Love

I've been over and over, this thing called love and I've been thinking about what my friends would say if I were to give it up. Those words are lyrics from a song, a band called Slow Club. They also represent perfectly how I feel at the moment. You see, last month I had my heart crushed, and since then I've been doing a lot of thinking amd I have reached one inescapable conclusion. What if love doesn't exist? What if Disney and every fairy tale and every romcom all lied to us. How can we be sure we have ever experienced love? How can we be sure it exists. What if life is all about finding someone who isn't completly insufferable and intolerable who also doesn't find you completley insufferable and intollerable and spending your life with them because ever other option available to you is shitter than what you are faced with at that moment?
I used to believe in love, and destiny, and that out there is someone perfect for us, that we will meet and fall in love with. If I'm honest I thought I had that. But now because of my own stupidity I am here, alone, bitter, and changing my view on life. Love is a lie lonely people tell themselves to make themselves feel better. Love is a lie couples tell themselves to hide their problems and issues. Love is a lie. Love is dead.
That or maybe I'm just a broken man, a man who hates himself for fucking up the one good thing he had in his life.
Or maybe it's both. I'm not gonna decide though. I'm too close to and too bitter about the whole situation.

How I Met Your Mother - a review

*caution, spoilers below*



So, after 9 years How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) has come to an end. Unfortunately for the shows many fans that end came not with a bang, not with tear jerking romance, but a 9 year old rehash that has divided opinion, albeit with slightly more negative reviews than positive ones.

Let me start from the begining. Nine years ago we met Ted, a doe eyed romantic telling his children the long story of how he met their mother. In a twist that provides the basic premise for the rest of the shows run the woman he spots across a crowded bar is not their mother, it is in fact their aunt Robin.
Over the next 9 years we get to see the characters develop, Teds best friends, Lily and Marshall get engaged, break up, make up, get married (3 times in technicality) get their own apartment, have a child of their own (they end up with three) and grow into an old couple with their own lives (Marshall a judge and latterly a state senator, and Lily, arguably with the saddest story of only being a mother, her greatest fear).
We also see Robins career slowly take off, and her rocky relationships with first Ted, then Barney. However her story would seem to have a happy ending with the last season revolving around her wedding to none other then the womanising, lying, cheating, drinking, gambling Barney. This is a man whom quite possibly travels the furthest of any character during the show, with a series of long term relationships ending in his, the most unlikely wedding ever.
Finally Ted, he spends 9 years looking for his perfect, bass playing star wars, romantic, woman. This involves a lot of stories of drinking, some recrational drug use, being left at the altar, and a parade of different women, with various hints about the mother being dropped throughout his search.
For some perspective in those 9 years we saw the rise and fall of Myspace, the rise of Facebook, barely a year old when the first episode aired, Twitter, Smartphones, the first Black president of the US, the first peacetime coalition government in the UK, high profile deaths of Michael Jackson, Steve Jobs, Margeret Thatcher and Osama Bin Laden to name a few, two Olympics, a global recession and the rise of 'structured reality' television.
So a lot happened in those 9 years, and the world HIMYM died in was mych different to the world it was born into, so it should come as no suprise that the finalle, scripted for 8 years was no longer relevant.
To surmise the finalle, Robin and Barney get divorced, ruining a season and a half of build up, Ted meets the mother, after she meets all his friends first (starting with Barney, then Lily, Marshall next, Robin and then finally Ted) however his happyness is short lived as she does indeed die, however in difference to the character meant we don't know how she died, what from, or even see what in theory could have been one of the most emotional moments of television. Instead the whole purpose of this story was laid bare from its start, Ted wanted Robin.

That however doesn't make sense, when you consider that Ted had made clear that she wasn't the one for him when, instead of saving the day he passed the torch to Barney.

I think that the show suffered for its writers vision, because it had to be set in stone from an early point (child actors growing up, how incosiderate) so the end was always going to be a fixed point in time. But I also think the suffering might have been less if season 8 had been the last season. We wouldn't have had 6 months of the mythos of the mother, and the wedding, with the investing in characters emotionally that came with it. It's clear that the mother was always meant to be disposable, a plot point to get us to the end. However the skill of the writers resulted in a heavy emotional investment in the character, thanks to fairly sporadic appearences and one episode dedicated to the mother.
Had season 9 not happened then I think there wouldn't have been this backlash. We wouldn't have felt cheated by the wedding and divorce, a sense of loss and betrayal at the death, however it happened, and I think to an extent, anger at a year we lost to end up back in 2005. Would the characters have developed differently? Possibly. Would there have been a different reaction? Part of me thinks so.
I will say this though, the moment Barney meets his daughter for the first time was legend-wait-for-it because of its raw tender emotion, a side we all dared to hope for for Barney I think. However with the annoucement of a spin off (How I Met Your Father) and the assertion that it will not involve any of the current cast the sceptic in me wonders if that scene is merely a plot point, a bookend for this sister show?
All in all I was left underwhelmed, I had my own idea how the show would end, I had guessed what was coming, just not how. All in all I was left with a bit of a bad taste, much like expired dairy. (Legendary)

Cycling Underground (A guide to riding a bike in london)

There are three main levels of cycling in London, 1) Beginner (usually tourists but also new commuters) 2) Intermediate (usually commuters) and 3) Advanced (usually a middle aged man in lycra that thinks he is Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins, or if he prefers, Victoria Pendleton).

Bradley Wiggins

Chris Hoy

Victoria Pendleton

















All Athletes

All commuters (not cyclists)














It's not hard to be a cyclist in London, but it can be pricey. Lets look at what you need.

Start with balls of steel

(mild steel shouldn't make a difference)











Add some protection

That should work.

Now, what sort of bike do you want? Boris, folding, road, hybrid or mountain? Well, there are no mountains in London, hybrids are a jack of all trades but master of none, road bikes only generally work if you have somewhere safe to store them and you have the stamina to cycle everywhere, folding bikes can go on the tube, but can be pricey, and don't have enough gears. Boris bikes are grand until you realise your closest docking station is half a mile away, defeating the object of the exercise. So the choice is yours really.


You should consider making yourself as conspicuous as possible, flashing lights and hi-viz work well, as will wearing a suit of armour, I imagine.

So, you should now be sitting on your bike of choice, as obvious and as safely as possible, lets get onto the rules of riding a bike.

Red lights mean stop, so you use your brakes, almost everything else on London's roads is bigger than you, and no amount of lights, armour or several hundred pounds worth of bike will change that.

Sometimes it will feel like other drivers resent you, because they do, you weave in and out of traffic, beating the medieval layout of London, of course, due to air conditioning they will be about as smug as you feel beating all the traffic.

Earphones are a no-no, cars, lorries, buses and other bikes have noise making devices so you can hear them, earphones defeat that idea.

By all means fit a camera to your bike, you could solve a crime, capture vital evidence if a crime is commited against you, or just earn 250 quid from you've been framed.

Finally lock your bike to something sturdy, going through both wheels, and for the record, railings, buses, other bikes or cars are not sturdy. And if you have anything you can remove without tools on your bike, remove it, because if you don't need tools, neither do criminals.

Next time will be the story of a typical bike journey in London

(BMX bikes were excluded from the list due to the fact no adult should be seen on one because they look stupid, except for actual sporting events. Penny farthings were excluded for being far too silly and tandem bikes because unless you are asking a woman called Daisy to marry you on the cheap whats the point?)

Break time

There exisits a room the existence of which is only mentioned in hushed tones. A room full of fear and trepidation. The staff canteen.
In this room the inexplicible is mixed with the inedible. Staff go there in the hope that lunch is some wonderous delight. That hope buoyed by the smell that eminates from behind the doors. Your hopes raise, your guard drops, then you see the offerings underneath the heat lamps. The sense of loss is immense, even if what you lost never existed in the first place.
You try it anyway, in the hope that it tastes better than it looks. Yet again your hopes are dashed.
You deside to wash the taste away with a hot drink, so you tempt the vending machine, hoping the cups have been refilled the right way up.
Pass this first hurdle and you are faced with the hot drink version of russian roulete. Once you find a drink you try it out. If youre lucky it will be at a drinkable temprature. Otherwise its hotter than a certain apple pie.
Of course if this does happen to you there is always hope that the radio will bust into life and you have to rush off somewhere, and upon your return suddenly and mysteriously loosing your appitite. But for some reason that seems rarer than a decent meal.

Spare Time

Does anyone ever seem to have enough time? I know I don't. I get up at the start of the day with a million and one things to do, and go to bed at the end of the day with a million and two things to do.
I have no clue where time goes, I can be sitting reading or writing and an hour passes in the blink of an eye. Equally so with patients, recently I found myself talking to a kid waiting for someone to come and pick him up to take him home, it seemed like 10, maybe 15 minutes passed. Until that is I compared times on the PRF, 2 hours.
My time is going to get even more spread out soon, because, even though it might not be on here, I still write, and one of my pieces is soon to be published on the interweb, and if it is well recieved, I shall have more to write, which will take up more time.
That is not to mention maintaining the illusion of a social life, working, trying not to get burried under paperwork, and the teenage motto, I will clean my room next chance I get.
So if anyone happens to have a delorian with a flux capacitor it would greatly help me out if I could borrow it, thanks.

reflections

I look at my reflection, be it in a window, mirror or even a puddle and I see my past, my present and my future reflected back at me.
I stare for a thousand miles, it could be at nothing at all or the most important thing in the world.
I don't have all the answers, I can't tell you what the future holds, I'm as human as they come, flawed and unique. I'm also quite cynical but that's life for you.
However, I try my hardest to help, I try to make the future less scary, I try to be there for my friends, but sometimes I feel it isn't enough

new year, same story

Well, I haven't been posting much here recently, that's because I haven't done much work, January was a slow month.
The only work I did then was new years day, I covered a gay night, one of the biggest south of the river. And, well, let's put it this way, drugs are as common as alcohol at these nights. Security do a fine job and stop a lot getting through, but without doing strip searches on every guest then some is always gonna get it. It usually becomes a problem if it's been cut with something dodgy, or more commonly, the drugs are mixed and matched, or the idiot taking them takes too much. GHB is the most common, with MDMA, Ketamine, Methadone and weed all putting in appearances. 4 people went to resus that night.
It all really picked up again this weekend. Friday was a dead slow night, international students, so no big deal there, I got home early, after blagging my way into a shut tube station to top up my oyster card. Oh, and being completely oblivious to a drunk throwing up right in front of me on the bus home, but hey ho.
Saturday night, well, that was, shall we say, interesting. I shan't go into detail here as, well, it might make some readers blush. I shall leave it as it was a fetish night, and aside from the normal mix of drunks there was also an interesting injury, but not in the way you might expect.
Finally, we had Sunday night. It was an underage party, so 14-18 year old kids, that haven't discovered personal hygiene, or any sort of respect. I shall confess, I did get annoyed at them, to the point you could hear me shouting above the music at these kids to shift every time I needed to get somewhere, and I made them co-operate simply with a look.
That night had the mix of kids getting drunk before, and getting high during, this time on e's. That is the dumbest thing to do in a club, on the dance floor, as exemplified by one girl who ended up having a febrile convulsion because of it, then tried to tell us she had epilepsy, even though her temp was 38.9 or something similar, 5 minutes after she came into our very cool medical room, topless and in shorts. Yeah, photosensitive epilepsy my arse.
She had a lucky escape, however others might not. So be careful.