deathblog

While I can’t complain and pretend to be a poor victim of fate in the mess that my life has recently been thrown in (which I will detail in my next post) there are some aspects of this Scandinavian shit storm that have been needlessly difficult and genuinely not my fault, and childish and wearisome as I know it may well be I do feel the overwhelming urge to frantically blog about these things. So I have decided to post this entry separately to my official report of Norway, which, I’m sure, will be a much more pleasant read. For now I advise that if you are of the curious belief that I am a sweet and moderate person, and want to maintain this belief, you should skip this post completely and wait instead for the next one in which I will undoubtedly rhapsodise about Norway’s magnificent scenery and the simple, wholesome joy of seeing snow fall for the very first time.

Wholesome image of snow

While there are number of factors which have contributed to making my current situation only slightly less than unbearable, there are only two people under whom I would like to place a short, sharp foot-note. The first comes in the form of the charming Elizabeth from Mastercard International, with whom I had the pleasure of a 2 hour conversation, and whose rather unique brand of idiocy is actually worthy of report. I can understand that in America (where the call centre was located) the spelling ‘Jeffry’ may be more common than ‘Geoffrey’, and that for an American sounding out the word ‘Melbourne’ may well not lend itself to the correct spelling, given their curious inability to elegantly negotiate the vowel sounds. But I have never before spoken to an English speaking person who needed to ask the spelling of the word ‘Oslo’. I almost didn’t tell her the answer, and if the circumstances had been different I may well not have. If you are so blessed as to live in an educated and literate country, having free and actively encouraged school participation, and have managed to live your whole life without, at some point, either encountering the word ‘Oslo’ or acquiring the intellectual facility to figure out how to spell it for yourself, you have not earned your right to the social benefit of public interaction, and should probably be deported in exchange for a third world child who possesses the quality of critical thought and a desire to be educated.  She also had a less than helpful way of confirming the letters and numbers I was reading to her when she misheard them, things like ‘n for nor’ (or was that ‘m for more’? I’m not quite sure) and one or two other similar sounding words. At one point she asked me if I meant ‘k as in Calvin Klein’, and, my personal favourite- ‘6 as in 666?’ I once had to quash the temptation to advise her ‘O as in Oslo’. Given the pace of the conversation I would not be surprised if she was being paid overtime for problem customers, or it could be that the Mastercard headquarters serves as a sort of half-way-house for the intellectually undercooked.

This is what I imagine she looked like

As I write about the second example I do so with all the pure and visceral loathing, the unadulterated hatred of a man who is being deprived of sleep. Though my verbal faculties may well be drastically impaired by my present condition,* my reasons for writing at 1am on my last night in Oslo, which would appear to be the first of two all-nighters (as I have overnight flights from Oslo-Bergen then Bergen-Amsterdam starting tomorrow), are twofold. The first fold being the fact that, due to mattresses and pillows that are so under-padded that they barely earn those titles, I find that my back, shoulders and neck whinge and complain whenever I try to lie down. The second fold is that regardless of the mattress and pillow comfort, if I were to lie down tonight I would not be able to sleep anyway, thanks to the putrid nasal chokings coming from the bed next to mine.

One small area in which I have been lucky during my time in Oslo is the friendliness, camaraderie, and all round pleasantness of my other dorm members. They kept reasonable hours when they knew others needed a good night’s sleep, they were respectful in their use of the facilities and their general behaviour, and I was able to have fun conversations with all of them, and was even offered a joint by one Englishman when I told him about my passport/financial troubles (don’t worry relatives, I declined). This luck ran out tonight when the room was stormed by a repulsive, vulgar, loud-mouthed, fat bastard Russian man. To give you some impression of what he was like I will ask you, if you dare, to imagine the social ineptitude of Chevy Chase as Pierce Hawthorn in the T.V series ‘Community’, the vocal projection of Brian Blessed and a breath stench that is comparable to a dying coprophile who has just vomited, all squeezed into the hulking, blubberous frame of James Gandolfini. 

Chevy Chase as Pierce Hawthorne

Brian Blessed

James Gandolfini and his hulking frame

And, filling the role of the dying, spewing coprophile,
another image of former British Conservative M.P. Anne Widdecombe

When he first walked into the dorm I was alone apart from one other man who was sleeping, a point which he either didn’t notice or didn’t care to note, as he cornered me between the two wardrobes to give me a gruff handshake and an incomprehensible (but very loud) introduction… which he would not relent until he seemed satisfied with my strained and desperate attempts to make sense of his accent, which was relative in strength to his hand shake and stench. I should make it clear that I can appreciate and applaud anybody’s attempts to speak in a foreign tongue; it’s something that I have never been able to do to any useful degree and would be very pleased if I could, but what is important is that were I to attempt it I would SPEAK the language, and not SHOUT it, especially not well into the midnight hours. Right now he appears to be asleep but unfortunately that’s put me in a position where I’m forced to hate him even more, since I find it almost impossible to believe that anybody’s snores could be so obnoxiously loud without being intentional. An hour or so ago the situation which was, for some time, teetering on the completely insufferable toppled and fell right over into the bizarre, when he started speaking again (bless him). There were two phrases which I could understand, one was his proud exclamation that he had killed his ex-girlfriend, and the second he repeated several times- “you will all remember me”. I assumed at first that he was sleep talking… but if that was the case he would presumably be speaking Russian. This raised the uncomfortable question- if he was speaking consciously, for whom was it intended?

It is now the next morning, and I did end up getting a small bit of sleep. Though unsurprisingly I was woken at 6am by the fat Russian maggot’s rousing from the land of nod. I opted to lie still (much as it pained my shoulders, back and neck) pretending to be asleep, because I saw that as a lesser evil than alerting him of my presence and suffering his conversation… the maniac bastardly douche. I hate to draw comparisons of this nature but the situation did put me in mind of a Soviet prison. Lying in anticipation of his departure I had nothing much to do other than trying to piece together the dream I was having moments before. As far as I remember it was the early 90’s and I was giving a blood-thirsty speech to a large group of supporters about staging a coup against Boris Yeltsin. I wonder what it was supposed to mean…

'Aw hell no Boris!'

The very worst thing about it, the final cherry on the top of the cake which broke the camel’s back, is the fact that I have encountered people like him before and know that there is no possibility of change, of reform or redemption. It is simply his putrid, pancreas-wrenching nature, from which there isn’t an escape. I can imagine the snivelling bastard travelling from city to city, country to country, staying in hostels and dorms. Meeting so many people and being wildly and uncontrollably despised by all of them, and having no idea why, the wretched thing, as he manages to inflict most of the damage he does while he is sleeping. Sick, distorted munt-stain of a turd. You bastardly Baltic swine. If I am ever so unfortunate as to meet you again I promise I will run until my legs have fallen of, and if you chase me I will vomit on you. There is not enough room in hell for you, you’re a stale dribble of faeces defiling the very face of humanity in all its goodness and charm and decency. I abominate you. Fuck off and die belching stale urine from your wobbling arse-pit, you ungodly turd. Your mother should have been baron.

I need a god-damned coffee

*Just as I completed this sentence Microsoft Word’s arsehole grammar checker drew a squiggly green line underneath it. I may be squinting at death’s door, which is slightly ajar, but I still refuse to agree with whichever insipid wank-stain undertook the boorish task of programming the vile bane on literary expression that we call the grammar check. No, I will not consider revising this sentence, fragmented as it may be. Go back to hell.