Before you think the rant has been beaten out of this ageing old rug with a broomstick, and I was beginning to think so myself, think again.

I landed in Nice today for a conference in Cannes. I know this sounds exotic, but it's not. Nice looks, well, nice. Something is nice when it's not interesting. It is closely related to Blackpool and Durban, it's Durban in the late seventies with a twist of lime and a dash of Redbull. It's sickly sweet, caffeinated and tastes like shit. Too many graying old farts with ebony prostitutes and too much wearing of white. It's trashy, Las vegas à la française by the sea. There are shops providing lip tattoos and botox for the ladies, in plain view, lunch hour treatment.

The whole experience is a blast because it's a business expense, I'm officially here on a business trip for a software conference, so if you want to call it work, be my guest. The day consisted of a reception where we, the valued customers, the delegates got to mingle with each other and exchange fascinating technical jargon; 'So, how have you deployed your metadata integrator?'

I entertained myself by conducting a small critique on the canapes, which weren't bad since I went back for seconds and thirds. The wine was not bad either and I met up with a few old colleagues, we all joked about how the good old days were over and how hard life was. I was invited to dinner on a private beach for the Swiss delegates which was, well, nice; as in not very interesting. Once again I entertained myself with a small critique on the food. The food was good and the wine was superb.

My colleague from Cologne was interesed in investigating the nightlife in Cannes, which one would expect to be riveting and debauched, sadly it was neither. The only place we could find was an Irish pub, Morrisons. We decided to ask the very good looking blonde barmaid where the nightlife was and as the complex algorithm began to work her two blonde braincells into an answer, we realised we were not going to get one, it was clearly too much to ask. A drunk Frenchman, now the only thing more unreliable than a Frenchman is a drunk Frechman, decided he would direct us to 'downtown'. His directions consisted of 'Zis way zen zat way and Tack Tack Tack. I shit you not.

A few more propositions later led me to believe that what he was thought was nightlife was infact some paid for sex. We found ourselves back on the seafront with nothing to do. I proposed that we go back to hotel as my motto is if sleep is better than what you are doing at the time, then that's what you should be doing, sleeping. We found a series of bars and entered one of them. Another blonde in Burberry opened the door to let us in to the cavern of deceipt. We order two beers, pay 20 Euros and get on with it. I'm elsewhere because I can't hear a fucking thing except Eurocrap being pumped out of the sound system. I get the urge to ram a 1500W speaker down the throat of the Disk Jockey/Idiot to see what kind of output I can get. There's a group of alpha idiots chasing tequila slammers, they've hit the happy stage of drunkeness and they're hugging eachother, the love is all around. I fumble in my pockets for a spare handgranade, pull the pin and slam it down the throat of Alpha Idiot number one. My beer is nearing empty and we realise we never got any change back. 2 beers can't cost 20 Euros so we query with barman who conveniently doesn't understand a word we're saying. We get the messages through to him, short of drawing pictures and saying 'donnez moi 10 euros, cunt'.

He compensated the attempted theft with two free shots of Cointreau after which he stole our lighter. It appears the only thing more untrustworthy than a drunk Frenchman in Cannes is the place that's making him drunk.

Back to the hotel for some sleep. I shall report back.

The cracks in Winter's face have appeared, her frozen mask has been shattered and spliced by the Sun. High Spring is here, it's beautiful. The turning gravel can be heard as lifelessness picks itself up and dusts down, brushing away the cobwebs of introspection and cryogenic contemplation that gathered in its wintery grave.

Saturday met me with warmth. I turned the steel shutters outside my bedroom window to let slender beams of light squeeze through, enough not to blind me but enough to mimic the rings of Saturn on my wall. Shades of gray vying for sparkle and brilliance splashed on the wall, dust particles float as if suspended by time. It's magical.

It would be a shame to let the day pass without making the most of it and since nothing in Switzerland is very far away from anything else we decide on a train journey to Luzern.

Perhaps I’ll continue, in a more factual manner to write. Please note that if I do it will be for my own personal record. Going back and reading one or two years ago, even though it was in a more detailed and embellished way makes me see the value in writing it all down. So much slips through the cracks and the slightest whiff can spark the memory to pick up a scent on the time and place, who and where we were.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly things can change, the pace of things causes life to streak and blur. As exilirating as it is there should be no need to let the delicious moments get lost in time or blend into the ever increasing span of our conscious collage. If we want to measure our place in time, we need givens, constants and variables. Take our past as a constant, our present as a given and the future as the variable.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera

It was pointed out to me that my last two posts contained, or started off with '... has come and gone...' - One of the occasions being Christmas and the other my birthday. I'm not sure if this is of any significance, that my life should now be measured by the arrival and departure of occasions.

The weekend came and went. My mother arrives tomorrow for a vist, she'll leave on Friday. I'm telling you this so that I don't repeat myself next Monday by writing that my beloved Maman has come and gone.

I have been experiencing a lull of late. I'm not sure if it's the weather that has been heavy and looming, the skies are constantly overcast, cloudy and gray. Climatic pressure that makes me feel lethargic, listless and in need of sleep therapy. I haven't had a holiday in the sun for a year now and even that wasn't a holiday enough, two weeks is simply not enough.

The rant is gone, in general, out of life. Maybe it's just dormant, sleeping and gargling through a long dream, nightmare maybe, getting ready to wake with furious anger when it shall then set upon any willing or unwilling subject for a roasting. I can't say it's the Alps and that there might be some magnetic force for the good of all peace and calm... now I'm talking shit. They say in Cape Town that the mountain, the mahntain is a great big lump of magnetized crystal or granite, that its effect is one of peace and calm, tranquility. This might ring true for all the Caep-Tahn-fully-mah-bru types having a toke on its sides every day. But what about all the others down in its shadow, stabbing and robbing, raping and pillaging. Make no mistake it's a wonderful city, but there's just too much shit going on for there to be any fucking mahntain force that governs peace and harmony.

My girlfriend thinks this is funny...

My birthday has come and gone and for the first time that I can recall, someone has placed me younger than I am. I got an SMS from my brother who told me that I was no longer a spring chicken, the big 32. A year younger than I am. So what should I do? Lie down and wait to die? It's all a matter of perception, since my boss told me that I was exactly that, a spring chicken. I'll go with the boss on this one.

I think culture shock is kicking in as I can't sleep. This has been going on for nearly two weeks. My dreams are more like nightmares and of the broken record variety. They get stuck in a meaningless loop and I'm aware of it. I'm asleep enough not to be able to get up and try to clear my mind and I'm awake enough to know I'm stuck in a loop and that I'm not really asleep.

I listen to the hurdly-gurdly of Swiss German around me, everything I see makes sense and it's all easy enough to traverse. I think moving on is easy, it's what you leave behind that's hard. The process of forgetting, not forever, but the little habits and trivial nuances that were once steadily part of our lives, are gone and are slowly being replaced by new ones.

I like new, I love it, it's refreshing. But that doesn't mean I can't wait to get up in the morning and get on with it. It'll pass, I'll adjust, we're animals and that's what we do, we survive. Besides, it's not like I've landed in dangerous territory, this place is the benchmark of civilization.

I bought myself a present, a nice big laptop. This way I can keep up the writing, capture these thoughts and process them, channel them into something else even. Although things are going to heat up at work and keep me busy, I don't see myself doing things like spending dedicated time with the idiot box. I don't understand any of it. Although this can be entertaining enough sometimes when you can indulge in a bit of making up your own dialogue. There is only so much time one can spend mindlessly flicking through crap. When I've got my apartment I'll be able to get the BBC channels, my umbilical chord to the Anglicised world.

Books are good, even the bad ones. I bought a pile of books at the corporate book sale, 5 Francs for 3 books so if the title read in English it went in the bag. I can report on the worst book I've ever read, other than 'The Celestine Prophecy' - who's readers should be rounded up and publicly flogged. The bad book in mention is called 'Bikini Planet'. It's about a cop in Las Vegas circa 1969 who is criogenically frozen by the mob for 300 years. When he emerges from his antique pod all this time later, much to his surprise everything has changed. And so he embarks on the worst space journey ever. I bought it for the blurb on the front of the book that said 'A billion monkeys working on a billion typewriters for a billion years couldn't have come up with this one' (Paul J. McAuley, remind me to skin him with sandpaper and paint stripper later) - it didn't take me long to discover that this was true. All those monkeys on all those typewriters, given a lot less time would in fact come up with something much better.

I think there should be an investigation into who writes these comments on the front of books. My bet is that they are false, made up by the drunk janitor in publishing houses. They forgot that in the evolutionary scheme of things we are those monkeys after millions of years and that any one of us could do better. So David Garnett, if you're reading this, your book is the worst I've ever read. To tell you how bad it is, I'm proud to say that I put it down and left it to gather dust some five pages before the end. I am ashamed of myself for having made it that far. You sir need to evolve as a writer or leave the fucking typewriter alone. Your work is not fit
for monkeys. To Mr Paul J. McAuley who wrote the blurb and who appears to be a writer himself, shame on you for having to stoop so low for payment. I shall make a point of never reading any of your books for fear of them being equally primitive. Paul J. McAuley should be publicly flogged as well.

I left a review of the book on Amazon, perhaps this is my new calling, perhaps this is one way I can make a difference, If I can stop at least one person from reading such crap, I will have saved a life. Apparently I was not the only one who thought it was a total waste of time, I'm the in the majority. One other review muskateer called it Froth. You have to love that.

I feel much better now.

As you know I’ve moved to Zürich, so far so good. It’s been a relatively smooth transition with the new company pushing the boat out, red carpet on board, to make sure I settle in and stay. With the costs involved in finding and keeping competence these days, it’s what they have to do.

I was very happy to get rid of my last corporate owner. Middle-management was the order of the day with generous helpings of pathetic process and general chaos on the side. You can only see things clearly once you move on, and since I’ve been gone I’ve realised just how bad things were with in-fighting, managerial bitches ready to scratch eachother’s eyes out in order to preserve their own little piece of the non-existent pie. It was a case of dying embers and who in the hierarchy was going to get pole position to keep their little asses warm and safe from the cold winds of change.

It’s funny how environments and situations carry themselves away. My last corporate owner was caught up in its own vortex, a dog chasing its own tail, a sick dog that needs to be put down and laid to rest by the great corporate vet. The company is booming on the NASDAQ, but the little people, the fraying ends who don’t matter at all are blinded by the dark hyponotics cascaded down from above. The little people believe that they are vital parts of the machine, that they count, that they matter, that they are important and irreplaceable. It’s only human to want to feel that you have made a difference, that what you’ve done matters,that you leave some legacy of contribution. It’s sad however that in this industry, IT, everything we work with is virtual, nothing really exists, nothing has a lifespan beyond 6 months – nothing really matters. So let’s all get a bit of perspective, get our heads out of our assholes and look at ourselves objectively, I am of course referring to my previous corporate owner. We are shit that doesn’t matter.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Christmas has come and gone. Another one, another year-end looms and I look back with a sense of momentum and achievement, we learn from our mistakes. A year ago I started a new job that I saw myself in for at least 3 years but in the process I managed to exceed my expectations and jump the gun, I only had to serve a minimum of the time and I now roam amongst the Swiss. Slick bankers and their fur-lined wives who’s only worrry in life is what to buy next. Marvellous.

I spent Christmas in Basel with Alex’s family. It was a warm Christmas with plenty of good food, vin chaud, foie gras, aspic, sauternes, turkey stuffed with rabbit, liver and chestnuts, gratin cardon, pommes dauphinous and panetone. All of the above making great boxing day sandwiches and picky things. I felt self-obliged to accompany the family to church on Christmas eve. I did this for 3 reasons, 1) why not? 2) it would be strange to leave the boyfriend at home alone 3) in some fateful booze-fuelled accident I might have set fire to the tree and presents. It was the safest thing to do so for once I saught refuge in a Church.

The church was old and dark, lit only by candlelight as they were doing their bit for the environment by not using electricity. At one point we had to go forward and gather in a great big silent circle. A robed man came round offering bits of bread to the crowd, I stood behind, outside of the circle as I thought in circle language this would indicate that I was not intending to partake in the meal, I had just eaten half a turkey and was already about to burst. I held onto the piece of bread that was thrust upon me until Alex asked what I was going to do with it. Was I going to wait for it to become a doughy mess and then make little things with it? was I going to throw it on the floor? Did she want it? So I put the argument of what the little piece of bread represented beghind me and swallowed it. As the congregation stood in contemplative silence and the deafening silence resounded like white noise through the great big hall, the little piece of bread got stuck, my solar plexus went into a spasm and one almighty hiccup sprang forth. It started a fit of giggles that left tears streaming down my face and me looking for the nearest exit.

All in all it was a good weekend. I am over fed and over rested. I’m back at work now getting ready for a visit from the auld scotch piss artist next week.I’m looking forward to it.