Be The Jam

Somehow I have got myself a job in the Alps for the winter, in Italy. Hopefully this should mean that by the spring I should just about be able to afford to get to the jungle. That's my justification and I'm sticking to it. I am in no way influenced in my decision to go and work a ski season by the fact that it sounds like a whole lot of fun and most certainly a lot more fun than working in London.

I went for an interview on Monday, I wasn't looking very smart. I had a bit of a crumpled look about me, clothes that have spent a bit of time squashed up in the bottom of a rucksack tend to take on the crumpled look I find. I did hang a blazer and shirt up on a tree overnight and so the worst of the creases had fallen out by the morning. I was going for a job as a chef so I diligently wrote up my 12 day menu plan, packed a copy of my passport, made a sample dish (endemame and prawn salad in a Thai dressing), and put them all in a bag together with the calculator I would apparently need. I was less than pleased when at Victoria I realised that this bag was now wending it's way off into the distance on the train I was no longer on. I had half an hour to spare in which to cook a sample dish. Interesting.

I'm not sure if you have ever tried to cook an impressive dish in half an hour at Victoria station, if you have not you probably won't realise that this isn't as simple as it seems. For a start there are not that many useful looking shops - "Whsmiths? No. Burger King? Hmmmm, maybe. Ah! Marks and Spencer's; fantastic!" Only it wasn't so fantastic, M&S are useless. They never have any ingredients worth speaking of just rows and rows of ready meals. "Hmmmm, ready meals - maybe? No". In the end all that I could think to make was a Raspberry Fool.

 

Recipie

 

Raspberry Fool

Creme Fraiche

Double Cream

Raspberries

Smash the berries to a pulp and mix in the Creme Fraiche and cream. A higher proportion of creme fraiche will result in a healthier pudding, a higher proportion of cream will result in a nicer one.

 

I managed to borrow a tuppaware container from a nearby cafe and then make the fool on the train to Clapham Junction. It was only later that I realised that the container was infused with the smell of garlic.

 

I thought I was going for a job cooking meals for people in Chalets, the interviewers thought I was going for a chef's position in a Hotel. I was briefly tempted but the idea of 12 hour days working hard without a break and stupidly high stress levels didn't appeal. In the end we settled on a compromise, I'm going to be the chef in a large chalet; maybe about 40 people. This means all I have to do is cook breakfast, afternoon cakes and an evening meal and the rest of the day is free, easy. As there are quite a few people to cook for I don't have to clean the chalet or make beds, just cook food and play in the snow.

I asked about living outside and they said that accommodation is included in the package. I said I knew but I wanted to live outside. They said this was most unusual and they would have to get back to me.

Apparently it is not possible to live outside in the Alps during the winter and hold down a job at the same time. I bowed to their superior knowledge and said I would live in doors.

I'm glad I'm a well balanced rounded type of person who doesn't take being told that something is not possible as a personal challenge. If I was that sort of person I might be planning to spend the first month or two in Italy getting the right bits of kit together, checking out how the system works and then going to live outside for a month or two without telling anyone. Good thing I'm all grown up now isn't it.

 

 

It was quite cold last night. I had forgotten about it getting cold, cold isn't strictly speaking my best thing in the world. Warm is a bit better. I did make some bread though so it was nice to wake up and have bread and marmalade after a night of being mostly a bit too cold to sleep. I think the Alps will be colder, this isn't necessarily a good thing. A lot of me doesn't want to go, mostly I think it is a bad idea, but weirdly this is what it attracting me to go; it will be challenging. Challenging is good.

I have a few interviews to attend for jobs in the Alps so things are moving on at quite apace. Only. Only I  might have found something even more challenging to do and which would possibly be better training for the jungle.

That's right kids, watch one idiot go and live in the jungle for 12
months and get an extra 5 months free! OK OK, 5 isn't 50% of 12 but I
can't be bothered to use my brain and my fingers are being used to
type so I can't do sums.

Another 5 months in the jungle? I hear you ask, no no, that would be
silly and quite unnecessary. The thing is that raising the funds to
get to South America is taking longer than expected, curiously I can't
find anyone else to pay so it looks as though I'm going to have to do
so myself! So, that means I'm stuck in Europe for a while longer
trying to organise things. I've done a winter living in the woods in
the UK and I'm not particularly keen to do another one - it was
horrible.

The plan is to go to the Alps, big pointy snow capped mountains, and
live in them until March, outside of course and get sponsored to do so
- all money going to Rainforest Concern this time. Whilst there I
intend to work as a chef, barman or somesuch, get the travel guide
running up to speed and raise the funds needed to get to the jungle.

Currently I'm considering my position re "tents are for girls".

Surely nothing can go wrong?


There is the possibility that in the next week or two someone will
come through with a big pile of cash with which to go to the jungle
with, in which case this plan might, might, be scrapped.

 

My search for work in the Alps has been made very easy thanks to natives.co.uk Click the link and have a look if you fancy working a ski season as well.

 

At the moment I guess I could be said to be practicing living in the wilds whist living of money earned  from running a web site. That would indeed be a good thing to do, it would be mighty good practice for going and living in the jungle and living off money earned from a web site, it would be handy to have some experience in at least one element of the going and living in the jungle and running a web site thing. The problem is that I'm not making any money from the site, this is probably because the site isn't yet in a position to start generating capital and I think that this could be traced back to the fact that I have irregular access to a computer and none of the necessary skills to make the computer do what I want it to.

I think though that I have found someone to build a web site that will do what is necessary and I might have figured out how to get myself access to a computer, I might also have figured out a way of marketing the site so as to get loads of people looking at the site. It is all going to take quite a lot of work, I had thought that going to the Amazon would be easy. I imagined, naively as it turns out, that it would be quite easy to find a corporate sponsor to put up a nice big pile of cash to fund Mission Improbable and in return the lovely corporate sponsor people would get to put their logo all over the web site and maybe give us a couple of baseball caps with their logos on for when we get photographed by the press. The reality is somewhat different, there have been plenty of people and companies who have very kindly offered bits of kit, reductions in services and what not but no big sponsor. So it seems that Mission Improbable is going to have to pay for itself.

Interesting.

Challenging.

 

 

Roll over Lois Pasteur, I have found a cure for the common cold. Once again I expect the Nobel Prize people are writing a cheque with my name on it.

Going to visit Rob and accidently staying for a couple of nights isn't it.

The cure goes a little something like this.

Leave nice warm flat in central London at about mid-day and spend the day walking about in the rain trying to remember in which of the identical looking houses in the identical looking streets that  I left my waterproof coat on Friday; fail in this task. Visit a friend in the early evening and be given a ticket to see "Souls of Mischief" at the Jazz Cafe that night. Go to the gig, bump into more friends and get plied with cocktails. At this point I should mention that I don't think that the Jazz Cafe or Souls of Mischief are central the cold cure, I think the cocktails were. Very spicy bloody mary X lots is what you need.

Having become suitably relaxed take a short but eventful journey on the underground, I highly recommend chatting to any Australians that you might meet along the way, take a bus deep into the countryside. Once dropped off walk for a mile or so through the slide and ooze, a thunder storm at this point would assist with the cure. Remember kids the worse a medicine tastes the better it is. Whilst walking do feel free to stand in puddles just a little deeper than the tops of your boots from time to time to add to your sense of well being. Eventually you should come to the main part of the cure which you will have cunningly "prepared earlier". Two days previously you will have left a sleeping bag and whatever other items that you might need for a comfortable night's sleep carefully wrapped in such a way as to keep the rain out. However, this is a ruse, really what you have to do is leave you things in such a manner as to ensure that they get soaked through but convince yourself that they will be nice and dry when you return. This way you can experience a truly amazing sense of disappointment and woe in the small hours as you climb inside a dank damp clingy oh so thin sleeping bag, if you are lucky then in your dreams the feel of the sleeping bag will turn into the fingers of Zombies pulling you into the earth.

After an hour or two of fitful sleep you will awake with the chest that has been causing so much discomfort over the past couple of days being almost completely blocked and a truly horrific noise, part wheeze part whistle echoing in your ears as you desperately try to get air into your lungs. At this point the trick is to sit upright and engage in a most vigorous bout of coughing until, with a low "whump", the blockage that has been building in your chest over the past few days is eventually cleared. Now you can breath clearly again and by morning you will feel better than you have for quite some time. 

I shall have to recommend this cure to Rob, apparently he has picked up a cold from somewhere.

As a result of all the running about doing endurance training I seem to have ended up with a rotten cold. One of those lying awake at night not being able to breath, feeling as though my chest is filling with water, blocked head, aching ears and general horribleness kind of a cold. Sitting under a small piece of tarp in the rain and mud doesn't tend to make one feel particularly great about life. This has added to a general sense of Malaise that I have at the moment, it has been a few months since I was last working and I think I'm feeling the lack of achievement in my life. On top of this I don't seem to be progressing much with the plans for Mission Improbable so life at the moment is kind of "trudgy". Not to worry, things will pick up soon I'm sure.

 

Autumn is unmistakably on it's way now. It has got a little colder over the last couple of days and the cool green ocean of the woods is slowly turning brown as life seeps away on the edge of the bitter wind that has started to blow. Hatches are being battened down, turnips, sweedes and hearty strews are on the menu. The wildness in the air sets the spirit alive with the promise of rough weather to come.

I have had enough of good ideas. The latest one was to get in some endurance training over the weekend, in theory this was quite a good idea. There is the potential for all kinds of things to go wrong in the jungle so building up a bit of toughness and resilience to hardship is probably just the sort of thing to be doing at the moment. With hindsight it might have been better to have started off gently  and built up to it as, for all my good intentions, I have hardly done any exercise save carry a rucksack about for months.

Over the normal 61 hour period between 10 am on Friday morning and 11pm on Sunday night I would sleep for at least 16 hours, eat at least 9 meals and walk maybe  4 or 5 miles. This is quite a civilised and sustainable lifestyle, fitting in I hours sleep, 5 meals and a very large number of miles walked in to the same time period is less enjoyable. When I woke this morning I thought that I was mostly dead, somehow I had got dehydrated, I ached all over and my brain refused to reboot for the first three hours of the day.

I'm not sure that such behaviour is wise, maybe it's good to push the biscuit every so often, maybe it's best to conserve energy for when such behaviour is actually necessary.

I had another "good idea" the other day, I'm trying to ignore it. It has plenty of scope to be fun, but that's the challenging kind of fun, the kind of fun that is more fun once it's over. One of those "in years from now I'll look back on this and laugh" type of ventures.

I have got a bit behind with what is going on lately so here is a quick update, hopefully things will get back to some sort of semblance of normality after this.  

 

It is a little annoying that most of my time and effort of late has been spent dealing with modernity rather than learning new and funky survival tricks and getting fit. I have, however, come up with a plan to  deal with the mass of red tape that now threatens to engulf me.

 I call this plan Operation Ignore It (OII)

Received wisdom dictates that ignoring official looking letters and the like is not a good thing and there is a lot of ground in this argument but there comes a point when only OII can help. For example I have spent a great deal of the last three weeks in the bank trying to sort a problem out - I now forget what the original problem was - and all I got out of it was stressed and angry. I would go to the bank, wait, wait some more, wait, get bored of waiting, wait some more and then get to speak to some one. After explaining the problem three or four times they would finally grasp that they didn't have a clue what I was talking about and tell me that I would have to talk to someone else. This would usually involve more waiting. When I finally managed to speak to someone who seemed to understand what was going on we would come to an agreement and I would leave feeling quite happy and a little bit guilty for thinking them to be completely incompetent earlier in the day. A day or two later I would discover that rather than doing what they had agreed they had done something else completely and so I would have to go back to the bank and start the whole process again but this time when speaking to the, different, person who seemed to know what they were talking about I would have to explain not only what had gone wrong this time but also what had gone wrong before that in order to arrive at the point where things went wrong again. After the seventh or eighth trip to the bank I began to forget what had happened in the first place. I realised recently that all I was getting out of going to the bank to complain about thing going wrong was that I was getting to go to the bank to complain; I have better things to do with my life then point out to the bank that there system is rubbish and they don't know what they are doing. So this time when they messed up I didn't go into complain, sure they still have made a mistake but at least I don't have to get stressed out about it or go and shout at anyone. The decision not to complain was made all the easier by the fact that for the first time they were not trying to charge me for their mistake, at least not yet. It seems then that there is a time to "let it go".

Not, I'm afraid to say, that OII can be applied to everything. Sadly there are a couple of organisations that I have done work for that have decided to ignore my requests for payment and I rather suspect that a cunning application of the principles OII will have little chance of getting money out of them.

 Gadgets

 

It started with a watch, I found an old watch the other day and started to wear it, apart for a couple of weeks in the spring this is the first time that I have had a watch or any kind of time piece about my person for nearly three years, it's quite useful. Then I found a compass that fits onto the watch strap, that had to go on, it's not very actuate but there are times when not very actuate is much better than walking around in circles. Then last weekend things went truly high tech, Rob gave me his old phone and a sim card. I haven't had a phone for, again, nearly three years and I was immediately hooked, the five pounds credit on the card went almost immediately on texting people to tell them that I now have a phone. Since then I have been inundated with text messages from Vodaphone encouraging me to join this price plan or that, it's almost as if they are trying to encourage me to spend more. Now that I have a phone with a camera I c an start to take photos of things and post them up here - just as soon as I can figure out how to get them off the phone and onto this world wide web thingy.

Rescuing my possessions from the storage facility on Wednesday was a bit of a shock, all I had was two rucksacks and two suitcases full of stuff - where did I put everything else? Looking through I discovered 6 mobile phones, some photos, lots of audio cables, a couple of changes of clothes and a few things to go on eBay. That was it, oh and a waterproof rucksack liner, why it never occurred to me that I might need a waterproof rucksack liner when going to live in the woods for a year I don't know. 

When I got back to the woods yesterday it seemed to be a good time to sort through all my possessions that I have there and try and get life in a bit more of an ordered state. I'm glad I did, I found a bit that has been missing from my jetboil so that will work as soon as I have picked up the new gauze from my parents. Jetboil have a 12 month guarantee to replace anything that wears out, I will take some photos of mine so you can see how worn out it got in just three months in the woods. I haven't been able to use it for ages as it got so worn out after those three months as to be unusable. I will be glad to have it working again, it will be like having a kettle - much easier than having to light a fire just to make tea in the morning.

The next gadget I found was my old Sigg petrol stove, it was this breaking that caused me to go buy the Jetboil. At the time it broke down I diagnosed that the pump on the fuel bottle had broken and as Sigg no longer make stoves and the pump was all incased in plastic it seemed as though that was the end of it. Yesterday I found the stove and bottle and soon realised that the bottle was half full of petrol. Petrol is fun. I attached the fuel hose to the bottle and, just for the sake of it, pumped the bottle up to add some pressure then turned the fuel tap on a little. To my delight petrol started to spurt out. There is only one thing to do with petrol spurting out of a hose. After a couple of minutes playing with my flame thrower it occurred to me that there was nothing wrong with the fuel bottle, it must be the stove that was broken. Indeed it was. Half an hour later the stove was taken apart, cleaned up, put back together, taken apart, put back together properly and then in an almighty fire ball it was working again. I'm not sure that it is supposed to create a ball of flame three feet high upon being lit but it did and it was exciting so I don't mind. So now I have  a jetboil that will soon work again and a petrol stove, this is going to make life quite a lot easier, some times when it is cold, dark, it has been raining for days on end and it is very late all I want to do is have a cup of tea and a bite to eat and go to bed. Spending half an hour coaxing a fire into life can in these situations be a little depressing.

 

The last few weeks were the most "interesting" so far.

 

Quite apart from nearly reaching a sticky end on the wrong end of 24 litres of organic soya milk - more on this on Friday - things have been very challenging lately. It is all good practice for living in the jungle I suppose, I rather suspect that things will be challenging there. Today though things have taken a turn for the much better, this is obviously and immediately a good thing, better still my reaction to things going wrong has taught me a valuable lesson or two.

Lessons learned

1. Keep a positive mental attitude, it isvery easy to slip into a negative frame of mind without realising it.
2. Keep busy.
3. Keep disciplined, lapses of concentration can lead to disasters like - loosing your bivi bag.

Anyway like I say things are much better now; I have eaten three big meals, had my first shower in over a week, gone to my storage place and got a whole new set of clothes that are clean, fresh and without holes, I even found a pair of Timberland boots I didn't know that I had. I feel like a King.