The Bachelor Pad Discoveries - Part 1

Two months down, and I'm finally settled into my new bachelor pad. Since I first moved in, I have made a number of discoveries - including those of the unpleasant, olfactory variety.

I have discovered this - given the distinct topography of my suburb and the particular aerodynamic qualities of my neighbourhood, when I open both the door in my bedroom (that leads onto the veranda) and the window in my living room, I can create a wind-tunnel - the ferocity of which can be tempered in part by my repositioning of the sliding door that separates the two rooms.

This God-like power to summon a veritable tornado in my apartment is especially handy now that it's summer in Japan. The downside, of course, is that it is entirely possible that any posters I put up on my walls of naughty girls in naughty positions wearing naughty, naughty negligé (if any) could get sucked out the window, never to be seen again...

People of the Polka-dotted Persuasion

Measles, measles everywhere, and not a spot to be seen...

It is to the eternal regret of my mother that I was never fortunate enough to contract measles or chicken pox as a child. Try as she might to 'socialise' me with the neighbourhood kids (each of whom were scratching, blotchy messes), her little boy's immune system was ever-so strong, and curiously insusceptible to the contagious trials and tribulations of other little boys and girls.

With my now advanced age, my immune system (my defense against the mercurial temperament of mother nature and her occasional tantrums direct at my person) has taken a battering of late through a combination of self-induced insomnia and sustained, yet moderated, self-abuse of the alcoholic variety.

And so it is that I, with my less-than-perfect immune system, find myself in a city that is now in the midst of an outbreak of measles on many of the campuses of its many universities... while some might call this a curious coincidence, I'm inclined to attribute it to the continued collusion of the malevolent fates conspiring against me... Supporting my theory of a damnable and malicious cosmic force, I am further aided by the evidence that whilst other universities have shutdown, mine has done little more than send out a half-hearted email to students (of which I was apparently not on the mailing list, and had to have it forwarded to me by a friend) urging those inflicted with polka-dots to stay at home... the rest of us, I assume, can be damned...