It's my birthday and I'll ignore if i want to

It was my birthday yesterday. I always find them deeply depressing for some reason. And not for what you're thinking... I don't care about getting older. I mean, it's not as if you didn't KNOW age was going to happen, you were walking down the street minding your own business and BAM, 'age' smacks you round the chops and you're a pensioner. To me, the passage of time has always gone quite slowly and I always try to remind myself that I'm a year old than I actually am. Therefore it's quite a relief when i realise on my birthday that I've just turned the age I thought I already was.

Wow, what a load of nonsense THAT paragraph was. Anywho, yeah, there's just something a bit 'murr' about the whole birthday thing. I think it's because it's a natural time for reflection and therefore pining over things that are not the same or around at all. I found it harder this year as I hadn't told anyone in Palma and so I was sent a load of messages and emails from friends back home but no-one here even mentioned it... But I'm glad it's over now and I can concentrate on the TOTAL SLOG that is 'work' at the moment. I've just got in and it's 11PM... and I felt guilty for leaving 'early' whilst others stayed on (I was just hanging around really). I've got to go in for the whole weekend too. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence when a company gets itself in a position where everyone has to work massive amounts of overtime (it's completely self-inflicted)... but that's a topic for a different blog I think (where I moan about the nature of the games industry).

Anyway, I just thought I'd write something on here about a report that's been done saying that Palma is one of the safest cities in the whole of Europe. I always got a feeling that it was intensely safe, I'm not sure how you get to be INTENSELY safe... but there it is. Maybe you have to lay all the roads in felt and cover all the stop signs in bubble wrap to avoid people walking into them (the irony of walking into a stop sign hit extra hard to someone I know once... when we had to spend the rest of the night in a Barcelona Hospital and I hung out with a tramp for a long time).

What I thought was funny about this report was that the perception of people on the street is (allegedly) still really bad. Especially amoungst the older generation who are apparently statistically much less likely to be the victim of crime... funnily it's a total vice versa (not the crap eighties film) for the younger people. It just shows you how public opinion on things like crime is utter nonsense. I always got that feeling in Britain too. The problem I think stems from the fact that the newspapers sell newspapers via fear ("THE STREETS ARE FILLED WITH MURDERERS, READ HERE TO FIND OUT!") and the opposition politicians are trying to discredit the current government ("THE STREETS ARE FILLED WITH MURDERERS. IT'S ALL THE GOVERNMENTS FAULT!").

Jeepers (a word I'm using a lot at the moment for some reason unknown to me), this post seems to have turned into somewhat of a crabfest. But to be honest, I'm just trying to kill time while my washing machine goes through the motions. I've got to entertain myself until it's finished otherwise I run the risk of having to wear dirty clothes tomorrow... again. I don't think turning your socks inside out TWICE counts as clean. But in my defence, it's only because I'm getting home so late... As Simply Red once sung 'Money's too tight to mention'... but replace the word 'money' with 'time' and replace Simply Red with someone less crap.

I'm supposed to be going to a nice meal at an Argentinian girl's house near the town of Inca tomorrow... it's not going to happen, I can just feel it. Well... I say 'nice meal' when I infact know nothing about it. All i know about Argentinian food is that it consists of big slabs of meat, and not much else. I tend to prefer meat that doesn't look like it's actually come from an animal. If you can shape it to look like a mini sized dinsaur and dust it in bread crumbs then I'm a happy man... actually give me a slice of a cow's butt and I'll give you my confused eyebrow, and no-one wants that over the dinner table.

R