Phil's Blog

I arrived on Thursday evening and had dinner with my brother and his girlfriend, called Catherine. Actually, we had a few drinks first and booked a table at a nice steak place while we waited for her to turn up.

Friday morning I was in a bad way, and lay on the sofa with a headache and massive nausea till about 3 pm, and I spend some of the time watching UKTV history and some of the time lying there and feeling sorry for myself. Then we saw our first show: The Local Stigmatic: a dog racing enthusiast and his friend decide to attack a minor celebrity A Clockwork Orange -style (crap).

After this is was time to have a few more drinks, so we went to a pub that was hosting free shows for the festival and saw The Decaffination of Kofi Annan, mainly because it had a funny title. The show was a Welsh comedian telling jokes (reasonable).

There are thousands of shows on each day, so our usual method is to anchor the weekend with a few good shows that we want to see, and then plan the others on the fly depending on what is on a what time and how good the title is, although we obviously then check the review...just in case it's helpful.

So, after this and after dinner we saw a headline event at the Teviot, which was 2-for-1 tickets. Stephen K Amos: a chat-show style event with various comedian friends. This turned out to be nothing special, especially the singer that they kept overly lauding and getting sing tuneless dirges. We only saw this because Jihad – The Musical was cancelled at the last minute.

That night I avoided the whisky, so the next morning (Saturday) we were up early enough to discuss my how my brother's economic politics had veered to the right after he read (and agreed with) The Road to Serfdom. We then went with one of his friends to another free show in a pub called Hare Krishna and The Philosopher's Stoned. I admit that this was my choice. An ex-hippy talked about his experiences with a Hindu spiritualist in Goa...I suppose it left space for the shows to improve through the day – we wouldn't have wanted to climax too early.

After lunch we saw one of my brother's choices of shows: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – Survived? Mark has a soft spot for any show title with a question mark in it, and, to be fair, last year's Count Arthur Strong – The Musical? was well worth its extortionate ticket price. This show was about two people on a desert island who act stupid and go mad (or do they?). I can't remember what happens at the end, I think they just ran out of script unless there was something in the story that I missed.

Then we met with George, another friend of my brother's, for lunch at a fish place that does good seafood chowder. George told us we had to all go and see The Changeling. A lot of the changes going on were by the actors between scenes to the extent that we were never sure which actor was playing which character at any particular point. This, added to the 17^th century English, sparse props and lack of narrative made the play difficult to follow, but it was nevertheless entertaining. And, of course, the smaller the cast, the greater the spoils.

After all this it was time for some takeaway dinner at John and Kirstie's flat, where my brother is moving into in September sometime. George went with his parents to see some good play, while my brother decided that free comedy was the way to go again.

He took us to a place called The Phoenix, which turned out to be both a gay bar and full of drunk football hooligans. The place had an aggressive and unpleasant atmosphere in the downstairs part where the entertainment was on. Upstairs was better, but there was a strange gay man there who was convinced that my brother was Alan Carr, a fairly ugly gay comedian.

Still intact the next day, my brother had another friend up from Newcastle, so with George and some others there was quite a large group. Large groups tend to inertia, so after lunch in a pub watching football we didn't get to see anything until The Physicists at about 5 pm. This was my choice and was an enjoyable play that is apparently also funny in German.

Our headline event for the day was Andrew Lawrence – Social Leprosy for Beginners and Improvers. Lawrence is an old school friend of mine that I remember sitting next to in French, but, unfortunately, he was all that funny then. He taught from the heart about being a social leper and told some unnecessarily offensive jokes...overall brilliant – I'm even a member of the Andrew Lawrence group on Facebook.

We met up at a pub after this and George made us see something from the dance and physical theatre section of the programme with 2-for-1 tickets: Astronomy for Insects. Suffice it to say that I'm not really well into this genre, so I didn't really understand why people in silver suits had to walk backwards in a funny way or why Santa Claus had to be beaten by the crutches he gave to the crippled child or why they couldn't have bought a more expensive sound card for the music. A stiff whisky or two were required afterwards.

Labels: comedy, edinburgh, festival, mark, theatre

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Labels: distant heat, holiday, jordan, Petra

Although just now some sort of party has just entered the hotel in Amman as I write this and they have started banging drums and singing, which is most distracting.

First off, I visited all the main sites of Larnaka: the fort, the archaeological museum and some ruins. They were all fairly mediocre. So I had lunch and spent the rest of the 3 days here on the beach.


Then I went to Amman on Friday, and everything went to plan. I spent the afternoon looking round the Temple of Hercules and the adjoining National [this time] Archaeological Museum. This museum was equally small and I was about to tar it with the same brush as the other one when I read my guidebook and found out it had some really cool stuff in it from Jericho. Jericho is now in the Palestinian Authority. But they claim to have the oldest extant man-made statue (like 8000 years old) and the oldest surviving fresco. I think they may also have claimed to have the oldest skull from a burial site, but I may have mis-read that bit.

They also had all this stone-age pottery and early Bronze age pottery. It made the Greek and Roman stuff they had look modern and boring. I was quite impressed. The adjoining ruined fort from about 600 AD wasn't much to look at, tho'.

After that I went for a wander round part of the older central parts of Amman, and found it hard to get a taxi back, as no-one wanted to go to where my hotel was. Weird. When I did get into a taxi, the driver said they'd been messing about with the road layout and it was a nightmare to get anywhere from that district now...or something.

After failing to find anywhere civilised to eat, I had to make do with the hotel buffet. I didn't find anywhere for lunch today, and ended up eating there again at about 5 pm. I don't know where they hide the places where people get food here.

So today I saw the other half of everything there is to see in Amman. That would be the Roman Ampitheatre, Odeon and Forum site. Where I found a restaurant - a proper sized one - that wasn't doing food at 1 pm. I saw the Nymphaeum, which was in ruins. Then I looked round the gold market, which is apparently the cheapest place in the world to buy gold jewellery and sells silver from 40p/ounce...or gram or something. Then I saw the rest of the markets, the wantonly famous roundabouts known as the 1st, 2nd and 3rd circles and an English bookshop.

Labels: amman, holiday, jordan, museum

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Hi Phil-philes,



Last week most of Oslo had been booked-out for a NATO conference, so my secretary (she's not my secretary, but I like saying it) had to book me a room in a different hotel, the Hotel Bastion.


As I was in the taxi between the two places this afternoon, the driver said to me that the road we were on wasn't very safe at night. I kinda ignored him, deciding that I'd lived in places before that would easily be more dangerous than anything Oslo had to offer. So I checked-in to the hotel that was charging my company about £200/nt due to the inflated demand in the city (apparently, there are no rooms available anywhere).


The room was a little strange in that there were 2 TVs. The first was mounted so that it faced the bathroom door, the second was mounted in the bathroom above the toilet. One of my colleagues said that the latter was a fashion in some Asian hotels. I'm not at all convinced that I would like to meet the person who decided that a civilised night in a hotel demanded being to be able to see 2 TVs from your bathroom doorway. Nor did they have free internet or a wake-up call service. That said, maybe past experience had taught them not to disturb anyone watching 2 TVs from their bathroom.


They said the hotel had a buffet dinner, but, when I looked at 7:30, it didn't look all the salubrious or appetising – some sort of chicken and rice mix, and they had some cheese and fruit. So I decided to have a walk into downtown to see if there was anywhere better and to make the most of my expenses.


I was looking round for somewhere to eat, and I went round a corner, and a woman said something to me quietly in Norwegian, and I ignored her. I went round another corner onto the main road, and another woman said to me in English "Would you like six?" So it turns out my £200/nt hotel is in the red light district – useful to know where it is if I do want "six", but such thoughts were rather far from my mind as I walked quickly passed her, muttering a kind of "nurr" sound.


I went to an American-style sports bar I'd been to before and got a "Daytona" burger and 0.6l of beer. It was Chelsea v Liverpool in the Champion's League, so I had something to watch while I ate on my own at the bar.


After the first half, I decided, after the excitement of my journey there, that getting back to the hotel as early as possible might keep my story short enough to write. The road I had to walk back down had lots of small groups of blokes hanging around and not doing much. I walked as quickly as possible and tried to avoid eye contact, kind of knowing what they were up to, but it didn't stop one guy offering me "weed, speed, anything you like". And I'd got a non-smoking room, dammit! Apart from that, the no eye contact and fast pace, rather like you do going past people who try to stop you on the street, meant that I got back to my hotel without being molested.

Labels: bastion, drugs, oslo, prostitutes