Catch the yellow midnight beer bus

Evenings ending up in friends+beer: episode 27364. The open-topped bus and free Corona one.

Coming to a town near you soon

I've not really drunk very much Corona before. If at all. But this was a bit different. Last week, during a night at Jim Morrisson's final pub, the Mazet, the usual suspects had blagged us onto a list of invitésto catch a yellow open-topped bus at mindight and drive around the sights of Paris while consuming free beer and generally making a noise. As if a ludicrous yellow open-topped bus with "Corona" written down the side going up the Champs-Elysées wasn't going to grab enough attention on its own.

I can thoroughly recommend this as a highly profitable way of spending an evening. You can meet friendly randoms with similar interests (largely limited admittedly to beer and, er, free nonsense), get drunk with them while trying to stand up on the top deck of a moving bus (which is a stupid idea even before you involve alcohol, and banned in most countries including funnily enough France) and, for extra points, avoid getting hit on any of Paris' numerous tree-lined avenues. The potential for spillage and indeed minor injury is frankly huge. Even better, you can wave at the people paying 5€ for an espresso in a horrific tourist café, raise a bottle to them, and feel smugly superior despite the fact that you look completely daft.

Moving home. Again.

Since arriving in Paris, I have built up something of a reputation for itchy feet. After band practices of old, Noël the bassist used to complain that I took a different route home every month. This weekend sees a move into my sixth Parisian home and, as Mike points out, in the not at all geeky gimpofactual moment of the day, it also means I've nearly completed a full sweep of the outer arrondissements from XV onwards.

I am looking forward to solitary confinement after a year of flatsharing. Living on my own. Bohemia. I can sit there sketching portraits, before sipping absinthe and composing maudlin guitar ballads about some bitch who left me.

Meanwhile, it is the summer, and the season of Nun Cricket. This game was initially conceived and popularised during Timber+Chakkers' European Tour of 2001. The concept was further developed by Olly and friends on their InterRail trip two years later. In the spirit of sharing the joys of this unparalleled game with all ye blogreaders, I shall outline the rules, so that ye too can partake in its incumbent splendature.

*Find some friends. Any kind of friends will do, as long as they're willing to travel around with you for a few weeks (Test match nun cricket) or a few days (limited overs nun cricket). Interrailing around major European cities is ideal, particularly in catholic countries, although it is indeed such a splendid sport that you could doubtless have a perfectly adequate game of Nun Cricket riding in a horse-drawn carriage around southeast Wales for a month.

*The aim of the game is to score more runs than your opponents. Runs are scored by spotting nuns in the wild, i.e. on the street, in the woods, in the lingerie section. Wherever, as long as it's not a convent.

*Scoring is as follows.
Each person who spots a nun scores one run. One run per nun. Nun-a-run. Etc. Sighting a minibus containing nothing but nuns could easily score you 23 in one go.
A monk is worth four runs.
A bishop is worth six runs.
Seeing the pope wins the contest outright, game, set, match, bang, finito, over.

*You cannot score in a convent, church, or monkery. (Unless you pull a nun. But that's a different story and those allegations were unfounded.)

And that's all there is to it. Happy gaming...

Coming up in your next blog entry: International Poohsticks.

My left arm is the wrong colour

The Parc André Citroën is one of Paris' best parks and you ought to go to it if you haven't been there yet. However, it will tempt you to spend faaaaaaar too long in the sun. Yes, kids, I have again tried something out so you don't have to. Wear sunscreen.

(Now that really does sound like the Baz Luhrman song, doesn't it, Mr(s) anonymous poster of two months back?)

Meanwhile, following a visit to the Salon de l'Aéronautique at le Bourget on Friday, I can confirm that this A380 megajumbo thing does actually fly:

I had the presence of mind to take this picture while standing on a tightrope between two hot air balloons.

The four-minute A380 flight was the obvious highlight, although a special mention should go to the Tiger helicopter, which went up into the sky like normal but then did some very wrong things that would have irritated my old Physics teacher.

This may be the last blogpost in a while due to the entire up-in-air nature of life currently.

A countryside adventure (with added compost)

Parents have been relatively well-behaved.

Yesterday we caught a train and headed for Fontainebleau. Which was about the first time Timber had been outside RATP zone 2 this calendar year. Tried to compost the tickets and found that our kind of tickets (pathetic little RATP purple card things, rather than yer important-looking but flimsy great SNCF ones) could not be composted by the yellow composting machines.

Oh well, we thought, and got on the train, as it was about to leave. Perhaps the conductor composts them on the train.

Cue conductor climbing into carriage just after Bois-le-Roi. Ah, he said in French to Mother, you has done a silly ting. Why hath ye not composted. All the world knows the commandment: thou shalt always compost.

On doit obligatoirement composter son billet avant tout trajet.

Meep, I interjecteth, ye poor Mutti do not speake Frankish, oh conductor dude. Be unwilling to do the ladie any harm with thy greate and impressionating garlickenesse! Speake then unto me.

It doth me greate sorrow, sayeth the displeased conductor dude, but thou shalt be made to paye for thine crimery.

It doth me even greater sorrowe, countereth the heroic Timber, but we shall not paye, for we are not paying.

Oh, embarketh ye conductor dude, greately flummoxed by the clearely superiant logicke of Timber, then makest thou shure that ye shall not recreate the same mistaycke in ye future never agayne.

Yea verily we shall not, I repondeth, now boggeth ye off with thine smelly visage of Frankish pong.*

And thus ended the discussion. We caught a bus to the château and did a great deal of walking and mother took some dastardly photos on her mobile whatsit. Perhaps one day I will upload them to this blog post. You'll have to wait till she's back in England, figures out how to use bluetooth, then sends them to me by email. Expect this to take at least 6 months.

* Timberblog accepts no responsibility for the quality of this transcription, but would like to apologise for any linguistic inaccuracies or anachronisms; the translation and proofreading of today's blog entry was undertaken by a work-experience student on an ERASMUS exchange scheme from Felixstowe.

Mmm... pie

A short entry before the parental invasion.

Last week truly was an exceptional week for cooked dinners and culminated last night in PIE. More specifically, steak+ale pie. This was very good indeed. France, as a country, is sadly lacking in pie.

Yesterday also saw a visit to a trendy wine bar in Batignolles and eating the olives (proffered as nibbles) with two friends who don't like olives any more than I do. This reminded me 1. why I don't eat olives very often, and 2. of a cruel Easter episode in Sardinia involving my unsuspecting cousin Jamie, the foil wrapping from a mini-egg, and an olive which looked remarkably like, well, a mini-egg.

PIE

As for the rest of last week, you can assume that, if there are any evenings I have not told you about, they finished with beer and friends.

Meanwhile I am planning the holiday of a lifetime for next Saturday. The excitement mounts.

Parental season hits

This is proving a very fruitful week in terms of having dinners provided for me.

June seems to be parental season in Paris, with various progenitors coming by car or aeroplane and returning with belongings bestowed upon them by the offspring who, having completed their university course, will also soon make their merry way back to Britain. This is the third opportunity I have had to witness the phenomenon. Lady Franchester's mother was the latest of the batch, and tagging along with her was the current holder of the award for the Most Irish Woman in the World. This resulted in a great deal of free beer on Sunday, and a large meal on Monday in what became a second birthday party. Which meant I slept on the floor again, and found this life-affirming again. Olly and David chose this occasion to embark on a 48hr binking dringe, which was doubtless life-affirming as well.

Final preparations are now underway for the arrival of the Timberparents, at 17h23CET, Monday. My bedroom is unrecognisable, which some of you may note is a synonym for "tidy".

Meanwhile Liverpool have released the £5m-worth of heroically bumbling mess that was Igor Biscan. I am upset. He will now presumably sign for some upper-midtable Italian or Spanish side and prove that he was actually a brilliant player all along (cf. Savo Milosevic, Dejan Kovacevic, Diego Forlan).

I (gor) just (Bis) can't believe it!

Look at him there, isn't he brilliant? Oh well, in an unrelated consolation, at least Ukraine are going to qualify for a major tournament.

15 free live acts in one weekend

In preparation for selling small yellow diggers to Americans, I shoved my teaching hours to the weekend, which means that I now wake up in the single hours on both Saturday and Sunday to go to work - this is fairly horrific.

Of course, as you will have read oh ye loyal blogfollowers, I walked out of that job on Wednesday and instigated plan B, but it means that at least the week is fairly clear now for picking up the Holy Grail (the bogstandard mon-fri full time 35heures could-be-done-by-a-trained-monkey kind of job which I have so far proved incapable of procuring). Which made it a little surprising when plan C suddenly phoned up from nowhere and invited me for interview on Friday. I did the interview, had a little tour, and concluded that plan C is lovely and I want it like a big cake. Watch this space for developments on plans B and C.

Diggers give you influence among colleagues and make you popular with the opposite sex.

I spent Friday night with an epic hayfever-induced headache, very much as if several hundred elephants were enjoying a raucous trance party in my brain. This made me fairly unpresentable for the Saturday morning lesson (as usual, for differing reasons) with Marthe, who always smiles very politely when opening the door to her parents' enormous flat in the 7th, but has probably got me down as some kind of uncouth tramp who happened upon employment by mistake. However, none of this prevented me from going down to the Paris Jazz Festival with Olly for the afternoon. The day's two acts, Daby Touré (Mauritius) and Rokia Traoré (Mali) proved that the word "jazz" was being used liberally if not downright irresponsibly. We became quickly bored of Rokia, and the evening ended up with beer and friends, which - I have noted - is generally what happens to evenings.

Sunday followed a not dissimilar pattern, with morning teaching, followed by a gig of my own, and then popping down to the Champs de Mars where NRJ radio had organised a free concert on the flimsy excuse that they were supporting Paris' bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. Feel free to go positively green with envy when I announce that I have now seen Maroon 5 and Natalie Imbruglia, plus a huge number of terrible French pop acts, "live". The inverted commas are necessary, because I am highly suspicious of exactly how live it all was. The singing was live. The music, particularly for Imbruglia, sounded remarkably like a CD backing track. So, basically, a glorified karaoke show. I don't recommend any of the acts to anyone, unless you are a 12-year-old girl who thinks NRJ is trop cool!!!!. The evening ended up with beer and friends, which... think you can see where this is going.

Starring role in gay porn movie

Well, that was Really Worthwhile!!!!

Had the briefing for ye job this morning. Turns out it is exactly what I specified to the agency I didn't want to do, which means that the agency Wummun was either horrifically misinformed, or a devious bint. I would rather have to go and live with my parents than phone Americans and ask them a 20-minute set of questions about their compact excavators. Hell, I'd rather star in a gay porn movie. With vacuum cleaners and Swedish firemen.

Quite simply, The Brick Testament is among the most beautiful things I have seen on the interweb ever.

I cannot accept the idea that I was brought into this world to piss people off. The occasional irritated friend, or disappointed Wummun, does not count. That is largely accidental and part of a different world in any case. I physically cannot do a job which involves no talent other than a willingness to deceive ("this survey will take a few minutes") and annoy (we all know how it feels to receive calls from randoms trying to sell us stuff, or canvass our opinion). If you can be paid for being useful, then it is a crime to take a job being paid for being an annoyance.

Still better is being paid to entertain, to bring people pleasure; hence the gay porn - perhaps. More pertinently to your intrepid blogger, I talk here about being paid for various artistic pursuits. That is of course the ideal. Admittedly artists will always annoy a proportion of the public - Avril Lavigne annoys me considerably, but the fact is she brings happiness to her fans. As such, I am willing to support her existence. And she is lucky enough to make a living out of bringing people pleasure. That is highly magnanimous and a goal I have set myself.

As such, I have now launched plan B. No, not the gay porn. Plan B will be revealed only if successful.