The Grand Walking Tour of Ancient Medici land in Florence

I think Jenny is going to get spoilt by all this travelling to the cultural capitols of the world with me we packed all our stuff, me for travelling onwards to Malabo and Jenny for 4 days in the sun. I organised taxis for pick cleared all my existing mail and packed all the computer bits and pieces I had bought on the internet, including headsets and cameras for the internet and 160 GB HDD for me to copy all my DVD’s onto a DVD- burner and case. I packed all the extra clothes I picked up in the house and packed them into a spare case Jenny brought with her. She took just enough clothing for her over the 4 days we were going to be in Florence together, We flew together from Manchester to Florence in Business class, this was purely and wonderfully accidental, as I have a frequent flyer card we were in the business class check in queue, some poncy sales rep thought I looked too rough for that queue and asked me in a rather condescending manner if I was business class and I just said yes without a second thought so when we checked in I automatically said can we have two seats together and the guy said yes and he must have just checked Jenny’s ticket which was the only one I could get that was on the same flights as me and it was business booked through my Airmiles card. So I got an automatic upgrade without even asking for it, I was nice to look down my nose at the poncy git anyway. We had an hour to kill in paris so we went to the business lounge and I had a few drinks and packed my bag with the bottles of water as I new they would be expensive in Florence. We flounced about in our poshness and felt great flying away together to this cultural centre and Jenny was in Heaven just setting foot in France as she is keen to learn the language and has always wanted to travel through Europe and this was her first time. We got to the check in and just as we were showing our boarding passes it was pointed out that I was on this flight and she was on the next, her face was utter shock and disappointment. I had to leave her there looking bewildered saying I would wait for her in Florence, it really screwed things up for us and probably cost us a full day sightseeing. I had to wait 2 hours in a pisspot airport in Florence whiling away my time by getting maps and hotel lists and ringing the office asking where they were going to book us in and that I wouldn’t make it int the office as I was waiting for my wife and to arrange a later date for the meeting with my manager. Jenny arrived and looked very relieved to see me at the arrivals gate, she did remind me that she had no money and no credit card and no phone numbers of the relatives in the UK just in case of something happening to me, it was all common sense but I had overlooked it all in the rush to get things organised for my trips. We went straight to the hotel and unpacked our crap and crashed out in the hotel, we popped into a little takeaway for Italian food about 50 metres from the hotel and had some stale pizza and some expensive snacks but as it is Florence and with it being on the Airport run you can expect to get some terrible service. Next morning we showered best we could in the minute shower and the shower mat was a great piece of medieval torture equipment, like a thousand spikes piercing your feet and making the shower an endurance test to see how long you could stay in the shower before having to jump out and scream out loud with the pain. We got to the office on time at 9.00am and was met by Zofia our office contact and very efficient administrator, she is very tall has perfect Italian and English which for a Polish girl is amazing, she does happen also to have married a local Italian turbine tech which helps I suppose. I met my expenses girl and asked for my new credit card to which she could find no reference or any mail I sent her asking for it, but I did get the paperwork signed for a delivery to my Costa Rican address. I completed all my outstanding expenses and timesheets. Got my air tickets changed for my return trip to Malabo hopefully for the last time I was thinking. I also was able to download all Jenny’s huge university attachments very quickly as the office has a very fast internet link. I enjoyed that part and we planned a meeting with my manager for 11.00 am. We trundled across the road from our office , it is only 150 metres away and got our security badge and walked to meet this man of mystery who had demanded my presence at such an awkward time for me. As soon as I laid eyes on him I realised he was one of the gang of guys I had worked with in California in 2001, I was amazed as how small the world the turbine business is and the guy who was stood with him turned out to be a guy I had worked with in Norway in 2000 on the Eldfisk platform in the north sea. You could have knocked me down with a feather. This immediately made for a very easy start to the meeting and we just joked about the job we had been on and the guys and life in California, we went outside for a coffee in the glorious sunshine of Florence and chatted a bit more about Malabo and how I didn’t enjoy the slow life in operations and that I wanted to go back on commissioning. It came to pass that I mentioned the fact I had worked for a competitor and I was used to working on many different types of turbines and his eyes opened up like he had seen some spirit coming down from heaven it turned out I had offered myself up for a job he had been searching for someone to do. He said he had a little job in Nigeria for a controls guy with experience and it would only be a couple of trips, I thought about how I have been trying to get on the big Brazilian project and if I did them the favour of completing the Nigerian job I would get some payback with the Brazilian job, I know it is wrong of me to think like that but I have to motivate myself with that sort of attitude, I even mentioned that I had been after the job in Brazil a couple of times and he said he had no notification of any customer requests for staff yet, so he didn’t know anything about it yet. I basically agreed to do the Nigerian job as I am desperate to get off these goddam nightshifts, they are killing me. So he showed me the new training room where they send all the new recruits , I thought it was a nice gesture but irrelevant and then he said thanks for coming and he’ll see me the next time I get a new project, and waved me goodbye, I was shocked to find after 1 ½ hours of chatting that the meeting was over, Jenny was also completely shocked to see her husband treated like a visiting dignitary and sent on his way with a smile, so unlike anything she had ever experienced in Costa Rica. We both found it rather amusing that the company spent so much money on me flying in for 4 days all expense paid trip to have a quick chat over coffee about things in general. I cannot say I dislike it in fact I love the job and the way I am treated, it is a deserved response to all the hard work I put in over the years being the dogs body. So Jenny and myself went back to lunch and sat in the sunshine and had a seafood salad, hot beef sandwich and fruit salad for desert and it was fantastic, better than the MacDonalds we had in London. We sauntered back to the office to pick up my onward airtickets to Malabo and complete any outstanding paperwork. We got into the office and was promised the tickets at 4.00pm but that left not time to do any sightseeing that afternoon. We sat doing mail and anything to forget the time and at 5.00 Jenny was getting frustrated and letting me know and accidentally Zofia was overhearing us and she kept asking the travel agency when the tickets were coming finally at 5.15pm we were finally told they had no one to deliver them so we packed up and shot off out to catch the train into Florence, and it was a very short and sedate journey of about 10 minutes which would have taken 20 by car. We immediately started our marathon walk around the town, first to the Duomo, 15th centuary cathedral with a St Pauls type domed tower, and then to the Palace Vecchio where the filthy rich Medici family lived and then to the river and the bridge Ponte Vecchio,


where the Medici family had a private walkway built over the road to be able to walk to the Palace Pitti there new place across the river, without touching the filthy peasants and of course getting wet, fantastic wealth in all its guises. We ate in a local taverna as I would call it and the food was OK nothing to shout home about and a beer and we were done for the night, we got a taxi back to the hotel and fell into a deep both of us after all the activity and early start for the airport.

Once more into the Field of Battle of Tourism Travelling

When I had left Malabo on my last trip I was definite I wasn’t going to return as my manager was talking about different jobs I was going to work on, Peru was the one I was hoping for and then possibly Brazil, after 1 week back in the UK clearing the accumulated crap out of my house that I hadn’t seen the inside of for 18 months, I was mailed by my manager telling me I was required in Spain to do a weeks babysitting on a new unit. Well this would have screwed up my holiday plans as my wife had only arrived in the UK from Costa Rica and had been with me for 4 days. As you could imagine she wasn’t happy about that to say the least, I told my manager about my situation and that I was trying to organize the selling of my house, he left me alone for a few more days. During this gap I was walking my wife to death, around the historic market town of Chesterfield and the surrounding areas, as well as up to the house from my sisters house where we managed to get a bed as my nephew wasn’t happy with his new bed. My wife was great at helping me clear out all that old crap you tend to keep hold of and we managed to get the local cat protection charity to come and remove it all, free of charge, they got all my old video camera gear and a couple of 35 mm cameras that I had never even used since I got my digital one. Just tons of crap that I had scraped and collected together over the previous years, and this is after 4 previous house moves. I will never collect that amount of crap again. I have developed a philosophy of if I don’t use it I will not collect it which is against my bringing up where both my mother and father collected any old crap just in case they may use it 20 years from now, well when they were kids I suppose that was OK as you never had anything and getting something for nothing was great even if you didn’t need it or have a use for it. When a previous company I worked for was bought out I managed to rummage through all their draws of the guys who left before me or were fired. I got a free hand at everything in their draws to take home, I had to put it all in a waste paper bin to handle all the pens and pritt sticks and marker pens and 15 rulers and staplers and hole punches, I even collected all the power adaptors for old phones and all the different telephone adaptors for all Europe and communication adaptors for the controllers I worked on and tons of useless things and all deposited in that waste bin. I think that I have everyone of the pens from that day and that was 5 years ago, virtually nothing as been removed but believe it or not some of the power adaptors have been used so some things were useful, but I have this built in magpie syndrome that I have to learn to control working amongst lots of equipment that is surplus on the job it is hard not to pick up things and take them home with me, it is easier as the years go on but I used to collect anything that I thought I may need in years to come including a kit to build a conveyer system, what the hell did I want with that, I was insane with the things I used to pick up but I am getting better, I was ruined by my mum and dad, my houses used to spill over with the cardboard boxes of items we had bought and “may need in future to return the item with”, what horse shit they filled me with. Today I clear with ease but in the back of my mind I still want to hoard. My dad told me of a woman he new that had died and her husband being old and infirm asked my dad and his girlfriend to help him clear the house, he thought it was just some old clothes and maybe some womens junk, shoes and knickknacks, but when he opened the door he was faced by a mountain of junk and fantastic stuff this woman hoarded in the house to the extent that it was packed in boxes piled to the roof in every room to the point that you could only just open doors and sit down on the sofa, every step of the stairs was packed with boxes of clothes and food and anything you could imagine, the bath had a door placed on it so she could stack 500 bars of soap on it and 200 bottles of shampoo, this woman could hoard for England. It took my dad 6 months of weekly jumble sales to get rid of it all, 500 hats and 500 pairs of Marks and Spencers bloomers, 1000 pairs of socks and , 1000’s of lengths of material and 100’s of tins of different foods and toys still in boxes and anything you could imagine. This is a mentality of hoarding for the shortages, something that kids of today know nothing about but she was a victim of her childhood and her husband suffered for it all his life, I bet he had terrible sex as she would have been perfectly satisfied doing the shopping each week and stacking the cupboards to the top with a glint in her eye. Anyhow my house clearing went well and I got in a decorator and managed to get the carpets sized up and picked for a fitting after the decorator had completed the touching up of the things I had altered 2 years before, but while Jenny and myself were clearing out, the weather was great and we spent many hours upstairs in the lovely cosy bedrooms overlooking the nice garden we have and it felt very nice to be there, it was almost a relief when she said she would love to come and spend a year or so with the kids to help them learn English properly. So the plan is sometime in the future we are going to move to the UK and spend a year or two living in the UK, I can say that I enjoyed my 2 weeks in the UK seeing my old buddies and relatives, I was startled my the cleanliness of the streets and town centre, being able to shop on the internet and buy anything I wanted from the supermarket was a revelation. It felt nice, but I kept telling her that the weather is normally crap but the sun kept shining day after day, we only got a sprinkling of rain on a couple of nights, Jenny was in love with the language and my dads house and my sisters new house and my house and the fact the school was only 100 yards away for the little girl and the junior school was only 300 yards away for the boy was all she kept thinking about. Why not the schooling in the UK is fantastic compared to the general schooling in Costa Rica, so there it is shopping And schooling what more does a mummy want. I was then mailed by my manager to tell me that he needed me to come for a meeting at the office in Florence with my regional manager, I was upset as they were pissing me about again but I could only think of the upcoming projects I have asking about and I was convinced that they were going to tell me where I was going to be working for the next 2 years, so I managed to convince Jenny that we had to go even though the house had many things to sort out and we were planning a trip to London to go to the theatre and see all the typical London sights that she would be fine even though she was overwhelmed with all the travelling as this was her first trip into Europe. We booked out trip to London on londontown.com we got seats in the Apollo theatre for the Saturday night fever show and two nights in a hotel, it was easy we took the train and arrived mid afternoon and got to our hotel via the London underground. Now I love the underground as it goes everywhere and you can get a ticket to travel everywhere all day for the same price, so we started hopping from one train to the next and went to the theatre and did a lot of walking around the museums and London bridge and the tower of London, not going in as it is expensive and nothing special.


I did it maybe 5 years ago, while we were walking around we came across the theatre which had the show Chicago on and we just popped in to see if they had seats available for the show and we were surprised to be offered tickets for the gods at £15, I was over the moon as they had Brook Shields on in her first week, we had to rush back to the hotel hopping on and off trains and to get ready for the show and hopping on and off trains again to get there for the curtain up,I loved the show and it was great, and the performing was flawless, OK Brooke didn’t have a great voice but she didn’t miss a word and I was in heaven, it took me back to the days when I worked in the local theatre in chesterfield as a school boy. We left late and went for a Macdonalds as it is cheap and quick, we got back to the hotel after a long day and slept like logs in a very small but very nice and comfortable room in central London. The next day we were up and active once again jumping from one tube line to another to get to the British museum which is my first time there and I was so impressed by the scale of the things there, the new atrium is vast and the displays of the ancient Egypt and Rome were just fantastic, incredible even, I was in awe at the monumental size of some of them, Jenny loved it as this was exactly what she was thinking about for the entire trip. We went along to the museum at Somerset House which houses the Cortauld Collection, and the Gilbert collection of expensive snuff boxes, the renovation of this fantastic ex inland revenue building is very impressive, the Cortauld collection has the Van Gogh self portrait of his bandaged head after he cut off his ear, what a fantastic painting, so full of expression, it had many fine pictures and I enjoyed it a lot, we went into the Gilbert collection and saw snuff boxes that were beyond description, full of jewels and made of the finest crafted gold and precious materials, especially the ones made for some king of the Hapsburg empire, Hagar the horrible or something like that, they must have had 2 pounds of tobacco in them, all for show but it was pretty fantastic with all the other fine things he collected, he must have been fantastically rich, lucky bastard, or hard working bastard. We went to our evening show at the other theatre to see the Saturday night fever show and it was again a perfectly performed theatrical performance with great singing and dancing, Jenny loved this the best out of the two and in some ways it was as good but the Chicago was better in my eyes for the length and varied type of acting, I was surprised to find out how empty the place was, less than half, the circle and gods were shut to save on staff and we got upgraded to the stalls a much better view all for the same £15, again we left and had a Macdonalds on the way home as it is quick and cheap and I do love them as I hardly ever get the chance to eat them these days. We crashed into bed again and overslept for breakfast and the 9.30 start to the cheap day all London tube tickets, we went to the National gallery to see the finest collection of painting in the world, possible and we found the new entrance impressive and the Sainsbusy wing quite impressive, there was some fantastic works of art and I did enjoy the Impressionist collection very good, especially the sunflowers by Van Gogh , I love his work , I saw another of his in the Smithsonian gallery in Washington DC, another self portrait, I find these days I have been spoilt by seeing so much fantastic work all around the world, unless it is better than great I am unimpressed, I hope this doesn’t spoil my choices for future holidays. We staggered back to St Pancras main line railway station and slumbered with aching legs into the uncomfortable seats and slept for some of the trip, I am feeling worn out and I don’t know if all the walking in Malabo is making me feel old but even Jenny was complaining about all the walking we were doing, but for me it was another day of walking and my feet were aching and burning again but we got back to Chesterfield tired but we had to get ready for travelling to Florence the following day. Next episode the Florence walking expedition.

The Chaotic world of contracting and a possible return to malabo

I have been on holiday less than a week and my boss tells me I have to go to Spain and then Florence for a meeting with him and then a trip back to Malabo until they find a replacement for the Malabo, this was all without consulting me and never listening to me telling him I need a break and my wife is flying in from Costa Rica to spend time into the U with me and was planning on enjoying her first trip to Europe, I am trying to clear my house of all the accumulated crap of life and get some decoration and carpeting finished, first time since I bought the house in Dec 2000. It is easy arranging things but getting time to do the things is another story, I am one week into this and I have achieved almost zero so far, crap piled up in the living room looking like a horror movie, once this is all gone hopefully today then it may look like a house again, decorator Saturday and carpet man measuring up Friday for a fitting next week sometime, should all look like a liveable house in 1 weeks time I hope, and that depends if my boss sends me to Spain, not sure if they will force me to go but I said my wife will let me go if you pay for her to fly with me on all my rounds trip to Spain and Florence, I haven’t heard back from them yet as they took that as a no from me. As far as a return to Malabo it was always on the books that i may stay there for another trip and maybe longer until they found a suitable replacement, i didnt want to go back as i hate the shift work but i have no right of refusal in my contract and it could be worse i could be sent to Nigeria,we'll see what transpires next.

The Last Party in Malabo Town

I was dragged out kicking and screaming on a leaving party and nearly got arrested by the site security at the main gate for not having my site pass, that was a bad omen I was thinking. We drove into town and waited at the toll booth, it is a party site, soldiers and a rag tag bunch of whores and soldiers friends all getting drunk and who knows what else. Probably sex in the bushes and stealing all the toll money, why else would they be hanging around the tollbooth. So we went got into town passed all the abandoned wheeless police cars outside the station. And through the shanty town squalor we jumped out all 15 maybe and went into the hotspot in town called treasure island, once again it is owned and run by the Chinese families that seem to run all the best business’s in town. But I was shocked to find a really clean and fresh drinking place without a whore in sight. It was OK as a starting place but it had no atmosphere at all just a posh restaurant like anywhere in the world so after 2 drinks we all abandoned ship. We walked through the rubble of the high street and I felt a little uncomfortable as women squatted at the side of the road selling junk mostly and staring at the strange white men, even though the oil guys have been here for about 10 years I think only in the last 2 years have there been more than a handful of Europeans or Americans in town. So we arrived at what can only be described as a space between two house and a few tables with white plastic chairs scattered around and this was called the china sisters bar, with a sign saying massage parlour on the wall. It is a hut out of which they sell beer and a toilet that stunk so badly as to be offensive in the extreme. Nothing more than a toilet bowl sat in concrete and a large water barrel and a jug that you were meant to flush it with. As there had been cholera in town for the previous 6 months I was avoiding touching anything. we asked if the sisters were doing the massages adn were told no, they were bringing beautiful chinese girls into E.G. from Chine but they couldnt get Visas for them yet, so the sign was a bit premature. We were drinking in a group of 6 and in the bar was a group of about 6 young prostitutes and for some strange reason they did not approach us at all, not once were we propositioned, they did eventually approach our colleagues on the other table but that was so late maybe 11.00pm and for me that was fine as they can be very forceful, grabbing hold of you and demanding beer, the girls were dancing around the table sitting on guys laps and wriggling about, the guys know the score and have a laugh, one or two were stood jiggling there huge booties in some guys face, there was even one of the waitresses from the canteen who was there trying to make some extra money as she was being very provocative with a few guys bending over and getting them to slap her ass, but we had a great laugh all night discussing the merits of where next to go working and where not to and watching the antics on the next table, we all agreed this place could be a very nice part of the world if the locals were not so badly corrupted by the president. It is inevitable that sooner or later this place will be like Nigeria and it is a shame, as they seem a nice sort of people just very stinky. We all staggered back to the bus and started singing those drunken songs that the brits do so well and after a minute there seemed to be some shouting and finger pointing going on and a then all hell broke loose, a couple of guys had to be held back from attacking a couple of guys who had been complaining that we had delayed the bus, it was all very nasty and drunken but the night out isn’t the same without some fighting at some point. It all calmed own after about 1 minute and then we all got back to singing. We didn’t get back to camp until 1.00am and then we were all up at 5.30am and in the whole year I have only ever been late for work twice and once was when I overlaid on night shift. I think everybody was very delicate the next day but we survived one more night in Malabo to tell the tale.

Weighing the anchor swabbing the decks and readying to hoist the mainsul

It is just a matter of clearing the decks ready for the move on, as well as getting everything ready for my first holiday back in the UK for the last 18 months, trying to do this as well as work on the running of 5 turbines and training a buffoon of a guy from Pakistan who really shouldn’t be let anywhere near a turbine even a microwave would be to much for him I think, his knowledge is appalling at best and non-existant at worst. So I am working as best I can within the limits of time and distance that will allow me. I have to be professional about leaving, I don’t want to leave a bitter taste in the mouth of anyone here who I am working for or with. It is hard not to crow about leaving though, I just want to sing it out loud that “I am leaving this shithole once and for all”, it isn’t cricket to do that, but just mentioning the fact that I am off to Peru or Brazil has the jaws twitching and the teeth grinding in envy, I am not intentionally pissing people off but it happens when a guy gets a good posting even if the money isn’t fantastic, working somewhere nice and relaxing and where you can live a normal life is worth a great deal of money. It is like having a home from home if you have a nice hotel or apartment, where you can go shopping and drinking and even partying ‘til dawn. In fact that is exactly how I felt when I was working in the USA. I was able to choose my hotel and I drove a nice hire car, the one I liked and I stayed in great hotels and ate what I wanted and danced ‘til dawn once or twice and it was heavenly, I was deeply depressed when they pulled me out of the USA, mortified even. I couldn’t believe it after nearly 3 years. What were they thinking of, then being sent to deepest darkest Turkmenistan was a shock to the system. I only lasted twelve weeks in that place after picking up a nasty bowel parasite, I quit my company and went on a 5 month holiday. So after recovering from that depression I ended up travelling to west Africa and it wasn’t for trying very hard to work in the USA again, there is just a glut of guys trying to work contract in the USA now and the salary is poor and I would be taxable. So it is hardly worth me going back there. I think I will end up working down south of the border forever, in South American and maybe Mexico. So I am distributing my e-mail and Blog site to the guys who I know would appreciate it and enjoy the silly humour and maybe keep in touch, it isn’t the guys who you would think, I have more of a rapport with the techs than the management, I think it is the fact that the engineers have no sense of humour just a head full of crap and total dedication to work, some of the engineers I have been unable to even strike up a conversation with, they either blank you or look the other way, pretending they haven’t seen you, what bullshit is that, I am not a demon I just want to say hello and receive a smile in return, so now they will be pissed off even more as I travel back to my home in central America and they move on to the next job in Norway, beautiful but oh so goddam cold and grey and miserable, and the beer is £5 a pint.

The Last Seven Painful Days Before Leaving

Well I have been without a contract for 5 days now and I had begun to think they were just stringing me along telling me I would get a contract and not to worry as I had threatened to leave the site as soon as my contract had expired, but to my surprise it arrived in the mail this morning so I can leave site knowing I am going to get paid after all and I will be travelling on to some other place in the near future. I wasn’t even worried about not getting a contract and I surprised myself with that, I was even thinking how nice it would be to have all the summer off and maybe take another contract next autumn in the USA as the job front for controls guys has blossomed lately and I have seen many offers but the money is appalling to say it would be taxable. I think the salaries being paid is about the same as ten years ago and that isn’t an incentive to make me leave this job and settle my feet under a table in Arkansas or some other backwater without a cinema and the local sport is shooting small furry things all day long. So I will be working international in the future but I am worried that they may ask me to go to some shithole in china where I have a buddy or even India which is an even bigger shithole where I have another old buddy telling me the rainy season has started. Well the rainy season has erupted here with just buckets pouring down all day. Quite depressing really, it is almost worse than the UK for the rain as when you get inside in the UK you can warm up, here the A/C is running and it chills you to the marrow and I was even shivering I was so cold, but if you wear a waterproof jacket you get as wet on the inside as you just sweat like a thoroughbred racehorse and smell twice as bad. The perspiration problem with a tropical country is nothing but a race against the bacteria that invade you warm and sweaty areas. As soon as you shower you have to wear anti-perspirant or within a few hours your armpits can stink like you have been harbouring a rotten cabbage in them, and unfortunately the locals who are as poor as hell and haven’t got a pot to piss in never mind a shower, usually stink to high heaven, some of the women are so rotten that it is impossible to stay in the same room as them when they come in to clean up, we did call them the mingettes, and proper minging they were to, good lord they were almost hovering off the ground with the odorous vapours pouring off them.
There is a potential leaving party in town this coming weekend and I am not looking forward to it as I am not happy about getting back there with all the muggers and aggressive prostitutes hanging about the place, I only go out for a laugh and a beer and it is impossible to have that sort of night out when you are constantly being harassed by the local whores who are only trying to make a living but it isn’t my cup of tea and I am hoping that the party ends up in the clubhouse where I have a 5 minute walk back to my room, the last thing I want to do is wake up with a pulsating head at 9.00am 3 hours late for work in some tin shed with a naked stinky prostitute at the side of me with a big smile on her face and I not remember anything. That was something one of the other contractors had to face up to, when he asked for the toilet he was pointed at a tin door and when he opened it he was faced with a hole in a dirt floor of a small tin outhouse. Not for me not in the slightest.

The Morality or Immorality of Copying DVD's and Music CD's

We are bombarded constantly with news quotes about the music industry and the film industry taking so called music and film pirates to court and demanding compensation for the loss of the money the artist should have been due to. I do have a huge philosophical problem with this. I totally disagree that a guy who maybe talented at writing music and maybe even playing an instrument should be rewarded with buckets of money and a very early retirement. It is immoral and a slap in the face for every hard working person in the planet. Mainly for the reason that if he is good he should make his money like the rest of us and get out on the road and earn it from live performances. I am of the opinion that the court cases against downloading of music are only for the protection of the music industry and not the musician. The industry usually screws the artist on their contract and makes the most from the CD’s, so I have no scruples about sharing my music via my MP3 player which isn’t an IPod and even cracking copy protected CD’s to copy onto my MP3 player. How many of us have been enraged by the ridiculous drug taking antics of some of the later performers and even older performers. Lets face it no one deserves to be stinking rich because they wrote a few songs. If it comes to that I don’t think a writer of novels should also become so fabulously wealthy they think they can take over a political party and even ignore the laws of the land. I even take the copying of DVD’s into this argument. I enjoy films and going to the cinema, which I do at least once a month but I do not and will not pay $20 for a DVD, it is a silly and large amount for something that can be seen on the TV after a couple of years for free basically. I copy copious amounts of DVD’s for my own personal use and don’t share them online but I do share them with my fellow contractors if they want, usually via large external hard drives. The overwhelming factor in all this argument is that the amounts of money we are talking about is huge and the companies involved want to screw us poor hard working public into giving them more and more of our hard earned money. I know that some of you think I probably earn too much myself but at least I do put in the hours and I did spend 4 years at university studying to get where I am today, but actors and musicians do not deserve a life of luxury just for what they do. The market forces will continue to drive people into copying music and films until the industry decides that they will have to charge the market price for there offerings. I think a DVD would be OK at $4 or $5 and a music CD at maybe $2, if I were to pay for the amount of times I have listened to Thin Lizzies greatest hits it would be about 25 cents. Some of the music I have got I don’t think I have ever listened to. I bet that most music downloaders are just collectors of MP3’s and hardly have time to listen to it. As far as DVD’s go I cannot see terrorist organisations ever trying to make money out of DVD’s as they are hardly a weapon of choice for the fundamentalists we have in the world. You would never see a proper suicide bomber trying kill others with the entire collection of The beach boys CD’s strapped to his body. It is a bogus argument and they are fighting a losing battle, market forces will without doubt always find a way to copy and reproduce both music and films into may digital formats and be carried about on mini digital players for both music and films so the sooner they understand that and stop pissing about trying to hold back the water like King Canute the better. Musicians would be better off distributing their music for free on their own websites and if they were good people would pay to go and see them, I have paid to see may great stars and would pay to see them again if they don’t keep retiring. I paid $100 to see Tina Turner and her fantastic singing even at the age of 56 overwhelmed me. So it isn’t the stars who would suffer only the companies, as for films well good films always make money at the box office and the crappy cinema copies that I often see are so bad I don’t bother copying them anyway so they should charge less and they would see the number of Films sold this way would multiply so greatly. So if they are listening to my rantings, Stop ripping us off you tight twats and sell the films cheap I would rather buy original than piss about for 3 hours ripping and burning poorer quality copies all for the cost of 15 cents, it is the cost you fools. Remember Walmart didn’t get where it was today by charging $50 for a loaf of bread did they so they should learnt he lesson or suffer constant piracy.