One of my favourite films of all time is Withnail and I and I`ve always wanted to try the Withnail and I drinking game.

The whole idea is that you match the main character ‘Withnail’ drink for drink for the entire film - no easy feet I can assure you, but yesterday I had my best chance yet to complete the game since I was on an 11 hour flight, had access to a free bar .and the inflight entertainment had Withnail as one of their films.

Sweeet

So I stocked up with the required amounts of booze and matched the great man drink for drink.

• Mouthful of red wine
• “Lighter fluid” (eg overproof rum)
• Double gin
• Finger of cider (with ice)
• Finger of cider (with ice)
• Finger of cider (with ice)
• Glass of sherry
• Two big chugs of sherry
• Mouthful of sherry
• Sip of sherry
• Double whisky
• Mouthful of whisky
• Mouthful of whisky
• Mouthful of whisky
• Mouthful of whisky
• Splash of whisky
• Single Teachers
• Double Teachers
• Double Teachers
• Single Teachers
• Sip of sherry
• Three fingers of ale
• Sip of red wine
• Gulp of sherry
• Small glass of red wine
• Sip of red wine
• Half glass of red wine
• Sip of something white (gin & bitter lemon?)
• Sip of red wine
• Sip of red wine
• Gulp of red wine
• Gulp of red wine
• Finger of red wine
• Finger of red wine
• Gulp of red wine ("‘53 Margeaux")
• Gulp of red wine ("‘53 Margeaux")
• Gulp of red wine ("‘53 Margeaux")
• Gulp of red wine ("‘53 Margeaux")

I`ll leave it up to you to decide when I knew I was way out of my depth.

:)

Right now I`m sitting in LAX airport drinking a pint of Sam Adams waiting to get on my plane back to Heathrow and then on to Paris.

The very fact that I`m drinking at all after the amount I managed to put away on Friday night is something of a miracle.

Yesterday at the gym my 1000 calorie cross trainer burnout took me a full minute longer than it normally does and for that the blame goes squarely, once again on Friday night.

Dont get me wrong - it was a wicked evening. Started out at Brea Diamonds Billiard Club, then on to TGI Fridays. We had a table booked for 19 of us to celebrate my birthday with the table booked under my real name and title of “Baron Atkins’. I even got a free ice-cream, for it being my birthday, not for being a baron:

Then we moved on to Commonwealth bar in Fullerton:

Then I woke up at 1pm on Saturday….

…and leaped out of bed and broke into a chorus of morning has broken!

Or something like that.

I do remember bits and pieces. I remember some local taking offence at my singing the lyrics “There’s 2 dollars to a pound” to the tune of ‘he’s got the whole world in his hands’, but I`m sure I settled the disagreement eloquently….

I think.

Anyway, I`m off to Paris for 3 weeks so I`ll be able to drink some real beer for a change.

Maybe I`ll even get to another Michelin star restaurant - maybe even a 2 star —-or 3!!!

Oh dear.

Last night we got back from our long weekend skiing trip to Mammoth Mountain in Northern California.

All 9 of us got back unscathed, which quite frankly is a miracle because at least 1 of us really should have broken a bone.

The first close call went to Ed. This was his first time skiing on snow so after a few successful runs down the green slopes Dave decided Ed was ready to try out a blue run.

But the blue we went down ended up being a Black Diamond run – otherwise known as a ‘sh*t your pants run’. Remember at this time the only ski positions that Ed knew were French Fries (go fast) and The Pizza (go slow), so the last I saw of Ed was him thundering down near vertical slopes in the pizza position screaming ‘PPIIIIZZZZZZZZAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!”.

Things got worse after that, but this time it was me taking centre stage.

Somehow I ended up on my own on a run that was closed to the public. I should have known better really. I had to climb under a load of ropes to get onto the run in the first place, so the signs were there from the start.

There were 2 official looking guys waving me over at the top of the run. The conversation went something like this:

Ski instructor – “hey mate, what you doing here?”
Me – “er – I`m a bit lost, I`m just trying to get down this blue run”
Ski instructor – “Oh right – well firstly this is not a blue run, it’s a black diamond and secondly this run is closed for the race team”.

I heard what they were saying, but it just didn’t sink in. Although it explained why the run was totally empty, had racing flags on it and was dam near vertical and covered in rocks and trees – one of which I very nearly hit.

I`m not sure what time my lap got, but I needed a strong scotch right after I finished.

So all in all it was an amazing weekend, without injury but certainly not without incident.

The perfect way to end my 29th year since its my birthday today.

Tomorrow I head off on my first ski holiday of the year. A group of us have booked out an 11 person villa on the slopes of Mammoth Mountain, which looks to be amazing.

I have my ski equipment packed and ready, and the best part is that I get to take my telescope somewhere that has no light pollution and is at a high altitude and cold so the air turbulence will be minimal giving awesome seeing conditions.

Add to that I`ve bought myself a hip flask and a good bottle of sherry to enjoy on the mountain to give me a nice false sense of warmth.

What can possibly go wrong?

I`ll tell you.

I found out on Monday that my company medical cover has been switched to a different company. I found out because my new contract and membership card arrived in the post.

This is what is says:

Policy number: XXXXXXX XXXXXX
In-patient plan: Premier Core Plan
Out patient plan: Silver out-patient plan.
Coverage: Worldwide (Excluding USA & Canada)

What?

I`m covered everywhere in the world apart from North America, which unfortunately for me is the continent where I live.

OMG!

Oh well – at least I`m not doing anything dangerous over the next couple of days.

I`m sure everything will be fine.

Absolutely nothing can go wrong!

I`d only been back in my flat in the OC for about 15 minutes last Saturday when I turned on my laptop, signed into MSN and got a message from Ed.

“Welcome back mate – can I come around?”

Ed had been back in California for a week at this point, and I had heard from several people that he was starting to go nuts with boredom. His original plan was that he would go out partying throughout New Year and the days after with the other guys in our complex, but things did not turn out that way. Dan had his wife and child with him, Mat had his family over, Rave was spending most of his time with his girlfriend, and the rest of us were still in the UK.

Things did not get any better for Ed since the New Year’s party the attended shut all the bars by 10:45pm.

That is pretty much the worst thing that could have happened to Ed. Its fair to say he likes a drink.

So it was no surprise to me that Ed was loitering around on MSN waiting for someone to talk to. Sadly for him though, I was about to fall asleep and so Ed had to wait on his own a bit longer.

So next day 8am I sign into MSN again. Once again

“I hope you are decent – I`m coming round in 10”

And so he did, and we talk about what we`ve been up to over the last few weeks. Its clear Ed has had plenty of time on his hands, but he is adamant that he “has not been bored”

I beg to differ with him.

Later that day we went around to Ed’s place and I go to go get some ice from his freezer.

And there is plenty of ice to choose from:

“Jeeeeeezzz mate, how bored have you been”

“I`VE NOT BEEN BORED!!!”

“Really?”

Ed had spent the week after New Year sculpting a vodka flume in his freezer out of ice. Basically the idea is that you pour in room temperature vodka and it flows down the ice flume and you collect the chilled vodka at the bottom.

It works surprisingly well actually. He tried it with orange juice but that just froze half way down the flume, which had the added benefit of flavoring the vodka that went down after it.

Ed says he is a creative genius, I say he is a bored mentalist with a blow torch and too much tupperware

I`ll let you make up your own mind.

Yesterday I flew back to Southern California, and it was a long long long day.

It did not start very well since I had to wake up at 4am to get my first flight from Edinburgh to London Heathrow, which in itself if a pretty bad experience, but considering that I`d only got to bed at about 1am things were particularly bad. I could not touch a fork full of the breakfast they served on the plane.

Then I have the pleasure of waiting around Heathrow Terminal 1 for 4 hours, actually make that 5 because my flight to LA was delayed. Nice.

Then all I have to do it sit on the plane.

For over 11 hours.

Fortunately one of my colleagues turned out to be on the same plane as me so I at least had a good chat for a few hours before touching down in LA, going through visa and immigration control (always a joy) and then waiting for my baggage.

and waiting

and more waiting

Turns out some pillock didn’t close their bag properly and all their clothes had escaped their home and mangled up the baggage handling machine. So we had to wait for a good 45 minutes while engineers pulled out the remains of underpants and socks.

Then off back to my flat in Fullerton with a quick stop off at Albertsons to get some supplies.

Back in the flat at last.

Then I remembered that I had a friends brother staying in my place over Christmas and I see that they had left me a gift:

A nice bottle of beer - exactly what I need, cheers guys.

I`ll just put that in the fridge along with the rest of my shopping:

Oh, perhaps there is no room in my fridge for food anymore since it contains 50 large bottles of beer.

Who needs milk anyway?

Obviously they were having fun because not only was the place spotless, but they even had left chocolates on my pillows

Which were very nice for breakfast this morning.

Thanks guys, that was hilarious, and the perfect end to a bad day.

My main Christmas gift from Fi this year was a ‘mystery tour’ somewhere in Scotland. I knew nothing about where it was going to be or anything else about what was going on.

Today it was time to set off, so I set my Garmin sat nav to the postcode where we were heading to and off we went.

3 and a half hour later we arrived……

….right back at our flat in Edinburgh.

That was not our intended destination. With about 15 miles of the journey left to go the roads we had to take to get where we were going were all windy B roads, and were all covered in about a foot of snow and ice.

We had pretty much no control over our Ford Escort, which to be fair is not really build for such conditions, but towards the end we had no control over steering or the speed we were travelling, so we decided to call it a day and head back to Edinburgh.

It turns out that our intended destination was actually Culcreuch Castle where we would have stayed in Baron’s Suite, which would have been amazing.

And it still will be, in April, when we have re-scheduled our trip for when the weather should be better.

Either that or I`m hiring a bulldozer.

Its that time of year again when the weak and worthless weeds amongst you decide to join a gym and begin your futile attempt to get fit and amazing and be more like me.

Dont waste your money.

You`ll notice that I did not say not to waste your time, thats because you wont ever go. If you do decide to join a gym you`ll sign up to a six month contract, go 4 times a week for the first week, 3 times the week after, twice the week after that perhaps once the following week.

Then silence.

January in the gym is a total nightmare. Every year its the same. The weeds all come running into their new playground having no idea what they are doing. At best they just get in my way, at worst they cripple themselves financially and physically. After a few weeks they find that they dont have a body like Arnie and give up.

But still have to pay 50 quid for another 5 months.

So this year do yourselves a favour and just dont bother. Spend that 50 quid a month on something else - a few more beers or bags of chips per week.

If you really are going to make a difference to your health or physique it has to be life style choice and you have to be in it for the long term, a bit like buying a puppy for Christmas.

I did not get a puppy for Christmas, I got a Nintendo Wii, which is the main reason why its been so quiet around here at 1point21gigawatts towers.

So anyway, instead of making getting fit your new years resolution why not try some other ridiculous ideas like pointlessly trying to increase your carbon footprint etc

But whatever you do, keep out of my gyms.

Happy New Year