geezer

La Carafe ... Houston's saving grace

Just a quick report on my first trip to Houston.  Couldn't believe the sprawl when I was coming on to land in the plane. it goes on forever!  The strange fractal patterns created by the new housing being built in the suburbs looks crazy from the air; the streets are blacktopped with tarmac; the plots are smoothed off and ready for building to commence; but the houses are not there yet. The result is a strange landscape that reminded me of the veins of  leaves.

The city itself was surprisingly big. it was really walkable though, and I enjoyed the oily humid air in the early evening.  Ended up at a wonderful dark bar called la Carafe in the old town. Great barman name of John. He'd been a regular at the bar for best part of a decade to earn his shot at working behind the bar.  The place was like a dark cave as I got there with the bright sun low in the sky. It's a refuge for good people and a place where "everyone knows your name" like the song says.  Very cool decor; brick walls; old photographs of Houston; great amassed candlewax sculptures and an old cash register that only goes up to nine dollars.

Check this place out if you can!

I'm back!!

The Geezer is back in the USA!!

The Missus and I got my Green Card approved in early April and undertook our long-awaited move back to the United States just a week ago. It was a rapid relocation but It's great to be back!  I'm in Worcester, Massachusetts, my new home. You'll hear a lot about Worcester, a great American city I have a lot of time for, as I breathe life back into my American blog after four years of hibernation during our stay in London. Stay tuned for reflections on four years in "River City" as Darius Jedburgh called it.

My last post was on 24 September 2004 and it was posted from Santorini, the location that my wife and I chose for the holiday we spent as a "thank-you" to ourselves at the end of a punishing last few months in the USA.  That summer of 2004,  I  wrote two books and held down a few jobs simultaneously and it damn near killed me. Looking back, it wasn't so hard; in the almost four years since, I've discovered that things could definitely get more hectic.  I thought I was going to fully burn out a few times, but it never quite happened. In the blogs to come, I'll be reflecting on the whole work/life balance thing or, put another way, "how to be a perfectionist and a control freak and a money junkie ... and still have a life..."

Some of my blogs will reflect on my work life in detail.  I'm a threat analyst and my focus is security in the Middle East. I have spent most of the last decade looking at security in Iraq and the Gulf.  Four years ago I thought I was a genius; now I know I'm not.  But I know what I am; I'm an analyst.  I love problem-solving and my area of experise is security in  the Arab world. Stay tuned for predictions, reflections and rants.

I'll also be displaying my nerdy side; I'm a dice and pen roleplayer (yeah, like Dungeons and Dragons, kinda), a wargamer (yeah, toy soldiers, kinda), a military history buff and a SciFi junkie. When I see a SciFi film, I almost always think i could have done a better job of  the script and the plotting.  More on that later ...

But mostly, you'll be getting my take on America and particularly Worcester, Massachusetts. Americans are fortunate people, but there is one thing  that many of them will never be lucky enough to experience; coming to America!!   

Dispatches from the volcano

Ahhhhhhhhh!

Hello Geezer readers. Hope all five of you are well. This is my second blog from stunning scenic Santorini - see the first part at http://swandiving.typepad.com - the bird's blog.

Like last time, we're blogging from our villa balcony, which clings precariously to the inside of Santorini's volcanic caldera. See, when the volcano blew the center of the island all over the Aegean over three thousand years ago, it created this huge lagoon in the center of the semi-circular surviving ring of the island - like a Pacific atoll!!

So Maria and I are sitting here looking out over the still moonlit waters of the caldera (lagoon), a gentle southerly breeze blowing, and I'm imagining Alastair MacLean-style British commando raids on unsuspecting Italian and German garrisons (we were just chatting to an old Greek guy who was gravely recounting the wartime years ...)

OK, picture time (click on the thumbnails for the full size photo) ...

Here I am on our down day yesterday - a day of not doing much, sitting around reading our books. From time immemorial I have enjoyed letting the water from a cool shower drip off me in a warm country, armed only with a crummy book and a beer. In this case, it was this holiday's "diamond in the rough," The Postman - now a major Kevin Costner motion picture. By the way, no one out there better dog on Kevin Costner movies because - to get technical for a moment - they rock!

Here's where I got that little gem - Atlantis Books. It's this great bookshop run by a couple of young Americans and Brits, installed in this poky little set of rooms under a rocky promonotory at the tip of the island. What a concept - they're selling off books old and new in a place with zero competition, their lives are easy, they sit there all day in their cool bookshop, shuffling the i-pod to set their soundtrack, look out onto their large balcony to catch the best sunset in the Aegean. Like the legendary Shakespeare & Co. in the Mediterranean - see http://gyoza.com/shakespeare/html/RDCframes.html

Ahhh! That is the life ... Bravo Atlantis Books, Bravo ...

Here's the sunset view from the little Armeni beach - a tiny fisherman's cove down a long slender cliffside pathway. We did a bit of "swimming" - read paddling - off the dock whilst all the tourists scrambled to catch the sunset on the other end of Oia. We, naturally, are not tourists - we are ... sigh ... travellers ...

Poopy. enjoying the sunset. Simply beautiful ...

A great study of the Geezer, and his roman nose, in profile, having Alexandrian delusions. The sea is calling to him, whispering ...

"reincarnated warrior of old, I remember you" ...

We saw these three sailing ships as we ascended from Armeni beach. Lovely to see the ships moving under sail. After reaching the top of the strenuous climb, we felt really really alive - young, fit, and in love ...

Like all great tales, this blog entry ends where it began ... with me quoffing a beer. In these islands, under this sun, pitted against the saltiness and dryness of the air, any beer becomes the elixir of life and any man can become king for a day.

Message in a bottle

Ah, my once loyal readership (all five of you),

I got overconfident, I started to take it for granted that you would check even if I didn't post, and now you have abandoned me ...

[sniff]

You know your blog's hit rock bottom when you check to make sure you have enabled the comments feature, and when you only get one hit a day ... and it's yourself. Well, maybe I can lure my once loyal readership back with tales of my European adventures in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, to attract some google browsers to boost my ratings, I'll have to resort to cheap tricks. So, here goes ...

Britney Spears ... er ... butt ... erm ... free ...

That should double my daily hits

to two

...

A New Hope

Well,

the time has come to leave Washington DC. Though I've always thought of Jerusalem as my "second city" after London, I suppose, in all truth, it is Washington. It's hard to summon up feelings of regret as I leave. That doesn't mean it's been unpleasant here - in fact, any hardships I suffered here were of my own creation - it's just been a time of isolation and unease. Isolation had one up-side; Maria and I had a whole eighteen months of glorious together time to get to know each other and grow together. I think she would agree that she's much better now ... ;-)

Now I'm in trouble - even that emoticon won't save me :-0

The only other thing that has been a pleasure has been getting under the skin of the Imperial capital at this auspicious time. Everyone knows where they were when 9/11 happened. I happened to be in a pub, the Hobgoblin on New Cross high street, finishing off a boozy lunch with my confederate Dave Flindall. Months later I was in the US watching Dubya give the Axis of Evil speech from an airbase in Alabama. In the 32 months since then, I've spent just over 26 in the US, most of that in DC. In that time, we've seen the Taliban booted out of power and the US/UK bloc wade into Iraq. It's been one mania after another - first terror-mania, then Iraq-mania, and then election-mania. I've spent loads of time sitting behind Rumsfeld and the other administration goons at Senate hearings, earwigging on their conversations. I've been in a lot of the closed-door meetings that were worth being at. I've been I guess it's been fun. I'm certainly all worn out with politics. They can all just stick it up their butts. I'm going for a pint.

This is my new philosophy; the pub, my new lodestone.

Looking forward to Greenwhich. Looking forward to running and sitting in Greenwich Park. Looking forward to reading books ... for fun! Looking forward to anticipating having brilliant thoughts and being surprised when I don't manage to have any. Most of all looking forward to having the gang/crew around me. It gets harder to make friends as you get older - that I've really learned here - especially when everyone is as busy as you. I reckon I've met a couple of people that I'd have spent time with if we were all on "London time," but it's different here. Hectic, transitory, remote. Goodbye to all that. Bring on the long lazy Saturdays lounging with old friends,

We've earned it.

She's crafty ...

Well,

the Bird shows off her psychic talents yet again, plucking the yearning to listen to some RDF directly from my brain. My birthday yesterday was awesome. In a carefully stagecrafted present-giving ceremony, the missus laid a bevy of present on me, best of all a couple of RDF albums - Borderline and Ragamuffin Statement - exactly what I wanted and the vinyl was in perfect condition!

As if that wasn't enough , I even got a couple of Sheep on Drugs albums and LPs. The lack of memories are flooding back ...

Anticipating my immediate need to put the needle on the record - the last place Sheep on Drugs would put a needle - the missus even got me a stylish little stacking system with a turntable.

See my reading section for some of the books that the Bird, and her excellent Mum and Bruvver laid on me ...

I'm in the house working away on my book. But it's time for a break. Selector, rewind and come again ...