Sleepy in Seattle

Jet lag is a murderous thing, or perhaps it's just the sleep debt I incurred through being an idiot on Friday night. Either way, I can hardly keep my eyes open and it's only 8pm local time.

Unhappy travels

What is it they say about it being better to travel in hope than arrive in Seattle?

A day in Edinburgh

Edinburgh is very nice when it's sunny. Or so it seemed for the twenty minutes that it was sunny. We walked up to the castle, then walked down towards the railway station, and the first drops of rain began to fall. We carried on, all the way to the Scott Memorial, which looks like some spiteful anachronism in the middle of town. All around it are gleaming, shiny buildings, and then there's this evil, blackened talon stabbing up at the sky.

Faster?

I don't know how I managed to get through the journey back without sleeping, but I seemed to manage. I think I dozed for a few hours on the Seattle-Narita leg, but I was resolute in staying awake all the way back to Singapore. That was made easier by the entertainment system working (it had burped, stuttered and hiccuped all the way from Seattle to Narita), but the downside was that I watched The Muppets (slightly overlong), Bridesmaids (a bunch of horrible, horrible women being horrible to one another) and The Hangover 2 (a bunch of horrible, horrible men being horrible to themselves and everyone in Thailand). The only thing that the last film taught me is that you can be a 'bro', popped collar and all, and also have sex with men, as long as they're Thai men with breasts and miniskirts. Ain't nothing wrong with ladyboys in foreign countries, apparently. Perhaps that's some subversive message the filmmakers were trying to sneak into the Hangover sequel. No, probably not.

Early morning run

I was a little amazed to wake up at 6:30 this morning feeling fine and dandy. Either the melatonin worked last night, or I haven't actually adjusted my time zones at all. No matter: it was time for my run.

Leaving Bellevue

Exhausted, I went to sleep at 10:30 last night, which of course meant I woke up at 4:30 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. I've given myself jet lag.

Back in Hong Kong at last

The plane back to Hong Kong seemed filled with children, who were all noisy at embarkation but thankfully docile throughout the flight. Or perhaps my noise cancelling headphones are much better than I thought. Or everyone has been dosing their kids with strong medication.

Acclimatising

I watched Dinner for Schmucks on the plane from Toronto to Halifax. It's things like that which make you wish that the entertainment system had been broken for that flight too: it was an egregious, heart-sappingly awful lump of rubbish. (I read a multiple page review of Steve Carrell in the New Yorker that gushed about his prodigious talents a few months ago, that suggested Dinner for Schmucks would be the greatest comedy the world had ever seen. It is. If you laugh at a man mugging for an hour and a half. I mean, there's nothing wrong at laughing at people with mental deficiencies and social inadequacies - I enjoy sneering at those worse off than me as much as the next guy - but this was really, really unpalatable. Grindingly, unremittingly, tooth-rottingly bad stuff.)

From the sacred to the profane

Take Out Comedy Dim Sum this evening and I played an alcoholic Jesus. On the positive side, I got to dress up in a 200% polyester Jesus costume. On the negative I forgot one of my best lines - "I'm no saint". People laughed though - I was proud to read Stuart's script for him.


Then I came home to wait for a phone call, and the call didn't come, so I put on Brendon Burns swearing. It's filth, awesome, angry raging filth about drug-and-drink fuelled breakdowns.

Oh, the horrors

What a horrendous day. I burned my mouth eating a hot wrap too quickly, I spent three hours in a meeting that I didn't understand a word of, I interviewed somebody for a job and almost blew my stack when I asked what I thought was a simple mathematical problem and got told to look it up on wikipedia. And my suit is covered on one side with a strange yellow stain.

I think I'm losing my mind

I deleted four hundred emails today.  To see if I still feel.  I focussed on the plane.  The only thing that's real.

Lagged

So I've been up now since 8am on Sunday, UK time, and it's now 10pm Monday, HK time, which is 30 hours awake, punctuated by a few fitful hours dozing on the plane. I suppose the victims of psychological experiments have been awake for longer, but sometimes they got given amphetamines, the lucky blighters.

Back in London

So after a day's sleep, I was recovered from jet lag.  Well, a night's sleep.  Maybe if I can't adequately distinguish night from day, I'm not totally back in proper mental shape.

Travelling

Pretty much a wreck now. Up at 5am to get a taxi to the airport to check in at 6 to fly at 8 to arrive 12 hours later at 1pm. But I survived torture by time zone and now I'm back in the familial manse.