I had my first year PhD upgrade today and I seemed to have had a most enjoyable experience. I will know later after I stop smiling like an idiot and come down from the shock of it all. Happy happy days!

Hello SG

I hope that all is faring well out there and that the week is treating you well and not after your own desert, for who should 'scape whipping. Today, I have decreed, shall be one of rest and recuperation. This weekend was not fun or hectic, just university and day job work, but I feel absolutely knackered. I thought that I would vegetate whilst watching television but I have been to tired to do anything other than read a book and write this not very exhaustive - if exhausting - blog, Other than my temporary fatigue all is going very very well at the moment. I am 1/3 through my Phd and am still finding it fascinating. I have applied for a part time job in a library which, if i get it, shall be bookish fun. I am going home for the first time in a long time for the month of April and my two cats (Catatonic and Cathartic) have taken to ignoring me of late which means that I have the couch to myself most days . There is also a soupçon of Spring in the air and this, more than anything, is bringing a big smile back on my face. I really am not a fan of Spring but it has just been such a long and miserable winter that any amelioration from its gloomy grip is purrfect like a cat birthday (30 rock lift).

I am making plans to go to New York and Baltimore during the summer. I am really looking forward to the trip, if it works out, but one way or the other I will have to go to both places within the next year. I also really want to go to Boston. I went to college there a few years ago and really want to catch up with some friends there. In the heel of the reel I shall be having quite the summer!

Slan abhaile to all those who can read it and safe home to all who can't

Happy Christmas. If you relish the season , celebrate it or hate it I wish you all some enjoyment over the weekend. To all my friends the heartiest of handshakes and smiles and best wishes for the future

Life is excellent. One essay down and one to go. University is such fun. Work is its own reward, the early bird catches the worm, if there was work in the bed he’d sleep on the floor and all that glitters is not gold. This blog is such a cliché. I am looking forward to the Christmas season as i will travel home and see most of my family and friends and generally be drunk for about ten days. Being Irish this is an acceptable standard of existence I am told. Then back to this reality that i have carved out for myself here. I need a job in the New Year though. I am a little tired of being skint. That, however, could be my only complaint. The snow has been here for nigh on two weeks and although it looks pretty and there are quite a few sweet snowmen scattered throughout the community the coldness almost would make one wish for rain although if it did rain it would inevitably be on my parade. I am going to a Viking festival in the New Year and really am quite excited about that. It should be, indeed must be, an immense amount of fun and frolics. It was my birthday a little while ago and I got the most stupendous present from my girlfriend. I don’t know if anyone else has read 'Bring me your love' by Charles Bukowski but it is a short short story about visiting a friend in an asylum. Anyway it is this that I received. It is very dear to me ..... my preciousssss. I am also flirting with the idea of going to see the new (relatively) Harry Potter film but am afraid that it will be like Beverly Hills 90210 when all those 40 year olds were playing high school students. Perhaps this is not the case. At any rate I just watched 'The boys from Brazil' and 'The Conversation' and they are probably better than anything in the cinema right now. Also the cinema costs a fortune. Anyway as stated life is at every turn interesting.

On a final note courtesy of Rupert Brookes

And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.

it is now 6.30 am and i have spent the last 15 hours drinking with two of my brothers. I don't know really why I can type but such is the way of life. Just to let all and sundry know we have solved the ills of the world, although my chemical castration came into it, and we have established a plan of action that could well help the educational disparity between the first and third worlds - if such cold war differentiations are still valid are at least en vogue. Two elephants fall off a cliff - boom boom. Anyway Spike Milligan is a hero of the ages and we are all shadows in the cave. Hope ye all feel better than i will in about six hours at least my apathetic nihilism should pull me through. I would love Nietzsche if i could be arsed. This is enough. Everyone is fantastic except my neighbour’s sheep and dogs.

I am moving to Scotland. Fourth country to live in in the past four years. I need to put down a root or two. Anyway it should be fun, although I need to invest in some warmer clothes, although not much warmer. I will also have the pleasure of finding another local pub that serves nice warm ales on those cold winter nights, days, afternoons and mornings. Somewhere with an open fire anyway.

Speed is like
a dozen transatlantic flights...

without ever
getting off the plane.

Time change.
You lose. You gain.

Makes no difference, so long
as you keep taking the pills.

But sooner or later,
you gotta get out...

because it's crashing,

and all at once
those frozen hours...

melt through
the nervous system...

and seep out the pores.

- from Withnail and I

I am travelling a lot of late i fly four times a fortnight. It engenders a real sense of lethargy. I am, as i write, lying on a bed in a house which is located for all intents and purposes at the end of the world. I spend about four nights here writing, reading, walking, fishing, drinking coffee and consciously not indulging in any indulgences. Tomorrow I will, yet again, fly to humanity and spend the next week in debauched drunkenness and intellectual redundancy. It is a good life I suppose. I shall be in uni in September again which is pleasing but there seems no end to the plodding exuberance of modern living. A day in the wilderness to find oneself, a day in church to find ones soul and a day in the pub to find ones spirits. I do not intend to bitch. My nephew is coming to the UK in a month or so to hang out. I am nervous. I foresee all sorts of unforeseen events. He is a cool kid; a little mixed up it seems but is that not the nail on which childhood hangs? I want to show him a good time but have no clue what he likes to do. He and i are different animals seeking different sport. so i should introduce him to my world and let him see another point of view. However, what if it sucks? rebuked by a drunken sixteen year old is to be the sum total of existence. Maybe i should tell him i am busy. Maybe i should tell him - there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

Well this is a first,

I understand that this is a forum where I can unleash my spectacularly and ever diminishing wit upon an unsuspecting and more pertinently uninterested population. Perhaps this malaise is the zeitgeist of the 21st century. We live in a land of weather forecasts and breakfasts that 'set in,' shat on by Tories, shoveled up by Labor in a kingdom of reigns where royalty comes in gangs. People we are at the end of an age! Adorno was right we are all commodified and standardised. There is an option on the SG website which states fuck you i defy categories as a pigeonhole. Oh that we have lived so long to see such times. Perhaps a lone voice whispering in the wind is the only reality we can muster in an era of constant repetition (note the irony!).

Anyway things are going well in my brain at the moment. I have just moved to a new part of a new country - for me that is - and things seem to be on the up and up. Just started a job i cannot abide but it has inspired in me the motivation to apply for a masters degree in some institute of education. I am attempting to sell my bike at the moment - a heart breaking decision, but only in an attempt to upgrade to a more pleasurable ride. Is that not the aspiration of any red blooded human? There are many things that I would like to mention here now that i have given myself the chance. Firstly I would like to thank all those that have accepted my offer of friendship on this site without having much evidence of the type of person i may or may not be. Secondly I vow that this shall be the first of many blogs that I shall undertake. Thirdly I shall put a photo or two up on this site to give people an idea of the shape of the person they may or may not be greeting. Fourthly I would like to thank my friends for introducing me to this site and pestering me to do something once i am on it. Lastly let the good times roll.

Tomorrow I am going to get so shitfaced drunk that you could stick a tail on me and call me road kill.
A bientot