Code of Error

Wednesday, 21 October 2009

I've always wanted to go on a road trip in the US - it's one of the few things that was on my definite all-time To Do list. However there was also the not so small matter of not being able to drive - and remedying that takes time, money and most worryingly, effort. So a Great American Road Trip was one of those far off I'll-get-round-to-it-eventually ambitions along with Marriage, or Kids, or Learning To Love Thyself (In A Less Literal Fashion).
Many months ago my friend Chris phoned me up out of the blue to ask if I wanted to go on an road trip in the States. This is strange for two reasons:
1. Not only does Chris know that I cannot drive, but
2. The idea of him wanting to go on holiday in the USA is completely new to me - he's also only just stopped referring to the place as "the traitorous colonies".
For me then, this ended up being more of a Passenger Trip but the effect was the same - maps were bought, plans were made and a journey was travelled.

Day 1 - Flight
It's been a while since I've flown so I'd forgotten just how cramped it is. There's the awkwardness of elbow/armrest etiquette - whose goes where, what's ok in terms of proximity, whether three shoulder nudges does in fact constitute an inadvertent cruising invitation for your fellow passenger to join you in the mile high club. Once I was buckled in though I didn't end up moving or taking off my belt until we'd hit solid ground again. Not because of any phobia of mine but because my attention was perfectly captured by a non-stop stream of film, television and music. 3 films of my choice (well 2 films and 1 morbid curiosity in Wolverine) and the occasional meal or snack brought by the perfectly pleasant stewardesses - it was a complete distraction from the non-sensation of my extremities slowly dying off. If they ever made human battery farms - assuming humans actually created a by-product more useful than their own Facebook statuses - they'd look something like this. And there'd be a fair few volunteers too.

Once we landed in a gloriously sunny Boston there must have been some kind of fault with the electronics because our individual TV screens started playing a grainy sub-VHS quality promotional video for London that simply went through generic stock footage clips - here's a red bus, here's a taxi, here's a million miserable Londoners walking en mass, rank and file down Oxford Street. The first thing I noticed was that whenever they required a shot of a tube station they kept on cutting back to various angles of High Street Kensington - presumably it was too difficult to get shots of other Underground stations, it's not like they're easily accessible or anything. Now High Street Kensington used to be pretty much my second home* so there was a slight tug of nostalgia there. Mostly though, as I stared at discoloured images of what is now becoming a retail post-credit-crunch wasteland, the video might as well have been screaming "Look how far you've come!", and I hadn't even left the plane yet.

*although not like an MP's second home, I actually spent some time there. Zing! Way to be political and topical, 6 months after the fact.

Labels: Boston, Flying, London, Road Trip, USA

posted at 11:49  0 comments

Friday, 16 October 2009

Where to start? ashdcuk has existed for a long time in a number of different guises (but always in lower-case) and, if I'm honest, has been a rather abandoned home for a lot of the time. It's always had the vague purpose of being a repository for my own confused bits of writing and 'art' and in that grand tradition I'm going to avoid clarifying the new site any further - probably because I don't have a clear idea myself. That might seem a problem in the future but it never really got in the way before.

Labels: Blogging

posted at 11:33  1 comments