Piss Off.

My new blog, which is a lot more fucking grown up with way less fucking swearing is here.

Recognition

I might kick it all in now after Vice recognised my very short term of service with an inclusion upon their Employee of the Month page (my capitals, employees and months are important enough to rise above other nouns).

Hitler

The time comes when every ex-pat feels confident enough to deliver the full skinny on the country they've chosen to inhabit. I've been here all of five minutes and I've got you sussed, type of thing. My time has come, I chose Hitler. This article is in Exberliner.

Fishing in Deutschland

There's nothing more frustrating than seeing your work translated into a language that you've been struggling to get a grip of for more than six months.

This article may have been written by Conor Creighton, but you will never hear Conor Creighton command German like this in a hundred years.

The article was called Prawns Ahoy, which in German is Garnelen Ahoi.

German Vice

B East

B EAST is a pretty sweet magazine based in Berlin, Prague and a few other cities out east. That's the point of it. They write about things that happen in the east. So if you're a hot new band from Fulham, you won't get any mention till you move to Bow, and if you're an artist from West Queens, you can say good luck to a review until you move across town, and well you get the picture.

I'm going to start writing about Kosovo for them. East Kosovo. Only thing is they can't afford to publish again. When I ran into their editor he was running a night in East Berlin to get some funds together for a print run.

As homage to the DDR, the organisers booked two old cassette DJs to play for the night. Although they weren't called that back in the day. To differentiate them from Westerners, East German DJs were called SPUs, which stands for Schallplattenunterhalte, which translates as disc moderator, which in English sounds more like someone who resets your lumbago rather than plays the one you want to hear.

It was a fun night, and I hoped they made enough money to pay for another issue. You can check out their online magazine here Beast .

At home with the kinder fickers

This is Leiden, a sleepy little town, just a short puck from Amsterdam. Did you know 8 presidents of the USA can trace their roots back to this town? And did you know that Rembrandt grew up here? Or did you know that it's home to Europe's two most famous paedophiles?




Meet Ricardo and Martijn. They're Dutch, they live together in Leiden and they really, really, really like kids. After about three months of correspondence they finally granted me an interview.

Ricardo runs a paedophile website called Martijn, which doesn't work a lot of the time as his many enemies hack in and make a mess of the place. They crashed the server recently by setting up some sort of virus which made the homepage open 200,000 times in a row. Martijn is a member of the Dutch PNVD party, a party whose principal aim is to reduce the age of consent to 12, and who didn't even come close to getting the required number of signatures to run for election last time around.

Ricardo is 22 and Marijn is 36, and if you could just put the fact that they get their kicks fucking children out of your mind, you might even find them pleasant.

Anyway, they gave me 3 hours and then let me take some photos of them. Their neighbours all know what they get up and during the interview there were a few bangs on the door and everyone who passed had a peak through the window. I thought I'd get lynched on my way back to the station but no such drama.

I stayed at a friend's in Amsterdam and went out to a party in an abandoned newspaper office with a bunch of freelancers who burst my bubble by telling me all the questions I should have asked.

Tonight I'm back in Berlin and I'm drinking tea while listening to the transcript. Frightening but true, MacCauley Culkin's name keeps popping up. Lucky for Mac he's the same age as me now but I wonder if he knows that Uncle Buck is like catnip for paedos.

and we're back...

...it's been a long, tough winter and it doesn't look like thaw anytime soon. On New Years it got right down to ten under and then the next day it snowed. We had a party on a rooftop in an eco-building covered in grass. The grass froze like ice and nearly half of us slipped off.

Berlin was chaos, but it wasn't a patch on Naples. The year I lived down in that town, my neighbour shot a round from his handgun into the air only for a stray bullet to drop right back on top of him and into his foot.

I also nearly lost my arm when a plaster of paris bust – it was Julius Caesar I think – dropped eight balconies down in front of me. The Italian tradition is to rid your apartment of unwanted furniture at midnight. It's sanctioned littering en masse, and it's the number one cause of visits to A&E.

Ambulances and fire engines wailed the whole night long in Berlin, but I doubt it got anywhere near as bad as timber armoires landing on baby carriages.

This month I've got an article about a week on a fishing trawler coming out in Vice. I'll stick a link up when it's live.