I’ve got female friends who I could’ve asked, but not all are single, so I by-passed them; and with the single girls that I could’ve asked, I think the day would’ve felt like a day long date and I don’t know if I want to keep my mental self in check for that long! Finally, my go to girl was unavailable and now it’s all too late!

Today was the last day to send in my/our menu selections and I’ve just done so…albeit a my and not an our menu selection…along with confirmation that I’m coming alone.

Single life suits me 99% of the time, especially when I haven’t wanted to commit to anything here in Belfast but JESUS – tonight, not having a date for a wedding feels like somewhere between not having milk for your cereal and a light for your smoke…plain depressing!

That’s only tonight though, right? Next week when I’m watching my mate getting hitched and dining and drinking and dancing with her friends and family, I can’t imagine I’ll be anything but all smiles

I won a baseball cap on ebay and wanting to ensure that I added to my 63 positive feedbacks that I’ve accrued over the past 10 years;  I made the payment for it via paypal on the same day. Three weeks later I was still awaiting contact or cap from the seller.

After the deadline I’d given for the seller to contact me came and went, I took the issue up with ebay who refunded the payment I’d made.

Now I’m left with the option of leaving the seller feedback…it’d have to be neutral or negative. But  today as I opened up ebay and deliberated over what to do, I had this thought; the dude might be dead.

You can’t leave a dead guy negative feedback. It’s not good karma. Maybe his perfectly positive ebay feedback profile was all he lived for. His dad, wanting to base his son’s obituary on his 100% positive feedback, checks his son’s profile one last time and there’s Sloan’s big, fat, red, negative icon and slanderous comment.

I can’t do it and in case the fucker’s still alive and strutting about wearing my damn hollister hat, I sure as hell ain’t leaving positive feedback. I’m destined to have one unresolved item on my ebay forever. I’d rather have my cap.

Mourne Mountains / Home

I made the call at 7.30am last Monday and for fifty minutes I juggled with tenses and sentence structure and then relief blew over me like an icy Siberian wind as my interviewer said he would like to offer me a place on the CELTA course in Beijing.

An email arrived in my inbox an hour later with my acceptance letter, pre-course task, recommended reading list and a map with directions to the school and nearby hostels marked on it.

By lunchtime I had handed my letter of notice of resignation to my boss and a week and a day on, I’ve paid my deposit to secure my place, have ordered my books and renewed my passport – opting for the ‘jumbo’ option as I pre-empt the amount of travelling I intend to do over the next few years; now what?

Well, now it’s sinking in. I’m leaving! I wasn’t ready to leave Asia when I did. I wasn’t ready to come home when I did. It’s said that as a man, every 8 seconds I think about sex; well in that case every 4-6seconds I’ve thought about leaving again since I got back. That’s not to say that I don’t love it here in our wee country:

I worked eighty-four hours last week, half of all the hours in that week, but still my compadres texted and called me to see if I wanted to go out to the cinema, for pints or to play football. That came on the back of a weekend were we had a fancy dress party and an engagement party. After that worked week we partied hard in Belfast for another friend’s birthday before I took off with a different group of mates on a one night trek and camp up in the Mourne Mountains. Now this week I’m only working my standard 35hrs squeezed into 3days and then I’m off for 5days - a couple of which will be spent partying and surfing up on the North Coast!

I’m spoilt here. I have great friends and family and live in a city that’s close to forests, mountains, beaches and stunning coastline and who’s development means that it’s getting better all the time. It’s easy to forget how lucky I am and how much I’ll miss it but like last time, it aint going anywhere and my people are still my people no matter where I am.

So after all the anticipation (14months of it), I’m a visa and a one way ticket away from finally realising  my dream and heading off on another adventure; one without a definite end point. A couple I met near the end of their round the world trip as I started mine said not to expect much change in yourself. You’ll maybe find qualities you already had are magnified while traveling; they singled out assertiveness then asserted that they doubt too many people ‘find themselves’ while on the road. I think it depends how you see that road and whether you think it started when you stepped out of your house with a pack on your back or whether you think you’ve always been on it.

I wouldn’t be so cute as to say I found myself while traveling but I was sure I was on the right track.

The Cove, Taiji, Japan

27th July 2010: Burma VJ (2008)

8th August 2010: The Cove (2009)

10th August 2010: Crude (2009)

I appear to have slipped into the habit of downloading and watching documentaries focusing on human and animal rights violations and those trying to cover them up - a world that I may have little or no access to should I end up on the Chinese mainland in the upcoming months.

I’m not entirely sure how free information of this type is there. I remember typing in Tiananmen Square protests to Google for the sake of it while searching for train information in Beijing – I got a few pages of tourist information about the Square and the surrounding tourist sites and even the weather but no mention of a massacre or even a vague ’a few people congregated for some reason or another’. I was hoping the train information I was after would tell me how to get to Hanoi from Beijing but all I got was useless information about Vietnam, it’s climate and geography, probably due to the ambiguity surrounding who won the last Sino-Vietnamese War in ’79.

This would be the thorn in my side of a life in China; censorship. The injustices reported in these three films have had tears well in my eyes. The footage of the Japanese journalist shot at point blank range on a street in Rangoon, closely followed by students linking arms while asking, ‘those not afraid to die come to the front’ as the Burmese army moved in. The images of the Japanese workers in Taiji slaughtering an entire pod of dolphins with harpoons with the blood rich waters splashing up about the boats as the last fits of life left the animals’ bodies, all set to a wall of sound that was distressed dolphin calls, that is until the last few isolated cries died out – just a few of the 23,000 dolphins slaughtered there each year. Tonight I witnessed 20 day old babies with severe skin diseases and 18 year old girls with cancer, mothers and fathers on death beds and cultures near extinction, all caused by contaminated water in the land and rivers beside their Amazonian villages; the product of 28years of continual pollution by oil companies in that area. The $27 billion legal case Crude says, is not likely to be resolved inside the next decade.

I’m not sure whats better – knowing but being able to do fuck all, or the bliss of ignorance but I’d rather have open eyes and clenched fists than be blind and indifferent.

Speak clearly for forty minutes. That’s all I gotta do. If I can manage that, then in 10days time, I should be looking at booking a one way plane ticket heading to the Far East in November. For most people that’d be a gift but for me I’m already sweating it!

I’ve read up on what my telephone interview with the language school in Beijing will roughly consist of. I’ve passed the task they set me and will study it more, along with suggestions I’ve read about, to ensure my chances of being accepted onto my chosen course are as good as possible.

The course itself seems to be as intensive as get out! (I’ll opt not to use slang during the interview). Its pass rate is very high but this is because they weed out the potential underachievers at this stage.

I’ve no doubt I could adapt to the rigours of its demands. I once heard someone explain their ability to do something because their zodiac sign was a water sign. They said that like water being poured into a container, they can be entered into a situation and adapt to it. I’m not a believer in astrology but as a Pisces I like to think that maybe they’ve got this one right.

It took no time at all for me to slow my speech and soften my accent when I travelled round the world. What’s more, it was necessary. Three weeks out of Belfast and a friend I made in Beijing could understand me perfectly…three weeks back in Belfast and that same friend laughed down the phone at me as she couldn’t understand me or what had happened to my speech; I was unleashing words like machine gun fire in a much broader accent than she knew I had.

There’s no one in the house right now. Since Tuesday, every time the opportunity has arisen, I’ve been practicing slowing my patter through talking to myself. To me, I sound retarded. To everyone else I’d probably sound coherent for a change. My own mother didn’t understand me during dinner last night! It took 3 repeats for her to get it!

So, while, I, have, the, chance, I, am, going, to, go, cook, some, poached, eggs, on, toast, and, speak, the, Queen’s, English, in, a, manner, that, might, lend, itself, to, me, getting, a, qualification, that, will, open, up, a, world, of, paid, travel, to, me.

At, this, speed, it’s, hard, to, convey, how, excited, I, am, about, it!

Four nights now rioting has continued in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast. It started after the peaceful protest of Nationalists against Orange Order Marches in that area that as a reasonable Ulsterman I can understand. I see the routes of some of the marches as unnecessary due to their inflammatory nature: I’m not alone. I’m also sure I’m not alone in respecting a determined and organised people, peacefully demonstrating their opposition to an activity which year in, year out, essentially offends them. What I can’t undertand is the mentality of people to bottle, brick and petrol bomb the country’s police service repeatedly, night after night. Pick a serving policeman or woman at random these days and it’s anyones guess what background they come from.

I’d applied twice before to join the police here; watching the footage over the past few days I’m glad that I didn’t get accepted. I want to be escaping the narrowmindedness of some in our community, not dealing with it on a daily basis. Ironically, those preferred to me in the selection process were from Catholic backgrounds and now in a Catholic area they are attacked. For all intensive purposes they are the same officers who sheltered Catholic families from the abuse and escalating violence towards them from Protestants, when trying to walk to Holy Cross Primary School in the early stages of last decade. Those previously protected children could well be the same that now launch the petrol bombs, bricks and fireworks at the PSNI. As our wee country tends to have violence that recurs time and again, it’s not unconceivable that the Holy Cross dispute could arise again. Would the kids be so quick to attack the police then? Would their parents still be so unconcerned as to let them?

The police ombudsman and peace process has the police service’s hands tied so tight that they have been nothing more than target practice for more than half a week now.  Some arrests came today. The figures of arrests are dwarfed by the numbers that have been on the streets rioting in Ardoyne and causing havoc elsewhere in the province. And should the arrested be convicted and sentences handed down; no doubt these sentences will be inferior of what the rioters actually deserve.

According to figures from the National Statistics Office; ‘the highest rate of male suicide in Northern Ireland was found in North Belfast’. I wouldn’t wish any family to be affected by suicide. That said, I’m glad it’s culling the numbers of potential wee fucks in this city.

Today Paul Merton was in southern China. In Guangzhou he embarked on the Guangzhou Hash; hashing takes place worldwide but this was the first time I’d seen or heard of it. The Guangzhou Hash is billed as ‘A Drinking Club with a Running Problem’. Participants jog a chosen route and upon finishing, drink as much beer as they can, men down whole beers out of their new and freshly-sweated-in trainers, others from what looked like urinal bowls used in hospitals. The women were then asked by the male host to get involved in what was described as ‘the age old game of camel toe’, at which point all the men chanted ‘camel toe’ and one by one the women would pull their shorts up until tight and revealing amidst a medley of frat-boy sounding cheers and whoops from the lads. Paul’s face said it all. I guess no matter where you go in the world you can’t avoid dickheads.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Twice in a week now I’ve been stopped and questioned by police; first time I was on foot, taking photos, minding my own and then tonight I was driving Belfast’s streets and chilling to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. I asked what was going on; as he passed back my (expired) license and shone a torch about my car, he said it was standard heightened security due to the increased terrorist threat. Both times they played the terrorism card. Who did they call with my details last week? Why didn’t he comment on my license this week?

In the darkness of night maybe my hair has passed for brown and now I’m free to type…or maybe they know that I’m one of them and maybe they’re keeping tabs on me, regardless, I now feel their breath on my neck…M.I.A, Born Free style raid expected imminently.

Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble makers and neutralise them.

Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!

Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!

How long? Not long, cause what you reap is what you sow!

Also, I got an email about one of my Belfast shots, requesting that I allow it to be submitted on a shortlist for shots that will be used on an online Belfast guide; doubt it’ll make the final cut but it’s nice to get asked so I’m moving my pics there to increase my chance of shit like that happening again!

In light of the recent disruprion caused by the eruption of Icelandic Volcano, Eyjafjallajökull and the frequency with which I’m being fed earthquake news, I decided to check out just how much tectonic activity has been kicking about up to now - the first third of 2010.  The quakes in China and Haiti alone left more than 252,500 dead and in Haiti and Chile a total of more than 4 million people were affected by their quakes!  Less disturbing, but again with a large figure; it is thought that around 600,000 people were affected by flights being grounded and European airspace closures due to ash clouds erupting from Eyjafjallajökull.

Below is a list of earthquakes this year that are on a par or stronger than that of the April 13, Yushu, China quake, I took the rest out and the list of volcanic activity is so long I got bored trying to copy it all to post it up, so it ain’t here.

Bottom line, Mother Nature is in a strop; maybe it’s PMT; maybe it’s menopause…either way it’s getting pretty messy.

Earthquakes of significance in 2010

•Magnitude 6.9 SOUTHERN QINGHAI, CHINA April 13, 2010
•Magnitude 6.8 SOLOMON ISLANDS April 11, 2010
•Magnitude 7.8 NORTHERN SUMATRA, INDONESIA April 06, 2010
•Magnitude 7.2 BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO April 04, 2010
•Magnitude 6.7 OFFSHORE BIO-BIO, CHILE March 16, 2010
•Magnitude 6.5 NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN March 14, 2010
•Magnitude 6.9 LIBERTADOR O HIGGINS, CHILE March 11, 2010
•Magnitude 6.8 SOUTHERN SUMATRA, INDONESIA March 05, 2010
•Magnitude 8.8 OFFSHORE MAULE, CHILE February 27, 2010
•Magnitude 7.0 RYUKYU ISLANDS, JAPAN February 26, 2010
•Magnitude 6.9 CHINA-RUSSIA-NORTH KOREA BORDER REGION February 18, 2010
•Magnitude 7.0 HAITI REGION January 12, 2010
•Magnitude 7.1 SOLOMON ISLANDS January 03, 2010