Don't let the weather stop you!

Partly as a joke and partly for the purposes of confirming stereotypes, Paul and I decided to start counting the consecutive days that rain falls in London. I arrived here on the 11th of July and it was raining when I got off the train. The day after that it rained. The day after that it rained too. This trend tended to remain consistant for another eight days until right now. And yes, it's raining right now. Such weather does indeed have the potential to put (quite literally) a 'dampener' on one's stay in England but I haven't let it get to me. In fact, over the past 10 days I've spent time with Uncle Paul both seeing sights and hunting down a broad and diverse range of work to keep me going. At first we did door knocks on random pubs in entertainment areas, talking to mangers and generally getting turned down.

With advice from some of these mangers, we

then proceeded to refine our search to the

more independently owned pubs. No luck here either. This went on for a couple of days before I decided that I needed to try out the waters within another pool of work. This turned out to be street promotion. A job of this description usually entails getting people into a bar, club or comedy house from the streets. So, after applying for every promoting job on every job-hunting website, I finally got a trial night at the Metra night club in Leicester Square in a busy area of London, Soho. Here, I spent 7 hours walking around, doing my best to ring people into the club in competition with several other more experienced promoters who were very good at bringing people into the club (and on some occasions, taking credit for my catches). Time tended to go extremely slow and by the end of the night I could hardly stand. I thought at least the pay should be ok since my manager said she would pay me by the hour. I was wrong. I only recieved

20 quid which is about 40 bucks for seven hours. I wasn't very happy since I brought home only 12 pounds after dinner and the bus ride home at 4 in the AM.

Needless to say, I wasn't too keen to go down the promotion road too much further as I knew I could be better spending my time earning three times the money with another type of work. The problem was, I still didn't know what that work was gunna be. The next day I wrung near 50 pubs that were located further out of London in the hope that they might have something for me. Nope.

After all that, I'm happy to say that finding work in London is no walk in the park.

A couple of days ago, my luck took a slightly different course. I met a friend of Paul and Karren's, Gabby, who ended up contacting a friend of hers who works in a contruction company. So last night, we got a call here at Hampstead asking if I'd like to work with him for a couple of days this week. The cash sounded good so I accepted the offer. I actually worked with them today. We were working in a massive Gym/Spa in London city, mostly ripping up and replacing the floor and ceiling. The old back's a bit sore but a cold beer at the end of the day always tastes better after some hard work.

It's great that this kind of work managed to pop up at the right time but unfortunately it does seem pretty casual. Will have to see how things turn out.

In other news, a couple of days ago after door knocking at pubs, Uncle Paul and I were sitting in a favourite spot of ours at the top of Primrose Hill in Hampstead Heath Park drinking a packed

beer when the weather decided to turn bad. Yes, you guessed it, it started to rain. Already comfy and with 3 quarters of a beer to go, Paul and I looked back at the clouds to discover that there was a big patch of blue heading our way. After all, it was only light rain and we thought we could

tough it out, so we did. A few minutes later, we briefly peeked over our shoulders to see that a police van was following a windy path up towards the top of the hill. Knowing full well that police patrols through nice areas of London were frequent, we didn't think much of this at the time.

So, in good spirit we continued to drink our beers in the

rain (which, I might add, is quite legal here) when the police van stopped behind us and out from it emerged to officers. We thought this was a bit odd, but still thought nothing of it.

"So what are you fellas up to? Just drinking a couple of beers here in the rain are we?" The first officer spoke.

To which we replied "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.. yeah, we're waiting for the rain to s-s-stop."

The officers thought that it was quite odd that these two Australian blokes were sitting at the top of Primrose Hill in the rain drinking beers surrounded by what they

described as 'Smoking paraphernalia' (of course these were cigarette buts that were there well before we sat down).

Almost immediately, the officers began to search our bags, our jackets, our pockets and even our wallets. At this stage, concerned mothers were tearing their unsuspecting childen off playground equipment and away from these two suspected drug dealers.

Luckily, Uncle Paul didn't have anything on him at the time so the police let us go with only a ticket detailing why the search had taken place. I've provided a picture of that ticket. It might be a bit hard to read but the words 'Strange

behaviour' are printed somewhere in there. Yikes!