Six weeks in...

That's how long ago I kicked off this idea.

Money saved: £0.00

Aha but I do have about €100 in a drawer somewhere, that should count, shouldn't it?

Money saved: €100 (approx.)


Just over three weeks since my last post, what has happened? I finished that Movember 10K in 47:47. Numerical alliteration aside, it was a shitey time. I took a stitch at about 7K and couldn't run it off and eventually had to walk for a  few minutes.

I spent a week in my hometown which was nice but reminded why I'm glad I don't live there any more.

I went to an Arcade Fire gig, sorry "The Reflektors", it was fucking brilliant, not least because just about every cunt followed the dress code and put on their Sunday best or in some cases, fancy dress. Magic.

I procured a guitar and I must learn at least one tune before the year's end.

There's been a couple of set backs...

My two-pronged plan of getting in shape and saving a shit-load of money took a couple of hits last week; one to each prong.

I caught a cold, a minor one but a cold nonetheless. I haven't been for a run in the last 10 days so I'm worried that I've missed some good training for the Movember run a week Sunday. I was about to go for a treadmill session last night but I couldn't find my running headphones and the thought of listening to Pure Gym's hellish playlist put me right off. I did a half-hearted back and biceps session in the hoose instead. I'll have to do 10K tonight, then on Friday and finally Sunday morning on Glasgow Green as my final practice.

I couldn't find my headphones because I put them in a pocket I don't normally use thanks to me trying out the pair I got with my new phone. Which leads me to the hit my savings took.

My phone, a Galaxy SIII, had a big crack in the screen. It worked fine but it didn't look great so I investigated getting it repaired. The option were pay £60 to get it done in a shop, or pay £11 to buy the parts myself. 

I chose the latter and carefully came in about my phone with a hair-dryer and blade. Before long there was an expensive sounding crunch and small explosion of glass-shards as I reconfigured a delicate piece of technology into a coaster. It's not even a coaster in fact because bits of fucking glass keeps falling off it.

My savings took a hit to the tune of £299.95 but I rationalised it by looking at the amount of use I get from the phone and it will be extremely useful to have one in foreign countries.

Lesson learned: aggressively saving money is fine but don't let it make you think you're fucking Inspector Gadget.

Here's my new watch

I needed a new wristwatch.

My previous, a particularly convincing TAG Heuer counterfeit which captured the obnoxious over-design really quite accurately (less can be said for the time it kept), met its demise in some kind of drunken fall. I'm not sure of the details, I woke after a good old booze-up and it was hanging off my wrist in bits.

A few weeks ago I was window shopping and came across Fossil and their fantastic range of fancy looking timepieces, all around the £100 mark. I'd found my watch, or at least I'd found a few to choose from but I would think about it and come back a week later to buy.

Unluckily for Fossil, in the subsequent week I had my money-saving epiphany and suddenly £100 for a watch seemed absurd. Especially one that isn't water resistant.

This led me to look for something cheaper, tougher and simpler and I ended up with the cheapest, toughest, simplest and coolest fucking watch on the planet. For £11.55.

This little bastard will travel the world

Can a watch be described as 'timeless'? Certainly the Casio F-91W has survived more than 20 years of changing fashion and technological progress to remain a massive selling product.

The F-91W can be bracketed with the Adidas Gazelle, the Swiss Army Knife and Magic Trees as a product with an enduring appeal to men who can take care of business.

Its continued popularity is ode to an elegant economy, a no-nonsense build that shines like a beacon, a tiny green beacon, in a world with an abundance of over-sized, over-designed and over-prices timepieces.

It remains iconic in a time of ever-changing icons. Its cult fed by a vast appeal from fathers to fashionistas, from teenagers to terrorists.

This unassuming, tough little watch has never pretended to be anything more than an accurate, affordable digital watch but somewhere along the line it became cool.

Truly the Casio F-91W is the watch of our times.

Here's the plan

Sometime last week, I'm not sure exactly what day, I took the decision to travel the world. I guess this will mean quitting my job, selling all my objects and buying a one-way ticket to a far-away country. Probably Thailand. No, Australia. Actually it might have to be Germany.

This isn't a spur of the moment thing; I've spent over 34 years meandering towards this point in my life. 

So there's the headline. My 'mission statement' if you like that sort of bullshit. I've got a vague framework bouncing around my head and this will start to take shape in the coming weeks, like a Lego spaceship. I fancy myself as a writer you see, and I'm not going to let the handicap of no experience, little education and careless approach to proof reading spoil it for me. These may, however, spoil it for you, dear reader.

Yes there are a couple of travel blogs out there already, over ten in fact. This is no surprise. In the Venn diagram of travellers and would-be writers of this world there was bound to be some overlap. I'm not actually expecting anyone to find, let alone read, this blog and I'm happy with that because I don't think I'm any good at it yet. I've been partly inspired by the stories of NeverEndingVoyage, 20-SomethingTravel and Ashley Cowie but I'm not banking on making any money out of this. Not at first.

Over the coming year or so I'll be posting regular updates, each more interesting and poetic than the last, journaling my preparation to travel around the globe. By the time I set off I imagine I'll be weaving such vivid tales in 400 words that National Geographic themselves will be there, contract in hand, to see me off.

There we have it; everything I do from here on in must propel me towards that goal. Every morning I have to ask myself, "What are you going to do today to achieve your dream?”

In the coming posts I'll fill in some back story about who the fuck I am, how the fuck I got here and why the fuck I'm doing this. I'll maybe post up some of my previous travel journals. I'll get some details of the intense savings plan I'll be working on. All this will be in the matey, talk-to-the-reader tone I've kicked off with, most will be funnier, and some might be insightful and reflective. There will be bad language.

So that's the plan and the first post of what should prove to be an award-winning blog and best-selling book. 

I put this motivational picture here as a thank you for reading.