans just above every 18-23 year old woman's arse, we have that rubber stamp of mass-market approval. No Starbucks. No MacDonalds. No Pret. No Burger King. But a well disguised Wetherspoons. Christ.

Anyway. Back to the cud.

I suppose it's only fair to point out that I too was one of those amazed by chlorophyll just a short time ago. Living in North London means that while grass and fields aren't unheard off, you need to make an effort to see them. As for cows? Nah, mate, unless they're with special sauce lettuce cheese on a sesame seed bun. So, when we made the move out a few months ago it was a bit of a shock to the system. No tubes. No red buses. But also none of the things that make London so crap sometimes. Looney drunks, smackheads, moodie hoodies, random stabbings.

Not in Berkhamsted. No no no.

So while in my mind I do long for the 24 hour shops, the plethora of pubs and clubs that I can drink all night in, the casinos and poker dens I can blow my cash in until the sun comes up, and all those 5* restaurants run by temperamental chefs, secretly, after five minutes of the dirt, the tube, the queues and the general attitude of most people, I'm glad to get back to the greenery.

That's the thing with living in London. It may be the coolest City in the world, and an amazing place to live and while you're there everything else seems just so...slow and pedestrian, but after a while its nice to have a change. Its got so that now if you're planning on living there you need to be a foreign national anyway (check the Sunday Times rich list), with a bankroll fatter than a Vegas buffet queue. On top of which it's never really dark, or quiet, or calm and without those, it's hard to really chill out.

Well. It was for me anyway. Until such time as my mid-life crisis kicks in and I need to move back to London to hide, the grass, the air, the ducks and cows and the farmer's market will do me fine. At least until the wife swapping season starts.

Until then, four legs good, 2 legs bad, and pass the scones vicar.