It Begins...

SO, here we are then. Nearly 4 years (Thursday 7th January 2003, to be exact) after I finished my last stint of creating publicly accessible drivel, it's time to do a little more.

HOWEVER, I'm not for one minute intending this to be a permanent return, and it's highly unlikely that anything you'll read here will be of any interest whatsoever, especially if you've come here thinking you'll find a techie based diatribe like wot I wrote before [or other stuff along the lines of what the remaining Daynotes (http://www.daynotes.com/) boys still do]. I'm doing it for the purely selfish reason of having somewhere to record my 2-month-and-one-day (don't forget the one day...) trip to Australia and Hong Kong, which starts, er, tomorrow. Nothing like preparation and planning here, you understand.

FIVE of us (myself, 'er indoors Ali, #1 Son Mike, #2 Chaz and our doubtless soon to be ex-friend Alan "Hoopy" Hooper) fly out at 22:00 tomorrow on Qantas QF10 London-Brisbane, via Singapore to commence a 62 day barrage of alcohol abuse, street fights with Australian cricket fans (a contradiction in terms, surely?) and cramming in as much sightseeing (and in Hoopy's case at least, shagging) as possible.

ACTUALLY, we're toddling off very innocently to watch the Ashes (Americans and other non-colonials can look it up here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ashes) and do a few other things besides - two of which I'm particularly looking forward to as either could leave me a very rich man indeed - Ali intends to go on a massive roller coaster and do a parachute jump. Where's that insurance policy...?

As I'll probably forget to put anything so remotely useful as place names in posts, we'll be going to these places:

Nov 18th - 28th : Brisbane, Queensland
Nov 29th - Dec 11th : Adelaide, South Australia
Dec 12th - 19th : Perth, Western Australia
Dec 20th - 29th : Melbourne, Victoria
Dec 30th - Jan 11th : Sydney, New South Wales (hawk... spit...)
Jan 12th - 16th : Hong Kong Island, Kong Kong
Jan 17th - Back in Blighty. Sigh.

ANYONE wishing to meet up for beer (or ladies/officers of the constabulary requiring Hoopy's cellphone number) is more than welcome to drop their contact details into a comments, which may or may not illicit a response...

WHY a blog and not simply photographs and memories like normal people, you ask? Well, for a start my memory doesn't work very well any more and many of the photographs I intend taking will, I hope, cause extreme embarrassment to the human subjects (Hoopy) concerned and should therefore be shared with as wider audience as possible, especially those he has previously regarded as friends back home in UKLand. Additionally, of course, it's a really cheap and lazy alternative to personal emails and postcards.

OH YES, about the name. Last Saturday, a day which will forever remain in the memories of those in attendance or unlucky enough to have overheard the antics, 12 of us went out for the quintessential pre-trip piss-up, of which the magnificent 7 ended up in Chandler's hot tub [bollock naked, obviously], eventually managing to stagger home (in various articles of undone/borrowed/wet/other clothing) sometime after 05:30; and it had been his idea during a conversation earlier in the night to keep a blog on the trip. So here it is.

MY NAME is Mat Lemmings, NOT Ian Chandler.

AND that's all for now.