bleungberg.com

Nothing like a piece of good news to cheer up the dullest of spring days in London - Kim Clijsters, the perennial Bleungberg favourite, is set to return to professional tennis from late summer with the aim of a rightful return to the sport’s top 10.

We can hardly wait.

Will her long-time rival and fellow Belgian Justine Henin do likewise? The women’s game could do with the pair of them!

His new wife’s dead. Her PR guru has left him for Portugal in the hope of finding Maddie McCann. His mother-in-law is too disdraught to care about him, whilst his step-children’s biological father hates him and is doing all he can to keep him away from them. Meanwhile, every tabloid editor is waiting to unleash their damning dossier on him once the hoo-hah surrounding the whole Goody demise dies down (excuse the pun..).

So, Jack Tweed - former football agent, nightclub organiser, all-round bad egg who’s due in court on Thursday for assault, what and where next?

Back in jail, naturally. And please, Justice Secretary Jack Straw MP, don’t you dare bend over backwards ever again to accommodate this lag!

BAA, the monopolistic, greedy, selfish megalomaniac of an airport operator, is crying foul after the Competitions Commission order them to sell at least one more airport in Scotland, which is in addition to Gatwick and Stansted in a bid to improve airport services in the UK.

Those Spanish-owned BAA morons are complaining that to do such things would be economically challenging in these trying times, and are considering an appeal.

So, let’s look at the facts: BAA-run airports are woefully-run on so many levels: long queues, dreadful security checks, unbelievably expensive parking costs, expensive food, lengthy delays, unappealing decors, poor baggage handling, and - worst of all - piss-poor transport links. To this day, Bleungberg still believes the Stansted Express to be the WORST airport link he’s ever used, quickly followed by the Gatwick Expresss. And guess who failed to invest adequately in these basic infrastructure?

All the while, they kept on increasing landing fees on flights, who then passed on the rising costs onto the passengers, who also had to endure awful delays and severe baggage restrictions - transit or no transit.

With airport users in the UK showing a fall for the first time in years in 2008,  should the appeal be successful, it would be detrimental to the future of travel within the UK as it loses even more customers to the likes of Schipol or Madrid.

The appeal must be overruled.

It’s rare that Bleungberg gets anything right - let alone two in a row - so it is a rare opportunity for us to gloat over some thing which we had rightly predicted all those years ago.

As with the F.A. Cup, when Varsity Boat Race Company Ltd sold its TV rights to ITV, we knew immediately that they were being heavily influenced by their sponsors, Xchanging, who are notorious for being a bunch of greedy fuckers. We also predicted that ITV would drop the event whenever they wanted.

And so it proved: ITV ditched the boat race in favour of football, and the Boat Race Company had to go begging for other broadcasters to pick it up. Cue Auntie to the rescue, who will once again broadcast the famous race from 2010.

Those greedy boat race people and their equally unsavouring sponsors could’ve saved themselves a lot of trouble by not being greedy in the first place. Terms and conditions haven’t been revealed - Bleungberg would be mightily annoyed if the BBC wasted too much of its millions on this event.

25/3/09 update: The BBC has picked up the Boat Race for free, but must fork out £600k on operational costs for broadcasting the event.

Hello all, and final greetings from Hong Kong.

Saying goodbye to this horribly crowded place isn’t something that I’ve been looking forward to, though, in all honesty, I never thought I would become so fond it either. It is very difficult to bid – temporarily – farewell to a city where everything just seems to work. Alright – that’s an exaggeration…a city where almost everything seems to work – especially when compared to the UK. I arrived here back in November with a degree of scepticism and detachment. I thought I knew what this place was about – hoards of people, nasty pollution, cockroaches but also brilliant food, unrivalled transport and a very industrious, materialistic and status-conscious population. However, there’s so much more to that. For example, I love the winter here, and have rediscovered just how much fun Chinese New Year can be for adults - a five-day orgy of food and gambling. I also love the people’s sense of humour here – and if you’re up for it, something as banal as buying oranges in a market could turn out to be the highlight of the afternoon just by engaging in a bit harmless banter with the traders. It’s a case of who gets the last word in, and it’s great fun, and I will miss that tremendously.

Hong Kong isn’t the only place that I’ve learned to love in this part of the world: for example, my memories of Japan become sweeter by the day. Similarly, I cannot begin to tell you how highly I regard South Korea as a country. My brief visit there around Christmas – freezing, ill, often hungry – were also five of the most enjoyable days of my life. I can’t quite pinpoint exactly what it was about the cities of Busan, Seoul and Incheon that I loved – they all looked dreary, grey, dirty, run-down - yet there is this rustic charm about these Korean cities which make them seem very gritty, nasty, unpretentious and very, very real. They don’t have the silliness of Hong Kong, the craziness of Tokyo, or the chaos of Bangkok, but they are well-worth a detour if you happen to be in the region, and especially if you fancy a bit of cold-hearted rudeness and outstandingly cheap shopping. South Korea is, put simply, highly underrated and easily the cheapest advanced country in the world. Go!

China, on the other hand, just gets worse every time I think about it. I ventured into a place called Zhuhei the other day and almost got beaten up by some guy wearing a pink t-shirt as I took pictures of his shop. I subsequently came to the conclusion that had I been beaten up, no one would have cared because they would’ve had to take me to the hospital and pay for my medical bills. And people in China don’t pay for other people’s medical bills! There aren’t many places I’ve visited that I would describe as awful: Alice Springs is one, the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, is another. And I can now add Ji’nan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhei to that list of six – the last four all in China. The word ‘shithole’ doesn’t even begin to cover those six places.

Similarly, my feelings about London is best described as lukewarm to downright negative at the moment. Chatting to one of you the other day – who’d also moved abroad in recent months – we both came to the conclusion that London is, well, shit. Nothing seems to work, everyone seems depressed and getting around is a chore. It’s bureaucratic, its people are useless, the whole city’s crowded, expensive, dirty, dangerous and just seems so unpalatable to live in right now. I even imagined this scenario the other day that things have become so bad in London that if there’s a corpse lying on the street, it’d probably be days before anyone clears that up because no one cares or knows what to do with it, whereas Hong Kong would deal with that within 30 minutes – only because they’re delayed by the newspaper paparazzi who’d always get there first! To me, London seems rudderless, ungovernable and uninhabitable and I get fairly depressed just thinking about that. One of you unkindly teased me the other day that after months of luxury on the Hong Kong underground system – the incredible MTR – I would now have to endure the London version. I guess you can add ‘torture’ to the list of crimes about London then.