Check in was smooth; Both flights arrived on time; The cabin was clean; I had decent enough legroom; And the plane didn’t suffer any loss of structural components. Rumours about a £1 charge to use the toilet were not true. Although there are plans to have passengers bring their own jet fuel.

Punctuality makes for good holidays but boring blog posts. Publishing bad news is preferable to good. But is it not better to celebrate the good rather than pull things down?

Complaints about Denmark

Amusingly, the Little Mermaid Statue in Copenhagen had been moved to Shanghai for the World Exhibition. However, I was convinced to go against the propaganda that it was worth seeing. I did not miss it.

In the end, the biggest disappointment was the terrible exchange rate, enough to turn Wagamamas from a cheap meal to a premium experience. Yes, I did travel hundreds of miles to a foreign culture to eat the same food. At least I refrained from my default choice of Chicken Katsu Curry. However, every other aspect was the same: the wooden benches, the menu, the chopsticks. The head waitress even sounded British. I might as well have been in London, except I was surrounded by a few Danes rather than hundreds of Canary Wharf yuppies. 

Ryanair, and Wagamamas, are actually quite good.

Old sleeping habits – Means staying up way past midnight; sleeping for more than 8 hours; sleeping in and afternoon naps. Bliss. However, I remember a journal a health economics journal which said that over-sleep was worse than sleep-deprivation for life expectancy.

Revision for an accountancy exam in two weeks. Actually, most of the course is self-study, so technically revision has not started yet. The recommended study guide is spread over three days, but assumes that you work for 10 hours a day.

Wii Mario Kart – This is the 4th iteration of Mario Kart that I have played (SNES, Gameboy Advance, Gamecube and Wii). A motion-sensing steering wheel is now the method of control. It takes time to learn how to use it after years of using a standard controller. Funnily enough when I first played Mario Kart on the SNES, I tried to tilt the controller in order to control the kart. (I wasn’t a smart 9 year old). Now technology has caught up with my childish intuition.

More time has been spent on Mario Kart than revision.

Snow isn’t fun anymore – Returning to Liverpool means I don’t have to use public transport and get to drive everywhere. However, it has been ridiculously cold and the roads have been frozen. Not being able to stop while going at 5mph is terrifying. Driving through snow for 20 miles is horrible. You trudge at 20mph without and sudden movements. You’re not sure if you or the car behind you can stop.

Snow isn’t fun anymore, but snowmen still are:

• Not leaving enough time to go to the post office and then finding a queue of ten people with only three staff working. This gives a ratio of 3.3. My personal rule is, if the ratio is more than 2 then it is not worth waiting. This rule does not apply at theme parks.
• I got to New Cross station and found late and cancelled trains. I really should have checked the National Rail website before I set off, but I had got used to the trains being very reliable. However, the combination of a new timetable and icy conditions meant that New Cross station had been like this all week. Ironically, the new timetable increased the frequency of trains.
• And I should have got a taxi back home. The train was slow and the walk home was covered in ice. Not easy with a suitcase.

Actually, writing about the journey home is an excuse for me to publish a photo which I took today:

While admiring the view, I asked the question: who got my work Secret Santa gift?

A bet for Liverpool to win the FA Cup AND for England to win the World Cup. I should be £125 richer at the end of July. As a clue, the accompanying card reads: “Miracles do happen at Christmas”.

Liverpool One Wheel

Liverpool was the end of a frantic week’s holiday. It started with a weekend trip to the South coast of England. I saw the channel for the first time. The calm white rolling waves can’t be found in the city.

The South Coast

Several friends commented that they would like to live in such a place. But not me, I’d be bored after a day. As annoying as London can be – the frantic pace and impersonal nature, it is addictively exciting. I do want to stay for a few more years at least. Friends have complained that London has caused them to feel abandoned in the North West. It’s a shame that the UK is so capital-centric, but the fact that it is London is compensation enough.

Let’s hope I don’t get burnt out soon.

This is not a photo of me at the ball. I still don’t own a (useable) camera. This was taken six years ago during a first year university ball. The photo is relevant because I still own the same bow tie.

Ball highlights

• Friends complaining about being 25. As a 24 year old I wasn’t among those complaining – but a six year old photo does makes you think.
• Random bidding on rounds of golf from someone who doesn’t own a set of clubs, play and lives 100 miles away from the course.
• Shouting “lower” on a charity auction is in bad taste (sorry).
• 1am is past my bedtime.
• Realising that we have no keys on the way home.
• Desperately ringing 118 118 for an emergency locksmith.
• And I quote “I’m sorry, but I’m going to try breaking into out own house before calling you back”
• Being hoisted into the kitchen extension roof by a guy with a broken wrist in a cast
• Climbing through the window, disabling the alarm, opening the front door, saving £70. Not priceless, but a welcome prevention of a depletion in net worth.

Stories like this can’t be bought.

I’ve been reading a book called “Killing Rommel” by Steven Pressfield. It’s a WWII fiction about the exploits of a crack British unit. There’s a line which says that the most important factor in winning or losing a war is morale. Yes, I am comparing accountancy exams to armed combat. I’m bloody hacked off and I feel like waving the white flag.

So I’m impelled to take a break, regroup and finish writing this long overdue blog post.

Water
All great cities are situated near some natural water feature. Beijing goes against this by being in the middle of a desert, but is still a great city. London has the River Thames and Toronto has Lake Ontario. Both are equally polluted. So the only way to judge which is better is to time how long you would survive a swim. In the River Thames you would be instantly killed by the River Boat. I’d take my chances against the radiation emanating from the nuclear power plant on the shore of Lake Ontario.

London 0 – Toronto 1

Number of Chinese People
For some reason, vast numbers of Chinese have made Toronto their home. The Chinatowns of both cities are pretty dire. However, Toronto wins because they sell cheaper bubble (tapioca) tea. 

London 0 – Toronto 1 – Liverpool 1 (because we have a better Chinatown with a much bigger arch)

Transport
Toronto’s roads are designed in an idiot-proof grid system. London’s roads require a Tom Tom to navigate, or a well trained black taxi driver. All Londoners moan about the tube, but the network is so extensive that two different shades of blue are needed for the map. Toronto has three lines and is crap.

London 1 – Toronto 1 – Liverpool -1 (I’ve just remembered how bad Merseyrail is)

Culture
Seriously? London hands down.

London 2 – Toronto 1 – Liverpool 0 (European Capital of Culture 2008 remember)

Global Warming Prospects
How would each city fare if the crackpot prophecies came true and the ice caps started to melt?

• Liverpool – floods
• Toronto – Also floods, and you will be attacked by radioactive moose
• London – Floods, unless you keep working in the office on the 17th floor while civilisation collapses around you. At least there won’t be a cooling problem on the Underground
• Beijing – is safe! Those ancient Chinese City planners were actually geniuses.

Final score

London 1 – Toronto 0 – Liverpool -1

And a million Scousers demand a recount.

Nottingham
My sister graduated, which coincided with a return trip to Nottingham. It was surreal walking past students house that friends used to live in. Now there are faded stories about the time we lit a bonfire in the garden and burnt things. (OK, that was just the once on the corner of Faraday Road / Derby Road).

Liverpool
Always good to see the guys, despite our increasingly busy schedules. It’s the last summer before everyone starts their adult jobs. Yes, the six-year medical degrees have ended, but not before the drunken press up with a 75kg Indian standing on your back contest. Sam beat Graham 4-0.

Luton
Where I audit and fix printers.

Angel (North London)
Most sane people are finished with exams after university. I even had a sadistic enjoyment from setting my English students tests. But I decided that I needed three years of professional exams in my life. It’s a constant and unyielding pressure. I’ve spent three weeks at college in Angel. I just found out that I passed the mock exams from last week. I don’t feel any satisfaction – it’s just relief.

Why do I do it? Obscenely ridiculous post-qualification salary.

Karaoke
Actually, the my real motivation for work is the chance to sing karaoke on a regular basis. I’ve sung Take That’s “Back for Good” three times in July. Happy times.

Now I’m off to Canada for two weeks holiday. They say that Karaoke is banned there. Unhappy times.

I was shocked to discover that there had been a Chinese Triad knife fight at one of my favourite Chinese retaurants – Chilli Chilli.

Chilli Chilli Restaurant

It’s made national and international news. Some links:

• The Sun
• The Daily Star
• Liverpool Echo – The original article in the Saturday Echo included an (impressive) misspelling of the proprietor’s name.
• Liverpool Daily Post
• Liverpool Click

The police wanted to shut down the restaurant. But that’s an irrational reaction.

• Statistically speaking, the triads aren’t likely to do the same thing twice. The restaurant is now safer than ever.
• A bouncer has been hired.
• The restaurant still offers the most authentic SiChuan food in the North-West.
• I’ll continue to go there and continue to invite my friends. I think I might be eating by myself.

Last Wednesday’s budget was shocking.

Over a pint of beer, my flatmate and I came up with some controversial measures:

Taxes Rises

The national debt is massive. Tax rises are inevitable. The alternative is to print money and inflate our way out of trouble (sound familiar?)

• The "Levi’s Tax" – tax on jeans with a waist size over 40 inches
• VAT to 20%
• Basic rate to 25% (OUCH OUCH OUCH)

Spending Cuts

Time to trim the fat.

• Cancel the Olympics – the money could be put to better use.
• Prescribe running shoes instead of medicine.
• Privatise schools and introduce a school voucher system. Efficiency savings all round.
• Cancel the £2000 rebate for cars – bad for the environment, everyone will still buy foreign cars anyway.
• No more agricultural subsidies. This is the real meaning of Fair Trade.
• Goodbye department for culture and sport.
• Cancel the aircraft carrier and issue everyone with a pitchfork.
• Cancel Christmas
• 99% pay cuts for junior doctors who once attended Merchant Taylors Boys School (sorry guys).

Tax Cuts

Tax cuts to stimulate the economy. Keynesian-style.

• Reduce employers National Insurance rate
• Give child benefits to schools to provide breakfast and free school uniforms
• Cancel the tax disc and increase fuel duty instead
• Cancel TV licence – expensive to administer.
• 50% tax on incomes over £1,000,000, not £150,000. I don’t think we should be scaring away the entrepreneurs.

Reforms

Reforms as a platform for the future. Monetarist-style.

• Massive investment in education
• Make engineering glamorous again
• More business/entrepreneurial education from an earlier age
• The environment – Carbon taxes, congestion charging

We sound like right-wing nuts. The other stuff wasn’t legal to publish. Suggestions?

Liverpool Football Club

This season is the closest that Liverpool have come to winning the league that I can remember. It has been a great season – plenty of goals and insane comebacks. But the hope of a league title died in a pub in Bath on Tuesday night. A great game, eight goals, but a 4-4 draw wasn’t the result that we needed.I had dared to hope in the past month, but I was disappointed again. There’s still a mathematical possibility, but I don’t want to hope again.

I’ll have to go back my dream of audit tests that pass and numbers that add.

The sequel to "Sleep Challenge" was born over the weekend: Sleep Challenge II: The Hundred Mile Challenge. My friend, Graham, and I have started jogging training. The first person to jog 100 miles wins £50. As ever, refer to the link for our progress.

Man-pride and money is at stake, so I expect this challenge to be hard fought. It’ll be useful training for the half-marathon and the day when expense cutbacks mean that we will have to run to the clients instead of using the train.

I’m focusing too much on the violence rather than the message behind the protests. I saw a map of potential targets that was intended for the protesters but got emailed to me. It was strange to see my firm highlighted on the map, not because it was unexpected but because I realised that I was on the other side. The G20 protesters were marching against capitalism, which includes me as well.

I’m unrepentant about being a "capitalist". I do believe that there is no better system. I also believe it is the fault of greedy individuals, rather than the system, who should be held accountable.  Unfortunately, greed is a natural human law, which is why we need law and regulations. In that respect, I do sympathise with the protesters. 

There is only one link between a photo that I took of Prague two years ago and an apparent misspelling of "America" – Franz Kafka. I could provide you a link to his Wikipedia page, but it’s getting late, so I expect you to Google it yourself (and I’m sure "to google" has entered the Oxford English dictionary).

I have nothing worth writing about, so I’ve resorted to writing GCSE-style book reviews. I’ve been trying to do something more productive than read the free newspapers during my daily commute. I used to be a proud Times reader when I was a student. Back then, it only cost 20p and I had spare hours every day to complete the crossword and Su Doku(s). Now we are in a recession and my free time is spent auditing and writing pointless blog posts.

I discovered Kafka in a very literal sense when I walked past his statue in a Prague museum. Then I bought his book. That brings me back to today. I’m substituting fiction for free newspapers but I feel that I should finish reading all the books that I already own.  One of these books is Franz Kafka’s America.

The Review

Karl Rossman emigrates to America after being kicked out by his parents for sleeping with the servant and, after defending the honour of the stoker, meets (unknown to Karl at the time) his uncle, who is a senator and guides Karl on his first tenative steps in America, however, he is under his uncle’s authority, though it is only an ostensible authority and not an actual one, and gets kicked out again after disobeying it, Karl wanders from job to job while always falling under new authority figures and never actually escapes, and never settles into a career, eventually, he joins the Oklahoma Theatre but a promising start under his uncle has turned into a random and nightmarish wandering through life – pointless.

If you had bothered to read Kafka’s Wikipedia page then you would have know that he writes in very long sentences with the punchline at the end. 

A couple of weeks ago out church sent a small group out to Rwanda to support Stephen. Stephen was an orphan victim from the Rwandan genocide. He now runs a church and various other projects for the orphans and widows. I can’t do his story any justice at all, so I will refer you to his website.

Abigail talked about her time in Rwanda. It had profoundly affected her and she talked about it for two gripping hours. It was horrible. It put my problems firmly into perspective

What got my was the story about the women who worked for two weeks to produce a sewn pot that creates a profit of £2.

• That barely covers a coffee and a newspaper in Britain.
• In audit £1000 is de minimis, which means that it is so trivial that it is not worth caring about.
• Poverty is defined as an annual income below £5,842 (for a single adult in the UK).
• Trillion dollar bailout for banks are the norm.

We can’t forget the hope. Stephen is doing tremendous work:

• Orphans and widows project – helping 160 people
• Tailoring project – work for 250 people
• Soccer team
• Church planting

Rwandan Kids

For the record, I woke up within 30 seconds of the alarm 27 out of 34 times. It was pretty exhausting at the start but it got easier towards the end. Some days I woke up before the alarm. My body clock adjusted to expect 8 (ish) hours of sleep a night.

Evolution of the Sleep Challenge Spreadsheet:
Written by Andrew

Week 1 – Wanting a way to easily streamline the updating and cross-monitoring, we set up this online shared spreadsheet system.
Week 2 – To streamline efforts and increase success chance, we ended up making our new habits identical. Same goals and targets.
Week 3 – To increase motivation, we implemented a scoring system against each other. Winner gets food/money/clean-clothes.
Week 4 – We combined the scoring system to a joint scoring system. We only get a joint point if we BOTH wake up within thirty seconds, but no points at all if either one of us fails to wake up in time. Thus we will put more importance on encouraging the other person to wake up, and also increased motivation from not wanting to make the team fail.

Some pointers

• Nothing like public shame as a motivation.
• Andrew and I changed from a competitive to a co-operative scoring system halfway though. However, this was less of a motivation. Also, there was an incentive to be dishonest so that the other side wasn’t let down.
• Ultimately, we would only deceive ourselves if we cheated on the sleep challenge.
• I immediately went back to the pattern of snoozing when the challenge ended.

Where now?

Some other challenge ideas:

• 3 MITs – complete the three "most important tasks" everyday.
• Zero information diet
• Zero fat diet
• The Batman Challenge – one act of vigilante justice everyday
• 100 Mile Challenge – 100 miles of running a month
• Punctuality Challenge – Don’t be late, ever.