Season's Greetings From Man Abroad

From all of us here at Man Abroad we wish you a lovely and boring festive season, eating your safe little supermarket fat-trimmed steaks and man-handled poultry while we pick the protein-rich flesh off the faces of recently slaughtered lambs with our bare hands at the dinner table.


Oh, can you pass me another tomato please? Yeah it's over there next to the severed lambs feet and tail chilling on the bench. And while your at it chuck us a hoof too, something to munch on in the meantime.


For some more traditional festive season imagery check out this Christmas Tree. Not bad hey — put it together myself. That's an impressive looking tree you might say. Well guess what? It ain't no tree mofo but 5,000 branchy bits from a super massive 30 metre high tree hacked off and artfully wired together by yours truly. Looks like a car crash from behind but this angle is just right.

So be merry and festive and all that shizmo while I Hard Yakka it up country stylings; dig holes, eat meat, move tonnes of compost 10 metres, chop wood until my lower back feels like it's been raped by a donkey, wash dishes like a madman, play with Guacho the puppy while avoiding Tokki the stinky old dog, ride a bike up hills like Lance Armstrong, eat 2 blocks of chocolate a day, think about blog entries, eat until my stomach hurts badly every meal, drink between 5 and 9 cups of tea daily with sugar, ride 15 minutes into a head wind to get lettuce for dinner urgently then ride back in a head wind and get yelled at because I bought a fucking cabbage instead and do it all over again, put on three layers of sunblock everyday (including my plumbers crack), hand plow acres of ground, get kicked in the chest by shit covered sheep hoofs, eat meat, keep and eye on the wasps that are nesting in the bathroom (don't what to get stung on the hornet whilst showering now do I?), try to keep the wood stove fire lit all fucking day, keep a spanish diary that reads like a 6 year old dyslexic school girl, eat pasta from a plate not a bowl, stop myself from crushing to death with my bear hands the roosters that go off from 3AM, drink milk straight from the udder, refuse to eat anything without putting butter on it, fake my way through all Spanish conversations and nod at all requests and instructions (when I can identify them thus) and suffer the consequences later, continue to look the wrong way every time I cross the street, consume more homemade jam than legally possible, learn to fear geese, find lambs jaws with teeth in the bottom of my soup bowl, get called gringo by five year old Chileans, use the third person for 'I understand' everytime instead of the first person (PERSON: You understand Nicholas? ME: Yes, you understand ), stick a finger covered in Chilli powder in my eye, develop callouses now on both hands and eat lots and lots of meat.