So... The Football season has started again here in the UK. 90 minutes of watching grown men kick an inflated pigs bladder around a grassy patch for a few hundred thousand pounds wages per week.
Over paid, with an over inflated ego and an over inflated sense of public adoration sums up your average Premiership football player. You are probably realising by now that I never really got the football bug.
I would watch my friends and colleagues transfixed to the screen, pint of beer in hand hanging on every kick, header, foul and goal. Every one a player, every one a manager, everyone a referee, the overwhelming desire to be on the pitch and show them how to do it properly.
"We was robbed.."
"The referee is a disgrace.."
"That guy should never be in that position... TACKLE..!"
"Get in you beauty..!"
I would sit there and feign a mild interest. Trying to think of something to say should I be asked a tactical question or deliver my verdict on a passage of play.
"Er.. Yeah... The fullback was maced when he got spatchcocked on the mullet with a blinder from the number 6. And.. Er... Oh yeah, the referee's a dick... And blind."
Phew, I think I got away with that. Football... Not my thing.
Paul Martin is @ukcameraman on Twitter.
Saturday, 18 August 2012
Thursday, 9 August 2012
A Ringside Seat...
I'm still working in London, and at this very moment I am sitting on the edge of the worlds anus, looking into the abyss that is Leicester Square. I can smell the oily fug eminating from the plethora of fast food joints, burger bars, fried chicken emporiums and pizza palaces.
Wherever I look I can see shops selling London themed tat, Olympic tat and any old tat. Theatre ticket touts, charity street muggers, street artists and talentless entertainers. High rent pubs with high rent prices selling low rent beer and food.
Yet strangely, the place is packed with tourists and people of every creed, colour and country. They spend their cash like water. They wander, cow like, peering into windows, admiring the grotty scene spread out before them.
Dominating the views are the cinemas, the casinos and bizarrely, a large building, five or six stories high, dedicated to a sweet. It's called M and M World. People take photos of it like its a cultural icon.
I sit here and watch as the masses pass by leaving their money behind, and wonder just how Leicester Square has got away with it for so long.
Paul Martin is @ukcameraman on Twitter
Wherever I look I can see shops selling London themed tat, Olympic tat and any old tat. Theatre ticket touts, charity street muggers, street artists and talentless entertainers. High rent pubs with high rent prices selling low rent beer and food.
Yet strangely, the place is packed with tourists and people of every creed, colour and country. They spend their cash like water. They wander, cow like, peering into windows, admiring the grotty scene spread out before them.
Dominating the views are the cinemas, the casinos and bizarrely, a large building, five or six stories high, dedicated to a sweet. It's called M and M World. People take photos of it like its a cultural icon.
I sit here and watch as the masses pass by leaving their money behind, and wonder just how Leicester Square has got away with it for so long.
Paul Martin is @ukcameraman on Twitter
Wednesday, 8 August 2012
Bloody Widgets...
I knew it was going to be a crappy day when i woke up this morning and banged by head on the headboard before being fully awake. The sudden realisation that a long day stretches out before you where anything and possibly everything can go wrong.
It happened in the car. I forgot something so reached for the door handle. The internal plasticky widget mechanism thingy snapped. I was stuck until i figured out that if i wind down the window, reach out and pull the outside handle, i would be free. I reached for the handle, only for it to break off the spindle and come away in my hands. It was not yet 9:30am. What a shitter of a morning i've had...
I had to shuffle across the seats and let myself out from the passenger side. Looked a right twat i did... if anyone was watching. Now i have to exit my vehicle via the passenger side and do the broke door shuffle.
Don't they make cars like they used to..? You know, big lumbering beasts where everything was made of good old Sheffield steel and rust? I blame the Japanese for bringing in cheap, lightweight, fuel efficient plastic cars. At least in the old days of British made cars like the Austin Allegro, made by a lazy, unionised British workforce, you were safe in the knowledge that if the car broke, which it would, it was down to good old British shoddy workmanship and not a cheap plastic widget that can easily be replaced.
Now i've got to go and buy a cheap plastic widget... Bastards.
Paul Martin is @ukcameraman on Twitter.
It happened in the car. I forgot something so reached for the door handle. The internal plasticky widget mechanism thingy snapped. I was stuck until i figured out that if i wind down the window, reach out and pull the outside handle, i would be free. I reached for the handle, only for it to break off the spindle and come away in my hands. It was not yet 9:30am. What a shitter of a morning i've had...
I had to shuffle across the seats and let myself out from the passenger side. Looked a right twat i did... if anyone was watching. Now i have to exit my vehicle via the passenger side and do the broke door shuffle.
Don't they make cars like they used to..? You know, big lumbering beasts where everything was made of good old Sheffield steel and rust? I blame the Japanese for bringing in cheap, lightweight, fuel efficient plastic cars. At least in the old days of British made cars like the Austin Allegro, made by a lazy, unionised British workforce, you were safe in the knowledge that if the car broke, which it would, it was down to good old British shoddy workmanship and not a cheap plastic widget that can easily be replaced.
Now i've got to go and buy a cheap plastic widget... Bastards.
Paul Martin is @ukcameraman on Twitter.
Friday, 3 August 2012
Critical Mass.
I'm currently working in London for the next few weeks. That in itself is enough to make a man go loopy-loo and start shouting at people in a bubbly froth of incoherent rage. In fact that is exactly what I have witnessed on a number of occasions in the past few days courtesy of street dwelling drinkers with a penchant for White Stripe cider, Tennants Extra and even a very fetching bottle of Lambrini.
I sympathise, it's a wonder that in a city full of people, all kinds of people, that riots and small scale local civil war doesn't break out on a regular basis. Baseball capped youths mix cautiously with flat capped senior citizens. Every colour of skin walk side by side, Jews, Muslims and Christians sit in Cafes with the Buddhists, Sikhs, and Secular. The moneyed few walk alongside the destitute on the same streets and the languages that fill the air tell of faraway lands.
This is just an observation as I sit here, taking in the lunchtime cafe culture of West London, that I am a tolerant, amiable and approachable chap with few hang ups about who I mix with. But if the bloke next to me hoiks up another gobful of phlegm and picks his nose one more time, I'm gonna go ballistic and force feed him breadsticks via his nose with a double dose of a kick in the bollocks.
One day, I'm going to really hurt someone...
Paul Martin is @ukcameraman on Twitter
I sympathise, it's a wonder that in a city full of people, all kinds of people, that riots and small scale local civil war doesn't break out on a regular basis. Baseball capped youths mix cautiously with flat capped senior citizens. Every colour of skin walk side by side, Jews, Muslims and Christians sit in Cafes with the Buddhists, Sikhs, and Secular. The moneyed few walk alongside the destitute on the same streets and the languages that fill the air tell of faraway lands.
This is just an observation as I sit here, taking in the lunchtime cafe culture of West London, that I am a tolerant, amiable and approachable chap with few hang ups about who I mix with. But if the bloke next to me hoiks up another gobful of phlegm and picks his nose one more time, I'm gonna go ballistic and force feed him breadsticks via his nose with a double dose of a kick in the bollocks.
One day, I'm going to really hurt someone...
Paul Martin is @ukcameraman on Twitter
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