It seems that regardless of city, in fact regardless of country, I am seemingly one of the most geographically aware persons on the planet. Just this Sunday on a quick run to the Eaton Centre to buy a pair of jeans, not more than ten minutes walk to and from my home, I was approached for directions not once, not twice, but trois times. I’m not particularly bothered by it these days, in fact I’m kind of used to it. Nine times out of ten I have no idea where the street/landmark/car park/train station/monument they’re after is but if they’re particularly nice about it I can use my iPhone to look it up for them.

After this Sunday’s particularly high direction-asking-count I started to think why it is that I’m approached. It’s not like I have “local tour guide” tattooed across my forehead in UV ink (well not that I’m aware of; hang on a minute I’m going to check…. …. … nope, I don’t), so why is it that I, instead of the hundreds of people around me is asked. Behold; “The top 5 reasons I’m asked for directions (in foreign countries)”

1. I walk like I know where I’m going
I’m not a dawdler. When I’m walking somewhere (regardless of if I know where “where” is) I walk with purpose; with “vigor” if you will. While some people may like to soak up the atmosphere of unfamiliar territory I prefer to do that off to the side, stopped, and out of the way of other pedestrians. This is probably because it annoys the hell out of me when tourists do it in my home town.

2. My racially independent aesthetics
Taking a look at me it would be difficult for most people to pick exactly what my origins are. Black hair, half olive skin, the lines of physical racial stereotypes become kind of blurred. People generally look at me like I’m retarded when an Aussie accent emerges and I tell them I have no idea where or what they’re talking about. A perfect example would be my time in Paris where at first I’d be polite and throw a “Pardon, je ne comprends pas” at them, but it was much more fun to watch their jaws drop with a “nah mate” reply.

3. I’m the least intimidating individual in the vicinity
I wouldn’t think downtown Toronto or Seattle are places that would be particularly scary during the day but as with all cities there are some unsavory folk about. In my opinion they are in the minority in comparison to your average ham sandwich beating the pavement going about their daily grind. Perhaps its because I’m not wearing a tie, maybe they’re the scary ones and all the guys with empty Starbuck cups rattling for change are the normal peeps?

4. 90% of the time I’m wearing headphones
Now this one confuses me a little. I would have thought the fact that you’re wearing “environmental-sensory-depravation-tools” (AKA headphones) would actual detract people from approaching you. For me I listen to music wherever I am in the world. Occasionally I’ll tune into the soul of a new city, getting a feel for it’s subtle overtures until people start looking at me funny and wonder why I’m conducting what is to them an invisible symphony atop a sewer grate of a major intersection. Maybe it looks like I’m listening to an audio tour of my current locale? If I had a Lonely Planet book in my hands maybe.

5. I’m just a nice, helpful, smiley guy and people can sense that
Now anyone that knows me will have either ruptured their bladder because they’re in public and wetting themselves would not be appropriate, although now you should get to a hospital pretty quick, ruptured bladder and all; or you’ve now noticed that the warm feeling of pee down your inside leg is starting to cool and you need to change. I know what I look like walking, trust me people have told me. I’m a petulant bastard that wants to get where he’s going and that about sums it all up. If I’m the happiest looking person on the street than we’re living in a very sad world and I’ll need to take up a religion and find out who or what to pray to for our souls. Who’s that alien dude the scientists guys worship? I think I’ll go watch Battlefield Earth now and find out.

Lets for a moment forget the fact that I’ve started a new job that has me slowly taming the beast known to the technorati as “Drupal” into a well trained, obediant King Charles Spaniel and concentrate on the rather unbelievable fact that I haven’t had coffee in about a month!

Yes children of the Internets I know it’s a hard fact to comprehend that I Raj “let’s-have-a-coffee” Sanchez could have been turned away from such a wonderful socially accepted addiction. You must be asking yourself “Why? What has happened to my little friend Raj to turn him away from his only true friend, coffee?” Well that’s a fantastic question really, why don’t you pull up your favourite Japanese-restaurant-sitting-cushion and get all settled in while I explain in intricate detail the justification in my passing on the joe.

Coffee in Canada sucks. Explanation over.

OK, I’ll go into a little more detail. If I wanted brown water I’d go down to the street and scoop out a cup from the nearest mud pool I can find. Why and more importantly “how” people can drink percolated coffee is beyond me! Yes it costs about CAD$1.50 for a jumbo mug of the garbage but that’s no reason for the millions of Tim Hortons’ franchises that exist here in plague proportions putting the US’s Starbucks chain to shame. Dare you ask for a “latte” you might find that you’re given something that resembles frothed milk but 9 times out of 10 it came out of an automated machine the likes of which you’d find in a Shell service station midpoint Melbourne and Adelaide.

There is one place I’ve found that does a good coffee, even if the late does come in a glass cup the size of a small water tower, and that’s the hotel I stayed in last year whilst I was visiting, The Drake. I’ve had about three there now and they’re generally pretty on the money.

Now before everyone (well mostly Canadians) out there starts screaming and rushing me in a mob like fashion I open up the comments section of the post to all of you T.dotters to please, please, tell me where I can get a good coffee!

P.S. If you tell me to go to Starbucks, Second Cup or any other chain that serves crap I’ll hunt you down and pour said establishments scolding muck in your lap ;)

As if Canadians weren’t already the butt of the iPhone world, being America’s North American co-inhabiter they’ve been denied the iPhone longer than anyone would’ve thought. Today however that was all meant to change, I say “meant” because as any of the hundreds to thousands that lined up this morning were sorely disappointed in a severe shortage of stock.

Out of the four stores that I walked between checking out lines and chatting with their patrons I didn’t find a single store with more than 30 phones and then each store seemed to have a 50/50 split of 8GB & 16GB another move I find strange.

So who’s to blame? Well you could say Apple, they are the ones who’re distributing the device across the world today but the majority, whether they’re right or wrong, will say Rogers. Let’s for the moment forget the fact that Roger’s contract length is 3 years, a period that will surely go well beyond this generation of iPhones life-cycle, and again forget that they have a huge monopoly in being the only GSM provider in the country; what really puts the nail in the coffin for these guys is the past week’s worth of controversy in regards to their exorbitant pricing and that “supposedly” Apple decided they’d teach them a lesson by not supplying much stock.

Now there’s no “official” word that this was the case but all fingers point to Rogers. That said I can understand where they’re coming from, this things a cash cow for them. The 3 year contract, high rate plans, it’s money for jam, not to mention they have no competition why would you make your plans cheap? I’ve worked for a telecommunications company for 7 years and trust me the one thing that drives good pricing is competition and Rogers has none.

So blame who you will, it’s unfortunately not going to change the fact that there’s little to no iPhones out there today and you’ll most likely be waiting another week to get a “Jesus Phone” in your hands. Sorry Canada.

Now I’m hardly the type of guy to complain (stop laughing) so rather than relay my lovely, fun-filled plane ride half way around the world I thought I’d point out a little discovery I’ve made here only one day into my Canadian journey. It’s hot; it’s mother frakin’ hot; so fraking hot that I’m a tad worried that I might have gotten off in the wrong country or something?!

To all those people that constantly took pleasure in reminding me just how cold it was going to be here in Canada I say “You were wrong bitches!”. Now I take no pleasure in pointing out this fact, nor am I enjoying the fact that today Toronto bear fruits to it’s hottest June day in recorded history! Thank you global warming! Maybe that Al Gore guy is on to something after all?! Hmmmm…

It wasn’t that bad really (33 degrees with 47% humidity), I wore jeans after all, but that may have had something to do with the fact that I only bought one pair of shorts with me and when I pulled them out they kinda needed a wash. That in mind I waded through the steaming heats and went downtown to the Eaton Centre to buy a new pair of shorts only to come back with new shorts, a belt, a new jumper, a prepaid phone (it was cheaper to buy a $70 phone that came with $50 free credit than a SIM separately for $40 and $50 credit) and a bag of Doritos! Ahhhh what a day.

Well that’s all so far folks, I’ll leave you with this photo showing off the view from my quite lovely hotel room…

I’m a public transport user, it’s not something I’m particular proud of, nor ashamed for that matter; after all it’s saving the environment blah, blah, insert tree-hugging-soliloquy-here. The point is, and trust me I am getting to one, is that by being a public transport user you’re privy to some of the world’s more annoying and unhygienic (that’s another story all together) traits.

Lets ignore the fact that talking on your mobile phone whilst in a crowded public place is down right rude, obnoxious and always results in the person talking in excess of ten times the volume of a 747 engine less than a metre from your ear drum for just a second and examine the latest fashion of annoyance by utilizing your phone’s whizz bang speaker phone functionality.

Most phone’s these days have the ability to use them in a “hands-free” mode where the caller’s voice is pumped out for all to hear and the phone’s microphone is turned up a notch to capture your own voice the general idea being that the phone is not right next to your mouth. Makes perfect sense really, the functionality was ideally created so that you could use your phone in your car (legally) even though that too is now counted as illegal in South Australia, requiring your car to be equipped with a completely separate hands free device. What completely bemuses me, and this is where we get to this post actually meaning something, is why people feel the need to use their “speaker phone” in public places? Why would I or anyone else within a hundred feet feel the need to hear both ends of your conversation let alone just your side?!! If you absolutely *have* to take the call turn off the speaker you f@#king moron!

I might add that this isn’t limited to public transport by any means, lately I’ve seen it around every shady corner I turn. It makes no sense, these people hold the phone less than two inches from their mouths to ensure the person on the other end hears them properly so why not exert yourself that little extra and put the bloody thing next to your ear and save the world from your rather boring life. (OK, so that’s harsh, but someone has to make a stand here!)

The only thing more dumb (although slightly less annoying to everyone around you) is seeing people with the older style handsfree kits (you know, the ones that use a cord to attach to your phone and have a microphone about 3/4 of the way up that then leads on to an earpiece) and they have their phone in one hand whilst the other one has the microphone portion of the cord held up to their mouths because the thing cost $5 out of a discount bin and has the listening reach of an 93 year old woman that was born deaf! Unplug the stupid handsfree kit and put the phone up to your head, you’re just as likely to get testicular cancer as you are brain! Grrr!!

We’re all fairly aware that Apple’s implementation of Bluetooth in the iPhone is retarded to say the least. At this point in time Apple has limited the iPhone to doing nothing more than pairing with a Bluetooth headset, and even then that seems to be difficult for some of your more “independent” accessory manufacturers. Features like file transfer, computer syncing or even talk-thru that you can find on any two-bit phone these days are AWOL and we’re all still waiting for a postcard!

You’ve got to ask yourself why Apple has limited the iPhone’s Bluetooth capabilities so much so lets pop the shoe on the proverbial “other foot” for a moment. The iPhone is designed on top of the iPod, yes we all thought we’d have the ability to sync those wirelessly by now too but it was never going to be over Bluetooth. Bluetooth’s transfer rate is so pathetic transferring 8GB of music & video would take you an entire weekend and that’s provided the connection actually stayed active. With that in mind you could still sync contacts & calenders via Bluetooth but if you’re plugging it in to do music why would you want to sync it a 2nd time for your contacts? Apple have done the right thing keeping everything in one place under iTunes even if it does put iSync out in the cold.

When it comes to file transfers, Apple doesn’t even let you browse an iPhone when it’s connected via a cable or on your wi-fi network (well, until you hack it yourself) so why would they want to give you access via Bluetooth? You could argue that’s fine, but what about iPhone to iPhone transfers? I can only put this one day to security, the last thing Apple want is some script kiddie writing a Bluetooth virus that renders every phone it connects to useless.

OK, Apple Fan-Boy hat off now. There is one Bluetooth connectivity area that I think Apple have really dropped the ball on when it comes to the iPhone. Do you remember way back when Address Book got all cuddly with your phone and iSync was running a high pulling and pushing your contacts to that brand new Sony Ericsson T610 you’d just bought? Well there was also the fantastic ability to pair the phone with your Mac and send text messages (SMS) to any of your contacts with a mobile phone number from your computer! Not to mention when you received a new SMS it would pop up on the screen and you’d could reply promptly without having to lift your hands from the keyboard. Where’s my SMS functionality Apple? You wrote Address Book, I’m pretty sure you made the iPhone and wrote OS X’s Bluetooth bits too but I can’t even pair the thing with my computer let alone send an SMS through it! Come on guys, someone’s dropped the ball big time here! My brand new US$399 iPhone has less integrated ability than my four year old Sony Ericsson.

Oh and P.S. Apple, the T610 it did MMS too!

I *love* Guitar Hero (or as I like to call it “The Heterosexual Man’s Singstar” *). To this date there hasn’t been a game, on any platform, that I’ve returned to as many times as I have with Guitar Hero. It really doesn’t matter how much of an idiot you might look like thumping away at a tiny plastic guitar that’s more likely to have been manufactured by Fisher-Price than Fender because for those few precious moments I am The-Rock-God and you will bow to my power of awesome-ness!

So with all that praise and admiration for myself Guitar Hero why wouldn’t I want the next imminent edition of this fantastic saga? Well you see, like many things in the world, I have a little problem with the Guitar Hero franchise. Personally I feel, as a game, there’s not a lot more that you can really add on in terms of gameplay. You plug in your guitar, you watch pretty coloured balls of light float down the screen and you do your best to co-ordinate your fingers pressing the same coloured buttons on your plastic axe, that’s pretty much the description on the box word for word. No really, it is… I’m sure that’s what it said.

The point is there isn’t much else to change or do; before you know it the developers try and lure you with fanciful ideas like having “battles” (ask any Guitar Hero fan boy about that and you’ll quickly find a unison feeling of hatred) and see the game incorporate tangents off a core functionality that works and is what people want. Sure, all the little additions haven’t been complete waste of time, and with the advent of “Rock Band” it wont be long before Guitar Hero will no doubt join the multi-faceted instrument world of its new competitor, but again it’s pretty much the same coloured blobs and timing.

If that’s the case then the only real desire for me purchase any new iteration of Guitar Hero is purely to gain access to a new range of new tracks that I can jump around the lounge room to, staring in my own personal sold out concert for one. In this my friends is where my problem ensues… Each Guitar Hero disc contains a range of songs, some you like more than others and some you only play once to get past them to finish the game and gain those precious Gamerscore points (you gamer-whore you!). What I’ve come to quickly learn is that there’s tracks on GHII that I really enjoy playing, Freebird for example, and occasionally I want to jam out it but the GHIII disc is in my xBox’s drive and now I’ve got to stand up and switch discs and re-load the game, blah, blah. OK, so doing it once isn’t too bad, but now I want to play 3’s & 7’s so it’s a disc switch again… and again… and again… and… well I’m sure you get my point.

It’s pretty annoying, I mean I can understand that a disc is a disc and that’s what’s stored on the thing, but when you buy tracks for GHII online which are stored on your console’s drive why can’t they be read by GHIII too? Have the guys at Red Octane changed the track’s code/format that much after their bust up with Harmonix? Come on people, a little thing called “backwards compatibility” springs to mind (even if I could care less about it on a console, that’s another story kids).

This is my big solution to make the new Guitar Hero 4 worth while as a purchase for little-old-me. Give me a disc, hell I’ll even pay double and take another plastic guitar too, for a game that works just as well and as fun as the others before it with a whole bunch of new tracks and low and behold it can read (at the bare minimum) all of my paid for downloaded tracks from GHII & GHIII. Now that would be great, but to make it awesome give me the ability to pop in my previous copies of Guitar Hero and copy those tracks to my drive and play them in GHIV too! Yeah!! That idea kicks royal arse! Sure there’d need to be some security, copyright bullshit so you can’t just have your mate pop around with their old disc and leech the tracks, I get that, but figure that shit out dudes, I’m the ideas man!

So there you have it, my idea for selling a ba-jillion copies of GHIV and perhaps even providing a reason to back-sell a crap load of old stock out there. I’m sure it’ll probably never happen though, and you know what, I’m pretty sure, come the later half of the year when the new version does come out, I’ll be one of the millions of consumers out there that add that game to my shelf right next to it’s older sisters regardless of my dreams coming true or not.

ROCK ON!

* Before you start sending the flame emails let me just clarify that in by saying that it doesn’t mean homosexual people wouldn’t enjoy Guitar Hero just the same as heterosexual people. I just don’t do Singstar… regardless of how drunk I get. lol.

Quite often I find myself walking down the street at any particular random time of the day in any just as random city approached by complete strangers who want to know if I’m the guy behind this website. More often than not almost immediately after I’m approached I also get to meet the warm embrace of their open palm or on particularly lucky occasions I have a more hard, clenched fist approach to the upper bridge of my nose further perpetuating my never ending quest to join the crooked likes of Hollywood greats such as Adrien Brody or Owen Wilson. You see, just in case you hadn’t figured it out already, these “fans” are in fact random persons who have no knowledge of myself and are probably wondering just who is this weirdo and why on earth should I know him?

Whilst the previous scenario may be entirely fictional it does provide a rather convenient segue into this particular post’s topic of who actually reads this blog? Someone must, there’s a few hundred hits every week and judging by the wonderful world of web statistics you’re pulled in from all corners of this big round ball I like to call “Earth”. So what I thought would be an interesting social experiment that I’m sure a tiny, tiny majority of you may partake in would be to ask you, the reader, to comment at the bottom of this article and tell me a little about yourself. I mean it’s only fair, you know all about me and my petulant ways why not tell me a little somethin’, somethin’ (to borrow a phrase from the kids these days) about your bad self!

“But Raj, what is it that you want to know about me?” I hear you painstakingly asking yourself. It’s OK my child, don’t fret I will help you out by providing some wonderfully well rounded and scientifically deduced questions below this very paragraph of all places! All you need to do is copy and paste them into the comments field and fill in the blanks! Ready?? Here we go…

The Questions about your “bad self”

• What is your name?
• Where are you from? (ie. City/Country)
• Do you know Raj in the real world and not just in a stalking online fashion type of way?
• Two part question… Do you come here often? Can I buy you a drink? Hang on; 2nd part applies to females only.
• Why is it that you’re reading this? Work that boring?
• What would you like me to write about more/less?
• How many roads must a man walk down before he can call himself a man?
• Tell me something interesting, anything… quickly, first thing that just zipped through your head!

There you go, they’re not hard at all are they?! To prove it I’m going to answer them myself to show you exactly what I’m expecting from you…. oh and if you’re wondering how to get to the comments section you need to click on the article’s title to take you to the right page.

When I was a kid I always struggled with the concept of “New Years”. You see I saw the calendar of twelve months as a linear path, you travel in a straight line through time from January to December and once you hit the 31st that’s it, year over. The problem wasn’t in that logic but more so the fact that after December 31 it was once again January. Calendars weren’t round like the clock hanging on the wall of my bunk-bed adorning room. Clocks made sense, you went in a circle, years were straight. I always imagined that there was this strange Euclidean time period between the end of the year just gone and the start of the new, some sort of time spatial U-turn the universe made to allow it to travel all the way back to January 1st. What made my mind explode just that little bit more causing me to start dripping blood from my nose Butterfly Effect style was if the universe had to travel all the way back to January how on earth did it do it so freakin’ quickly when it took us 365 days to trudge through the year. Had I been alive in the days of Magellan or Columbus I dare say I would’ve been your typical ham sandwich pitchfork farmer burning witches and waiting for some poor bastard to sail of the edge of the earth because he was some crackpot that thought the world was round.

Needles to say I was quite young when I thought like that, you get a little older you learn about orbits, the year being another circle of the sun, blah, blah, yadda, yadda. Boring science, I like my idea better; you try and get a four year old to create their own time/space theories! I was a special child.

So how does all this relate to the year that is soon to be passed, 2007. Well… it probably doesn’t really, but I thought it best to share a nice story rather than swear through this entry entirely about how much of a shit year it’s been and that no matter who I’ve talked to they all say the same. I don’t know what it is (actually no that’s a lie, I do know, but I’m not sharing so there!) but boy did this year suck the cock meat sandwich (Harold & Kumar 2 reference… watch trailer here). I truly hated this year; even with my world trip I am gladly leaving this year in the past!

To mark this rather dubious celebration of crapness I wanted to do something a little different than highlighting what I believe are my favourite movies, TV shows, and similar junk that every man & his blog (I say man because 99% are done by nerds) will do and never be read. Whilst I’m most certainly not under the illusion that millions will read my blog either it will none the less be entertaining and cathartic for myself.

It is with belated breath and great pleasure that I present to you… Raj’s list of stuff for 2007 (very similar to the Raj-makes-up-categories TV Awards)

Most annoying thing of the year - People on Public Transport
I could devote a yearlong expose on how much the persons occupying space on any form of public transport truly shit me to tears but I’ll try and keep it brief today. I’ve got no beef with public transport itself, as in the actual physical thing that gets you from A to B, it would be a fantastic system if I was the only person using it at any time of the day and I didn’t have to put up with the seemingly endless sea of frigtards (see next award) that don’t cover their mouths to cough & sneeze, that stink, that are just purely nuts and that don’t make room for anyone to get on! I fucking hate public transport, and if any of you write a comment saying “buy a car then” I’ll personally send the crazy air gun guy from No Country for Old Men after you.

Word/Saying of the year - frigtard
Whilst the rest of the world can go on believing that the geek word “w00t” is somehow cool now because all the frigtards out there are now online using Facebook or MySpace and can speak like a 12 year old kid playing Halo 3 for sixteen hours straight on his Xbox I will break from the collective sheep and personally elect another completely made up word that I have already used in this paragraph. Frigtard (pronounced frig – tard)
Frigtard is a word that I believe was made up by this guy who wrote a blog pretending to be Steve Jobs (well that’s where I found it anyway). The word (if you haven’t guessed this already) is a derivative of two, frigging (used as a euphemism for ‘fuck’ according to Apple’s Dictionary app) and retard (a politically incorrect way of saying moron). Ergo all people on public transport are frigtards. See what I did there, tying it back into the previous award, clever!

Best procrastination tool of the year - Guitar Hero
I’m extremely tempted to put the Internet as the winner of this award but I spent a month without that and one of the only things that kept me from doing anything productive during the solemn period was Guitar Hero 3. That and not only did I get Guitar Hero 3 this year but I also bought number 2 earlier on and haven’t stopped playing both of them since. When you haven’t got time to spare but you really don’t want to do what you’re supposed to be doing than this is the tool for you! Sit back and watch the hours literally disappear and your impending unemployment become ever closer.

Worst moment of the year - Being overseas when I should’ve been at a funeral
Had a couple of things happened in January instead of December 2006 this little award would’ve been completely different but as it turned out they just happened a little too early and basically made this year shit. Anyway that didn’t happen in 2007 but this one did. So I was overseas, sitting around Paris enjoying myself as you do in Paris when I find out that an old friend of mine has passed away. Shit in itself but the next two weeks I spent trying to get home early to attend a funeral and unfortunately couldn’t do it. It sucked; I still feel shit about it.

Best moment of the year - Watching Ice Hockey in Toronto
Just to prove I’m not a complete pessimist I thought I’d better balance things out with the best moment of the year. Sitting in the Air Canada stadium watching the Toronto Maple Leafs and some other team (I forget) play live was just awesome! I’m not really good at talking about stuff I actually enjoy or like so I don’t really have much else to say other than it was like I was a kid again just having fun!

2008 Resolutions - None
Making a New Year Resolution is just a stupid idea. Anyone that hasn’t figured that out by now is either five years old or has the brain of a five year old. If you want to do something or make a change in your life do it right then and now, don’t wait for some special date because it will never last my dear kiddies.

A special thanks to all the people that have contributed to this year sucking so much; you know who you are. I couldn’t have been so bitter and dry without your help and without your shit I’d have nothing to write about. True I might be to blame for a lot of it myself but in true Raj fashion I’ll blame others. hehe.

In all seriousness though, I hope everyone has a great year in 2008. Thank you for reading my ramblings throughout 2007, perhaps if I find a girlfriend any time soon you wont be subjected to them anymore! Hehe. Au Revoir.

Well everyone it’s getting very, very close to that time of year again and with only a few more sleeps until some fat bastard in a bright red suit of commercialism funnels his way down your chimney (or through your living room window or however you’ve described to your children’s young and impressionable minds) and places a collective of junk beneath your tree. “Presents” that you’ll smile at wryly pretending to be surprised or impressed at, oh and perhaps the useful gift of a digital camera that will come in extremely handy in about 24 hours when you start putting the unwanted on eBay.

Now, now, that’s hardly the spirit is it? And believe it or not that’s not the entire truth as to how I look at Christmas. I’m actually not a complete prick when it comes to the festive season, in fact I’d consider myself quite the opposite. Yes, I’m sure this may shock you all a tad but I’m a sucker for this holiday and not at all because it has anything to do with getting presents. I enjoy Christmas; prepare yourself for this…. I enjoy Christmas for the time I get to spend with my family and the presents I get to give!

Whilst the whole cluttered shopping, putting up shitty tinsel and singing carols basically makes me dry reach ten times a day for the six weeks leading up to the holidays I do enjoy the elation of buying presents for my family. I take a great deal of care in ensuring I’m not rushing around at the last minute buying some piece of shit from an airport newsagent before I fly home for the actual day. I enjoy nutting out the ideal gift and as annoying as that can be sometimes to see their face as they tear open that parcel (mutilating what took you fifteen minutes to wrap ever so delicately in a little under five seconds) and it’s exactly right is more reward than any present you can receive.

I’d say I was a lucky kid, we always had great Christmas days with a whole bunch of relatives and regardless of anything that was going on behind doors Christmas was a time to put that aside and enjoy the fact we had each other. Whilst, unfortunately, the family has thinned and scattered over the years I still get to spend it with my immediate family by travelling to Adelaide and seeing them all at once is a present worth travelling countries let alone interstate for.

When it all comes down to it I guess what I’m trying to say is that Christmas, I believe, is a time to put aside any differences you might have. Reach out and embrace those that are special to you and be thankful for what you have; or rather, far more importantly who you have in your life!

To everyone out there in Internet land have a wonderful Christmas and happy holidays.

Be safe.