cold fingers of xmas

call this an interim (are any of my net writing other than..?) post til we get the dark aged ones who run the 'technology' in this dickens-era town to give us our broadband line back (these folks invented bureauocrasy 'member...)
sittin in leceister square; looking at a cool old-skool looking (but immaculately newly painted & lit) horsey-propelling carousel. one of those rotating, people-in-teacups type rides thunders around at 90dB a metre to my left while it's current riders scream & whoop in a vain attempt to overpower the steroid tempo techno blasting from yonder. this is xmas chee(z)r london style.
my fingers are getting cold. i'm @ a wifi hotspot paid 4 by some corporate entity with pretensions to adulation - they don't provide hot coffee tho, so i can only last so long...
love to all the loves & lovers out there til i get my greasy telecommunication wires on u during jesus' big day.
kisses,
leon

republic of leon

not to whinge or anything, but i'm currently unable to get back into work due to the gals refilling the atms, thus i'm at the net cafe. my team leader is a twenty year old eastenders dropout who has to speak to form thoughts and has two personality modes: panic & sleep (that's an assumption). now, sitting in full corpowear at the cafe, i've just been locked out of my barclays bank account because i can't remember one of the 4 password/pin/memorable word/electrowidget identikitty parts!?!? fukn brilliant. off to corpo-play free drinks/eats with the folks from the branch tonite. wonder if i can out-faux pas cockney steve's effort from last week? to quote charles brown, "*sigh*".
this shit wouldn't happen under a republic.

3for1 deal on Australian wine, and it's results

So here are some more fun photos of the weekend in Edinburgh when I went flat hunting and once again the girls extended their fabulous hospitality. And Ashley drank much too much wine. Again. And we discovered the joys of Magners Irish cider. Yum. Lizzie and Sarah, you are bad influences! Oh, and there's also a coupla pics of Leon attacking our backyard with a scythe because it's bbq weather and the freakn mower doesn't work. And how vein am I? I just love posting up photos of MYSELF!!! ha.

the giant dance

Hey you mob. Check it out. On my birthday, we hired a zippy little vehicle and headed out of London on the M5. Traffic was a bit of a nightmare at first and it was pissing down, but our trusty driver Rachel steered us safely into the carpark at Windsor palace, whilst I received a very merry birthday call from our Briswegian posse. After a very professional rendition of 'happy birthday' (you mob are good singers hey! wonderlungs!) it was kind of like speed dating, with the phone ricocheting from one freak to another and me trying to tell everyone what was going on in new and exciting ways each time...meanwhile Leon and Rach battled it out for control of navigation in the front, while Zoe remained patient...
Hey Sal, can you see what the sticker on this car says??? It says ASHMOLE and then 'Have you dropped one'! I was squinting into the diabolical English sun for this photo. I just hope you appreciate that.
After Windsor, it was onwards to Glastonbury, where we drank beers, finally found a camp, pitched the tent in darkness next to a big pile of cow shit, and then slept. Next morning, we drove to the BEACH to fulfil one of my birthday wishes, stopping at Dunster along the way. Nearly left Leon there, the name of the place just seemed to fit some how. (Oooh!) The beach itself was somewhat of an anti-climax, altho our full English breakfast was bonza.

Whipped back to Glastonbury again and climbed the TOR and shared a bottle of yummy plum wine! Oh, knights in shining armour and all that jazz. I think I saw Arthur and Guinevere kissing behind one of those hedgerows...oh no, it was just a blackfaced sheep and her wee lamb. Oh.

Then we went to STONEHENGE to fulfill yet another of my dreams. And it was CHOICE. Zoe rubbed her bum all over those stones. Oh yeah. Go Zo! We kissed them. We stroked them. We rolled around and drank silver birch wine (yuck!). It was rad. We also visited Silbury, and the stone circle at Avebury, which was ripper too.

Ended up our holiday in Edinburgh with our Scottish lassies. Sarah & Liz, Claire & Kirsteen, we LOVE YOU!

Have found a flat to share in Edinburgh over the summer. Roll on Edinburgh fest!

So are you all happy? I know its a lot to cram into one posting, but hey, we've got to give our public something! It was fabulous doing a giant dance round the countryside...

roving round the royal regions

Look, its Zoe the eskimo girl! Altho Inuit is the preferred nomenclature, dude!
it's only been 1 month since leon last wrote anything here, but it seems like much much longer. since our arrival in London, we have had many debauched nights in hammertown with the hammer crew (jen & kate we love yr work!) and also had a few shennanigans with cath west over in little venice. we have visited zoe & james in dublin and drank guinness, and we ate haggis and black pud with lizzie & claire in scotland. Note the piccie of the FULL SCOTTISH BREAKFAST. That little black disk is BLACK PUDDING. It's a remedy for Bunyip breath. Or is it a cause..?
This is the sort of thing i came to the uk to enjoy. Good times. My birthday adventures will be reported in the next post, and it was all made even better, if that is actually possible, by a happy birthday phone call from the crew in briswegia, as organised by me old mates sal and angie. nice work girls!!!

By the way, I think the Beltane Festival in Edinburgh really deserved a blog entry all of it's own, but well who has time for blogging in these hectic modern times? Only reason I'm managing to do this now is because I've chucked a sickie!!! Ooh look, naked people! The RED DEVILS making merry before the coming of the MAY QUEEN!

And then of course there was the morning after (he he he, that was a good one. I crashed at 7:45am and woke up to get the train at 8:10) and the long sleep on the trainride home. Bless Lizzie and Claire and Sarah for supplying us with out Scottish EMERGENCY TRAIN SURVIVAL KIT! Scottish hospitality is unsurpassed! Cheers girls and we'll be seeing you soon...

karaoke in hackney

hey you mob!
we had a karaoke night at the new house on friday to celebrate our arrival and make it crystal clear to the rest of the household that we are ROCK & RAWL! our housemates were like "ooh yeah, great, i'm not singing...no not me...oh yeah cool, you go girl..." and you know what? all those shy flowers turned into KARAOKE CARNIVORES and were fighting for the mike, as ya do.
karaoke was a sleepover extravaganza, with mates rearranging the furniture so they could gently drift back down to earth in each other's fleshy embrace. aaaw. it was beautiful. bodies everywhere. english breakfast. kickn the ball in the park next day, ash finally breached the barrier and learnt to HEAD BUTT. yeah. feeling more english everyday...but not. know what i mean?
photos soon...
miss yez, love yez,
we love hackney. we are diggn the borough!

by the way, here is a shot of the cool stage curtain when we went to see the mighty boosh the other month...with jen and stu, it was rad

brief enter lewd

hi kids,
mucho apologies for the long delay; it's sometimes easy to forget folks are hanging on yr every word (i assume). Much has transpired - not near a net cafe, but- and so for a brief update:
We are now back in Hackney, in our new real non-short-term, we don't gotta carry all our shit on the train again residence. Hackney has a reputation about as nice as the word sounds if u inject it with a cockney, londoner, scouse or afro-carribean...see? But, despite everyone from the guy at customs on the way in wrinkling their collective nose, me n ash like this end of town.
we spent the previous 10 days in putney (also a charming moniker), living with 'saffos' (the delightful south african folks) and sucking up a little britain proper. this end of town, just south of hammersmith, earls court and those other 'antipodean' suburbs (gee, don't all this terminology make u puke?), is decidedly WHITE. very few of what our potential indian landlord disparagingly referred to as 'coloured people'. hey, go figure. actually putney is really boring and overpriced, but at least the folks can sleep safe knowing the beggars are all whitey.
enough of boring tedious london moving.
been feeling a little more up since i got a job (thank u to all those i harassed 4 references; these brit's will believe anything!). be feeling even better once i get paid. £7 an hour is not exactly what richard branson gets, i'll wager, but it's a start.

i'm crediting the suit with my success - i even got an op shop tie! god, metrosexual yuppie heaven is just a classic car reissue away!. ash is just about to get a break due to kiddies holidays, so lucky i'm earning or we'd be well poor, instead of just common poor.

jen and kate have been ensuring our lowbrow australian cultural fixes are being taken care of (no, don't interpret that, we got fotos!).

i've drunk more foster's in the last month than in my entire life previous, i reckon. this is only cos it's the cheapest thing to buy most places, i swear.

rach and her, ah, 'friend' (i dunno, ask her), have been keeping our broader london cultural experience alive, despite the shoestring.

anyways, we'll get a proper good update and email and skype and shit going reel soon, i promise.
talk 2 y'all soon, kiddies. don't forget us...
oh, and happy birthday to micko, dan and salbo.
xxxx leon

jean-claude van damme nice place u got here

hey kiddies,
jus about 2 leave brussels 4 the big bad massive of london.
our short stay in brussels has reintroduced us 2 first world costs (actually the euro makes the aussie $ feel pretty scummy), and reminded us that sunny days (literally only, in shallah) are over.
our hostel, from within which i now pen these words (sorry, i'm reading "the fatal shore"), was a jump of 1500% on our dahab lodgings and for a moment panic set in. it's very nice tho...


however yesterday we discovered that you can pay for a good meal in brussels and actually get what u pay 4. gastronomes rock!

also, u can actually drink belgian beer in the multiplicity of quaint pubs aropund here 4 less than u would in that overpriced belgian joint in bris city. oooh, now i feel sleepy.

catch y'all on the other side of the channel.
love, leon n ash

this one goes out to the ones we love

Hey you mob. Even ıf your pıc doesnt appear here, you know who you are. Im sick with chic flu. Its the flu only girls get which is why Leon is so sickeningly healthy. Thıs flu is making me homesick. So here are some photos of all the folks we know and love so well. You are all so damn good looking! And so youve got something to read along with these pretty pictures I may as well update you. Today I tried for the last time to get a cheque in pounds sterling so I could pay for my registration as a teacher ın Scotland. No bank here, including HSBC, wants to take my money. So it will have to wait until we reach UK. After that, Leon & I went and sat in a park. I tried to sleep & he tried to read. I desperately needed somewhere to be ill & sleepy and didnt want to impose on our friends by sneezing, coughing, wheezing & being generally completely fucking miserable and bad company in their home. I also didnt want to offend our friends who have welcomed us to stay in what little space they have by choosing to get a room in a hostel instead. So we went to the park where I tried to chill out & relax. This plan backfired dramatically when I ended up balling my eyes out because I felt so sick and so homeless. Leon came to my rescue, got me a cup of tea and a simit (Turkish bread snacks - excellent!) and then he went & found Deniz at her offıce. She escorted us straıght back to her house, gave me some paracetamol (on top of all the Nurofen+ Ive been munching) and some pseudoefodrıne (whateva) and put me to bed. Thankyou very much Deniz! I hope one day I can look after her as well as she has looked after me, twice now, in health and ın sıckness. Leon is now in the kitchen cooking up a big feed of spag bol, all these guys think he is a legend (& as we all know, he is). Burak (Denizs boyfrıend) walked ın the door from work and offered to take me to hospıtal. Im about 100% sure he was takıng the pıss. Maybe he wıll catch my flu and then I can offer to take hım to hospıtal.