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| MarcusStrapp |
--- Outbound ---
Eurostar not bad huh. A client visit in Brussels has meant that I get my first experience of this service. To date all international visits have meant flying, even some domestic visits have worked out cheaper, quicker or both by EasyJet or Ryan Air. But just as I was about to book flights for this trip my client forwarded me details of Eurostar and so here I am sitting on the 8:25am to Brussels. It was an early start this morning. My first slight hiccup was when collecting my tickets as St Pancras, I discovered that I must have mislaid my business credit cards somewhere. The woman on Eurostar ticket counter was wonderful. She contact my bank for me and I was able to stop the card immediately. A few button presses later and she placed the tickets in my hand and I went to departure. Security is a little like airports, with all carry on baggage going through an x-ray machine. The difference being that all my tools and can go with me onboard. The security is more relaxed than at most airports. Passport control, then on to board. Attendants stood smartly uniformed at the doors to each of the coaches to assist, rather impressive. We pulled out on the dot and within moments was drawn into subterranean darkness,. The cabin environment is smart and comfy. In the tunnels there is a drone that is a tad louder than I would have expected for modern rolling stock, but when you emerge back into daylight it is whisper quiet.
Oh wow, we have emerged from the tunnel in to a dawn of smokey dusky pink skies and the urban metrololis sliding by my window . We've just passed the QE2 bridge. Oh this is so much better than being at 40,000 feet. Don't get me wrong I love the take off and landing, but once your are at 40,000 feet there is little to hold your interest and the noise always gets me down.
Of other news, this week has seen me without any one night stands. This is cause for much perturbation. The Christmas period provide for some delightful one night stands. 3 days of one nights stands running back to back. Well a man does have his appetites.
Frosted fields. Winter bare trees, The breath of horses clouding and rising into the cold air. A white water sun striving to turn pink into blue. Sunlight shafts sweeping between the trees in the morning mist. Even the pylons striding across the countryside look impressively majestic today.
Random thought: How great is that gift of submission when the giver has not been indoctrinated with the words of our culture. When did a man's heart not break when a woman debased herself and let her thighs fall open as the words "fuck me" fell out of her mouth? When did a man not become giddy when such a slut who is no slut at all rushed to show him that she purchased a corset or sheer stockings to make herself his pleasure? Oh women, are they not the only thing in the whole world worth possessing? We must fuck these women! Not to do so is to leave them unrealised, a potential not reached, a dream undreamt, a life unlived. We must fuck them and fuck them. We must savour and appreciate them. Take them on our tongue and in our hearts. We must make firm promises, rigid proposals, and thrust our hardened arguments of lust deep inside them, We must know them and they must know us. Only then is all in balance and the world can sleep deep and peaceful.
I wish there were power sockets at every seat, and WiFI, an extra fiver for the journey would be wonderful value. As I walk to the buffet car I note that some carriage do have power sockets. I wonder if I could change seat, but we are nearly there now?
--- Work ---
Smart modern university building. Much better facilities than so many of my UK customers. I'll not bore you with the details but the installation goes without the slightest hiccup. This is a huge relief to me. This is an upgrade to an existing system. A new system I can build and test in the office. I ship it complete and I know with almost complete certainty that it is all going to work. Upgrades are a nightmare. For such a complex system there are countless tiny things that can be the difference between a working system and a dead one. When the system is in another country, I really want to get it right first time. A missing cable, an incompatible device, the wrong version of software.... there are countless opportunities for failure and there is nothing that gets to me so much as letting my customers down. But today, it all goes as smooth as silk. The post docs, technicians and doctors all file in for training and it's like a stage performance that goes really well. Question time is like stand-up improv', and this time each inbound suggestion from the audience hits the bat dead on the sweet spot. If I seeded the crowd with my own cronies it could not have gone better.
--- Hotel ---
It's a Holiday Inn. The up side is that it is clean, presentable and predictably similar to the last Holiday Inn I stayed in. Such sameness goes some way to reducing the stress at the end of the day for the business traveller. I could probably undress, lay my clothes on the chair, find may way to the bathroom, wash my teeth and get into bed blindfolded and having never seen this particular room before. On the down side, it's boring. My first choice of hotel, a much smaller affair, slightly further from the university, was fully booked.
The hotel internet is not working. Oh no, I can read my memos on my iPhone, but I cannot be arsed to attempt a decent reply by one finger punching on a diddy virtual keyboard. I hope people will not think me rude that my replies will be a few days late.
Dining alone in a hotel restaurant is one of the things I like least in life. Nothing makes me feel more lonely than sitting alone at a table for two in a hotel restaurant. Millions do it, showing up with their paperbacks and mobiles. There is no enjoyment to be had in dining alone. The food tonight; Holiday Inn food, a triumph of presentation over content. An aesthetically pleasing arrangement of pre-prepared items of school dinner quality. Vegetables subjected to microwave reheating. Lamb chops of unreasonably diminutive proportion. Sauces of unknown provenance that at this same instance are being poured from identical plastic containers onto identical plates in identical silly patterns in identical Holiday Inns all over the country.
It would of course be of no consequence at all if I had been lucky enough to find a one night stand to share it with. Despite my efforts, I did not strike it lucky this evening.
I'll retire and write that piece of software in answer to that post doc's "it would be nice id the system could do... it would save us hours of work". I'll demonstrate it tomorrow and if I am lucky six months from now he'll be working in another group and with think, "ah Multinational Bigboys Incorporated just say yes then don't deliver. That curious Cambridge based outfit don't tend to say much but it turns up by lunchtime." Well it goes down like that sometimes.
--- Work ---
Well there really is not that much to do today. So I launch into some more training. I demo the software I wrote last night and get the sort of beaming faced response that makes me feel it's a job really well done.
A brief excursion to drive around the Atomium and then back to the station to see if i can catch an earlier Eurostar.
Christ I have been horny all day (I think success at work tends to make me horny, mind so does many other things) I am so in need of a one night stand that I am salivating at the thoughts that infest my addled brain. I need to fuck. I need to fuck so bad that I may no longer be capable of speech until I fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. My vision is going purple around the edges. Fuck, fuck, fuck. My mouth is watering excessively. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I think my knuckles are dragging on the ground. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
--- Return ---
The seats in the Brussels Midi Eurostar terminal waiting area are uncomfortable. Red painted perforated sheet metal affairs. All the more uncomfortable when your work has gone well and you have left early and you have 3 hours to kill. The shiny seats don't let you slump down in your seat. If you start to slump, you slide and go on slumping until you're scrambling back up to avoid slipping into a slumped heap on the floor. No matter how you twist or try to arrange yourself, there is no way for the tired man to gain a restful repose in the Brussels Midi Eurostar terminal waiting area. Perhaps it is intentional. Being a heated area pre check in, perhaps if it were any more comfortable it would become all too popular with non Eurostar travellers. Eventually I board and take my place. We pull out on time. It's 7pm local time and there is just the very last 15 minutes of a chill twilight. Why do they insist on bright interior cabin lights on planes and trains for night journeys. Switch them off! Switch them off! Let me either sleep, or let me adapt to the dark landscape that goes into reverse and slips away from me through the window. Instead all I see are reflections of the other travellers, their newspapers, books and laptops and then the reflections of reflections and the curious aspect of ghosts hidden by a direct line of sight. Sometimes a string of sodium street lights makes it through and sometimes, particularly near the station the electric overhead cables spark and light up the outside like a miniature electrical storm.
Random thought: Academics are like children. Only children and academics share such earnest dedication in what they do. They only differ in whether they call it, work or play. This I feel is especially true of social science academics. They have more personal fulfilment in their "work" than is rightful to expect in a modern life. It's like buying your way into the aristocracy. Social science academics are bounders, if not cads.
Random thought: I need a one night stand. I'm obsessed with thought of that between legs taste of sex. Like an alcoholic or drug user I need my fix. I'll go to bed alone tonight, my kids will be there waiting for me when I arrive But tomorrow I am going to have to sneak out and satisfy my craving. I have to find a slut who will let me slake my thirst. Another one night stand although I doubt I will be able to wait until night, I expect I will have to sneak out sometime in the day. It's hard when you are an addict.
Random thought: Is there a 3 foot high club for trains, a low altitude version of the mile high club? I've never really fancied the idea of shagging at 40,000 feet, but then perhaps I have not had the opportunity. But then I do tend to want to feast when I'm hungry and cabin noise and confined spaces strike me as more adequate for a quick snack than a banquet.
| 10 Jan 09, 10:28 AM lucky_1 7 yrs |
Oh how I get the business trip! I remember two Christmases ago coming back on a late night flight from Oslo, I seemed to have spent three days in total darkness. There was very little daylight up there at that time of year and those hours had been spent in meetings. I remember very clearly circling above the Peak District and just watching the other planes like little beacons. Quite peaceful really.
The book at dinner is a defence mechanism! There is always what I term the public transport nutter who will insist on sitting next you you and conversing when it should be quite plain that you prefer your own company. Ipods were made for this! At dinner an ipod is a little over the top so out comes the book. It's a barrier that says "leave me alone!" and it does give me something to do while I am waiting for my school dinner meal. Especially if it's one of the Kusheils novels
I'm having a nice break from all that right now and doing my own thing photographically which, I have to say, is an altogether very pleasant experience
I'm in my own world. It's Ok, they know me here. |
| 17 Jan 09, 2:02 PM merrynb99 UK(SL), 6 yrs |
I don't miss business trips at all. I only ever had one fun one, in which one of my colleagues taught me to do a handbrake turn in a distant corner of a dusty dirt road somewhere near the Botswana border, and that night we had a pool competition in the bar of the Great North Road Hotel, in which Tequila Sheila and I were the only two women and she beat me hands down ...
Memories! |
| 18 Jan 09, 12:44 AM playzone UK, 5 yrs  |
My business trips are (hopefully) now in the past. All trips from now on will be for the hell of it and not to the order of clients, meetings or corporate hospitality. My trips now are for walks on the peaks or moors, and will be unhurried and relaxing - and will not be spent thinking about one night stands!!
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