Driving through Keynsham.

 This Morning in Keynsham Highstreet

Friends... My premiership of Keynsham has been short but glorious. What started as a crazy dream just  a few short weeks ago has now become history. Right now I cower in the peoples palace, while those outside, whipped up by CIA propaganda and pro-capitalist lies, beat their fists on the gates of freedom.

I ask you now Keynsham, when all is said and done and I hang from the gallows like a common criminal, what victory will you have you won? Another second rate retail outlet, another Starbucks? Even now the top brass meet to discuss how to rebuild what we have torn down and planted over, but to them ‘rebuild’ is simply a euphemism for carve up and destroy. Will they focus on the people? No, will they fight the ignorance and apathy that characterised the time before my coming?  No. Will they line their pockets with dirty money and the sweat from your  backs? Yes, yes they will.

Watch them chew up your green belt and pleasant land and with frightening logic, build-up there, their shopping malls and stadia.

There will be those that ask why we did what we did. There will be those who wonder what it was all about. So let me tell you now.




People of Keysham, I came to shake you, to invigorate your spirit and make you beautiful and wonderful again. But you have defeated me, and your reward is this. You shall have the chance to piss your lives away in a succession of meaningless futureless jobs. You and you progeny shall be never more than content,  neither rich nor poor, cultured nor cool they shall populate the half-way point between Bristol and Bath, until such time as you are swallowed and forgotten by the sub-urban sprawl.

We had the chance for one fleeting moment to make the word revolution mean more than a circuit of the Hicksgate roundabout.

No doubt the powers that be will tear down the tollgates there if they have not done so already.

No doubt they will tear down all the others as well. No doubt they shall remove the mounted guns and the heads on spikes and reclaim the coins and Sat Nav’s we took and no doubt they shall call it a victory for convenience and freedom. But it shall not be one for independence.

I said to you that we would have to make sacrifices, and we have. Many of you have paid the ultimate price, many of you have lost loved ones. I can see why you might be angry.

The gods are meant to reward sacrifice, and you feel that they have turned against you because those rewards were not forthcoming. We did not get bigger and brighter televisions. We did not get warmer homes and softer beds. We actually lost things... We lost broadband, we lost free view, we lost non-seasonal vegetables, fast-food meals and exotic-meats. We lost petrol and telephones and electricity but stop and think for a moment what we gained.

Who can forget the crops that we harvested together and how good it felt to see them safely stored in the new barn. Who can forget the waves of tangible solidarity that swept through us as we manned the guns for the first wave of government troops that snaked it’s way like column of dragons along the A4. Who can forget the joy as they turned their tails and fled dragging dead and wounded as they went.

When this is reported, the story will be told of a mad man. A mad man and a community of deluded followers, led to their own destruction. They will call us a cancer, they will call us an abomination. But Keysham, beautiful Keynsham… I weep for you. For I believe that we really had something special, something undeniably pure. Our stand together, though violent, was as a rare flower bursting into life. A desert poppy blooming in the wilderness now drowned in rivers of blood.

Stories I have hidden in the data base at work.

I buried these stories in the Radio Station Database Program months ago. So far no one has found them so... while I suffer a little writers block I thought I would share them with you....




1. It was the summer of 1979,

Every kid on the block had a space hopper. One kid had one that was rocket powered. His dad was one of those insane mad inventor types.

To this day I have no idea how he didn't burn his feet off. The thing used to go like 20 feet in the air, but it left big holes all up and down the street.

Eventually the residents committee put a stop to it.
That was a week before the residents committee building mysteriously burnt to the ground.





2."Who shot me?"
He seemed more surprised than anything else.
Supply teachers never could keep us under control. They never expected heat.

"Seriously... which one of you little bastards is packing?"

We kept quiet.

You don't rat on a kid with a gun.





3. Once upon a time there was a giant bird, so fucking large that it could barely get it's fat ass off the ground.

Instead of flight the bird chose to roll around. Over the next million years or so, the bird developed a kind of internal axel. a core of bone around which the rest of the bird rotated.

Unfortunately it was much better at moving down hill than it was at moving up hill.

The entire species eventually ended up in the sea, and they were all eaten by sharks.

That's how we ended up with all the fat assed sharks.





4. "It's hopeless" he said.

And he was right. We looked around at each other. Our little blue Pixelated faces, all of us totally 2D.

"I'm not just saying this because I’m a lemming either, were just obsolete"





5. Underneath the building there was a kind of crawl space. I liked to stuff things down there. Sometimes for safe keeping, sometimes just to hide it from my sister.

I couldn't keep food there though,

Under the house was like rat city. Rat's move fast. They sound like they're tap dancing at incredible speed.

20 Questions: PART 1

If you were a type of fruit which would you be?

I would be a pear, cool pale greens almost like an apple but somehow softer on the inside, softer than perhaps my exterior looks from the outside. Stiff yet delicate. Also you can eat all of me except for the stalk at the top. I’m more efficient then an apple. I don’t really have a core.


I would be an orange. I can be sharp or sweet, but you never really know until you try me. In fact if I really had to pin it down I’d be a Satsuma or a Clementine. Oranges are too difficult to eat. They’re a pain in the arse. I don’t think I’m a pain in the arse.


I would be a banana. Not just because of the fact that it looks like an erect penis, but because it’s mostly seedless, but those tiny little black soft seeds can spout forth a whole new banana tree. What may have looked like a casual excuse for a knob joke can actually be a catalyst for real change… perhaps even tripping up those that underestimate it with it's own discarded skin.


I’d be a Dragon fruit exotic and surprising and utterly delicious.

If you could live in any period of time, which would you, choose?

I would live in the time of the Buddhist Masters in Japan. I would like to go back to a time when there were so few people around that a bunch of guys sitting around thinking about stuff could be the cutting edge of a whole new type of thought, I'd go and hang with the mystics, I’d go and do my best to shape an emerging religion without really trying.


I would go back to the second world war. I would have liked to have been a fighter pilot, an ace. The thrill of the chaise every day, It would be like living in a Lichtenstein painting. Wham! Take that Brad and Janet!


I be the first fish to come up on land. I be the one that started gulping air and eating all the insects that thought that they were safe. I show them. I show them all, cocky little bastards.


I’ll go back, gosh I don’t know. I’ll go back maybe to the 1970s, to when people really didn’t have to worry to much about the environment or cholesterol or anything, but I think that I’ll take a few things back with me… all our technology for example, I don't want to have to go back if I can't still email my friends.

If you could change your name what would you call yourself?

Viking, I would call myself Viking. Just one word, Viking. No one’s going to mess with someone called Viking


Um…. Virginia Ballentine. Something flowery and literary, one of those women that writes about 100 books that are all the same and then kills herself or something. Maybe I would be the type that just writes one book that everyone says is a amazing but is actually a massive pain in the arse to get through.


I’d change my name to Faustus and I’d be bloody good at everything, just to freak people out, make them think they’d met the actual Faustus. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.


I would be called Hewlett Packshard and I would play James Bondage in a pornographic version of the Spy loved me, called ‘The Spy Who Whipped Me With A Bicycle Chain.’ Or perhaps ‘Dr Can’t Say No’ or something.


If you had twenty minutes to live what would you do?

I would try and get myself arrested so that by the time I died I’d be in police custardy and some other bastard would have to carry the can for it.


If anything was an option I’d probably just get on the back of a jet-ski and shoot off into the sea, I’d tape down the throttle and just disappear in a straight line, jumping off the waves until I hit an oil tanker or something.


I suppose I would want to write a letter to my friends and family, try and think of a few lines that would sum up how I feel about them, let them know that I was both clever and witty at the end, and also thinking about them.


I think I’d most likely just piss myself.


If you went back in time and became your own grandfather what would you buy yourself for Christmas?

I’d get myself a skelectrics labyrinth. And I’d hide it in a room in the house that I had no idea existed and then I’d engineer it so that I’d find it one day, like in a dream and there it would be all set up and ready to go. I’d make it so shifting and complex that it was never the same track twice. It would never get boring.


I’d get myself laid I think. Early on, like age 15 or something and not just with one person but a bunch of people. Get all that crap out the way at the start. Then I’d get myself to buckle down and get some work done.


I’d get myself a kind of massive book token, but when I got it I wouldn’t actually spend it on books I’d make it into an origami boat and use it to go on imaginary journeys. Like in ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’ I’d try my best give myself some imagination.


I think I’d just give myself some good advice. ‘Don’t bone your grandma you little pervert.’ After that I think I’d give myself a little bit of a kicking for not taking my own advice, if you see what I mean.


If you could swap lives with JFK would you duck at the crucial time?

No I don’t think so, JFK is such a legend now, if we’d swapped lives I don’t feel that I'd have the right to deny him that. Without that bullet making contact he’d just be another Bill Clinton figure, a nice but largely irrelevant ladies man who did a half decent job of running the states for a few years.


I would duck, but really only because I’d be having too much fun not to. I mean Marylyn Monroe, Jackie Onassis… interns. All that and your finger on the button… I think that that’s what I’d do. Go home with Jackie and Marilyn and a couple of interns and then right when the party was reaching it’s climax I’d bash my fist down hard on the nuclear button, take out two thirds of the human race. Let the rest die in a nuclear winter.


I would not duck. But I’d put a little card in my top pocket at the start of the day saying "I knew this was going to happen" and “I knew it would be you Lee Harvey” That would be the best way to grow the brand. That way I’d be going out like Jesus instead of some ivy league schmuck in a suit.


Duck? I’d have sent a ringer in my place. and then I’d have risen again the next day, call it the greatest political comeback in the history of time. Colour me president for life after that kind of a stunt.



What do you think will kill you in the end?

Apathy, I think I’ll just get to the point where I can’t be bothered to breath any more. When the miracle of respiration looses its appeal I’ll probably just call it a day.


I’ve always hoped that it would be a lion or some other big cat. Perhaps if it was a super volcano, but then even that seems too general. I reckon it might be best to die saving a kid from an escaped Tiger, strangle the damn thing before I pass out and die from loss of blood. In the end they'd change the kids name to my name and he'd have to live the rest of his life fulfilling my dreams as some kind of twisted penance.


Statistically I’m most likely to die of heart disease or cancer of the colon. I think I’d prefer heart disease, at least it’s quick and it doesn’t involve doctors sticking stuff up my arse. It might even happen in my sleep and then I’d have no idea that I’d died.


I’m picturing a party being held in my honour, like maybe I won a Nobel prize and every ones calling for a speech and I’m heading up to the podium and then when I get up their these two guys turn up in balaclava’s and just gun me down. Women scream, people pass out in shock; the whole thing is like national news and they never find out who did it or why.


If you had to eat one thing for the rest of your life what would it be?


Are you kidding me, I think you can guess what I’d eat. I’d die pretty quick but at least I’d die happy


I’d want it to be something sustainable, something that would send a message that I wasn’t some kind of despotic psychopath. I guess bread, I’d have to go for bread, it’s a working man's food, people can respect someone that only eats bread.


I’d eat Salmon, lightly grilled with a little bit of Mayo on the side. And I’d eat a lot of it. I think those bears that only eat fish have it good. I guess I could just turn into one of those after a while and do without the Mayo. Maybe raise a couple of cubs. Teach them to bash a $300 fish straight out of the air.


I’d eat dolphin. Or whale or panda or something and when they ran out I’d go with them, that way I’d have a personal interest in keeping the species going, that might spur me into some kind of action. Turn me into the worlds most twisted eco warrior

If you were the world expert on one thing what would it be?

I’d like to be an expert on what people don't know, I mean I don’t want to know everything but I’d like to know what it is that people actually know and what they just pretend to know. Like in science, I’d like to be able to tell when they are just spouting hype. Right now nobody has clue about how the mechanics of gravity work, they have no idea how the first cells formed, I’d like to be the guy that called them up on that.


I’d like to be an expert In making people laugh, I’d like to be able to read peoples faces and see their sense of humour and have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all possible jokes. people would come up to me and be all "say something funny!” and I’d make them die laughing just by raising an eyebrow at the right time. I’d have this incredible depth of knowledge but only ever scrape the surface.


I’d be the worlds foremost expert on nutrition and I’d use it to live to 2000 and I’d finance my long life by writing totally false and self contradicting diet books. People would have to follow them because I’d lived so long, but truth is the last thing I want is other people living to 2000 there’s too many people as it is. Maybe I’d start a cult or something keep my friends and family alive, but I’d have to do all the cooking so no one else could figure out my secret.


I’d like to be an expert on insects and animals, to the point where I could talk to them and get them to do my bidding. I’d have them invade people’s houses and make them pay me to get them removed. I’d get rid of them just by shouting really loud and waving my arms about like a gibbon.

The Great Bristol Drag Race: PART 2

The clue is pretty easy, ‘Through this gate no gas will go, just ask old John Atyeo’ ‘Bristol Rovers used to play near a gas works, so City fans call them ‘Gas Heads’ or collectively ‘The Gas’. Incidentally Bristol Rovers fans call City fans ‘shit heads’ the logic, I think, being that city rhymes with shitty. (Though you’ll never hear it said on Match of the Day or even Geoff Twentyman Talks Back for that matter.) Sandman doesn’t even have to say the words, he just hands back our camel backs. Ramped up on Redbull, we’re off to Ashton Gate.

The lights are red so rather than risk death, we pour down into the underpass. Skidding my back wheel hard I barely make the 90-degree turn at the bottom of the slope and have to ring my bell furiously to avoid foot traffic. In the tunnel under the road we have to slow down and dodge around a guy on a dirty red blanket. He’s playing the penny whistle. He has a dog, one of those little black Staffordshire terriers. The Staffie is supposed to be a fighting dog, but I think they have kind, almost sad looking face. I always think of them as having a secretly gentle spirit, that they are a reluctant fighting dog perhaps. This particular Staffie has a slightly greying muzzle and a beatific, knowing smile.

Then we are into the BearPitt. The sunken centre of a large roundabout where four arterial roads meet. The pit is busy today. I guess that the shops in town have decided to stay open for the bank holiday. Down and outs gather around the side-walls in various packs, they seem like part of the furniture, camouflaged against the dirty grey concrete. One of them is lying on a raised flowerbed, apparently asleep. Her hand hangs down towards a Tesco bag full of bottles. I wonder why they come to places like this. Perhaps it’s because in places like this, places that no one really owns, they don’t get moved on. Maybe It is because this is the natural habitat for despair. It could also be they can make good money here, praying on the herds of dark blue business people that file past avoiding eye contact.

Gaps open up for us as we ride. Raised up on our bikes we weave in and out of the flock like sheepdogs. An old man, there is always one, starts to yell something about how we should get off our bikes and push, but then Sandman gives him a look and he shuts up. We move slowly, soaking up dirty looks. After a frustrating few minutes we are on the other side, going through another tunnel where another busker plays ‘The Rock Iron line’ on guitar.

He is at the point in the song where the train reaches the toll-booth and the man asks him what he has on board.

He sings ‘I’ve got all live stock, I got cow’s, I got goats, I got sheep, I got hens, I’ve got all live stock’.

And because I know the song I know he’s lying and that as soon as that train passes the toll he’ll reveal that he’s actually got a whole train full of pig iron, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to pay the toll.

People pass buy pretending they have no change in their pockets, some even pat them down for visual effect, give that little smile that says ‘Sorry mate’ all of them on their way to or back from the shops.

Another 90-degree turn onto the slope and we are onto a wider section of pavement. On our right, having taken the road around instead of going under, a group of riders wearing wigs and padded bras flies past us. Oddly enough, one of the new lead group is actually is a genuine woman, she is now a woman dressed as a woman. A woman squared. There is no time to ponder this.

We should not have gotten bogged down in the Pitt. It’s time to take back the lead. Sadly we are trapped by the railings and are forced to watch, helpless as they disappear into the distance.

Eventually we are able to peel off the pavement near the new Primark store, and push hard past the sailboat style 'meeting-place' they put up for the Millennium or something. Then we have to stop again as a bus comes out of the bus gate and cuts the road off completely, heading up past The Bay Horse pub and onto lower Maudlin Street. As soon as there is a gap behind it though we explode through it like blood from a wound, the red blur on our left is the old Bridewell Street Fire Station the white one on our right, is that weird office building with the strange digital tree in the foyer. I glimpse a man struck dumb, halfway through the revolving door. We are the second group of transvestite cyclists he’s seen in the last two minutes. There must me a glitch in the matrix.

The roads are wide here. They feel like computer game roads. On either side are large blocky buildings, there is even a concrete overpass for foot traffic. It is a once modern, retro 70’s, Meet George Jetson dream of what the future would look like, I'll bet they never saw us coming.

Keeping to the bus lane, and claiming the inside line, we glide around the long left-hander past an over grown traffic island come park. The lights for the zebra crossing leading to this patch of green are red, but luckily the man that was going to cross over here is in a similar state of confusion to the one outside the digital tree building. He just stands there and watches as we go buy. We are Aliens, a close encounter of the 4th kind.

Up ahead, held up at the lights is are our rivals dressed in all spandex and big hair wigs like an 80's metal band. We see feet unclipped and down on the floor. Strangely it is Mirtek that seems to feel it first and pushes his illegally geared bike further forward in the group, then we all get it, chances are that if we just keep going hard we can catch the lights just as they turn green and leave the Spandexers to make a standing start.

I grin as this idea spreads through the group. We are about to retake the lead with gut’s and glory. This one sweet move will strike a victorious power chord for truth and justice, and leave them flailing in our wake as it echos on and on around the world...

My joy suddenly turns to horror as I realise that the lights are not going to change in time. Milliseconds seconds pass and I find that we have accelerated through the point of no return; there is no longer room for us to stop. Without what you would call brakes we are about to be spat out into a mincing machine of free flowing traffic.

The way the road works down here, everyone except taxi’s and buses has to turn right, so baring them, if we can keep to the left and stay thin enough we might be ok. Then it's too late for calculations and we are doing it for real.

The double woman, screams ‘Holy Shit’ as we break the line. Car horns erupt, there is a taxi turning left but he slams on his brakes just in time, jerking forward against the seatbelt, other cars are forced to stop behind him. I am glad not to hear the tell tale sound of metal on metal, or flesh on concrete for that matter. I quickly check my six… by some force of a miracle, no one has been hurt and we are in the centre of town. The wide open centre with it’s impractical one way system that perplexes tourists for hours. After the storm it it feels serene and calm. but not for long as behind us the Spandexers are off the mark and hot on our heels, and then just as we think that they will catch us, they turn off up Baldwin street, while we carry straight on down the bus-only section of Broad Quay. ‘Why would they do that?’ Tom thinks he knows, 'The Spandexers are out of Towners, they may well be using a Sat Nav, it’s why they didn’t go under the Bear Pitt, but it’s also why they have no idea about the footbridge.'

They are off towards Bristol Bridge and then down past Temple Meads. They’ll be doing an extra half mile at least. My smile returns. It will be local knowledge that will allow us to win the day. Not guts after all.

We speed on unheeded beyond Broad Quay and down onto Prince street. Its an odd road this one it seems strangely like a New York back-alley. Everytime in come down here I half expect a yellow cab to stop over a steaming drain and yell at someone. Prince Street is sandwiched betweens Queens Square and The Harbour Side, so the buildings on both sides back onto it. Here you get to see the backside of a multi story car park, the back of a large waterfront Jurys hotel. It even has an underpass which looks like and entrance to a subway. There’s also a couple of office buildings with 'Central Perk' style bottom floor corner coffee shops, where the weekday trade fill up on lattes and Pannni’s. There’s a Stone warehouse that’s been converted into a 'Cheers' style pub where the earlier mentioned lunchtime crowd eats and drinks it’s dinner.

On the other side of Prince Street, there’s a pub called Ye Old Shakespeare, My brother used to work there, as it swings by on my right I remember a time when I popped in to see him at work and we staged a fight. I ‘started some shit’ and he threw me out. Apparently that little show of aggression earned him a lot of points with the office workers. They’re not used to seeing a man say no to a customer.

I’ve never really been a water-cooler type, I don’t know what it feels like to drop my BMW keys on a polished wooden table or order Tapas with a gold card. Sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out.

I’m so wrapped up in my memories that I almost miss the fact that a bunch of the guys from the Mud Dock cycle works have come out and come down the road to cheer us on. For a moment there is some confusion as a kid in combats on an orange BMX thinks they are cheering at him. He doesn’t look any less confused when we buzz him like a radio tower and leave him reeling like a drunk. He’d like to catch us up, I can tell, but there's simply no way he will on those tiny wheels. The Mud-Dockers laugh. The benches outside Princes Pantry are full of more of the Mud Dock crowd. I feel like I’m on a village stage of the tour de France. Tom who is leading the peloton raises his fist in a kind of cycle power salute, and with his arm as our vibrating standard, we push ahead towards the Bridge.

Just before Prince Street Bridge the tarmac road is replaced with cobblestones. Our racer thin tires are not built for this and I envy Mirtek whose suspension handles the bumps with ease. the bridge itself is A kind of Steampunk style swing-bridge a maritime leftover made from shaped metal girders. There is one Central Girder that goes down the middle of the road and neatly separates the two lanes. The side effect of this is that both lanes of traffic are remarkably thin and if you look for it you can see the mutli-coloured remains of the paint jobs of trucks that have failed to judge the gap.

On our right as we cross are the four big Canes of the old working dock. Now they are just sentinels for the Industrial Museum. Relics of the days when the shipping didn’t stop and Avonmouth but came all the way into the heart of the city. They look like dinosaur Skeletons and in a way I guess that that’s exactly what they are.
our own skeletons still being firmly rattled by the cobbles.

On the left is ramshackle collection of houseboats, moored all the way along the water’s edge. There seems to be no conformity as to style, I spy a narrow-boat, and a fishing trawler, even an old stream tug that looks like it belongs to pop eye. That must be a pretty cool. I'll bet this is a very different city for the people that live on the water.

Then we are past the river, and over the tram tracks and mercifully beyond the cobblestones that have rattled us like cutlery in stuck draw. All the way down Wapping road there are cheap built river-side apartments. Someone’s made a killing from developing this land and it looks like they made that killing as fast as they could. I think for a moment about what Bristol must have looked like before it got bombed to pieces. All I can think is that it looked like Tortuga from pirates of the Caribbean. Lot’s of wonky overhung Tudar pubs full of drunken pirates and bawdyhouse girls. My thoughts are not in any way accurate I am sure. At the end of Wapping road comes the Louisiana Pub. It’s Victorian I guess, with a kind southern style riverboat veranda. I’ve been there lots of times. It’s is a popular ‘new’ music venue, I must have seen a dozen friends bands here. Bassist’s, lead guitars, singers… even the odd would-be rap superstar. A man in his mid twenties caries a black guitar case towards the stage door entrance. His mate sits in the van, guarding the rest of the stuff. According to the poster The bands Tonight are The Setbacks, Panic Number and CCQ. The last band I saw here was The Badgers. Before that it was Seven Minute Abbs.

We avoid the classic mistake of going over the bridge to Commercial Road and instead straight-line the mini roundabout onto Cumberland. The writer part of me wishes Cumberland Road was Cult Street or Roots Avenue… something more like the opposite of Commercial Road so that I could seamlessly link it into the choice of directions a new band can take once they leave the Louisiana. but it isn't.

To be honest, in my experience, most of the bands I’ve seen here, even some of the good ones, tend to split up and go in all different directions, at best they seem to just drift off down Obscurity Lane.

We are not on Cumberland for long before we come to the afore mentioned footbridge that I hope will give us the edge over the Spandexers.

The Bridge is split into two lanes but to our horror, both are blocked by women with prams. We are forced to stop and wait for them to get over the bridge before we can carry on. This is far from ideal as half a mile does not take a lot of time to cover on bikes like these. to make things even worse the mother know each other and stop mid-bridge for a chat. No amount of bell ringing seems to get their attention and even sandman isn't going to yell obscenities at a mother and child. Eventually all the gossip has changed hands and slowly slowly we are able to get over the river.
Frustrated we decide not to get back on the road but to head straight up the pavement cycle-path that hugs the river almost all the way along Coronation road. Just as we are setting off, we hear jeering coming from behind us. It is of course the spandexers, they are on the road proper Skitching a tow from a scaffolding truck. We pass Dean Lane and Osbourn Road. They are forced to abandon the truck as it turns left onto Camden Road. We are forced to lose time around Beuley Road where a family out for a bank holiday walk see us a little late and have to move quick to clear a path. Once again it’s neck and neck.

We pass Greenway Bush lane and Greenbank road and then Coronation Road peels away from the river and things get a little more complicated. Traffic here is directed down Clift House road but we want to keep going down Coronation. In order to do this we have to cross the line of traffic and in doing so split the Spandexers into two groups as the back half has to slow down to avoid us, We then have to bunny up onto a traffic island before speeding the wrong way down a one way street. \

Luckily there isn't a game on today and I guess the Northstreet shops are shut because the road is empty and pretty soon we are legal again as we come onto Ashton road which borders Greville Smyth Park. More importantly Ashton road comes to an end at Ashton Gate Stadium. The gate through which no gas will go.
We come to a skidding halt at the now familiar set up of folding table and cycle couriers’ girlfriend that is the next check point. Seven seconds later the spandexers come streaming out of Greville Smyth park. Someone from the back end steps up to sandman, get’s right up in his face.

‘You think this is funny you prick!’

He’s pointing to blood on his elbow, I guess not all of them were able to come to a controlled stop when we cut the off on Coronation Road. It’s odd watching them square up. Two grown men in padded bras.

‘Alls fair in love and war yeah, so, keep your wig on yeah’

The more sensible members of the group separate them before things get the chance to really kick off. I hear the phrase ‘save it man, save it for the hill' yeah’ I feel like I have fallen into one of those testosterone fuelled adrenaline movies they made after the success of Point Break.

Do you feel alive!

Scuffles continue as they queue up behind us and one by one we are handed a flowery summer dress, a full pint of Scrumpy and some further instructions. ‘What’s the forfeit for not downing this?’ Says Tom, straight edge to the end. See that tent behind me? She says, ‘Your forfeit is in there.’

Decorating Bath

Documenting the rise of 3D Micro-Graffiti in North Somerset

In the Shadow of the Thunder God

This day trip has been in the diary for a while but to be honest I don’t really feel like going. Today I got a rejection letter from the writer’s room, not the total ‘fuck you and goodnight’ they sent me last time, which is something, but still a no. They actually looked at it this time though, someone read it and what I got back was about two pages of feedback. This time I got another step closer, the problem being that my best effort so far, still isn’t quite good enough. Last night I sat and watched the evening news. Earthquakes in Sumatra, Tsunami in Samoa… going unreported is the construction of another massive network of coal powered power stations in China and the fact that there are now two cars for every household in Mumbai, and that they sit in total gridlock for an average of three hours a day pumping out a cocktail of geotoxic gasses. Rather than put things in perspective, or even push me over the edge, this information forces a mathematical calculation in my head. Which is more likely? my making any kind of breakthrough in my life… or a total global catastrophe and the end of western civilisation. Then I realise that the real question is. Which of these things is going to happen first?

But that was last night, right now I am walking up Landsdown road with a plastic carrier bag filled with a couple of bottles of DR Pepper, some prawn cocktail shells, a Peperami and a large bag of Peanut MnM’s. Even as I was buying it I felt guilty for doing so, aware that the ratio of ecological damage to nutritional value was very, very low. But like a lot of people I am a creature of habit. I like to have snacks around me when I drive. Getting into my little grey Peugeot I place them all their correct locations: peanuts and soda to the right, Peperami and crisps to the left. God damn it; I’m going to end up as fat as Manatee.

Ali is back at the house printing off directions from the internet, she is pressing Ctrl p and hitting Enter as I start the engine, pop some gum in my mouth and make a three point turn in the street. As some kind of compromise between concerns and convenience, I put my foot on the clutch and let the car roll down Lansdowne Hill. I may have just used an unnecessary plastic bag but I’ll be damned if I am going to waste petrol driving the engine on a downhill slope.

Ali looks in the cupboard for a pair of fresh socks while the words ‘Anomalous Micro-Fissure’ crawl slowly out of the printer.

Pulling up on the other side of the road to my house, I beep the horn a couple of times. There is no response, so I call Ali on her mobile. She picks up, grabs the directions from the printer and tells me she’s on her way. My phone is also my Camera, organiser and mp3 player. There is a headphone jack in the top. While I’m waiting in the street I hook it up to start playing Tom Petty’s ‘Highway Companion’ album through the stereo, and pop it in that little hollow in front of the gear-stick next to the chewing gum. This album was written when cars symbolised the freedom and independence available in the western world. In a time when driving at 150 miles an hour across the deserts of Nevada in a bright-red convertible seemed like the peak of human evolution. The kind of thing dolphins would do, if they had the limbs for it.

Ali comes down and gets in the car. Despite having the printed-paper map we’re probably not going to use it. We just take the postcode and type that into the Sat-Nav and pull away from the kerb. My Sat-Nav can take anything from ten to twenty five minutes to find a satellite worth talking to so we’ll be most of the way to Bristol before it realises we are ignoring it. The stupid machine doesn’t know that we have to pick up Chris. It has no idea is that he is my oldest and best friend. If it did it would probably be jealous of the fact that we get to see each other. Apart from me and Ali, all it’s friends live in space. We are just outside of Keynsham when it starts telling us to ‘Do a U-turn when possible.’

I met Chris when my mum moved the family from the cold streets of St Pauls into welcoming arms of West Wales. Sometimes I feel like my turning up in Wales somehow disturbed the natural balance of things. A red ant dropped into a black nest, already beaten and bruised. Sometimes I get the niggling feeling that in moving I stole someone else’s life.

By a series of coincidences Chris now lives in the same area where I grew up, just a street away from my childhood home. He lives in the grey violent smog of the city and I am married to the comely little sister of his old best friend.

I stop the car in the middle of the road. Cars are parked on either side, leaving a single lane for traffic. I beep the horn. The cadres of local rude boys are sitting out side, they watch us with glass eyes. One of them is astride a quad bike. Apparently it is legal to ride a quad bike in the city. It has a number plate. Still it’s unnervingly out of place. It reminds me of Grand Theft Auto. Perhaps that’s why he bought it. If people are seeking to emulate that particular computer game then this whole society really is doomed.

Chris comes out, shouts something through the still open front door, lets it fall closed behind him and makes his way to the car.

He hops in the back. The sat-nav suggests for the fifteenth time that we do a u-turn. Sadly I continue to ignore it. I’m Pretty sure I know this particular area better than it does. Besides, it’s time will come. Out side of Bristol it is happy. The Sat Nav loves the simplicity of country roads. It creates a solid blue line through the green and we follow. For once it has a clear purpose in life, it knows where it’s going and how it’s going to get there, it doesn’t think for a minute that we could crash.

Ali risks car sickness to read a description of where we are going.

‘Birth of the Rookham Anomaly
The county of Somerset is mostly built on limestone, a rock made from the bodies of billions upon billions of dead sea creatures. Limestone is both porous and soluble in water. (it is dissolved limestone that means we have to put water softener into our washing machines and anti lime-scale bleach into our toilets.) It’s also why there are so many caves in the West Country. Sometimes, drawn by gravity these caves can go deep enough to touch the harder metamorphic rocks of the earth's crust. Down this deep the rock is hot. Where there are cracks in the metamorphic rock, water can trickle in and when it gets heated it expands and cause these cracks to get bigger. Over time the crust can develop networks of small cracks or ‘micro fissures’ that allow small amounts of the magma from the earth's mantel to be pushed up. The Rookham Anomaly is the high peak of one such system of micro-fissures, seams of lava come up through the same paths the water originally came down. It is this micro-fissure system that gives us the Hot Springs in Bath and the slightly cooler but still hot, hot wells of Hotwells and of course the Rookham Anomaly.’

I tell Chris that basically what we are going to see is the worlds smallest Volcano; he tells me to stop being over-dramatic. Then I tell him it’s Britain's only volcano and he tells me to shut up because it’s not even a volcano.

Although there are lots of signs to the nearby Wookie Hole, there are none to lead us to the Rookham Anomaly, in fact upon arriving at the farm in which it grew we are greeted with nothing more fancy than A carved wooden sign saying 'Derweze Farm', a rusty gate and cow shit encrusted concrete driveway. There is nothing that says ‘Home of the Micro Fissure ‘as seen on TV’ It’s so nondescript, and so like every other farm for 100 miles that I am tempted smack the Sat Nav about a bit and tell it stop dicking us around, but checking the map Ali is adamant that this farm is the right one. Chris jumps out, opens the gate. I drive along the path to the farmhouse. Beneath the tyres the cow crap makes a slick and sticky noise.

I think that Chris should be the one to knock on the door, Pointing out that 'people like Chris' because he’s tall and funny looking. Chris tells me in no uncertain terms that I am the one to do the talking. This trip was my idea. I am the Butch to his Sundance and therefore affable one, knocking on stranger’s doors and asking if we can see their volcano is my department. Ali nods in agreement. ‘Alright’ I say, ‘but if it end’s bloody don’t come running to me.’

‘You just keep thinking Butch… that’s what you’re good at.’

A woman comes to the door. ‘Hi’ My names Dann, ‘um my friends and I heard about the um… Micro-fissure and were wondering if we could take a look at it.”

She looks like the queen on her day off, green puffy body warmer over tweed. Hair tied back, Wellington boots. Luckily no shotgun.

“Are you scientists or something.”

“What no, we’re just curious… I write a blog.”

“Cuz we have them geology students on Wednesdays, but today’s Saturday”

She talks like the women that serve coffee from a hatch where I work, slow deliberate and slightly hostile to me for a reason I cannot pin down.

“right.. um we’d be happy to pay, I mean you can just point it out to us and we’ll find it ourselves.”

She looks at me through one eye.

“Two pound each and I’ll see if he has the time”

‘He’ turns out to be quite young for a farmer, His name is Rupert. Rupert is keen. ‘Come to see the bulge have you! Right this way.' The woman who took our six pounds is apparently his housekeeper. On the way he tells us the story of how he found it, he tells his story quickly, like he’s told it many times before.

'Actually my cat found it first, an big old black Tomcat called Gizmo, used to spend all his time sitting in this one particular spot. I didn’t think anything of it and then the other cat’s started to come and do the same thing. But cat’s will be cats after all and then one year it snowed I noticed that it was the one place it didn’t settle. I mean, these were just all these little things going on in one place, but eventually it was just obvious, the thing was getting bigger and bigger and you could go over and touch it and it was hot on your hand, and in the morning the due would evaporate off, all steam coming up and such, so you know, we thought it best to have someone come out and have a look at it. I think we called the Water-Bourd first, they had no idea what it was, put us on to English Heritage who told us to call the geology department of the university. They came by pretty sharpish mind. The Professor turning up in his tiny little car with his beard and everything and he seemed pretty worried. Apparently the last time one of these things popped up it was in Mexico, place called Paricutin, the damn thing grew nearly 400 meters inside a year, went AWOL and buried a whole town. But having looked at this one they think it’s pretty stable. They ran all kinds of tests. I mean they can’t be sure, but they say its better than fifty fifty it wont get much larger than a family caravan, that’s the worst it’s likely to do.’

We finally reach a section of the field that’s been cordoned off by a chain-link fence. It looks like one of those pens that they heard sheep into on one man and his dog. About thirty feet square. In the middle is what looks like a very large anthill, or a giant pitchers mound with three cats asleep around the edges.
The fence seems like overkill but according to Rupert any kind of geothermal activity has to be cordoned off in this way. Apparently the health and safety people came the day after the Professor and put this up without even asking him.

We circle the fence, staring at a patch of bare red earth, searching to see if there is some kind of emotional reaction buried deep inside that we will find if we just keep staring. To be honest, I feel no different having seen it that when I first read about it on Wikipedia.

Rupert sits cross legged in the grass and pulls up a bit of leaf and starts eat it.
‘lambs lettuce’ he says ‘They sell it in Waitrose now.’

‘I see the cat’s are still here?’

‘You try and keep them away’ says Rupert.

‘Which ones Gizmo?’ I say naively

‘Gizmo is Dead, along time ago’ says Rupert.

Chris wants’ to go inside the barbed wire. Ali doesn’t think it’s safe. I look at the innocuous mound; three cat’s happily napping away. I go back to Rupert.

‘Can we go inside the fence?’

He puts up a little resistance at first and then folds.

‘All right,’ he says, ‘but if it goes off on one then you’re on your own. If anyone asks you’ll have to say you were trespassing’

Chris approaches the fence there is no gate in the fence, stakes have simply been hammered in with the chain-link wrapped around them up to a hight of about four and half feet. Chris kind of stands there bemused for a moment, taking it in, deciding on the best plan of attack, then starts climbing.

The cats eye him nonchalantly as he climbs, looking at him without looking like they’re looking. Chris jumps into the paddock and two of the cat’s get up and move off, as if this was there plan all along and Chris’ approach had nothing to do with it.

He paces around, feeling the strange crunch of the earth. I watch him get down on all fours and feel the ground with his hands

‘You should come in here man,’ he says, ‘it’s weird.’ then he lies down as if hugging the bulge. 'It’s so warm' he says.

Rupert looks at me, almost with the same expression as the cats A part of me hesitates, a little bit of my primeval mind clocking the fact that this is unknown territory and the next thing I know, I too am climbing over the fence with Ali telling me to be careful.

Dropping inside I feel like a man at a zoo who suddenly finds himself inside one of the cages. I feel the heat rising off of the ground. Above me there are birds riding the thermal. What looks like a buzzard circling high above us. ‘Here be dragons’ my mind says.

The biggest volcano in the world is Yellowstone, if it erupted it could wipe out more species in a year than the industrial revolution has managed since it began. If Yellowstone went off, it would wipe the slate clean.

Ali decides that since both Chris and I are alive, then she too would like to step inside the fence. I catch her as she drops down. Instinctively she touches the ground. It’s like it’s magnetic, like sand in the tropics, so hot and dry. Eventually we all end up lying down, the three of us circled around the mound, feet facing outwards, heads towards the middle, holding hands. We feel the heat of earth coming up through our whole bodies. I close my eyes, feel the sun from above and the magma below. I find what I had been looking for from outside the cage. An emotional even spiritual reaction to this scientific truth. Its easy to think of the Planet as something already dead, as a ball of rock spinning around in emptiness, but right now it feels truly alive, and this heat is the heat of it’s massive body and it’s moving up into mine and for a moment I can mistake this warmth for love and I can feel like a child again, lying on the belly of my mother, before I knew that I was dyeing and the she was dyeing and that everything I was looking at would one day fade away into dust. I feel safe in way that I haven’t since I was 5 years old. I look over to Ali. I get the feeling that she’s feeling the same way. Ali starts giggling and pretty soon we are all laughing together.

As much as we might want them to, moments like this do not last forever. I roll into my back. Get up and dust off my clothes, I’m wearing a black long-sleave T but even on that, the deep red dust of the micro fissure is visible. It is so fine that rather than brushing off it seems to just penetrate the cloth deeper and stain it as if it were a liquid. My blue jeans are also covered and may never look the same again. I look down at Chris. He is wearing a white shirt. Unusually Ali is wearing a dress and the dust has managed to stain the skin on her legs a deep mocha red. The thought occurs to me that I had my face pressed to the floor. I must look like I have a horrific birthmark right now. Chris stands up. Chris’ ear is red with dust. ‘Dude, did you hear it grumbling….’

‘No but clearly you did’

I turn to Rupert.

‘Does it ever erupt?’ I ask.

‘Not what you’d call a proper eruption’ he says.

‘We get gas sometimes, that’s what did for Gizmo. There is one of these in Cartegina that erupted mud once, now the tourists pay to swim in it because they think it cures acne.’

‘This thing gives off poisonous gas?’

‘I did warn you. Once you pass the wire your on your own’

I Ali gets up off the ground, she has dust in her hair and a red patch on her forehead.

After we are out of the cage, I ask Rupert what it’s like to live in the shadow of something that could very well blow up one day and take his whole farm down with it.
He doesn’t seem to understand.

He tells me that ‘They keep a very close I on it.’ he points out a number of small boxes, that apparently contain seismographs. ‘I’m sure they’d tell us if was going to go off properly.’

I press him, ‘But this farm is your life’s work. How can he keep putting in the hours if there’s a the possibility that tomorrow the whole place could be buried under a mountain of lava.’

He laughs. And again he goes back to the science. ‘The likelihood is that its already done all it’s going to do. I mean I’m not allowed to dig a mine, but other than that I can pretty much farm around it as normal.’

I look into his eyes, searching out that glimmer of self-doubt, and I suppose that he sees more in me than I do in him.

‘This... thing isn’t different to anything else’ he say. ‘Plenty of things could come along and destroy me or my house or this farm or whatever. If I let a little thing like this stop me getting on with things, what kind of a farmer would I be?'

We get back into the car and drive home without the aid of the Sat Nav. We let it sleep, it’s had a busy day. I always find it easier to figure out the way home anyway. For one the signposts say things like Bristol and Bath rather than Nempnet Thrubwell and Barrington Gurney. And for another the roads get bigger and more rather than less familiar as I go. Towards the end even the side streets fill up with memories, the red lights remind me of conversations I’ve had in the past. Here we stopped five years ago and talked about the end of the world. BSE, The Ebola Virus, Nuclear War.

I drop off Chris in Montpelier, there is a light rain and the rude boys have gone inside although the quad bike is still there. I roll out through the Urban dystopia of Saint Paul's, the dealers hanging around outside the betting shop. These are the streets I grew up in, These are the pavements on which my child feet walked and then ran and fell flat on my face. There is where I twisted an ackles and took a heavy beating from the gang that gave chaise. Pretty soon were up on the portray heading out past the showcase cinema and the Hollywood Bowl. Here me and My dad would go to bond when, after five years of tension, my parent’s finally broke up. Me and my dad would come here and talk about aliens and UFOs, once we even chased one on the back of his motorbike, all the way to the airport. Later it turned out to be advertising blimp.

Settling into my car seat I let my subconscious take over and the car seems to drive itself to where it likes to park, and then my feet walk themselves down Landsdown Hill until I find myself back in the flat and Ali and I decide to take the evening off from all our various creative projects and ignore the news at ten and just sit down and watch a few old episodes of the IT Crowd. We get a takeaway from the Chinese place. Go to bed early and dream of tomorrow, safe in the knowledge that no one can be sure it will ever come.

This is what I never learned how to do.

I am the world's last barman poet... Rather than get up on the bar, I just tend to mumble my poetry to myself. A lot of it is very angry.


PS. According to a comment on youtube... "if you need two barmen and three minutes to make one drink, you're heading for insolvency."

Viva La Bottom Line: PART 6 (the end)

With a belly full of squid and olives I take my seat in the room. This is it. This is the last session, the last afternoon on the day before the first day of the rest of my life. The sun continues to beat down on the street outside. Car horns are sounding off the frustration of motorists trapped in traffic. The groups of team members are filtering back from their various lunch assignments. We sit and feed back on our lunchtime experiences. One by one we criticise our waiters, have a go at the chefs and state categorically that we wouldn’t eat there again. It’s a light-hearted discussion, a group hate session for the axis of crappy service; a chance to identify the enemy and thus identify ourselves as the Alies of fine dining. The laughter and story telling is cut short with a word, written in large blue letters on the flip chart.
Upselling.
We are asked to get our booklets out. By this point all the replacement booklets are already in a pile in the middle of the table. As if waiting to be burned. Reluctantly we each take one.
‘Our Sales Value – Never leave sales on the table
This is about seeking every opportunity to drive sales’
There it is, the words ‘sales’, used three times in quick succession. There is a photograph of a laughing team member, thrusting bread and olives in front of two women who already have ‘large’ glasses of wine.
The caption reads
‘Whoever sells the greatest amount of cocktails per shift gets a gift voucher- a great incentive.’
Apparently ‘Baz from Birmingham’ said this. Good for him. There is no cocktail in the picture, unless bread and olives now counts as a cocktail. A ‘wheaty greek, extra dry’
Further copy tells us that we must ‘Sell up at every opportunity.’
We must ‘Suggest ideas to increase sales - no idea is too outrageous’
Really? If I come up with idea that causes outrage but increase sales, no one will mind? What about if we, on our traditionally slow Sundays, stream hardcore pornography onto our TV screens and have a drinks promotions for convicted sex offenders, perhaps 50% off Bloody Marys? We could change all our bulbs out for red ones and call it ‘Satan’s Sundays’. A real money spinner from an otherwise untapped demographic!
I wisely keep my mouth shut about this genius piece of potential marketing gold, lest it actually happen one day. The truth is, they don’t really want our ideas, they just want to make sure we ‘Upsell’.
Despite the fact that it isn’t one, upselling has become one of the most used “words” in retail. Upselling is taking someone who is already buying something and persuading them to buy more. It’s what ‘Sell up at every opportunity means’
In the presentation we are told to sell in three different ways. Kinetic, descriptive and suggestive. Kinetic and Descriptive seem to be about describing the higher priced food with words like premium and juicy. We are to explain that certain foods a popular. We should mention where its come from and why this makes it special we should talk about each high priced dish in mouth-watering detail so that people who come in wanting a plate of chips stay on for a full on steak dinner.
Suggestive selling is where we get into TV hypnotism. The idea is that we can sell more if we ask the right questions in the right way. We are to ask ‘Is that a large?’ rather than ‘would you like large or small’ We are to say ‘is that a double?’ when selling shots. When asking ‘is that a double?’ we are to nod. Our tone of voice, our eyes and uniforms, even our smell should suggest that yes is the right answer. In this way the guest feels that they are being judged. Not having a double, would mean a personal failure on their part. ‘Is that a double?’ isn’t so much a question as a dare. ‘Is that a double… or are you some kind of cheap ass coward?’ Saying no is restricting and unpleasant, stressful even, like dieting, it’s something people can only do for short periods of time before they snap and plunge their face into a black forest gateau.
In a social situation to refuse to take more when it’s offered is almost rude and since these are our guests and all talk of money should be done only in code this situation has become artificially social.
‘Is that a double?’
‘yeah, why not, yeah I’ll have a double, why the hell not…’ as if maybe some subconscious part of their brain is actually searching for a good reason before it’s too late. But it is already to late.
Once we finish a drinks order, we are to immediately offer bread and olives. Saying yes for the guest, has hopefully by this point become habitual. As habitual as our offering it. We must offer Bread and Olives to every guest. We must nod and smile as we offer them. According to the company booklet, We must
‘Live Bread and Breath Olives’.
What’s odd about this part of our training is that the Company seems to assume that as a group we will be against upselling. They seem to assume we will view it as morally and or ethically repugnant. Our trainer skirts around the facts, sidestepping and hinting at what she wants us to do rather telling us directly. She attempts to sell “selling” to us. Her presentation is benefit led, we are told that upselling is merely ‘Offering the guest the opportunity to trade up to a more premium product.’ guests will be upset if not offered this premium experience so it’s really doing them a favour to say ‘is that a large?’ She gets us to agree with her as much as possible. The rhetorical questions, the endless rhetorical questions that she has demanded we answer out loud now suddenly make sense.
The more we are forced to agree with her, the more it becomes the habit to agree.
It is only after the main talk that she tags on a line about how much our tips will improve if we can get the guests to spend more. It isn’t in the booklet. She raises an eyebrow and does a face that expresses greed. It is almost as if this information is a secret, that doing this will be a personal elicit thrill.
The Frenchman throws out a question, ‘So we just want to manipulate people so we can to get them to spend as much as possible?’
‘No, no’ says our trainer, ‘We just want to offer them the best…’
One of my managers cannot hold his piece any longer, ‘I’m not going to apologise for selling to people, this is a sales position. We want them to buy as much as possible’
He seems baffled by the cloak and dagger approach to the obvious bottom line benefits to the floor team and puts forward the mathematical facts
‘You get 10%! Get them to buy bread and olives for three Pounds and that’s 30p straight to you, over ten tables your looking at three quid, tax free. I mean, if you can manipulate people into spending an extra five quid per table that’s another five quid in your pay packet. That’s free money! Free money, just for doing your job!’
The Trainer jumps in, she seems angry that he would pop the bubble. Again she says say that it is not manipulative. According to her own rules on body language she isn’t doing to well.
I get the feeling that perhaps she finds the idea of mind fucking the guests to be breaking her own code of ethics, possibly because she is more often the guest than the server.
I think the problem with upselling is the shadow it casts on the bulk of the rest of the training. It is the sharp tooth that turns a our welcoming smiles into sinister predatory grins.
In reality people don’t always tip 10% in the UK. Not everyone is naive and easily led. It is possible sometimes to ‘over sell’ a table and lose your tip entirely. We servers walk a fine line.
Our trainer moves on to the next exercise before the discussion can get any deeper into personal ethics. She gets out three pens a green a red and a yellow. She draws a happy green man. A sad red one and yellow one with a straight line for a mouth.
Beneath this triptych it she writes
How do you turn a red guest green?
Turning around again she asks us out loud ‘What is a green guest like?’ it’s getting late in the day and even she seems to be rushing this part of the training. We smell the end coming.
Someone says ‘happy?’ I think he looks seasick.
It turns out the green guest is ‘easily sold to.’ We go through the obvious questions; red guests do not want bread and olives, they want small glasses and single shots. Red Guests will complain if things go wrong. Amber guests are like zombies, after a busy day in the office their brains are missing. They could go either way.
We should turn a yellow or red guest green by asking about their day, finding out why they are upset or indifferent. We should engage them, become friends with them, then upsell.
I sit back and let it all wash over me like an alcoholic at a party. I am amused by, yet detached from the situation, safe in the knowledge that time will not stop and soon all of this will be over. It is a sweet beatific feeling. I am at peace. Then all of that … get’s blown clean out of the water by the horrific prospect of role play.
This time not in groups, we cannot hide behinds childish jokes. This time our most aggressive boss is to sit in the middle of the room and pretend to be a guest. There is fear in the room. I bet this looked great on paper. I bet, that by now, on paper, we would have been well up for this. We would reel off the answers like marines doing roll call. But it’s not like that in reality. Many of us are not on the bus any more, a lot of us simply got up late this morning and watched the bus pass by the bedroom window. We all know what is going to happen. One by one, around the room we will be asked to turn her from red to green. This is true horror.
I have gone beyond apathetic compliance. I am too tired and fucked off to even play the game. I am not even watching the bus go by I am under a duvet, I just want them to leave me alone. They point at me first. The group expects, my trainer expects.
‘Hello,’ I say, ‘Can I interest you in some bread and olives? I am more Red than my manger.
The Welsh trainer picks my performance apart. I failed to engage. For one horrible moment I get the feeling that she is going to ask me to do it again. That she want’s me to repeat it until I get it right. All symptoms of stockholms syndrome have since faded, she reminds me now of the general in Shindler’s list, shooting people at random from the balcony. Thankfully she moves on to someone else. One by one we speak in open questions and describe juicy steaks and ‘really crunchy fries.’ From tone of voice alone I deduce that we would almost rather the sweet release of the snipers bullet and the closure brought forth by the rising pink mist.
Then from out of nowhere. There is cake. A whole bag, there are three cakes in total. Three delicious cakes. My mouth begins to water. My boss finally starts to turn from red to green and my the trainer starts on her ‘Gerry’s final thought’ for the exercise.
‘Never leave sales on the table!’ she says. ‘Try to get them to join the online community…’
She is reading from the booklet. I’m not listening. I am looking at the cake. Delicious Cake.
Wait a minute the what?
‘Bring our Offer to life!
with Full Product knowledge
Know your menu…’
But they haven’t told us what’s on the menu, we havn’t even looked at the menu All we’ve done is go through these ridiculous booklets. We could have learned every dish inside out by now! I don’t know anything about the product! I well up with fury. The one thing I wanted to learn was cocktails. It’s half an hour before the end of the training and we haven’t even mentioned the cocktails. We’ve been here for two god-damn days. Give me the cake! Give me the fucking cake!
Finally she places the cake on the table. Three cakes. A small one with roses and icing and everything all over it, a middle sized one with no icing and a regular sized one with a regular amount of icing.
She points to the smallest of the cakes. The gaudy one, the gilded lily.
“This is what success looks like, this cake right here… is success”
No time to laugh. Just give me the cake.
Then it hits me. There is not enough of the small cake to go around. I’m pretty sure only the managers are going to be able to share it. This worries me. I don’t want to be shown success and then not be allowed to taste it. I do not want to settle for the canteen experience when I could be enjoying the grill… I want the fancy cake!
She gets out a knife and takes the middle cake, the ugliest of the three. She tells us that she is going to explain to us where the money goes. It’s a big knife.
These cakes are not a reward. They are pure metaphore. Virgin pie-charts in a sick corporate ritual.
She plunges the knife deep into the ugly cake. ‘This is for wages, This is for rent. This is for consumables. This is for wastage… and this… she points at the tiny remaining slice, (about four degrees of the ugly cake.) is our profit.
‘Any way we can make this piece bigger,’ She says, waving the knife in our faces, ‘we should’
She points the knife at me.
‘How can we save money?’
‘Not throwing bev naps away?’
‘Good, Now you’
She points the blade at the buxom barmaid…
‘t’t’turning off lights… n’n’not wasting electricity?’
‘Good. What else?’ She says.
‘Not making mistakes…’
I look at the tiny slice of profit. Four percent. Surely they would get a better return just putting their money in the bank. Why bother with the restaurant. Why waste the resources, our time, our energy? Why get so damn crazy about everything when they’re only making four percent.
She has stopped talking, the ritual is over. The cakes are all sliced into pieces and I make a grab for my slice of success. Eat as much as I can and make dash for the door.
Strangely we never talk about the last part booklet, and it is only later when I get home and start writing this that I read it. I like to think it’s been implied through out, the last part of the booklet is titled ‘Brand Obsession’.
It says
‘We are obsessed with food.
We are obsessed with our brand.’
Obsessed comes form an old word meaning to be besieged. To be obsessed with food is to be in the middle of a food fight.
To be obsessed with the brand it to be sat in a chair and talk at and talked at and talked at until you simply can’t take any more.

The Great Bristol Drag Race: PART 1

The race starts le man style with a whole load of very improbable looking athletes making a dash across the Downs towards their bikes. I’m going to be following Tom, he won the last one of these but as a favour to me he agrees to go at my pace today. Still I don’t want to be a total slow-coach so I’m running as fast as I can. I used to be a mountain bike journalist and I have ridden with some of the best professional cyclists in the word. The problem is that these are not professional cyclists. These guys are cycle couriers, and cycle couriers are nuts.

God know what you would do if you needed a package sent today. Couriers form four cities are here, Cardiff, London, Bristol and Birmingham. But I guess that since it’s a bank holiday Monday no one cares.

We pick up the bikes, but rather than steam off into the distance most people just stand their scratching their heads. To each bike is pinned a note. It’s a clue to the first checkpoint. It say’s

“You swore you’d never shop there then as soon as it opened you did, now hills of gold amass where once wild animals hid.”

‘What the hell?’

‘I thought they’d be a lot less cryptic than this.’

‘Well we’ll just have to wait till someone figures it out and follow them!’

Four or five bikes high-tail it off past the water tower, before swinging around to the left like a flock of birds. People murmur they think they may just be going off at random, like they have no idea where to go, but want to make us think that they do by going off early.

‘The Zoo?’

‘No.’

‘Could it be Cabot Circus?’

‘There were no wild animals at Cabot Circus… No Golden Hills either.’

Then I get it. It’s the Tesco they built on the old playing fields at Golden Hill. There were a whole bunch of protests at the time, but eventually they came to nothing. The council gave permission, and then stubbornly stood by it. As if looking down at the people and saying, ‘who the hell are you to stand in the way of progress.’ I whisper ‘Tesco’ to Tom and we are away, the second group out of the blocks.
The fact that we go the same route as the first group means we get a whole raft of hangers-on clinging to our coattails. As we speed towards the first junction the lights turn yellow, we sneak through just in time and then thirty five bikes run the red light behind us. A cacophony of car horns erupts as traffic makes a start and then suddenly has to stop as it’s penned in by a Hitchcockian mob of couriers on fixies. We are gone before the real chaos beings and drifting at forty-five degrees around the Westbury road roundabout. A couple of other bikes have bunny hopped up onto the kerb so they can straight line it across and they almost hit us as we enter Redland hill and pedal frantically just to keep up with our own wheels.

We race down towards the roundabout at the bottom forming up into an unofficial peloton. Taking the brunt of the wind is Sandman. Even among the cycle-courier community Sandman has a reputation for insanity. He got the nickname in his last Joe Job before he became a courier. He was working at a bar in Birmingham and decided that it might be funny if he put Rohypnol into every drink he sold. 78 people passed out. The local news called it a ‘Chemical Attack’. While no one could prove it was him that did it, he still lost his job; three of the people that passed out were only Seventeen and the police shut the whole place down.

Joe jobs and Cycle couriers don’t mix, perhaps because this is one of the few careers in the world where it actually does help to be crazy. Sandman’ s girlfriend calls him Sandy. Nobody has any idea what he was doing with that much Rohypnol.
We steam towards the roundabout. Briefly flirting with the idea of going down Durham Park Road but thinking better of it. Just past the eco-house, I see Sandman come very close to slamming into the 586 bus on its way to Hotwells. There are no breaks on a fixie, but there is no flywheel either, the single gear is fixed directly to the back wheel so when he stops his pedals the back wheel stops spinning and skids out.
Almost immediately he cuts inside and is back on the power more horns from the bus, the hiss of its hydraulic breaks… Then in the window I see and angry looking child covered in his own orange juice, an even angrier looking mother.

We come onto the roundabout like crows chasing off an eagle and pedal hard to keep the speed as we shoot up Redland road and then onto Coldharbour Road. From here it’s just a long straight dash all the way up Golden Hill.

Even on quiet day this ColdHarbour is too narrow for the traffic . A blue rover with a covered plastic roof rack has come to a standstill in the middle of the road… he shouts and waves his fist at us. Sandman shouts something back about saving the planet. I don’t think even his heart was in it.

I wonder if that same blue rover is stopped like this because of the group ahead of us. If perhaps that irate driver thought that they were just one small group of crazies and now this, Coldharbour Road isn’t used to this, it’s not prepared for people with strange haircuts and garish clothes, Coldharbour Road is stone cold tree lined suburbia, we are it’s worst nightmare. We are Mad Max, we are the end of the world.

The trees give way to a set of local shops as the road begins to slope down hill again. There are three people on the zebra crossing. Tom who now fronts the peleton shows no intention of stopping. . I am in the space just behind I ring the bell on my bike. Sandman laughs hard and all five of our bikes zip through a gap with barley inches to spare followed shortly by another fifteen or so.

Seconds later more traffic lights, this time green, thank god. For the first time we see the first breakaway pack ahead of us. See the three of them starting the climb that comes after this descent. Slowing down as Coldharbour becomes Kelloway avenue. There can be no doubt about it, they are going to the same place as us. Seeing the rival group spurs us on and we strain to catch up. There are no gears on a fixie so going up hill just means pedalling harder. People have them set up in different ways depending on what they think they can handle. The bike tom has leant me is set at quite a high ratio, which is great for going quickly down hill (due to the fixed back wheel we have to pedal even going downhill…) but not so good for climbing. I start to fall back from the rest of the group. I’m simply not used to this. My thighs pine for gearing like a dogs for their master. It seems crazy. Why should we suffer when we have the technology, why have we taken this step back in time? I watch Tom, Carl, Yorkie and Sandman get smaller and smaller. I get passed by three other bikes. The others are going to be angry with me, but not as angry as my thighs.

At crawl speed I cut off the road and onto the redbrick walkway that head to the front of tesco’s. There is blood on the floor and already there are tyre tracks going straight through it.

One of the first group went over a shopping trolley. Luckily it didn’t belong to anyone. It was just sitting in the middle of the walkway, he has gravel rash on his leg, he’s doesnt seem to care, he says he was ‘checking his six’ when he hit it and laughs.

The check point, has clearly come out of the back of someone’s car. It is a collapsible picnic table with a girl behind it. She must be 19 years old with long dark hair and a selection of facial piercings. Pretty typical for a Courier girlfriend, she probably sings in a punk band. She hands me a Blond wig and a can of beer.

I take the wig, but I’m allergic to beer so I refuse it. On top of that all I want right now is water. I can’t see Tom at all but Carl says he doesn’t drink so he has gone to do the forfeit, three circuits of the car park. I don’t feel like doing futile laps of the car park on already tired legs so I just take a black stamp on my hand in the shape of a small cat, it will add six minutes to my final time. Wearing the wig is non negotiable.

I have to loosen my helmet in order to get the wig underneath it. When I was working on What Mountainbike I wrote about a study that showed that on the road you are actually safer in wig than a bike helmet. Apparently people think blonds are prone to swerve around at random. If you have long blond hair they are much less likely to overtake and when they do will give you an average of almost 16 inches more room. I know of some drivers that would never overtake an attractive woman on a bicycle, simply because they wouldn’t want to spoil the view.

This kind of Driver psychology won’t save us today. A blond wig will not protect you head from a collision with a shopping trolley. Sandman Downs his Beer. Tom get’s back.

‘Why is everyone still here?’

‘5102’

‘What?’

‘That’s the clue, just four numbers 5,1,0,2, we think it might be a pin number or locker combination or something.’

‘I know where that is.’

It’s a miracle, but I do, my friend Andy did a radio show about those four numbers for BBC Bristol investigates. They are the longitude and latitude of Bristol, they are also the numbers written on the building that crosses stokes croft, just before the Bear Pit roundabout.

Just as the last group of riders are arriving at the check point we pull out of Golden Hill with our locks flowing behind us in the wind.

For 100 yards of so we go back the back the way we came, and then swoop off like top gun jets down Longmead Avenue. We ride top speed with the cold air in our lungs, the last day of summer, the first of autumn… Damn it feels good to be young and free today. On our right we pass the giant grey wall of Horfield Prison.

Cycle couriers don’t tend to ask what they are carrying. Often it’s documents; sometimes it’s DVD’s or Dat tapes. Once in a while someone will pay you over the odds to carry a mysterious brown parcel or two. The police can usually get a car to stop, they’d have a hard time getting one of these guy’s to pull over.

The down hill blur ends with five back wheel skids and a moment of panic I am sure I will not be able to stop on time and will just burst out on to Gloucester Road and die, but just in time I am able to skid the back out and do what I think is a quite impressive BMX style skid . Then Tom does one next to me and as he rotates, clips my front wheel with his back one and leaves me sprawled on the floor. Yorkie, whose nickname stems from the fact that he once lived in York, giggles. ‘Classic Takedown’ I get the feeling Tom might have done this on purpose.

The turn onto Gloucester Road is the last turn off we have to make before the checkpoint, from here is its three miles of gentle downhill slope. I feel confident. I have raced this route before, hundreds of times, for years I was commuting up and down the Gloucester Road at least five times a week, when you do a route that often you get to know the other riders. I remember Cannondale Man. Trek boy and the elusive yet beautiful Blue Racer Girl. I remember their faces, their thighs, their strengths and weaknesses. I remember every bump and every turn of this road, almost as if it runs down the centre of my brain.

This is probably why I’m not paying enough attention when an ordinary cyclist, in a grey and red shell-suit jacket, a man who is not involved in a life and death race against the clock pulls out of Wesley Road without looking, and it’s all I can do to stay on the bike as I am forced to cut inside him, Carl follows me as Tom, Yorkie and Sandman, zip past on his right. How does he react to this, almost as soon as we pass, he is up out of his saddle and peddling hard to catch up. The last thing he wants is to have to explain to his friends that he just got overtaken by transvestites on fixies.

So now we are six, like Charlies Angels with Charlie five feet behind. We zip past Oddbins, Bishopston Hardware, Bristol North Swimming baths, and Somerfield. There is a brief incident with a scaffolding truck, but we come out unscathed. Then we are past Re-Psycho and the Hobgoblin Pub, where I am briefly distracted by an attractive redhead and nearly pay for it with my life and the back of large blue Taxi. Luckily by this point I am getting the hang of pedal breaking, but the course correction costs me some speed. Charlie yells, ‘come on!’ like Leyton Hewitt, as he overtakes zipping past my right handlebar.

The prom wine bar and Mr Pringles arcade/pool-hall disappear in our wake. All too soon we are at the junction where Gloucester road meets, Zetland road and the light is red. Apparently winning is more important that living to tell the tale. Oddly enough, Charlie, who isn’t even officially involved, doesn’t so much as flinch at the lights, he just tilts his GT and hugs the curb next to the Prince of Wales and hopes beyond hope that no one is going to turn into Cromwell street and cut off his route. He survives so I follow him through and as one long worm of riders we progress up the empty bus lane and then out under the arches of the railway bridge, and carry as much speed through the next junction as we can into the only section of uphill between us and the check point. I ride the thick white line that separates the bus lane from the road in the mistaken belief that I will somehow gain more traction on the smooth rubbery paint. I stay tight behind Charlie, slip streaming him all the way up. I know this road. Just outside Colston Girls School I make my move, the maximum chance of a nubile audience making his humiliation complete. Feeling extremely self-satisfied I rejoin the back of our peleton and act as if nothing has happened. We start to leave Charlie behind. Thankfully the lights near the old White Tree Garage are green and we are able to scoot though safely, onwards up what is now Cheltenham Road, past Fred Baker Cycles towards the Pipe and Slippers. The outside punters look puzzled. We are a flash of the surreal in their drunken afternoon, and then we are gone… Clear through another green light and into the Peoples Republic of Stokes Croft. Finally a place where there’s nothing unusual about a group of freaks on specialist bicycles.
Stokes croft is 200 yards of bad area in an otherwise nice street. Ketemin heads and borderline homeless mix with middle class radicals and lipstick crusties till it’s hard to tell the two apart. Now though there’s a group of people who want to use art to do the place up. A graffiti makeover. Perhaps inspired by the famous Banksey mural that lives here, with it’s Mild Mild West Slogan that berates the West for being politically inert. That yellow teddy is now speeding towards me on my left hand side, it’s petrol bomb held high, in echo of the riots that ravaged this street twice in the 1980s. Riots I watched from my bedroom window. The people’s republic are the people who turfed over Turbo Island. They paint murals on burnt out buildings and strive to build a community from the ashes of one that went up in smoke.

We are past, lickin’ chicken’, the city road junction, and the spiralling acid trip paintwork Clockwork and the Blue Mountain club. Then suddenly, just outside the Halfmoon Pub we cut onto the curb before we come to skidding halt under the 5102 building. Followed very shortly by Charlie, who turns out to be called Mirek.
‘You guy’s are fricken crazy man’ say’s Mirek ‘I love it.’ Mirek is Polish.

The Mariana Trench on Facebook

Viva La Bottom Line: PART 5

That night I dreamed of disabled giraffes throwing fish at women with men’s heads. I dreamed of a server in ripped jeans and an old led zepplin T Shirt arriving at working with a fag butt in his mouth a full tramps beard and birds-nest hair. I saw myself throwing up all over his trainers and then making a run for the kitchen. Then I was running through a tunnel and every ten feet I crossed a line had to change into a new uniform, new shirt, new shoes, a new smiling mouth to replace my own. over the loudspeaker came our soft welsh trainer lady whispering, ‘less body… more soul,’ over and over again until even the individual words ceased making sense and it began to sound like a Buddhist mantra. Slowley everyone began chanting together, The giraffes, the fish, the tardy server, my managers and the rest of the bar maids, the stiletto Frenchman, even Craig David. And in the way that these things happen in dreams I found that they were chanting something else. They were chanting ‘come and join us, come and join us’. They were chanting ‘Cross the Yellow Line! Then they raised high their steak knives and moved in for the kill.

I wake up with fifteen minutes to get back to the training room, pull on some jeans and a top and run for the door, There is no way I am going to miss the free coffee that I know I am going to need. Half way out the house I stop turn and run back in. I grab some soy milk, enough for all the lactose intolerant team-members. I am sure I was going to be late but when I arrive I am actually the first one there. Cradled in my hands is warm coffee, sweet dark ballast for the coming storm. With no breakfast inside me the jitters begin to set in. Figuring it's a good idea to also drink some orange juice with my coffee I go back to the drink station. As I approach
the Frenchman pours himself an entire glass of soy milk. ‘That’s my soy milk’ I say just as he takes a large mouthful. He spits it back into the glass. ‘Oh my god… Soy milk… disgusting…. I had, I had no idea.’ He doesn’t apologize for wasting an entire glass. He goes down in my estimations.

We go back to the table and sit down. I am next to the Frenchman on one side and Craig David on the other. Looking up at the trainer preparing for today’s session I feel a sudden wave of Panicked Claustrophobia. Perhaps it's just adrenalin from the milk incident riding the back of the caffeine and sugar, but it takes all that I have to resist the urge to just get up and just run for the door. Instead I clench my fists and close my eyes. Tough it out. The moment passes, turning my head to the right.
“I don’t know if I can take another day of this, man. I really don't”
“I know what you mean.” Says Craig David.

Trainer lady asks us if we still have the booklets she had handed out yesterday.

Last night in order to take my mind off things I did a bit of DIY. I was making a kind of climbers grip trainer that involved drilling a hole through a broomstick. I used my Company booklet as a mat to prevent the drill from damaging my coffee table. my booklet is still there, it’s cover wilfully scratched and cut by the drill. No one had brought their booklets back. She reminds us of how important they are to the whole team.

She has spare booklets for everyone.

We flip past, Less Body More Soul and into the section marked 'Our Guest Value- whatever it takes.'

'What ever it takes.'

Around 7000% less cryptic than ‘less body more soul. 'What ever it takes' is the slogan that denotes what we will do to make sure that the guest has a good time. Trainer lady has drawn a set of three concentric circles on the flip-chart. The outer circle being ‘the customer experience’, the middle circle is labeled ‘the service’ and the inner core ‘the central infrastructure.’ I am having a hard time concentrating today. So it's not really registering what these circles are meant to represent. I'm still thinking about 'Whatever it takes'. It's already a lie, I know there are lots of things we will not do in order to make a customer happy.

To go with the circles there is the usual burst of ridiculously obvious questions. Which part of this does the customer experience? What part of this is to do with Service? What is service? what is the inner core of our business? We try and give her the answers she want's to hear.

The questions finally stop and she places her hands on the desk and faces us. There is a pause. clearly she want's to make a point. The way her shirt has folded has caused a gap to appear between two buttons. It has created a little window in the cloth through which I can see part of her bra. I’m not proud of myself for looking. but in my defense, judging from the hushed Polish whispers, I wasn’t the only one.

‘How much does a complaint cost us?’ she says with a force that snaps us out of our lechery. No one is sure if they are meant to put their hand up and answer or not. Apparently not.

She begins to draw a pyramid next to the concentric diagram. At the top she puts one person with a sad face. Each person with a bad experience will apparently tell ten people and each one of them will tell six people and each one of them will tell an additional five people. She works this out as being 301 people that may never come to The Company again. At an average of £35 a visit, a single complaint could cost the company £10335, the difference between a good month and a bad one. The difference between the Company staying afloat and going under.

My main thought is that this information is at least five years old. This little tally predates the total proliferation of the internet. All a complainer need do is post a bad review on a where to eat website, make a status update and a tweet that says, I found a finger in a Company Burger, and that’s already five times as many people turned off the Company than in her model, Add to this figure the possibility of unpredictable pickups like that the guy that got his guitar busted up by United Airlines. They refused compensation so he made a song about it. ‘United break guitars’ it has four and a half million views on Youtube and as a result, it made the national news. Forget about word of mouth, the internet is a global megaphone.

After explaining the spiraling cost of the complaints pyramid our trainer returns to the three circles. And things take a turn for the metaphysical, almost mythical in fact. She gets her pen and draws a swan on the flip chart. ‘This is you’ she says, you are this swan, here, swimming on this line. And the guest should only ever see this part, the top of the swan. They should never ever see this part. Your ugly little legs kicking as hard as they can to make sure that everything is perfect.' Apparently they don’t want to know that we’re a chef down. They don’t want to hear that we can’t do something, they just want their food, and they want it to be good. And they want you to be smart and to smile when you put it on their plate.’

Then she says my favorite sentence of the whole two days.
‘This Swan here, is what fish is all about.’ Why I don't get up and leave I don't know. perhaps it's because we have been so beaten into submission by this point that ‘This swan is what fish is all about’ barely raises and eyebrow with the rest of the group. They stare blankly forward as the words fades into the general miasma of jargonous white-noise. Part of the reason I make no comment it that I don’t want to cause any trouble; trouble will just make this go on longer. What I want to do is make my trainer happy, I want to answer her questions quickly and correctly.

Outside the open window I hear the beachboys coming from the stereo of convertible sports car. A man, a boy really, sits in the front seat. It’s a harsh reminder. Somehow I am a few days off turning 30 and I am still working in a bar. I work hard, they tell me I have talent. Even this trainer says I’m a natural leader. How the hell did this happen?

I don’t want to be a billionaire. I don’t want a luxury yacht and a palace, but is a BMW z4 and some leisure time too much to ask.

'that's were we wanna go, we'll get there fast and then we'll take it slow.'

I feel trapped, Like a hostage held and gun point, I cannot leave. I look pleadingly towards our trainer. The gap in the shirt is still there. She is really quite an attractive woman in a kind of well kempt office girl kind of a way. Mid-thirties with a great figure. If things were different, if the world hadn’t conspired against us we could run away, right now, together, away from all this.
I wonder if may be I am starting to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.

‘Bermuda, Bahamas, come on pretty mama...’

I picture the two of us holding hands and leaving the room. I hear the stunned silence comming up at from the horseshoe of desks as we make our way to a Caribbean island. Welsh trainer lady exchanges her expensive shirt for a bikini and we sip fruit cocktails in the sun, a steal band plays,

‘Key largo, montego baby why dont we go’

The traffic lights change and the man in the convertible drives away taking the Bahamas with him. Then I remember that I am married, happily married. Still I have been day dreaming for the last ten minutes. I need to start paying attention again. It’s too dangerous to let stuff like this drift over you. That's how it slips into your brain unnoticed, and without your paying attention becomes a part of who you are. Questions come from the front, 'what should we do to make a guest happy?'

Across the group hands that were once raised proudly, now rise, slow and limp, like three day old celery. Craig answers 'Whatever it takes' you can tell wanted it to sound ironic but to his own horror and surprise it doesn't. He cannot muster the energy.

I need more coffee. By the time I get back to the table we are being split into groups again. to prevent us from falling asleep I guess, we are going to do a role-play of ‘the service journey’. We will in turn play the part of the server and the guest. Guests will be given the same sheet of paper that the mystery diners use to judge us. Like everything else it is insane in it’s attention to detail. Every minute of 'The Service Journey' is accounted for.

We will start off by offering drinks, we will recommend wine. Expensive wine. We will then offer bread and olives and explain the soup of the day. We will say that there is a choice of bread. We will take orders for Starters and finally mains. We will recommend mains, expensive mains. We will recommend expensive wines to go with the mains. We will deliver the food, offer more drinks. Check back on the food, clear the food. We will bring additional cutlery. We will offer more drinks and ask if they need any sauce at all. We will check back asking if ‘everything is ok with the food’. We will make sure to add ‘with the food’ so that the guest does not tell us about their emotional problems. We will clear the food and offer desert menus, we will offer more drinks. We will bring the food. We will check back on it. We will clear it away. Like children we will do all of this in our heads, miming the actions with empty hands. We will sit while a Polish chef who is never ever going to do this again takes us through the service journey. When it is our turn will confuse this chef by describing the soup of the day as French semen and onion. We will tell him that it is very fresh. We will say that all our starters come with erotic toast. We will pretend to have a wheat allergy. We will demand that the waiter bring us seven shots of tequila for our 10 year old son. We will then ask for bread explaining that we will simply eat round the wheat. While the trainer is out of the room we will explode in laughter and rebellion and childish puerile humor. When she comes back we will feed back to the group. We will lie. We will say ‘No feedback’ We will say, ‘Everyone did great’.

It’s a lie that get’s us through to lunchtime. Lunch is going to be a little different today. Instead of eating ‘in house’ we have all been given a budget and told to go and spy on our competition. Divided into another set of groups we are to visit a set of random Bistros and “Grills”. We are going to be like mystery diners. We will come back and feedback to the group. Feedback feedback feedback.

Money has been handed out. Management are insistent that we do not have an alcoholic drink. They also don’t want us to spend more than £10 each. Fair enough. This is pretty close to freedom, we’ll take whatever we can get right now.

My group goes to an over 21’s bar where they serve Tapas. It’s lunch time and as luck would have it the same day that the student of three universities hold their graduations. As a result everywhere in town is rammed. We order the tapas deal for five intending to share it between three of us. When it arrives there is three of everything. Clearly we have been scammed here We ordered food enough for five, we will pay for food enough for five. We don’t say anything, just note it down. This is no good. Too us it’s free, so we don’t feel the need to complain.

Talk around the table is pretty much the same as yesterday. We talk about how it seems much more of a pain in the arse today. That it’s so much more tiring. We talk about how hot it is. We decide that despite the obvious skimming we are still going to tip the waiter.

That is one thing about everyone who works in service. We tip. We tip because we know how important it is. How much they deserve it. We tip because if we didn’t we would see the looks we were getting, we would feel the virtual daggers in our backs as we walked out. Non tippers are the devil.

You know who you are.

Stop it.