Saturday 21 May 2016

Just trying out. Later - seems to have worked, though I can't see yet how to add pictures on the app. And I make a new acquaintance, just by chance, a 54-year-old Bangladeshi Australian from Melbourne

Bad Gastein - Day Three: Cup Final day when Louis van Hopeless's fate is decided.

I have downloaded some kind of app which allows me to blog on the move and I'm trying it out. Why blog on the move, which involves - quite literally - one-finger typing? Well, as the Irish say just for the craic. I've just taken a photo of my lunch to be (as it were) to see whether I can also add photos. Well! Can life get any more exciting? I didn't think so!

Think on it: I'm sitting jn the back if Austrian beyond in a Gasthof with a large beer and a Gasteiner Bauernsalat and I can still burble on about fuck-all to my heart's content. Here's the photo (No, it isn’t. Ed), then I shall get on with lunch. Can life get any better? Well, yes, quite probably, but first I'll have lunch. If you are reading this now, more follows later. If you are reading this later, more followed.

. . .

Well, here’s later, I’m back at base killing time before the Cup Final starts at 5.30pm (18.30 local time) and perhaps – perhaps – bloody Manchester United don’t play like a kindergarten scratch side and will beat the shit out of Crystal Palace. I have already made the mistake of laying a fiver on them to win, and as I almost always lose my bets, that would seem Palace have it in the bag. Maybe I should put twice as much on Palace to win, but no doubt Sod’s Law will apply and I will find myself in the clover.

The first bit of this blog was written one-finger style on my iPhone using an app linked to Blogger. I just wanted to see whether it was any cop. I went for the £2.29 ‘pro’ version, which might seem like a waste of dosh to you, but as you can’t even scratch yourself in West London these days for less than a fiver what the hell. While I was sitting at the Salzburgerhof Hotel in Bad Hofgastein, just three/four miles down the road from here, I finally got around to contacting a Liblu Hossain who had Facebook messaged me a few weeks ago querying whether we had any friends in common.


Well, I didn’t recognise the name (and it was similar to a Skype scam I once came across in which someone would ask me to add her – always a her – to my address book, so I was cautious. As it turned out, so was she. It seems that somehow I had sent her a message asking whether she wanted to be Facebook friends. I can’t remember doing so, but these things can happen by chance, so earlier on I messaged her asking her why she had originally asked me whether we had common friends. I thought she might, perhaps, be a friend of my sister’s, who once live in Istanbul and has a lot of different friends, but that wasn’t the case.

To cut a long story short, it was just a fluke. But we chatted for a while and I said I would mention her in this ‘ere blog. So: hello Liblu, I hope you are well, and perhaps we can chat again, though the next time I shall do so at a laptop keyboard as I find typing with all my fingers a damn sight faster than with just the one. So that’s what I did today: got in the car, drove the few miles to Bad Hofgastein, found a bar/café/restaurant, had Gasteiner Bauernsalat for lunch, chatted with Liblu, then came back to watch the Cup Final,

I hope on one of the cable channels on the TV in my room or else on BBC courtesy of Zenmate which allows me to pretend I am in Britain. But I can’t leave without mentioning these bloody sodding hives. Today they were worse again and I am at my wits end. It’s all very well the medical bods informing me that it is ‘idiopathic’ i.e. they don’t know the cause, but that basically your immune system is pumping out histamine – which leads to the itching and thus scratching – in response to ‘an allergy’ of some kind. But what bloody allergy can it bloody be in my case?

If I remember it more or less started when I was visiting Seth last September in Spain, or a little after, although if the truth be told for several years now I have woken to feel a little itchy all over, though by no means as it is now. It isn’t quite as bad as it was in Spain because I am popping anti-histamine tabs as though there were no tomorrow, but that is just sticking a plaster on it all: I want to find out what is causing it in my case and see if I can’t sort it out from that end. My two suspicions have been sugar and alcohol.

Well, I’ve since knocked sugar on the head and sweet things and I have never been a big drinker anyway. But when I get back home, I shall knock booze on the head, too, to see whether for some insane reason I have become allergic to alcohol.

Pip, pip.

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