So, I moved to Barcelona...

I live in Barcelona now, come say hello if you get bored.

I decided I needed a change of everything so I sold all my stuff and hopped on a plane, this was about 4 months ago.

I have a Spanish job, a Spanish bank account, a Spanish social security number, a Spanish national insurance number and Swedish furniture (thanks ikea). I speak terrible Spanish and this generally makes everything a huge pain in the arse to sort out, which I love for some reason.

I talk to children for a living, its pretty funny, I get paid about 10p an hour and taxed 25% for being english, it is pretty great. They give me free sandwiches too.

There are a lot of very small dogs here, they even have clothes shops just for tiny dogs.

The only foods available in Barcelona are bread and meat.

There is a beggar with no nose.

I am very tall in Spain.

Our fish died.

Its warm.

Bye.

Psycological toothpaste warfare

I want to talk to you today about decisions, capitalism, self loathing and tongue scrapers.

Now, I would generally describe myself as an intelligent person and I consider myself to have a decent understanding of advertising and the manipulation of the press due to both my degree and my interests.

I know how advertisers mold the world around us in order to make us consume the items they are being paid to promote and I generally keep a cynical eye on the things I am buying.

I am a decisive person, having worked in various businesses environments and also I am good at getting things done under pressure.

Give me a tough choice during a crisis and I will make it.

But I have a problem. An issue. A Psychological foible that ignores all of the above evidence and stuns me, rendering me speechless and immovable.

Present me with a choice between two (or seventy) things that are near identical and I freeze quicker than an earthworm in a tub of haagen daazs.

I am almost incapable of buying a toothbrush.

The toothbrush aisle completely overwhelms me, I can't remember the last time the choice took me less than half an hour to make.

The chocolate bar aisle, the icecream cabinet, petrol station sandwiches; all capable of rendering me inert.

Am I alone on this?

I am alive... just.

Just a quick note to say that I have not given up on the blog, I have just been sick and one of the things I cannae do it stare at screens for very long.

I just spent the night whispering soup rumours into the big porcelain phone and feel so bad that I figured I may aswell write an update anyhow.

In a few weeks I am moving to Barcelona for a while, so things should pick up again then and I also have some reviews of Polish foodstuffs to write.

Cheersthen!

Elbows and unwell-bows

Second year of University, Sunday, around 2pm.

I slowly regain conciousness unsure of where I am, one crusted eye slowly pulls itself open and I breathe a sigh of relief, my own bedroom, my own bed.

I reach an arm across my bed, searching for a phone so I could check the time. My memories start creeping up on me, we drank a bottle, we watched a band, we headed to a club, but then, nothing; a psychological road block. My phone confirms that I was still compos mentis and texting friends at 5am, my memories I figure, stop at around midnight.

I manage to persuade my second (of two) eyes to get in the game, I try to focus and blearily I make out a tall shape, a figure is looming over me, unmoving, silent.

My eyes adjust once again.

It is a tree.

As I regain my senses and my unease grows, I realise something is wrong with my arm. I throw the covers off my body. I am fully dressed, including a pair of soil covered shoes, the arm of my hoody is ripped and blood stains the sheets.

Life in sound #3 - The Day We Caught the Train

As well as being from the third album I can remember owning, this song reminds of budget holidays when I was knee-high to a pig and full of jellybeans.

When I say budget, I mean, collect 10 vouchers in the sun and a family of four can go on holiday for £10.

When I say holiday, I mean 4 days in a camp site run by the cast of the league of gentleman.

When I say camp site, I mean a Welsh field with a toilet in it.

Chiefly it brings up these three memories:

1. At an indoor swimming pool, some seven year old Spanish ruffian stole my inflatable rubber ring whilst I was showing some girls my dance moves by the towel racks (basic robot followed by some body popping). I chased him down (the girls had lost interest during a poorly executed cartwheel) and gave him a ruddy good lesson on English swearwords and British inflatable ownership law.


2. We went to cheddar on one of these holidays and we visited cheddar gorge. About half way through a tour, I got so scared by a mannequin that looked at me suggestively that I cried, climbed my dad like a tree and we all had to leave. In retrospect, I am not entirely it wasn't just Sir Jimmy dressed in a miners outfit with a Papier-mâché hat and ideas beyond his station.


3. One year we pulled into a jam packed welsh camp site and there was an empty pitch right in the premium first row near what they had rather optimistically dubbed a swimming pool in the brochure. We thought we had struck lucky and spent several hours putting up some sort of quasi  military fabric bunker my dad had borrowed from a family friend. The rest of the day was spent watching my father wage war against the gigantic ants nest we had invaded and triumph over the thriving mass of insects using fire, poison and (if I memory serves me correctly), his bare fists.

Confessions of a lazy banker

I am here today to make a confession.

Something I am deeply ashamed of (and equally amused by) has recently been uncovered by people close to me and I think it is time to share it with the wider world.

All the people at my local bank branch think that I am illiterate.

They think this because I accidentally suggested it and the lie just snowballed from there.

Now, before you start getting on any of the numerous high horses that I have seen casually munching the extremely moral grass in your back garden, I did not mean for this to happen.

About two years ago I went to the bank to physically put some cash into my account (what is this the nineties?) at the cashier window.

I queued politely and eventually the robot told me where to go (cashier number 3 please), I handed her the money and she asked me if I had filled in a "paying in slip" (what is this, the eighties?) and the dialogue went a little like this...

Electric brain soup

Things have been a bit quiet on the blog front as I have been suffering from migraines for the first time ever (Do I get a badge?) and looking at bright things makes me feel like my brain is a very irate chinchilla.

That being said, there is not much that can be done about it for now so I am filling myself to the brim with painkillers and going forth.

Apologies if my posts get a bit obscure or my grammar suffers at the hands of a brain full of narcotics and what feel like pointy and inquisitive eel folk.

The 5th Spice girl - Winky Spice

This is what happens to your eye if you blow into a tube of chilli powder.

In the immediate aftermath of shouting for someone to 'GOOGLE CHILLI IN THE EYE!" and finding out various milk and water based remedies, this represents my efforts in stemming the immense pain in my eye:

My bathroom smells milky.

You win this round, ingredients.

Things my doctor finds funny:

Not funny:

Jokes about doctors
Impressions of famous doctors
Me claiming I am a Doctor
Dancing

Funny:

Colourful socks.

Madness? THIS. IS. BLOGGER.

Welcome to my blog, I am a blogger, doing blogs. Blogs blogs blogs. Blog is an ugly word which only gets worse when repeated thrice.

I have been running several blogs over the years under many psuedonyms and I thought it was around time I started again, from scratch, under my own real life identity (20 something moron).

This blog will mainly serve as a toilet for general thoughts that fall out of my headbox which in the past have just collected in the upturns of my skinny fit jeans like soup.

I will be pulling in some old content which hopefully I can seperate out using some tags or something, hashtags? People love hastags. I am going to put millions of hashtags all over this because I think you get better traffic if you have lots of hastags. #HASHTAG

One of these sections will explore the music that has defined my life, this one is fairly depressing sometimes so watch out for those ones comedy lovers!

Anyway, hope this blog makes you laugh at some point.

Rhys

#thingstonotsaywhenyoumeetghandi