Posts Tagged ‘St Neots’

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Ramblings, Hamblings, and the fact I’m Still Standing

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Yes Chef!

Howdy breds and crips and all you other lot. It is my day off finally after another week of trying to be artistic, passionate, and of course, ok at my job.

This week has proved to be another busy one, leading to me missing my bus three times in a row. So, needless to say after my fourth night away from home, Sunday was a good sleep. My chef, Captain Spoon, or Mr Collins as he’s widely known by Cambridge students and other trampy types, is doing very well, helping me to run the kitchen like a fiery, quick-off-the-draw muthafucka.

Now, my main joy this week was seeing the mother of me, Timothy and Suzanne. She brought the usual perfect loot of sausage, fags and Jäger. So I ordered some ribs from the butchers and Collins and I set about making a sticky Jäger sauce for them. Beautiful, “old Levi Roots better watch out baby!” Of course Marcus, well done.

Unfortunately it’s not all fun and games in the work place and when it gets really busy, Mr Collins and I have to work on full throttle, which as a chef makes me a little short with people, and while I never mean what I say… I think I sacked Antonio about 8 times on Saturday lunch service. Luckily, a bit of verbal abuse has given him a sense of humor and he laughed it off in spectacular Spanish style.

I also realized on Sunday morning, that I really don’t like waiters taking food out of the oven. It really grinds my gears, and I find myself telling people off while they stand looking like a rabbit in the headlights. Either way, I discovered that to keep a little less eggy (I’m not an angry person), all i need to do is, stop listening to heavy metal, and actually just listen to “Elton Johns Greatest Hits” on repeat and sing along to it while merrily getting bummed with tables wanting extra spring onion in their mash and telling me that the Hollandaise sauce is in fact not Hollandaise sauce, but a sauce made with egg yolks and butter (really, really, really? Pretty sure that is infact Hollandaise sauce but if i’m incorrect please tell me and I’ll tell you how wrong you are).

So, another lovely week at work, can’t really comment on the home front as I haven’t been here! However, blud Ben does have a very bad back at the moment which I’ve been trying to fix with beer. And I think, failing. See you next time wankers!

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Introduction O’Clock!

Friday, February 19th, 2010

Good morning people! Thought I’d start a little bloggy about the trials and tribulations of a dirty, smelly compulsive chef.

I’m Marcus, or as some people call me Chil, Dumbo, Gengus, Gary Lineker, Wersal Gummage, Inspector Gadget, etc etc etc. I am apparently the head chef of the Castle, a small gastro pub-cum-cocktail bar in the centre of Cambridge. It’s a lovely place that is well cultured, innit. In that respect, we have a lot of nationalities working there and I wouldn’t have it any other way. You see, once they finally realise you’re not just being a massive arsehole and start to understand English humour, they find sarcasm funnier than most other people. Plus you learn stuff, you know, like, about their countries and that. Yeah. So anyway, the kitchen team at the Castle compromises four people: “Head Chef” (yours truly); Matt “Sous Chef” Collins; Roberto, our amasingly amusing Fillippino breakfast chef and Antonio, our curly haired Spanish pot wash.

Other people from the past I may occationaly mention (so take note) are Cirill, the ex head chef, now working at Jamie Oliver’s new restaurant cooking garlic bread, opening Dolmio etc, and Tom Doughty, my favorite potwash, sacked for being a bit too much of a piss taker. He once text my ex girlfriend from my phone while i was in the toilet saying “I miss your vagina”. I found it funny, not many other people did. I currently work with his older brother, flairing superstar Christopher Bardwell-Doughty. (more…)

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Viewable

Monday, February 8th, 2010

After months of searching through Gumtree et al to find somewhere to live in Cambridge, I am going tonight to look at a double room in a shared house in the wastelands between Mill Road and Cherry Hinton Road, somewhere behind Cambridge Leisure.

It’s not a student house, it’s not a bedsit, it’s ten minutes from uni and it’s CHEAP – £90pw all in. Which is GOOD.

But I am having doubts now. As much as I hate getting the X5 every day (although if you have to get a bus every day, the mightiness of the X5 means it isn’t quite so arduous), and want to be closer to uni, able to get a job in Cambridge without being constrained by buses etc., I wonder whether I would miss the security of “my flat”, and whether I am ready to leave St Neots for a third time.

St Neots is great; most of my friends are there, little brother is there, it’s handy for getting into not just Cambridge but also Peterborough, Bedford, London etc.

More than anything though, despite the fact I share a flat, it’s very much “my” place. I can do what I want when I want. I have all my crap spread all over the place, I can have who I want round when I want – I don’t have to live by someone else’s rules. It’s a selfish thing basically. Could I live by someone else’s rules?

So I am going to look at this room in CB1 today, and will keep the following in my mind. If it’s truly an amazing place, I’ll seriously think about moving. But anything less, I’m going to stay where I am, at least for the time being.

There’ll be other places. And £90pw does seem a little TOO good to be true…

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D Is For Decade

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

It’s only just struck me that in two and a half weeks’ time, we’ll be entering a new decade.

This is the third time I’ve done this, although only the second time it actually occurs to me that it’s a little bit more than another Christmas holiday, on account of me being six when we rolled from ’89 to ’90.

And as I was discussing with associate Phil the other day, we’ll soon have to start including the “nineteen” when we talk about the past. “The twenties” has always meant the 1920′s, but in another ten years we’ll be entering the twenties ourselves, and saying 2020′s sounds a bit awkward as a term for the whole ten years – of course, “the 2000′s” sounded odd which led to people referring to “the noughties”, which I absolutely fucking hate. This will become more noticeable in a few years’ time, when people refer back to the first measurable slice of the 21st century, and aren’t really sure how to phrase it.

Unfortunately, i didn’t really achieve much in the last ten years. The decade started with me dropping out of Sixth Form, where I would have been part of the year group taking the last old-style A-levels ever. I learnt to drive. I got a full-time job with a company who went bust after six weeks and didn’t pay me, then shifted myself down to That London for a couple of years. After I came back, I lived at home for a bit, then with Alex, Paul and Magee in scummy Potton Road and posh Emery Place, then back at home. I worked for a prison and a tea company before joining BP as a part-time till-tart, then going full-time, then being an assistant manager for a bit, then… leaving. (more…)

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1000 Words

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

I wondered if I could write 1000 words, about nothing in particular, in fifteen minutes.

Write or Die is a great little tool which tells you your wordcount in one corner… and time to write in the other. Pause for too long, the screen goes red and you need to SPEED UP! Pause a bit longer and it starts DELETING what you’ve written.

Picture 2
But what to write 1000 words on in fifteen minutes? No time to think or plan reall, no time to go back and edit what I’ve done. No time to try to reach a sensible conclusion. But so far, I’m just filling space, and that isn’t the aim of this exercise! (Write or Die does allow you to click “pause”, but that kind of feels like cheating… It only works once though.)

Have just finished the usual supposed-to-be-three-hours workshop class that I have every Wednesday afternoon. Like most of my classes, it seems to have disintegrated rather quickly, and only around ten people remain.

There’s about four of us from the UK. Then there is Fatmir from Kosovo, Neda from Iran or French Angola or something, Bandar from Saudi, one Portuguese girl, and a couple of others I’m not so sure about. (more…)

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C Is For Citizen

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

Way back in 2001 I was a regular reader of the hugely successful Geordie Citizen and Whitley Bay Citizen. After submitting a couple of articles, I decided that there was no way these Northerners should have all the glory, and thought I’d get involved.

The St Neots Citizen was born. Running for about two years, the Citizen featured two main types of story. One, spoofing local events and getting at councillors who seem to like to ruin everything St Neots loves – the outdoor pool was a great example, which they finally managed to close a few years ago. Or commenting on the town’s number one industry, empty retail units.

The second involved completely fictional events, based around typical characters of any market town – the whinging, slightly mad old lady, the boy racer, the chavvy 14-year-old mummy.

Eventually I lost interest and the Citizen died out.

In 2007, whilst working at ABB, I was rather bored one lunchtime and went trawling through the Wayback Machine to see if any of my old sites still existed. And there, lo and behold, were a few fragmented bits and bobs from the Citizen. A ha, I thought, it’s about time this came back!! (more…)

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So… uni then…

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I’ve now been at ARU for a month and am not enjoying it any more than I was.

I’m not gonna whinge about the amount of work, because really it’s no more than working full-time and in fact is often less. I’m not gonna whinge about all the twats around campus because I don’t socialise with them. No, I’m going to have a moan about travelling.

Because of the times my lectures start, I’m on the X5 during rush-hour most days of the week. When I worked at booking.com, it was the summer holidays so even if you got the 8.09 bus you were in Cambo just before 9. Now everyone’s back and the traffic is ridiculous. So for a 9am start I have to get the 7.09 bus and I still only scrape in on time, so I’m reduced to getting the fucking 6.39 bus – which gets to Cambridge in 35 minutes so I have to kill a load of time. Now, I’m all for spending less time on the bus itself, but that’s ridiculous.

I need some sort of transport. I can’t afford a car. It’s too far to bike. I could get some sort of scooter, but as Julie so rightly pointed out, I’d die. The thing that annoys me most is that the journey robs me of two to three hours a day when I could be doing some work, leaving my evenings and weekends mostly free, apart from that mystical just-before-deadline time. I can’t read on buses, it makes me instantly nauseous, and I’m fairly sure that if I tried it for more than thirty seconds there’d be vom everywhere.

Thing is, when you finish at 4 and then spend ninety minutes getting home, you aren’t in the mood to work any more. Those who live on campus or nearby (the famous Mill Road being a prime example and my eventual intended residence) can swing home, work like a bitch and still be eating dinner and watching Hollyoaks before I am.

Because this uni has a “non-traditional” student mix – lots of international and shitloads of mature students, most of whom obviously already have somewhere to live – their housing stock is even less sufficient than most. Renting in Cambridge is a joke so that leaves me traipsing back and forth every day. If it was to work, it wouldn’t bother me so much – walk out the door at the end of the day and relax, you are done. But when you have stacks of “homework” to do, the only reasonable alternative is to stay in the library until the late bus and just get it done.

Which isn’t a thrilling prospect.

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Stereotypical

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

A friend and former colleague emailed me today. “Dewey, I bumped some next matey’s car at the roundabout near the office. I said to him, OK pull off into that exit, indicating the first.

Because I braked I just scuffed his bumper, didn’t even damage mine. He was driving some 55 plate Mondeo.

I had three choices here.
1) Hand over all the dollar I had on me (about 10p)
2) Pull over, assess damage, take details and contact insurance
3) Chip.

I chose option three. He pulled down exit one like a n00b and I took exit four to continue on my way to work.

I thought I had got away with it, but mang, I dunno, the roundabout is hench busy but if he works locally there is always the chance of a rendez-vous by accident. The dude was black so I’m a bit unnerved.” (more…)

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Been A Bit Lax

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Once again, I have been a bit of a fail at updating. Brilliantly I see that a lot of people are still visiting me, and these are regular non-robot visitors. Seeing as I rarely have anything interesting to say this does come as rather a surprise… Still.

Like all the great famous blogs of the past (let’s pretend for a moment that I’m a great famous blogger), life has got in the way of the internet and necessitated this brief hiatus from spilling the contents of my increasingly troubled brain into a readable format. Sadly, unlike people like Tom Coates, Cal Henderson and that Gerald dude, all fellow members of the old UK Bloggers Yahoo! group back in ’01, I haven’t really been filling my time with anything intriguing or worthwhile. So what have I been doing? (more…)

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In Less Than A Month I’ll Be Really Old

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

On 11th February I’ll be 26, and as far as I’m concerned that is old enough.

Therefore I am not actually going to be aging. What I will celebrate is the first anniversary of my 25th birthday. Usefully, there is some d’n'b’n'dubstep silliness on the preceeding Saturday, in ‘orrible Neots at the New Inn.

On my last birthday I was working until past midnight, and moving house the next day, so celebration was nil. The previous birthday is lost to my mind – I was living in Huntingdon and have a sneaking suspicion I may have gone for a few drinks up there. But I’m not sure.

22nd was Hare’n'Hounds mayhem, with 50 people crammed into the back room as these were the times of Monday Night Pub Night. Much drinking done and much drugs lost, not by me I hasten to add, down the back of those secure storage box things. Oh, and a scrap with some dude which involved hair pulling and fighting dirty. Again, I was merely a spectator.

21st was a house party, and involved four of us demolishing two bottles of vodka in four and a bit minutes, shot by shot.

So I’ve had pretty much every standard type of cheap birthday celebrations the last few years, so that’s it. No more. I am not celebrating turning 26. I’m celebrating still being 25.

Good times!

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