Someone on a talker I use who knows someone who has a friend in the BBC says Michael Jackson is dead.

It seems my employers are out to confuse me. Not content with rearranging the office whilst I’m off ill for a day, meaning that suddenly the artists are sat where the programmers are meant to be and the designers are all off in a little room of their own, they’ve started employing more people without me noticing. Our office isn’t particularly big, and there aren’t a huge number of us working there – less than 20, at last count – so basically, everyone knows who everyone else is. It’s therefore quite embarassing when you realise, when you’re standing in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, that you have absolutely no idea who the guy standing next to you is. Turns out he was a new artist, and he’d been with the company for nearly three weeks (one week of which, admittedly, I was in foreign parts).

And even if I am introduced to people, that’s no guarantee I’ll remember who they are days, hours – or even minutes – later. Shortly after I was introduced to another artist who joined us several months ago, I forgot his name – but immediately decided that it was probably Rob. Which, naturally, it wasn’t. I managed to conduct several conversations with him before I worked it out; I may even have called him Rob on several occasions, but he never mentioned anything to me, so who knows.

At least I can’t miss the new guy who started this week – he sits directly behind me, and as he’s a programmer, occasionally asks me questions about how our code works and things. And I’m fairly sure his name’s Dave.

Or is it Albert?

Sinbad?

Geoff. That could be it.

Ah, yes. He’s called Quetzacotl. Definitely Quetzacotl.

(or am I thinking of someone else?)

I hate coming home after holidays. It makes you see just how depressing, repetitive, boring and just plain un-fun real life is, and exacerbates (“what does that mean?”) this odd feeling of dissatisfaction and impermanence that seems to be pervading my life of late.

So, yes. Anyway. Following on from the previous entry, I feel I need to clarify one or two things.

Skiing good, Snowboarding bad – Goddamnit, at the very least have separate pistes for them so that us real snow users can enjoy nice, groomed pistes which haven’t been smoothed off to ice (except where the snow has been pushed up into big mounds specifically designed to catapult you halfway across the mountain when you hit them) and without the danger of a boarder suddenly drifting nonchalantly across your path (it seems that, whilst skiers go down the hill, snowboarders seem quite content to spend their lives going across the way, which is quite annoying). And all of them have that stupid, surly, oh-so-cooler-than-thou attitude and hang out in annoying little cliques, speaking in some foreign language (what the hell does “gnarly” mean, anyway?) and basking in the mistaken belief that they are somehow better than skiers. Well, hey guys – you’re not. Get off the goddamn slopes; we were there first.

Canadian beer – there’s an advert on in Canada which goes something like the following:

“Why don’t I drink American beer? Well, why don’t I buy a Moroccan bobsleigh, or a pair of Jamaican snow-shoes?”

And they have a good point. A point which would be better if Canadian beer were anything worth writing home about as well, but a point nonetheless. Canadian beer is, at least, drinkable and moderately enjoyable with it (even if their dark beer is served at slightly below freezing so any flavour it has is masked by the cold anyway). I’d rather have a nice pint of Marston’s Pedigree, thanks.

Long journeys – Getting to Banff involved a flight (7 hours, 6 hours behind England) to Toronto (which I mistyped at least three times as Totoro), a flight from there to Calgary (4 hours, 2 hours behind Toronto), and a bus from there to Banff (1.5 horus, no hours behind Calgary, but the clocks went forwards an hour anyway, specifically to confuse foreigners who thought they’d got the hang of this timezones thing). The result was that, after leaving the UK at 3pm, we arrived at 1am local time, after travelling for about 20 hours. And they then gave us the wrong apartment, so we had to go and explain to reception that it wasn’t possible for four people to sleep in an apartment with one bedroom. That was fun, then.

Country music – Ok. This is the one I’m going to get most stick for. Let me first start by stating my position on a couple of things: Firstly, there is no such thing as an inherently bad style of music; country music is not, in itself, an inherently bad thing. Secondly, despite this, country music seems to consistently produce the worst artists and songs of practically any genre of music around today. Thirdly, it follows, therefore, that someone, somewhere out there must be capable of producing enjoyable country music.

It turns out that there are, and they’re two guys who do the entertainment for the Sundowner at Sunshine Village near Banff. Maybe it was the fact we’d been drinking (quite a bit of) beer at high altitude, maybe it was the sledging, maybe it was the food, maybe it was just the atmosphere, or maybe it was just the fact that they were actually really damned good musicians and didn’t take themselves so ridiculously seriously as most country singers, but it was a damned good evening.

(And for my next trick, I shall argue that Pete Waterman is one of the greatest* songwriters of our generation)

We found Kat! – Well, that’s not quite true. She (that is, Custard’s fiancee’s sister, who happened to be working in Banff at the time we were there) finally sent me a text message. Ten minutes before we were due to catch the bus back to Calgary for the flight home. This website might have been a useful thing to find before I went away, too. Bah.

Anyway, I’ve got to get a train back to Manchester today, and that’s another four and a half hours from here, so I’d best get myself off to the station.

Work tomorrow. Bah.

The network which hosts this fair website went arse-over-tit not five minutes after I left the house, necessitating a lengthy phonecall in which numerous Top Secret Passwords were revealed whilst I talked my long-suffering flatmate through the correct procedure to bring things back to life. It seems to have survived since then, though, because I haven’t had any panicky text messages from the missus about her email, and also, because I can write this post.

Anyway, I’ll no doubt ramble on tediously about how great my holiday was when I get back, so I’ll keep it short for now and simply summarise:

• Skiing good
• Canadian beer adequate but far better than American
• Snowboarders still spawn of satan
• Internet access not exactly available on every street corner
• Mobile phone works, though
• Long journeys still no fun
• Country music apparently actually enjoyable under certain select circumstances
• Custard‘s fiancees sister still unlocated

I think that about covers everything. I’ll see you all again on Monday, trains, planes and automobiles permitting.

Right, I’m off to Canada for a week to go and throw myself down mountains on two planks of fibreglass. I’m taking my laptop in the vain hope that there might be an ethernet socket I can plug into somewhere, but if I don’t post for a week, don’t assume I’m dead.

Oh, and also: Presenting the Archers Remix Project.

On the Today programme this morning, they had a (presumably April Fools) feature about how the Archers theme is to get a makeover by Brian Eno. I can’t say I was terribly impressed by their remix, though, so I went ahead and did my own version, which you can get from http://www.parm.net/archers.mp3. Listen and weepenjoy.

Edit – I’m really sorry about this, but here‘s another one, just in case The Archers ever decides to go “street”. I feel a project coming on…