Tue 01.01.13 – Mon 07.01.13:

2013 began, as all good years should, with a kiss.

The cute redhead (that isn’t me) is my new girlfriend, Casey Turner. She’s a professional designer, artist and musician and she complements my talent set like Crunchy Nut Cornflakes complement VANILLA ICE CREAM (I demand you stop reading this for a moment and try that for yourself). She’s young, feisty, talented, sweet, witty, dangerous and blessed with a brilliant and cunning mind. We make quite a formidable team. And we’re both ginger. BOOYAH!

Casey and I saw in the New Year at a house party off Hope Street in Liverpool. We had been invited along by my gorgeous friend Lorna Brookes. Lorna’s persuasive phone calls to shipping companies had been instrumental in the successful completion of The Odyssey Expedition. There was fondue and a stack of booze, it was all very pleasant and terribly middle class. And so here we are: 2013! The year that I hopefully get paid for something!! I hope this blog isn’t going to end up detailing my life working at Starbucks.

So far, I’m in the running to host a travel show for NBC Peacock productions over in New York (but that’s not going to be until later in the year), I’ll be appearing onstage at Telegraph Adventure Travel Live in London over the weekend of 26-27 January and I’ve been asked to do a talk at TEDActive, a parallel TED Conference in Palm Springs, CA that takes place at the same time as the main one over in Long Beach. This will be on February 28, which, happily enough, is going to be my 34th birthday. This will be my fifth birthday in a row not spent at home. Thus is life for a one-man itinerant court such as myself.

I’m also having talks with Paradigm Talent Agency about representation. As well as the movie scripts I’m hoping to get into circulation, I would quite like to kick off things with a spring term speaking tour of American Universities, so again, watch this space.

Team Jinja returned to London on the night of January 2. I didn’t have much of a plan of action, I just wanted to spend as much time as possible with Casey who lives and works down here. My brilliant mate Lindsey (who helped The Odyssey Expedition with London visas) put us up for a few days in Kilburn while we pretended to work on an animated series we’re hoping to bring to YouTube in the next few weeks. On the Sunday night Case returned home to Hounslow and I stayed in Mile End with Dan Martin, my top chum from The Guardian and the NME (he gets me into gigs, I get him into trouble). The following evening we were joined by my wonderful compadre Matt for the pub quiz at The Crown in Bow (as in Bells). We came a valiant third, not bad considering the top team had six members and there was only three of us. Although that’s no excuse – I should be able to win these things on my own and in my sleep. Grr… I blame smartphones.

With the quiz all wrapped up, I thought I’d just quickly check my email before setting off to Matt’s place where I’d be staying the night. There was a message there from Guinness World Records. I’ve been waiting two months for this email. I read it. My jaw hit the ground.

To Be Continued…