Year: 2005

Oh dear. It’s that time of year again: tonight is my work Christmas party. After last year’s truly awful Medieval Banquet-themed event, I had assumed that this year’s party couldn’t possibly be any worse, but it looks like I might be about to be proved wrong.

The first worrying sign came way back in July, when we were emailed a list of potential options, all of which seemed to be offered by this company: www.christmasparties.net, and which mostly seem to consist of a conference room in some shabby hotel that’s been decorated in a particular theme.

For example, how could you possibly resist the “Hooray for Hollywood” themed event:

“As you sip your welcome drink in the glamorous foyer take in the aura of anticipation as everybody marvels at which famous stars they will see!

Our giant illuminated Oscars will lead the way to your reserved table, where you will have a rare opportunity to dine with the stars, as images of famous screen icons adorn the room.”

So that opportunity to “dine with the stars” on your “reserved table” basically means that there are going to be a couple of film posters on the walls.

Or there’s the “Viva Las Vegas” night, which captures the spirit of Vegas with its “Tables dressed with black tablecloths and white napkins”, and I’m pleased to see that they list “lighting” as one of the items included. Wow. With these lights and tablecloths they are really spoiling us.

So the pretty universal reaction to all this nonsense was that none of us wanted to attend any of these overpriced, naff, tacky events, and were sure that the company could do a lot more with the fifty quid a head that they were planning to spend.

Flash forward a couple of months, and the people tasked with booking our Christmas party come round the office to ask everyone individually what they’d like to do this year. In an entirely impartial and non-influential voting system, we were asked whether we’d like (in a low, dull voice) to just go out as the company for “a boring, normal meal” somewhere or (in an excited, happy voice) would we like “a really exciting and fun themed party event with other companies who will surely bring along lots of single men and women”.

I voted for the meal.

And, of course, we’re going to “Disco thru’ the Decades“, because the entire decision on where to go for the evening should be based on the off chance that a couple of developers might pull. I think my favourite part of the theme we’ve chosen is their classy use of the deliberate misspelling “thru” in the event’s title. And I must say, I’m looking forward to “bopping along to the fantastic DJ” at “Club Awesome” as he plays disco hits from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. I imagine it will just be like being 16, back in Southport, and at the Kingsway listening to all my favourite songs, like “It’s Raining Men”, and “Oh What A Night”. And you can never listen to enough of the same 5 disco songs from the 19070s can you? I mean surely no other type of music happened during that 10 years, did it?

But wait, what’s that you say? There’s Karaoke too, for the “budding pop stars”? And that’s “awesome” as well? What are the chances! It’ll be just like that Pop Stars Factor show that all the kids are watching these days.

Oh, and I almost forgot to point out the opulent hotel where all this excitement is taking place. Don’t those stylish conference rooms look great.

I can’t wait. Can you tell?

That said, there is one story that does bear telling properly. As a birthday present for me, Sal had decided that we should take a trip along the coast for a few days, and towards the end of our stay in Melbourne, that is what we did. I’d been part of the way along the Great Ocean Road on both of my two previous trips to Australia. For various reasons, I’d never quite made it past Apollo Bay, and I’d certainly never made it as far as the twelve apostles, a collection of large limestone rock formations just off the coastline near Port Campbell.

This time, Sal had booked us a night in a lovely apartment just outside Apollo Bay, so there was no excuse not to make it to the apostles themselves–although I never did find out where the name came from, given that there not only aren’t 12 of them, but, being large lumps of rock in the sea, they also bear very little similarity to what I’d imagine the founding members of a religious cult in the Middle East a couple of thousand years ago would have looked like. Incidentally, Wikipedia is no help in this regard, either, although it does tell me that they were originally called “The Sow and Piglets”. Frankly, that’s even more baffling–perhaps this is like one of those dot puzzles they give to reality television contestants to test how susceptible they would be to a space-related practical joke (“yeah, that one’s a pig, and those are the babies… no, I’ve got it, sorry, I think that one’s Jesus…”)

Our gorgeous apartment was situated a few kilometres along the coast from Apollo Bay, just up from the beach with only the other three apartments for company, which provided a nice illusion of being completely isolated (while maintaining the luxury of having the town only a stone’s throw away). It was another one of those “it’s bigger than our flat” scenarios, what with its two bedrooms and bathrooms, spa bath, lovely spacious kitchen, front and back seating areas and automatic coffee machine. We didn’t want to leave.

After we’d spent a little while wandering around the apartment saying “Wow!” a lot, and taking photos, we decided we’d better go and get the lobster we’d planned to have for dinner, so we sauntered into town and down to the port. Rather worryingly, given that one of the main things we’d planned to do there had been to buy a lobster, and eat it, we entered Apollo Bay’s only fish shop to see the fishmonger at Apollo Bay’s only fish shop scraping up the remaining ice from the empty cabinet at the front of Apollo Bay’s only fish shop. But, luckily, he did indeed have a cooked lobster out the back for us, which he duly produced and offered to cut in half (but not before Sal had asked if we could take a photo–not something I think I could do in Sainsbury’s without being laughed out of the shop, mind).

Returning to the apartment, we settled into the plush leather sofas with a glass of wine to get on with the important business of thinking about having dinner, or maybe a spa bath. So there we sat and watched not very much happening at all on the empty beach that was immediately outside. And through our floor to ceiling windows it was rather like watching a very big widescreen tv, as we watched the man and woman from the apartment behind ours wander down to the beach, he rushing ahead slightly with a carrier bag and her holding back to admire the view. Then he knelt down in the sand and started fiddling with some rocks on the beach. Being the pragmatic sort, I thought he might be constructing one of those BBQ things in the sand where you bury some fish and roast it underground in some way, but Sal, being a girl, knew immediately what was going on. Sure enough, after some more fiddling the woman was finally allowed to approach, and as he now properly got down on bended knee, she did a little excited jumping up and down thing as he produced the ring. And we sat in our lovely apartment in our comfortable sofas shamelessly trespassing on their very private moment.

Later, much later, when they’d gone back to their apartment, we wandered down to what was now effectively our private beach and walked about for a bit. Sure enough, there it was in the sand, crudely constructed out of small stones: “Will U Marry Me?”

So, it’s becoming increasingly clear that in spite of my best efforts I’m never going to actually catch up with the last month’s worth of bloggable events. We’ve been back from Australia for over a week now, and, well, I’ve got nowhere, frankly. (er, actually, make that two weeks: see, I even started this entry in the past…)

SO. Perhaps a summary of notable events is in order. I’m clearly quite incapable of yoking together these disparate events into some kind of coherent narrative, so I’ll merely lump them all together here: here are the things I might have blogged, if I’d had the time. Perhaps you’d like to think up appropriate segues for yourself? Ok. Thanks, that’s great…

– Entering a bar in Federation Square near the start of our stay, I was asked for ID. “I’m 28”, I said to the bouncer, a bit taken aback. “You’ve got a very young face”, he said, before asking Sal (Australian driving license in hand) if she’d like to vouch for me.

– A week into our stay in Melbourne, and I suppose feeling a bit homesick, I made the rather unusual decision to get up early in the morning and watch the live Premiership football. After watching a rather dull 1-0 victory for Bolton over Tottenham I was expecting maybe some punditry, perhaps an interview with the managers or a look at the table. But no, apparently. Just straight to adverts and on to the bob sleigh. Clearly a far more important and popular sporting event in the southern hemisphere (at 8 AM on a Tuesday morning).

– Despite having been to Australia three times now, somehow it was still news to me that the standard Australian English word for sheets, towels, linen, and so on, is Manchester. Since when did a town in the north of England become a word for towels? How long has this been going on? Why did no one think to tell me? Can we use the names for other places in the North West to refer to things (Blackpool? Chester? Southport?)

– I’m not sure why, but the question I was most asked during my stay was “is this your first time in Australia?” Without exception, every single new person I was introduced to asked me this question. In some cases there were whole people with whom this was the only conversation I had. By the end of the holiday I was so bored with giving the same answer to the question I was almost at the point of just making stuff up.

– On the plane back I spent much of the second half of the flight exploring the seat-back entertainment system. One of the features this included was a live text news section, which was a bit like a really rubbish version of the Internet crossed with a rubbish version of Ceefax. In amongst the entertainment news I was delighted to read the extremely Onion-esque headline “Incident Blown Out Of All Proportion”.

Thursday saw my first trip to the race ground itself (and in fact my first trip to a race ground anywhere, for that matter), as we headed to Flemington for Oaks Day. Unfortunately my betting abilities were in no way improved by my proximity to the races themselves, but it was still a fun way to spend the day, swanning around in a suit, drinking cheap Champagne, eating “Dim Sim” on a stick (a bizarre Australian-Chinese hybrid of a food that seems to consist of some kind of fried fat, with a coating of some more fat, dipped in soy sauce), and wandering over to the bookies to give them money in return for an extra element of excitement in the next race. The best I managed all day was a solitary place in the seventh race, but even then the odds were so poor that my each way bet paid out less than my total initial stake.

By the time I returned to the course on Saturday (for Stakes day, and Chris’s stag do), I was slowly coming to the realisation that the only way I’d ever stand any chance of any kind of betting success was to abdicate responsibility for any actual decision making, and let someone do it. It was time to join a syndicate.

And so it was that I ended up going in with four of the other guys, and we decided to try to pick the trifecta (a type of bet where you win by picking all of the first three horses in the race, in order). There were five of us, so we picked a horse each for each of five races, and took it in turns to put the bet on, each time betting on all possible combinations of those five horses so that, should any three of our five come in in the first three places in any order, we’d be in the money. We put the bet on at 50 cents, so with 60 possible combinations of our 5 horses, it was a total $30 bet each, and we knew that we’d get half of any displayed prize money at the end of the race.

After 3 fruitless races, I was starting to think that my jinx was carrying over into other people’s bets. Even worse, it was now my turn to stick the bet on. Scanning the odds in the creased copy of the Herald Sun we were all circled around, I opted for “Grey Song”. At 26-1, it clearly had no chance of coming in the places, but at least if by some miracle it did we’d get a decent return. The others gave me their four horses in turn, and off I trotted to the TAB desk to put our bet on, and we settled back in at our spot by the finish line to watch race 7, the Queen Elizabeth Stakes.

By the time the horses came round the final bend, two of our horses were running in first and second places. Close, but clearly not enough. But what’s this? It’s Grey Song making a late dash round the outside and appearing to cross the line in third place.

“I think we’ve got it!” I shouted, as we all waited eagerly for the giant TV screen to display the result. Sure enough, there were three of our horses, including my Grey Song. And thanks to those long odds, it paid out $1987… er, of which we got half, and it was split between 5 people, and it was Australian dollars. But, hey, it’s the most money I’ve ever won and going to collect it was an extremely satisfying moment. “Is Green OK?” said the woman as she started counting out $100 bills in front of me. Oh yes. That’ll do nicely…

Pleasing to see that I’ll still be able to keep up with the fortunes of Everton if I ever have to live over in Australia for some reason, at least as long as we have an Australian player–the Herald Sun, the shabby sub-Daily Mail Murdoch tabloid that is ubiquitous in these parts, providing a handy does of right-wing paranoia and scaremongering for those with a fear of the different, tells me that “Aussie Tim Cahill played a full 90 minutes in Everton’s one-nil victory over Middlesborough”. Thanks for that. I’m sure no one here could possibly want to know any more information about that, such as who scored the goal, for example. Presumably that was a non-Australian.

If you ever find yourself on the streets of an Australian town centre, you might get to witness a very Australian shopping phenomenon: businesses attempting to drum up trade by employing some hapless assistant to stand outside with a microphone announcing the various bargains and discounts on offer. I’ve seen this before, on my previous two trips to the country, and I’ve always found it rather amusing, in a low-budget, 1970s kind of way. Still, wasn’t quite what I was expecting as I stepped off the plane at Tullamarine airport, but sure enough, there opposite the walkway was a woman greeting us with “some fantastic offers” on various alcoholic beverages available in the duty free shop. “Some really great savings to be made today”, she said. Frankly, whiskey is probably the last thing I want to think about after spending the best part of 24 hours in the air, but there you go.

The first week of our stay over here was dominated by the Spring Racing Carnival, Melbourne’s annual racing festival. It’s big, around these parts. In fact, it was so important to Sal that it caused her to set off early and beat me to the country by just over a day in order to attend Saturday’s Derby Day. For my first taste of the racing, I had to wait until Tuesday, which saw the arrival of Australia’s biggest race, the Melbourne Cup. With Sal’s house stuffed full of friends and relatives attending their barbecue, we ate, drank, and gambled. At three, we left the fuzzy tv in the garage on which we’d been struggling to follow the action up to that point, and headed inside to watch the main event on a tv where you could actually see what was happening. With the BBQ sweep running at $70 for first place, and a stack of betting stubs from the TAB sitting on the kitchen table, the stakes were certainly high.

In terms of the national impact, the Melbourne Cup is a bit like an Australian version of the Grand National–everyone puts a bet on, and everyone pays attention to the result, whether they care about racing or not. Unlike the National, the Melbourne Cup does provide the interesting bonus that, lacking fences as it does, there’s a fairly good chance that your horse will still be running by the end of the race. Not that it makes much difference to me, of course, because it’s spectacularly unlikely that any horse I’ve backed will be anywhere near the front, even if it can get to the finish line.

On the off chance that the event didn’t mean quite so much to the rest of the world as it apparently did to the state of Victoria, I should perhaps mention that, much to the delight of the local media, what was apparently the most important and exciting and relevant thing in the history of everything happened, as the horse that had won for the last two years won the thing again. Far be it from me to suggest that the hyperbolic reaction from the local tv and press was perhaps disproportionate to the shock occurrence of one of the horses in the race winning it, but it seems that history was made. And no, I’m not just bitter because of the fact that my horse cantered over the line in eighth place. It’s just that a later check of the international news websites revealed that the historic event merited little more than a tiny article in the depths of the racing pages. At one point one of Sal’s relatives asked if we usually watched the Melbourne Cup back home. I didn’t have the heart to explain that it isn’t even televised in the UK…

And so Friday’s 5.30pm rolled around, and I found myself not really doing much of anything at my desk, so I decided to head off to Heathrow, ridiculously early of course, but at least on holiday. Probably just as well, in the end, as I had to endure an excruciating wait to check in at the Singapore Airlines desk, standing in a queue that failed spectacularly to move for absolutely ages. Seriously, what takes some people so long? Oh look, there’s Mr flying economy but I’ve got ten million bags to check in, and oh, there’s Ms don’t know why it’s taken me ten million years to be allocated a seat on this plane and given a printed bit of paper, but I’m waving a credit card around for some reason. Not that I’m bitter or anything. Rather predictably, this was followed by a similarly baffling delay at security (I mean do people not realise that, um, metal objects are going to set the alarms off, and things will be a lot quicker for everyone if they put them in their hand luggage before they get to the scanner? No, obviously not).

Anyway, I eventually got through security in time to grab a rather disgusting meal in one of the restaurants (washed down with a couple of hoegaardens that left me feeling surprisingly tipsy), grab a book or two for the flight and the holiday, and head over to find my plane.

The first 13 hours of my trip, which have brought me to Singapore, have been fairly uneventful. I watched The Wedding Crashers, which was much worse than I expected it to be (i.e., ultimately just a generic romantic comedy, with all the usual clichés), and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was rather better than I expected it to be. Perhaps a sign of a Burton renaissance. And I spent hours upon hours watching that little plane image slowly crossing that little computer map of the world that you get. At one point I woke to see us skirting around the top edge of Iraqi airspace by just a few pixels, and then heading just past Tehran. Strange to think of all the things going on below us as the 747 rumbled on.

Purely for novelty value, I was almost going to start this blog from 30,000 feet (a service that Singapore Airlines are now offering), but sadly I think my laptop battery would barely have survived the time it would have taken to log on. So I’m in Singapore using the free wireless access. Because I can.

See you in Melbourne.

A nice little early birthday present was waiting for me when I got home on Friday night in the form of a court summons for our errant landlady. You may remember our potential eviction woes back in July following her apparent failure to bother to pay the mortgage. We thought it had all been resolved, but it appears not, and proceedings initiated by her bank to recover possession of the property will be heard at a central London court next month. Oh joy of joys. Once again I’m reminded that as tenants we have no rights whatsoever if she opts not to pay her mortgage and no right to be provided with any more information about the case. Well, it’s only our home after all. Luckily it turns out that the wheels of legal process turn mightily slowly, and we should have a good while (imminent holiday in Australia notwithstanding) to make alternative arrangements. I wonder what level of Spencer Mike’s Instant Bankruptcy Programme (TM) she’s reached now.

Another present arrived in the middle of the night, some four hours or so into the day of my 28th birthday, as the car alarm on the BMW belonging to one of our fellow residents went off for the second night in three (it’s now become 4 in 6). After a few minutes of this we became aware of an unusual hissing sound, and peered out into the car park to see if the foxes we’ve previously noticed engaging in some kind of late night vulpine Fight Club back there were at it again (and the impetus for the motion related alarm to disturb most of the block). No, actually, it was just a fellow resident who had snapped, in a Michael Douglas Falling Down sort of way, and who was now spraying shaving cream all over said BMW. [In the morning we subsequently heard the chap–an Aussie, natch–chatting to the bloke who owned the car and claiming to have “left a note on it”. Well, you could say that, I suppose…]

These distractions out of the way, and with our friends George and Rohan about to leave London for good in the back of their imminently arriving taxi, we headed over to the local to join them for their final pint in the UK and start my birthday celebrations. Things go a bit hazy at some point in the afternoon, but thanks to everyone who came, on the off chance that you’re reading. And thanks to everyone who bought me drinks (but not the shots; they were foul).

The other weekend Sal and I popped over to Naples as part of my work’s annual company holiday. It’s always an entertaining experience watching your colleagues get spectacularly drunk and do silly things, and this weekend was no exception. Before we went, I’d heard many things about the fine city of Naples, mostly along the lines of “nice pizza, shame about the city” (my mum, helpfully, said “well, isn’t that what they say: ‘see Naples and die’?”)

Of course with our expectations set suitably low we couldn’t realistically be disappointed, and it turned out to be not nearly as bad as we were expecting (thinks… perhaps other shabby cities could use this kind of reverse psychology in their marketing–“come to Bognor Regis, you’ll hate it!” etc). The pizza is indeed fantastic, but the memory that will remain with me and no doubt most of the other visitors to the city is not, sadly, the wonderful dough-based food, or the beauty of the coast, Vesuvius or Pompeii, but the city’s drivers. I’ve seen some crazy driving in my time (in Turkey and Barcelona this year alone), but the roads in Naples operate in a world of their very own (I don’t believe I saw a vehicle without dents during the entire weekend), and a stay in the city is soundtracked by the continual wail of ambulance (never police) sirens.

Crossing the road is also a rather interesting feature of the city. The best strategy seems to be just walking out in front of the cars looking like you know what you’re doing, not showing any signs of hesitation or weakness and hoping for the best. Takes a bit of adjusting to remember that that isn’t such a good idea when you get back to London, though…

The company weekend is mostly an opportunity to get drunk somewhere interesting, but we do have the formality of a company meeting on the Saturday afternoon during which we spend hours discussing how to make the company better and then instantly forget everything we’ve decided and never implement any of the proposals. (It did provide some amusement value, though: I had to try my best not to laugh at one point during the meeting, when the director who was chairing our discussion group–who had been calling one of the other members of the group by the wrong name for the first half of the meeting until he asked her a direct question and she was forced to stop ignoring it and correct him–suggested that the directors “may be out of touch with what’s going on”. Hmm. You don’t say…)

With the formalities out of the way, we all headed off into the city in teams to attempt to complete a list of challenges and return with photographic evidence of team members doing things like making silly poses outside various monuments, or drinking in various bars. By far the most interesting challenge was attempting to persuade strangers to kiss various members of the group. With 3 bonus points up for grabs for every member of the team photographed being kissed by a stranger of the same sex, the scoring system was heavily skewed towards this one challenge. Sadly, it turns out it’s surprisingly difficult to persuade Italian men to kiss another man on the cheek in public (“…if I do this here, people will think things about me”, said one). The silly macho homophobic idiots…

Over two weeks ago now (yes, I’ve been awfully slack, I know), I spent a weekend in a blur of lederhosen and steins at the world-famous Oktoberfest in Munich. For some reason, it’s not an event that attracts many Brits, as far as I can tell, but as even a cursory glance at a copy of TNT will tell you, it’s well and truly on the default itinerary for every antipodean temporary London resident (ethically dubious bull related hijinks in Pamplona? Check! Dawn Service at Anzac cove in Gallipoli? Check! Shared house in Action with 15 other people sharing rooms and a bunch of “dossers” sleeping on the couch? Check! A weekend drinking litre glasses of beer in Germany? Check…)

I travelled over on my own, to meet up over there with the Australians with whom I was tagging along so as to feel like something less of an interloper, but there were plenty of them surrounding me on the plane to help me feel that bit more at home before I even arrived. It was only when we landed that I realised that I’d just arrived on my own late at night in a country where I speak little to none of the language. Rather conveniently, though, I was able simply to follow the accents to find my way into town (after a few seconds of stabbing wildly at the little picture of a Union Jack on the ticket machine screen–or at least for long enough to work out that it wasn’t actually a touch-screen machine–I opted to just push the button that everyone in front of me had pushed, and hope for the best, and then follow everyone else onto the train, hoping for the best.

Luckily, everyone else was heading into town, and I was transported into the city centre quickly, efficiently, and (best of all) quietly enough to listen to my iPod with the volume at a sensible level. The only potential disruption to my listening pleasure was the consistent grumbling of the drunk elderly German who boarded the train with a beer bottle in one hand and proceeded to talk to himself in German for the duration of the trip. I can only assume he was employed by the city council to provide a helpful warning about the dangers of drink to all the crazy foreigners descending on the city to celebrate the wonders of the fizzy orange stuff.

After a suitably early night, we roused ourselves at an ungodly hour in the morning to begin the challenge of finding a table where we could install ourselves for the duration of the opening day. Unfortunately, we had awoken to some rather miserable weather and the kind of pathetic but constant rain that’s more characteristic of London in October, than the sunny September Munich we’d all been expecting (I had even returned to the flat the previous morning from half way down the street to collect my almost forgotten but entirely redundant shorts and flip flops). The effect of the weather was that no one wanted to sit at any of the thousands of outside tables and instead had already packed themselves in to the tents. With the knowledge that you can’t get served a drunk at Oktoberfest unless you are seated in the back of all our minds, things were starting to look rather bleak.

After some time we eventually discovered one table at the back of the Lowenbraü tent that appeared to contain neither a lot of thirsty Germans nor a small reserved sign, and we eagerly snapped it up. It wasn’t quite that easy, though, because we still weren’t sure whether the table was in fact reserved–after a while one of the waitresses produced some more reserved signs for the table. When we asked her, she seemed to suggest that we could sit there in spite of this, but at the same time told other people to simply go away. Had she misunderstood us, or did she just not like the look of the others? At this point there were still several hours to go before the official opening of the festival (and our first beer of the day) so we sent an advance party out into the rain to hunt for an alternative. Sadly they returned with just some comedy Oktoberfest hats, but no table.

Ah, but it was all ok, because our waitress did happen to like the look of us after all: shortly before 12 she asked us if we could squish down the end to let a German bowling team join us on our table, and at that point we realised we were probably safe. After what seemed like an interminable wait, the procession arrived in the hall and the beer began to flow. Things get a little bit hazy from this point onwards. I can remember being consistently amazed by the ability of the waitresses to carry 10 or 11 steins in one go (it’s quite a sight to behold). I can remember that the German bowlers turned out to be very entertaining company–they taught me the words to the repeated-every-5-minutes oompah, oompah drinking song “Ein Prosit, Ein Prosit, der Gemütlichkeit”, for example (although admittedly those in fact are the words to the repeated-every-5-minutes oompah, oompah drinking song, it’s still something of a feat after several steins). They were also engaging in entertaining challenges like timing each others trips to the toilet. He who takes longest buys the next round, apparently.

At the same time, I don’t remember one of our party emptying the contents of his stomach into his stein (and no, it wasn’t me), and I don’t remember quite how I came to fall asleep on a chair in a bar some hours after the beer hall had closed. I do remember waking up to find a couple of Germans guys poking me to see if I was still alive (presumably), and thus realising that it might be time to go home to the hotel to sleep.

On the Sunday, things were much calmer, and we arrived at the Paulaner tent with plenty of empty tables to choose from. With none of the “no beer until noon” rules in effect on the opening day, we had our first steins in front of us at 9.30 am, and consequently I had to stop drinking by mid afternoon, conscious of my early flight back to London (and straight to work) the following morning. We rounded the weekend off by sampling some of the fairground rides (surely a dangerous combination–very drunk people and machines that tip you upside down at high speed), and heading for a kebab.

Anyway, it’s all rather good. I strongly advise you to go (but maybe just the one time will be enough…)