Green living

Bit of a late write up this but... In February I received a commission to 'go green' for the week for the 'Green Issue' of the Vueling inflight magazine, Ling. The idea was simple: to be as eco friendly as possible with regards to recycling, shopping, getting around, eating, etc... and discuss how it affected my everyday. Now, I already consider myself to be a thoughtful if relentlessly hypocritical friend of the earth (like much of the working planet that doesn't live in a tree) so I didn't think this piece would be too much of a challenge. I can't have been thinking straight. My mind must have been busy trying to figure out how wise it was for a magazine promoting a low-cost airline to be running a 'Green Issue'. Anyway, ethics aside and commission underway, the article was certainly a wake-up call to my sleep-walking wastefulness. I fitted timers to boilers, stopped eating meat, lowered my heating tariff, cycled everywhere, wore a few more layers of clothes (Valencian flats are built to keep cool, which is great in 35 degrees but bad news in 5 – the magic number on the thermostat during February's 'eco week') and sorted a 'pre-eco week' shop into literally a dozen bin bags. At the end of the experiment, when I was lugging those dozen bags full of plastics, metals, milk cartons, wine bottles and food waste down my stairs and then to the communal bins at the end of our road, I got thinking. Not just about how much of my money I was needlessly giving away to an energy company, but about the amount of other peoples' shit I'm willing to pay for and then dispose of in my own free time. Bastards! Never again. I resolved that I wouldn't become more eco-friendly because I love the planet, but because I hate getting treated like a mug.

Vote Valencia

I moved to Valencia with my girlfriend in late 2007. While I could probably give you a million reasons why we're still here, I still haven't the foggiest idea what made us decide to relocate to this perennially sunny Mediterranean city, renowned for good food and endless festivals, in the first place. Honestly, we didn't know a thing about all this before we left. Okay, maybe we had an inkling that it would be warmer than Finsbury Park in winter. We just decided that we wanted to try out life in another country, and that Madrid or Barcelona would have been too big for comfort. So you could say that we settled on Spain's third-largest metropolis, well, by default. That's no bad thing, though. In fact, as a travel writer looking for inspiration you can't beat having a brand new city to explore with a blank notebook. Making up for my initial ignorance, I made it my job to find out what makes the city tick and have learned, burned, eaten and partied a lot over the last few years doing it. I've lived it to write it to live another day, basically. My latest guide in the Ryanair magazine is an unabashedly subjective albeit worthy selection of the bars, restaurants, people and cultural quirks that have made my life here pretty bloody marvellous. Hopefully it will provide an appealing slice of Valencia, inspiring those who weren't sure about the city before to pop over when they can and learn a little more. (www.ryanairmag.com)

Powder parties

I hate skiing and snowboarding in equal measure. If you're assuming that there must have been a massive ski-based trauma in my past to make me feel this way, you're wrong. There were two. On the first occasion I had been invited to a friend's birthday party on the picturesque slopes of Hendon, North London. Making up for the climactic shortfall of soft, fluffy snow, the terrain was an unforgiving latticework of the kind of bristles you usually find beside metal grated doormats. You know, the kind built for scraping hard, dry mud/shit off your boots? Well, even the jeans I was wearing at the time couldn't protect my knees and buttocks from the brutal buffing I endured in punishment for screwing up 3% of every 97%-perfect snowplough. I was ten, but the scars still remain. So the next time I was obliged to go skiing, for a work 'away weekend', I chose snowboarding. I used to skateboard a little with my brother and I could bend my knees in all the right places in front of the mirror before I left, so I was confident. Maybe too confident, according to the infuriatingly talented snowboard instructor that hauled me out of a snow dune on my first (and last) run. It further confirmed that me and skis were never meant to be. Which is a shame because the atmosphere on the slope and around the resort was amazing. And the views? Incredible. My piece in the Ryanair February/March issue is guide for reluctant skiers, like myself, who prefer their aprés ski without all the hassle of having to throw themselves down a slope to deserve it. It was a rundown of the biggest and best snow festivals across Europe. (www.ryanairmag.com)

Made in the Mediterranean

Expats in Spain are always getting a bad press. The way they get pigeonholed at home (I'm using the UK as my point of reference but I'm sure they get similar stick in Germany, France and Holland) you would think they were all sunburned alcoholics incapable of a) learning a language or b) holding down a proper job. Admittedly, there are few that fit the a) and b) profile staggering around the place (admits the binge-drinking freelancer who avoids his elderly neighbour because she speaks as fast a jet fighter) but I reckon the worst of them should be seen like bad pop music; louder than everything else and seemingly everywhere, yes, but not always the whole story. Because if you dig a little deeper, beyond the brash and the predictable, you'll discover richer themes bursting with creativity and tenacity that connect the lives of literally thousands of unsung expats. So when I was asked to find a few expat success stories (ie. the silent majority that can drag their arse off a beach to work) across the Balearic Islands for a series of interviews in Ling magazine, the inflight magazine for Vueling, I was thrilled at the chance to re-balance the debate. I found a young web designer and digital entrepreneur in Menorca, a veteran events guru in Mallorca and a husband and wife team serving up contemporary Indian cuisine in Ibiza to help me prove that there is a more industrious and inspirational side to life as an expat. Check them out respectively at: www.aflua.com, www.gloria-events.com and www.cardamomclub.com.

Christmas Phd-ing

I didn't enjoy my time at university all that much. After a great first year it became a bit humdrum to be honest. I enjoyed the course, though. I just wish it had been squeezed into one year so I could have avoided the bad hair, boredom and debt. The degree was run by the chalk and cheese pairing of the humanities and science faculties at Bristol UWE and called Science, Society and the Media. It was an often confusing mish mash of media studies and practical science experiments one week, followed by a way out pairing of classical scientific philosophy and cosmology the next. I actually think it was cancelled a year after I left. Anyway, out of all the confusion I ended up with a pretty respectable degree and began thinking about the world in a completely different way. I suddenly had the confidence to approach the 'Big Ideas' with a bit of logic and rational thought, a bit like Einstein, and wasn't scared shitless by physics anymore. Even so, when Paul St George, a multi-media artist, sculptor and Principal Lecturer in Computer Animation at the London Metropolitan University, asked me to proofread his 40,000-word PhD thesis and root out the mistakes I trembled a little under the weight of his big ideas. Along with an interesting foray into the pioneering works of nineteenth-century filmmakers, such as Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, and their influence on contemporary visual artists, his masterpiece was essentially about how space and time is represented and constructed by both the artist and the observer, I think, and how this throws up new questions about a multi-dimensional universe, I think. What I do know for sure is that there were a few typos, grammatical wobbles and formatting issues that needed my expert eye. www.paulstgeorge.com

Innovation frustration

This morning I was looking at myself in the mirror, quietly confident I had the best a man could get, when I suddenly realised – with a little discomfort – that I didn’t. What had happened to my razor of champions; a blade that was supposed to handle the demanding contours of my face, as well as a bit of her unorthodox against-the-grain leg shaving? Well, it had gone blunt as a spoon after a week and I happened to feel like a loser: a stubbly one. But us freelancers are well accustomed to that. No, what really pissed me off was returning to purchase the same brand of blades and discovering what kind of ‘innovation technology’ they had been investing in. It would appear that battery-operated vibration and vitamin e-secreting neon-strip ‘upgrades’ had drained the budget out of making decent razor blades forever. Aren’t they missing the point there slightly? Do they care? I fear not. In fact, I’m beginning to see a rather ugly pattern emerging, and it’s not just the one on my chin. Pointless innovations, updates and applications that do little or no service to the original piece of machinery – sounds like a good rant piece for the Vueling inflight magazine, Ling...

In other words

There are three types of foreigner in Spain: those who have lived here a few years and speak less than 10 words of Spanish (it must be true; I read it in a Giles Tremlett book); those who have lived here a few years, speak very good Spanish yet still assume they sound terrible; and those who have lived here a few years and think their spoken Spanish is pretty good when it's actually bloody awful. I fall into the third category. Locksmiths, receptionists and the old lady next door will testify to this. And though it has improved steadily since I arrived (positively skyrocketing once I realised fluency wouldn't come by watching gameshows or eavesdropping in bars, but by study) I still find it incredibly frustrating that I can't be as articulate in Spanish as I can, on a good day, in English. What I can do very well, however, is understand the written word. So when my girlfriend, a qualified translator, asked me to do the donkey work on a 28,000-word translation last week, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to repay a small chunk of the linguistic debt to her I incurred when we arrived. Picture the scene two years ago: Her: "Babe, can you get the door phone while I'm putting on my make-up?" Me: "No, I'm scared." I wasn't easy to live with. Anyway, back to the translation: it was vast. But we persevered and completed it on deadline (within five days!). And apart from a liiiiittle bit of stress, I found the whole experience very gratifying. As well as the obvious act of translating one language into another, the whole process involved a hefty amount of editing, sub editing, proofreading and hundreds of "how would we say that in English?" questions. Basically, a few things I have a geekish fascination with already. Woe betide anyone who thinks translation is just replacing words with equivalent words; you've got to find the cultural and linguistic equivalence! We did. And I helped. Only 95% of the debt left to pay then...