battle royale

The summer of 2004 was a dismal one. I spent most of it on my friends couch. I was unemployed and had just had my visa to live in hungary revoked, forcing me to leave the country and move to paris, where (I was told at the time) I should work while killing time over the course next year, waiting to be allowed to begin a doctorate in another country. Had all of this happened just a few months later, it would have been unnecessary, hungary would have been in the EU and I wouldn't have needed the visa anyway to stay on there.
But things happened the way they did and I ended up unemployed and in paris.
It was a bad summer, but it would have been a lot worse without the gloomily entertaining presence of Laurent.
Laurent actually was employed, he just barely ever bothered to show up at his workplace. He got away with this as apparently he was a genius in some aspect of computer engineering. Since periodically his company would fly him to 5 star hotels in odd places (gabon, chad) I guess he must indeed have been bright.
He was also depressive, yet amusing in an off beat way. He liked gory asian films where lots of people get killed. So the best parts of that summer were spent on the couch watching strange Japanese, Chinese and Korean murder films with Laurent. I eventually got a job and he followed some girl (kiki? Miki? Niki?) off to gabon, I haven't seen him since. But then this weekend I was doing some returns at the bookshop, when the barcodes on my clipboard sent me into the manga section, which I normally avoid due to the unpleasant body odour that tends to accompany the teenage boys to that part of the shop.
There, going through the mangas to find the right ISBNs, my eyes passed over a copy of Battle Royale, one of the first of the many gory asian flicks I watched with Laurent.
If you don't know it, battle royale is a gory Japanese modern-day lord of the flies. Japan has turned into a police state, known as the Republic of Greater East Asia. In this sick society, obsessed by reality TV, a show called The Programme has developed. Supposedly started as a military research project, The Program is a means of terrorising the population, of creating such paranoia as to make organised insurgency impossible. According to the rules, every year since 1947, fifty 3rd year junior high school (14-15 years old) classes are isolated, and the students required to fight to the death until one student remains. Their movements are restricted and monitored by metal collars around their necks which contain tracking and listening devices; if any student should attempt to escape The Program, or enter declared "danger zones", a bomb will be detonated in the collar, killing the wearer. If the students refuse to participate, they will all be killed simultaneously. As you might imagine, a brave protagonist steps forward to attempt to destroy the perverted and twisted system.
So, anyway, I bought the manga, took it home and started reading. The quality of the images astonishes me, and the story is so dark you cant help get pulled in. to my surprise (I am not normally a manga reader) I found myself this afternoon placing an order on amazon for the next ones in the series. I already know how it all ends, but I want to read/see it again for myself in print.

double life

It is more a triple life in reality, as I am supposed to be doing a phd. But that has been relegated to the side for the moment. Even I can only juggle so much.
So yesterday I left the office at the usual time, with the usual pleasantries of the "have a nice evening sort." But my evening directed me to my other job for the annual stock take.
I get called up for this every year. This is partly because I am one of the few who is willing. Most people complain endlessly that it is dull and inconvenient, but my view is pragmatic: free pizza, easy work and double pay. I don't see any reason to object! My entry from last year describes the routine: squads of around 40 indian guys come into the shop right after closing and start beeping the books. They spread throughout the place, and we follow with endless sheets of paper, checking up behind them. We work through the night, mainly underground (our lowest floor is Europe's largest underground trading area) wandering around the shelves like zombies, refuelling on bad pizza and nachos when necessary. This year, as the "experienced" member of staff I had to go through the safe and cash office as well, counting up every piece of paper that could resemble a voucher or certificate.
Every time they send me home in a taxi (which they have to do by contract after midnight) I wonder at how empty the streets are. The city whirls past and only the occasional drunk reveller is still on the street. and I know things will look very different a few hours later when I am heading back to the centre, to my other job, and it all begins again…..

out of office messages

1. I am currently out at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position. I may be a little moody so be prepared.



2. You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn't have received anything at all.



3. Sorry to have missed you, but I am at the doctor's having my brain removed so I can be promoted to our management team.



4. I will be unable to delete all the unread, worthless emails you send me until I return from vacation on 4/18. Please be patient, and your mail will be deleted in the order it was received.



5. Thank you for your email. Your credit card has been charged £115.99 for the first 10 words and £11.99 for each additional word in your message.



6. The e-mail server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this message. Please restart your computer and try sending again. (The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see how many in-duh-viduals did this over and over.)



7. Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system. You are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.



8. Hi, I'm thinking about what you've just sent me. Please wait by your PC for my response.



9. I've run away to join a different circus.

the gym

I have become a regular at the gym near, not out of a love for physical fitness, but rather out of boredom.
Going to the gym is one of the few socially acceptable reasons to spend lots of time out of the office. For some reason, if you say you are meeting a friend, or going shopping, this does not meet the criteria, and you can be accused of being lazy, or not pulling your weight. However, taking an hour and a half in the middle of the day to go work out is fine, in fact it is commended, it shows drive and energy, which is apparently mentally linked to ambition.
So, seeing this, I went off to the gym around the corner and asked what I have to do (and how much I have to pay) to become a member.
I was taken to a little room to have a "consultation" with a "personal fitness consultant," who turned out to be a nice south African guy about my age. I later realised that everyone who works in this particular gym is apparently from south Africa, oddly.
So the guy went through a list of pre-prescribed questions seeking to establish why I wanted to become a member: did I want to tone my body? Improve my sex life? Increase my strength? Endurance levels?
No, I replied. i am looking for an acceptable reason to escape the office
The guy looked at me like I was nuts. But I am sure I am not the only person in this position, I am probably just the first to admit to it. In the end, I took a sample 3 month membership to see if I like it.
I have been going at least 3 times a week since then. It is a bizarre experience. Given that the area I work in is overwhelmingly male, and that the few women in the area tend to be secretaries (and thus unlikely to be able to afford the ridiculous costs), I am often the only female in the place. Sometimes I get the whole changing room to myself, including the whirlpool and sauna area. On Fridays after using the equipment I go in their and just lay about, passing the time and splashing water on the wood.
The actually exercise area is a mirror of my office: filled with alfa males preening in front of the mirrors and each other. they totally ignore me, which is a relief. but i study them endlessly, it has become a sociological observation unit in my head. i feel like a fly on the wall observing a world i can barely comprehend.

the line of beauty

my sudden tour of the thatcher kingdom that is canary wharf, combined with the upcoming Booker of Booker award (celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Booker prize) led me to pick up a copy of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty.
I had been aware of the book for some time. it was a regular sellar at the book shop as well as a staff favourite, but it was only now i managed to pick up a copy and read it. on the one hand, i regret that i waited so long to enjoy this masterpiece, but on the other hand, maybe it is better. I can appreciate it all the more now within my current setting here in the City.
Many people have labelled the book "gay fiction" or a "gay romance" but i find these labels absurd. yes the protagonist is gay.....and? sure, there are plenty of gay sex scenes, but i fail to see how this makes the book worth button holing in such a fashion. if it needs classification, i would put it as a brilliant social satire, or even a historical memory of Thatcher's London, in the same way that Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanieties is a brilliant documentary of Reagan's United States.
It begins in the summer of 1983 "the last summer of its kind there was ever to be." Young and impressionable Nick (an ultimately middle class boy) moves to london and stays with his friend's parents. the father is a palpably ambitious tory MP, determined to impress the Prime Minister (or The Lady as she is generally refered to). Nick is given a front row seat to the happenings and pretensions of the time.
And what a ruthless decade the 80s was....and a self satisfied one too, for some. with a keen eye for social nuance, Hollinghurst recreates this universe with almost scary accuracy. it is all there: the bankers and their coke addiction, the self important Tory MPs who declare "the 80s are going on forever" as 3.5 british citizens are without jobs and mines are closing all over the north, the Diana hair cuts, AIDS, and Every Breath You Take.
Nick is and is not part of this world, and in such a way is the perfect observor, close enough to comment accurately but still reflective. A PhD student at UCL, he is obsessed by aesthetic beauty which he pursues relentlessly amist a world of ultimately philistine Tories who seem to see art exclusively as a symbol or social advancement. Intrigued by Hogarth's Line of Beauty, he attempts to create an artistic world together with his millionaire Lebanese lover. So, yes there is a gay love story, but it is the personalities of the characters that intrigue me. I was just old enough to remember these times, and i recognise too well some of the types: the vulgar businessman turned millionaire by creating an empire, but still remains the crude entrepreneur, the disatisfied who are always lurking beneath the shiny surface. it reminds me of the parties i attended at the time: the posh tory parents who drank too much and disappeared to the bath room to cut lines with their platenum credit cards, leaving us (the kids) to lounge bored around the pool. i remember all to clearly the time my classmate (we were about 11 or 12) took the keys to his dad's Mercedes.....and drove it into a lake....he swam out through the window. the parents grounded him for 2 weeks, and bought another Mercedes.
a vulgar and excessive time.

canary wharf

aside from some hedge funds in the west end, london has two main business centres: the city and canary wharf.
i sucessfully avoided these areas until this past month when i took a job in the city. there was actually no real reason why i avoided the city before, it is just that i never had any real reason to go there. now every day i arrived in a metro car that resembles a game of sardines, and i am normally the only woman except for the occassional secretary.
since there is a lot of business between the two, it seems i shall also frequently be expected to go to canary wharf.

According to wikipedia (ever reliable source that it is!) Canary Wharf is built on the site of the old West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs. From 1802 to 1980, the area was one of the busiest docks in the world, with at one point 50,000 employed. According to the guy in a siut i found myself sitting accross from yesterday, it used to be completely cut off from london. The man was telling me that he had been raised in the docklands, back when it had functioned as a seperate entity with its own police force and restricted enterance. apparently, Canary Wharf itself takes its name from the sea trade with the Canary Islands, whose name comes from the dogs which the Spaniards found there (think in latin here), producing the terms Dog Islands and the Isle of Dogs.
but then the world economy changed, and the docks were useless and obsolete by the 1980s. so, the area is no longer a dock, but an english equivelent of paris's la defence, a wierd business complex partly cut off from the rest of the city, and so different architecturally that is appears more of a seperate entity entirely.
the place is a scary testament to thatcher and the 80s. The Big Bang deregulation of financial services in London radically changed the way merchant banks operated. Instead of the small, corridor and office based buildings occupied in the traditional square mile, like the building i am presently working in, the demand shifted to large floor-plate, open plan space which could be used as a trading floor. actually, i find these huge open plan creations horrid, i always feel i am being watched. but, that was the trend of the time and canary wharf is its lasting legacy. everything here is big and over sized. but i will admit there are some spectacular flats in this area. They all seem massive and well built, both unusual characteristics in london! they have large open spaces and huge windows overlooking the whole city. but i guess the downside is you have to spend all your time in canary wharf....

the job

this afternoon i found myself in a suit, standing in front of a room of businessmen making a presentation in the middle of a massive development in Canary Warf.
i was the only woman in the room, just as i am the only woman (aside from HR) in my company.
i spent nearly an hour going over a database which provides market analysis. i rattled on about the usefulness of the project in due dilligence.
afterwards i wandered over to the ontario tower in canada square and inspected the cocktail bar, already filled with tipsy men in suits, even though it was only lunch time.
and at a certain point, i wondered how the hell i ended up here.

milton keynes, take 2

those of you who have been reading this blog for years might remember an entry from several years back. it was my first weekend in the UK, and my good friend harry (who is not a fan of this country and spends as little time in it as possible, although he was in fact born in london) decided to horrify me. i think he wanted to pursuade me that i had made a grave error in relocating here, or maybe he just wanted to open my eyes fully to the reality of modern england.
in any case, he took me to milton keynes.
specifically, we went to the milton keynes leisure centre, which was probably as far from the world i was just leaving in paris as possible within the European continent.
milton keynes is one of the most culturally lacking places i have ever been (ok, it is not as bad and the MAll of Americas, but up there).
the whole place was strategically planned in the late 60s, and really took off under the dark days of thatcher when such planned communities were considered the way forward. the organisers planned the major road layout according to street hierarchy principles, using a grid pattern of approximately 1 km interval, rather than on the more conventional radialpattern found in older settlements. Major roads within the town run between communities, rather than through them: the major roads are known locally as grid roads and the spaces between them are known as grid squares. so, the place looks like a board game, with zero organic growth architecturally.
i wouldnt want to live here, but maybe i have something wrong with me. unemployment is practically non-existant, houses are larger and cheaper than in london, the birth rate is one of the highest in the country, and families are supposedly happy and intact (if you believe the locals, that is). for my views on the "leisure centre" see the early entry from September 2005.
regardless of what the place is or isnt, my recent evening spent there was truely lovely.
i dont get to see harry that often, so i have to take advantage of the opportunities i get, even if they happen to involve milton keynes. harry and his god mother picked me up at the station and took my to the god mothers house. there, harry and i had a long catching up chat in the back garden over tea while vivian prepared a delicious home cooked english meal. very rarely do you read praise of english cuisine in these pages, but this i assure you was delicious. very rarely do i ever get to have a home made meal in an actual home, including good company, a big dessert and endless cups of tea. the experience was so unusual it seemed strangely exotic.....

the new strong russia?

I got this letter circulated to me by an old friend. he wrote it, it is about his family. now i work for the state media, and a brief inquiry into our computer system revealed nothing has, and most likely nothing will, be published on this....most likely because it is not in the local government's interest. so much for the state of law in putin, um, medvedev's russia.



ДОРОГИЕ ДРУЗЬЯ!
Я И МОЯ СЕМЬЯ СТАЛИ ЖЕРТВАМИ БАНДИСТКОГО ПРОИЗВОЛА, НАПРАВЛЕННОГО НА ЗАХВАТ БИЗНЕСА МОЕГО ОТЦА В Г. ЭНГЕЛЬСЕ, САРАТОВСКОЙ ОБЛАСТИ, ЗА КОТОРЫМ СТОЯТ ОТДЕЛЬНЫЕ СОТРУДНИКИ МЕСТНЫХ ПРАВООХРАНИТЕЛЬНЫХ ОРГАНОВ И АДМИНИСТРАЦИИ Г. ЭНГЕЛЬСА, САРАТОВСКОЙ ОБЛАСТИ. 17 МАЯ 2008 В ЕГО СЛУЖЕБНЫЙ АВТОМОБИЛЬ БЫЛ ПОДБРОШЕН ПИСТОЛЕТ.
20 МАЯ 2008 ГОДА ЗВОНИЛИ С УГРОЗАМИ МОЕЙ МАТЕРИ.
18 ИЮНЯ 2008 ЕМУ В ОФИС ПОДБРОСИЛИ НАРКОТИКИ.

ПРЕСТУПНИКИ МОГУТ ПОЙТИ НА ФИЗИЧЕСКОЕ УСТРАНЕНИЕ ОТЦА ИЛИ КОГО-ТО ИЗ ЧЛЕНОВ НАШЕЙ СЕМЬИ.
ЕСЛИ МОЖЕТЕ СООБЩИТЕ ЭТУ ИНФОРМАЦИЮ ТЕМ ВАШИМ ЗНАКОМЫМ (ВОЗМОЖНО ЖУРНАЛИСТАМ) , КОТОРЫЕ МОГЛИ БЫ СВЯЗАТЬСЯ СО МНОЙ И СООБЩИТЬ О ДАННОЙ ИСТОРИИ ШИРОКОЙ ПУБЛИКЕ.

СПАСИБО ЗА ПОДДЕРЖУ
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DEAR FRIENDS!

I AND MY FAMILY HAVE BEEN ATTACKED BY A GANG OF CRIMINALS FROM ENGELS, SARATOV REGION.

CRIMINALS ARE TRYING TO TAKE OVER MY FATHER’S (NIKOLAY MOTSNYI) BUSINESS WITH THE USE OF CORRUPTED LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS.

FIRST THEY PLANTED A GUN IN MY FATHER’S BUSINESS CAR ON 17 MAY 2008 AND HE WAS CHARGED WITH ILLEGAL POSSESSION OF FIREARMS.

CRIMINALS ORGANIZED A NEW ATTACK AND PLANTED DRUGS INTO THE OFFICE OF HIS COMPANY IN ENGELS, SARATOV REGION ON 18 JUNE (JUST 2 DAYS AFTER HE WAS CLEARED OFF THE PREVIOUS CHARGES).
MY MOTHER RECEIVED A PHONE CALL WITH A THREAT ON 20 MAY 2008.
THIS CRIMINAL ACTIVITY IS FULLY SUPPORTED BY SOME CORRUPTED MEMBERS OF LOCAL POLICE AND SOME OFFICIALS FROM ENGELS CITY ADMINISTRATION.
CRIMINALS ARE READY TO GO FURTHER AND MURDER MY FATHER OR ANYONE FROM OUR FAMILY.
IF YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO COULD CONTACT ME FOR MORE DETAILS AND TELL THIS STORY TO THE WIDER PUBLIC PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO HIM.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT

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