Well, I’ve been stationary for too long again. After another few days at Belinda and Albert’s, I booked a flight to Cairns for this evening at a stupidly low price. It means arriving at midnight, but that’s hardly a problem.

Again I have to offer a huge amount of thanks to B&A for their hospitality, generosity and kindness. They dropped me off at the airport a short while ago (I’m typing this after finishing my Red Rooster burger and while waiting for my boarding call) and foolishly kindly offered to let me stay on my way back, should I head southwards again.

The last couple of days have been very much “not a lot to report”. On Saturday night we watched The Hills Have Eyes (recent remake) and ate sweeties. One of the great things about being “grown up” is the way you can walk into a newsagent, point at the 5c candy (they call them generically “lollies” over here) and just say “Four of each please”. Then pay for the whole lot on plastic. Then get really sick munching them, sat on a beanbag watching people being eviscerated by radioactive mutants.

Sunday you all know about (previous post, people).

Monday was spent playing Planescape Torment on my laptop for roughly 18 hours. I started this in Thailand, I think, and made a short return to it in Thailand. I bought Evil Genius while on my first visit to NZ and became addicted to it for 3 days until I had so many minions that may laptop started to go into meltdown and staggered like a drunken 95 year-old on two wooden legs of odd sizes. I’ll have to save that one until I get home, I think.

Lo and behold, I was sick of the mention of hit points, THAC0 and planes of existence by this morning so spent the day reading my electronic copy of Tom Reynold’s superb book Blood, Sweat and Tea. For anyone who doesn’t spend far too much time online, “Tom” (it’s a pen-name) is an Ambulance Technician or some similar term. Generically he’s an ambulanceman and he started a blog some time ago called Random Acts of Reality about his job. This is also the reason for his pseudonym – many employers have taken a dim view of people in the UK and US exercising their legal right to free speech and have sacked them (or at least threatened dismissal) for discussing their work online.

Fortunately for him and us, Tom’s employers didn’t even go mental when he was offered a book deal and started appearing on everything from Radio 4 to Sky News plugging it. The book is available to buy from Amazon or you can legally download it as a PDF file from Friday Books, the publisher. I’ve read a lot of it before in its original blog form, but it’s a great read. As well as being humorous, touching and emotive it’s also very well written. Go on – download it. And if you enjoy it, buy the thing. “Tom” is one of the many unsung heroes in the UK who often gets the rough end of a stick. It’s great to see that he outsold pretty much everything on Amazon during the first week of publication despite the free download version being available.

Anyway.

I am now sat an at airport. My flight call is in 35 minutes and at 23:40 I will be arriving in Cairns. While there I intend to not drown. I intend to do this with the aid of a tank full of air and some professional people who I’m hoping will be able to tell me how to use the thing to prevent the drowning hoo-ha. As my camera is not waterproof, do not expect too many pictures unless I fork out and hire a proper underwater one for a day.

Now why doesn’t Brisbane airport have free wireless internet? Cheapskates.