Well, everyone's got to have a hobby...

Leo v's The Ear Mites

My cat has ear mites - which means we have to do scrub him with Anti-Mite Stuff on a weekly basis. As you can imagine, it really does hurt us alot more than it hurts him to do so.

I drink too much. The last time I gave a urine sample it had an olive in it.

Since my last posting I have mostly been ...drunk.

It's not big, and its certainly not clever, but it is most definitely fun.

I'd like to tell you all about my inebriated antics, but to be perfectly honest, I can't quite remember alot of them. Which may be a good thing, well, it usually is. I managed three consecutive nights though, with a whole plethora of societies and groups meaning that all in all, I've made a complete arse of myself infront of a good socio-economic cross section of my university ...pagans, gays, socialists, Planeteers, mountaineers, postgrads - they all featured somewhere or other. Some more frequently than others.

And the moral of the story kids?

Tequilla is not your friend.

Royal Mess

This country is a complete joke.

Apparently we are the forth richest nation in the world - and yet we don't even have the competence to manage our own rail system so that trains arrive on time, or our own mail system so that letters arrive ...at all.

In the past 6 months, we have had countless items delivered to the WRONG SODDING HOUSE rather than ours. We rely on the good nature of our neighbours to re-deliver our mail to its correct address, and we, in return, re-delived their mail that inevitably and erroneously lands through our door. I didn't realise how terribly confusing it must be for those poor postmen, what with us living at Number 4 and all. I really feel for people who live at houses with numbers so impossibly large that they cannot even be counted on the fingers of both hands.

Apart from the incovenience of receiving bills late, we have had over £60 worth of DVDs and CDs, bought from Amazon, go mysteriously missing. After several complaints to Royal Mail, they still never materialised, but thankfully the people at Amazon seem to be so familiar with this scenario, that they sent us replacements without so much as a second guess.

To top off my general contempt for the Royal Mail they have gone and outdone their own levels of utter incompetance. Seeing as the nearest branch of my bank is in Glasgow (and because my university insists on paying my stipend by cheque rather than directly through BACS), I have to mail my stipend off before it comes on to my account. Prepared to ignore the sheer inefficiency of this system, given how straightforwad modern e-commerce should be, I grin and bear the process. But there is only so much ineptitude I can take!

April 7th was when I posted my much needed stipend cheque off to my bank. April 7th!! I paid extra to have the bloody envelope "Recorded" seeing as it had my next 3 months money contained within it. So imagine my surprise when I check my balance expecting a nice healthy positive number, to find a worryingly depressing negative one.

Trying not to fret too much about it, I logged on to the website available to track your mail, and entered the little reference code that I had spent the extra time, care and expense paying for. Apparently tracking Recorded mail means that "items are only tracked after the item has been delivered". Of course! Why did I stupidly expect them to KNOW where the hell my letter was, just because I'd asked it to be recorded! Thats like having a tracker dog that could only find drugs once you'd unstuffed them from inside the "I Love Amsterdam" teddy bear and plonked them right in front of its nose. Useless!

On contacting said *COUGH muppets COUGH* mail service in person, I was then just told to phone my bank, as of course it was probably them who had infact made the error, and had no doubt just "forgotten" to deal with banking my cheque..... So I checked. And they haven't.

The Royal Mail is a disgrace. It is a complete farce. How come people get away with not doing their own jobs - what they are after all paid to do - properly??? Surely, if everyone made sure that they looked after their own little bit of responsibility, the world would be a much more bearable place to live in. If your job is to pick up mail, sort it, and then deliver it to the correct address, then how the f*ck can you make such a complete and utter balls of it?? I don't see where the difficulty lies. Its your JOB! You should be quite aware of how it works.

What happened to the country's 400 plus years of delivering mail religiously on time? The Mail Trains that were a national pride? Even sodding carrier pigeons seemed to be more efficient!! I realise that not all postpeople are the fools I believe them to be, but by letting those wankers who don't care enough about their job to actually do it properly get away with it, then they are tarring themselves with the same brush.

Amusingly, I have just this second had to go answer the door to a confused looking Postman looking for an address he couldn't find. As much as I felt like berrating him with my frustrations, I decided to just be nice and help him out, in the hope that someone, somewhere is doing the same for my mail.

Socialist's Social

The Belgian one was playing away on some far flung Hebridean island in the wind and rain with her mum and brother for a long weekend, leaving muggins here stuck behind to demonstrate in lab practicals (fish dissections! ooh, the fun we had!) and mark papers.

I did however manage to drag myself away from the workload long enough to attend the Socialists Sunday School. This workshop, set up to provide forums for discussion about various issues, included speakers from various organisations including the Scottish Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party and G8 Alternatives.

Alan McCombes started things off with a talk about Marxism in a modern day context. He highlighted that Capitalism is a system that allows an oligarchy (government by the few) or a plutocracy (government by the wealthy) to accumulate capital and thereby restrict the natural circulation of wealth through the economy. He stated the importance of working-class self emancipation as the only means by which social reform is possible. People often think of Socialism or Marxism and immediately leap to visions of Stalin's Russia, North Korea, and China - but this is Communism, not Socialism. The difference being that Communism is centred around the idea of the state as a central repository of economic wisdom, agency and control, whereas in Socialism, it is 'the workers' who ultimately hold the power.

This was demonstrated by the next speaker, Mike Gonzalez, in his talk on Venezuela. Venezuela provides no less than 13% of the world's oil, when you consider that Iraq supplies 17%, it is no wonder then that the US has been equally "interested" in the country's political affairs. Since the 1970s, Venezuela’s middle and elite classes have been profiting from the nation’s lucrative oil industry, despite it being a supposedly state-owned industry. However, when the socialist Hugo Chavez was democratically elected in 1998, he set about re-establishing state control of the industry and using its substantial profits to improve conditions (health, eductaion, housing) for the country's poor. None too pleased with his actions, Venezuela’s upper class minority, backed by US dollars, tried on three attempts to oust Chavez. On each occasion, it was the poor workers who's voices were heard. With 80% of the population living in poverty, it is not surprising that each time Chevez has come bouncing back.

The system in Venezuela is not the ideal, with a solitary president incharge, there will always remain the possibility of it turning into a dictatorship - but the important message we should take from the Venezuelan people is what can happen when people use their voice. It makes you think what we could have really done to stop the War on Iraq two years ago.

The final speaker, Donny Nicholson (SSY, G8 Alternatives) rounded up the day with a motivating talk about the G8. Sarah and I had already booked into our diaries the events taking place after previous meetings and demos we had attended. These include Make Poverty History demo Edinburgh 2 July; Alternative Summit Edinburgh 3 July; Anti-nuclear demo against Britains WMD Faslane and Dungavel 4 July; Culminating in the Anti-G8 protests Gleneagles 6 July.

These demonstrations are not just somewhere for international anarchists and trouble makers to cause trouble. The people attending these demonstrations will be local Scotts (and British) who want to go out and make their voices heard - that George Bush, the other First World Leaders, and their greedy Capitalist ways are not welcome here. It is a unique opportunity not just in Scotland, but the UK as whole, for people to unify, realise their strength, and demand change.

Some highlights from this week...

I learnt several new recipes. Im particularly liking tarragon butter sauce with fish. Yum! I also spent ALOT of time juicing vegetables. It's becomming a bit of a compulsion. As is making chicken soup...

I spent a debaucherous night out in Edinburgh, and Carlisle. Obviously, not on the same night.


..drugs are bad kids.

I decided that Ray Mears is my new hero. Deciding this has made me even more determined to become skilled in field craft - which is going to be a must for my work... just need to get myself some khakis and a whittling stick and I'll be sorted.

In a fit of sheer impulse buying, Sarah and I bought tickets for the T in the Park festival this July, woo-hoo! ..Green Day, The Killers, The Prodigy, Kasabian, Bloc Party and The Foo Fighters among many others. Oh. And the mud, we mustn't forget the mud!

Sarah's ongoing battle with The Cat has escalated to silly proportions. In an attempt to stop him from trying to sleep on her head every night, she has now taken to going to bed armed with a spray bottle loaded with water. Funnily enough, the ensuing carnage has gone completely unnoticed by me, as I manage to sleep quite soundly through it all.

I discovered the Joy of Napster - so I can now listen to vitually any album/song I can think of in full and then choose to buy it, or not! ..Hence now I am quickly attempting to develop my Will Power enough so that I do not 1.) spend the next three month's stipend before it has even arrived; and 2.) spend the next three month's searching for obscure tracks from my youth rather than working. It's not looking promising. Maybe this wasn't such a geat discovery afterall...

As you can see, the life of a PhD student is a none stop rollercoaster of exciting thrills and spills.