'Well Oil Beef Hooked....'

There were a pair Irish men on the same flight from Amsterdam as me. They looked like they had been partying for the past week. I watched them emerge from Baggage Claim with the wobbly boots well and truly attached. Tired and emotional, they couldn't face the long queue at passport control, so they opted to use the OCR reader at Gatwick airport - a fancy new piece of technology that scans and reads the unique image of your eyes for recognition.

The slightly less pissed of the two staggered into the glass containment cage and lurched over the optical reader - after several failed attempts he was able to stand still enough for the machine to scan his eyes and let him through. The second, significantly more pissed of the two, bumped his way into the glass containment cage like...like...a very pissed person bumping his way into a glass containment cage.

He leaned up against the scanner and started swaying backwards and forwards as he tried to keep his balance.

'Please stand closer', said the computerised voice. The drunk man swayed forwards.

'Please stand further back', said the computerised voice. The drunk man swayed backwards.

'Please stand closer', repeated the computerised voice. The drunk man swayed forwards.

This continued for several minutes as the man performed an intimate dance with the scanner.

'Oim fooken well standin on top o you', he slurred at the computerised voice.

'Please stand closer', repeated the computerised voice.

He then proceeded to debate whether he was standing too far back or too close to the scanner with a computerised voice generator.

'Please stand further back', asked the computerised voice.

Our drunken travel companion finally gave up and joined the end of the queue to the wild applause of hundreds of witnesses.

The Young Fatty...

I'm always impressed by Dutch cuisine - it's so creative. Almost as creative as some of the venues it is served in. The highlight of my recent business trip to Amsterdam was dinner at The Young Fatty (rough English translation). It's a big old windmill that has been turned into a restaurant.

The Dikkert (The Fatty) is the orginal name of this 300-year-old mill, which used to be a watermill situated just north of Amsterdam - they've just refurbished it so it's now referred to as The Jonge Dikkert......it's worth the effort to get there.

En-ger-land, En-ger-land, En-ger-land

It was St George's Day on the 23rd of April. A day of national pride, when the nation unfurls and waves the St George's Cross across the land. It's also a day of tacky medievel themed village fetes and novelty promotions in all the pubs in England.

My local pub held a 'Trivia Knight' and whipped the crowd (12 of us) into a frenzy of national pride by replaying great moments in English sport on the TV over the bar - we watched a black and white fuzzy replay of the 1966 world cup victory over Germany....ate our free portion of toad-in-the-hole and promptly left.......glowing with pride and burning with gastric reflux.

It's not just skateboarding...

My youngest son, Liam, has informed me that he wants to become a professional skateboarder....that's him getting some air at Skaterham (a refurbished church). His elder brother Mika insisted on skating for two hours despite torn ligaments in his foot - they are both obsessed with skateboarding.

Home away from home...

They started eating sweets on the bus out to the airport and finished the last one just as we pulled up to the terminal. The kids were flying even before they got onto the plane....500 grams of pure sugar left them wide-eyed and hyperactive.

We herded them through customs and into the duty free area in Barcelona International Airport......then spent the next 90 minutes to bring them down from a massive sugar rush by administering water. Maybe Spanish sweets are a little stronger then they are used to.

Our flight into Gatwick was a short one. You tend to forget how conveniently positioned London is to the rest of Europe. In under two hours we were in an entirely different culture....I had gone from wearing a t-shirt to sporting a jacket. The sunny skies over Barcelona had clouded over in Surrey and the friendly locals around La Rambla had turned a little cranky.

Welcome to Gatwick said the large sign over customs - I read between the lines - it said 'now you can bugger off to where you came from...'

Barcelona Ole!

'Hola' (Hello), beamed Manjeeta.

'Ole!' (Hurrah!), I responded.

Okay, my Spanish sucks, but at least she was polite enough to just raise an eyebrow at me. We decided to rent a penthouse apartment just around the corner from Plaza de Catalunya. It was spacious, with sweeping views of every TV aeriel south of Calle Fontanella.....it also had a faint smell fo sewerage to it.

We had travelled to Barcelona to meet up with my brother Jaakko and his partner Alessandro. They were staying at a funky little boutique hotel deep in the Gothic lanes - it smelled of expensive aftershave.

Finding it was always going to be a challenge. In fact, if my brother's street directions had any vague similarity to the actual layout of the city it would have been difficult, but as he was probably studying a map of Mexico City when he gave me directions to the hotel it was actually a bloody miracle that we found it.

Shaun the Sheep...

'Inquisitive, fun loving and mischievous, Shaun is a sheep who stands out from the rest of the flock. You can always count on this natural leader to get ewe into, and out of, trouble!'......this is the bio of the protagonist in my son's copy of Shaun the Sheep comic - a literary masterpiece that documents Shaun's Baa-a-a-a-army adventures.

It was only a matter of time before Shaun expanded his very successful TV franchise into magazines and merchandising. Such is the pulling power of this animated bag of wool that children all over England, aged between 3 and 10 years old, have started to bleat and baa in homage to this under-cooked leg of lamb.

I picked up the inaugral issue of Shaun the Sheep Comic with disdain and ended up giggling like a little schoolboy.....there wasn't a word of English in it - the whole thing is written in sheepish.

Check out his website http://www.shaunthesheep.com

Mountain of meat...

The Napier Pub in Fitzroy, Australia, has just launched the 'Bogan (insert Chav here) Burger'. Constructed of Turkish bread, steak, chicken schnitzel, potato cake, bacon, egg, cheese, onion, pineapple and beetroot, it stands at an impressive 17cm, weighs 7,000 kilojoules and contains over 94 grams of pure fat.......with potato wedges on the side. Apparantly, the pub sells around 15 a day - 'it's mainly blokey action', says the landlord.

It seems that, nowadays, a coronary only costs AUD$15.50...

Destination Heathrow...

I have just learnt that it is still dark in England at 4:51am. No, I hadn't got up early to watch the sunrise. Nor was I returning from a big night out.....I was driving my brother Jaakko to the Heathrow Airport. These are the types of things you do for your family - because one day we all call in our favours.

Not surprisingly, there was very little traffic on the M25 on a public holiday at that time of the morning. In fact, I had the road to myself, apart from a couple of truck drivers, no doubt well into the final leg of a cross-continental transit and dangerously high on amphetamines. We covered the 48 mile journey in record time and I was back home in time to get back into bed before anyone had woken up.

Badger and out....

'Look, I've photographed a badger!', exclaimed my brother breathlessly. Was this code-talk for some sort of fetish that he'd developed in my absence from Australia? Apparantly not.

'A badger?', I couldn't help but sound surprised. There are plenty of badgers around the Surrey Hills, but they are supposed to be nocternal. I was genuinely impressed - until I saw the photograph.

'Is it asleep?', I asked sarcastically. There was not doubt about it...it was a photo of a badger. A badger that had either had a very heavy night on the sauce and passed out in the gutter or....

'No...it was hit by a car', he deadpanned back to me. He could sense that I was unimpressed.

'It was really difficult to take the photograph', he said - a little defensively.

'It doesn't look like it was moving very quickly', I offered.

'No, I know', he paused. 'I just didn't want your neighbours to catch me taking photos of roadkill.....'

Role reversal...

Some kids grow up far too fast - some adults never grow up.

My daughter told me today that one of her friends at school has just given up smoking - she is 11 years old.

My brother nearly killed himself on a skateboard today - he's 41 years old.