Ken's Dirty Dives

  A slight detour from my usual bollocks in this one, but it's a tale worth telling. I rocked up on an October morning after a ridiculous layover to a city filled with beautiful landscapes, wonderful coffee, and offered some of the best scuba diving I've ever experienced. There was a mesmerizing hustle to Cartagena like I've never seen before. People riding around with chilly bins selling cervezas and aquas, hustlers coming up to you and free style rapping with a boom box on their shoulder, and of course street vendors selling all sorts of hooky shit everywhere. It was awesome, very European, but mostly just extremely loose.  I will say as much as I enjoyed the street vendors, the cerveza salesman, the 17th century walls around the city, and so on, I was extremely on edge for the first 24 hours I was there. I clearly looked like a tourist, I was on my own, and only having a basic basic understanding of the language. I found myself getting called Gringo a lot and saying ...

  Home Sweet Home .  While I spent my formative years in Canada, London will always hold a special place in my heart. For the most part it's a bit of a dump, hideously expensive, and outrageously over crowded, but there is a certain "je ne sais quoi" to it that I adore. There are so many gems to be found at every corner in this city, and as much as the entire country runs on a "make do and mend" philosophy, its unbelievably simple to get from one end of town to another, unlike Toronto. A fresh coat of paint here and there wouldn't hurt though. Since moving to Canada, I've been back and forth countless times. Those red eye flights across the pond are a bloody drag, but considering 100 years ago it would take months to cross, and you would have been lucky not to sink, I shouldn't complain. I must say, I don't find flying exhausting per se, you have little to no obligations other than to not be a cunt to the flight attendants, drink a cold one, and...

My first time in the big city of Toronto was back in 2001, not long after the passing of the late great Dale Earnhardt. A race which weirdly, I was at. Obviously in '01 I was much too young to be slamming cans, but that didn't stop my parents from handing me the occasional Shandy. My grandad was absolute legend of a bloke, he had a unique ability to roll a smokeo in one hand, whilst driving a manual truck with the other, having only one eye. The funniest part in this, his best mate Ken, was also missing an eye. Only the other one, so they equalled each other out. How good's that eh? Monty Python couldn't have written a better skit. Two peas in a pod. I tell ya, they don't make blokes the way they used too. Maybe it had something to do with them growing up in London after the Luftwaffe paid us a visit. Sadly my grandad passed on not long after Earnhardt, but I vividly remember being a wee lad and sitting in the pub with him dipping my lollipop into his Guinness. This...