It’s hanami season here in Japan right now. Hanami (or 花見 to use the lingo) is, ostensibly anyway, a centuries-old celebration to mark the blooming of the cherry blossoms and the coming of spring but basically it’s an excuse to get pissed in a field. You leave work early, grab a couple of moderately-priced lager beers from a convenience store (the more determined hanami enthusiast will choose the chu-hi -  a vile, sugary alco-pop favoured by vagrants and girls with only the most cursory attachment to their underwear), maybe get some fried snacks, you stake out your place near the trees, and you drink yourself into a pleasantly glazed stupor while delicate pink petals collect in your hair. Looks something like this:

I quite like hanami season. It’s essentially a more sophisticated version of a popular Irish past-time known as ‘knacker drinking‘. As ‘pennyr200′ very eloquently describes it:

‘When Irish teenagers are underage and have nothing less to do they go knacker drinking. This is where they buy (or some one who is over 18 buys for them) cheap alcohol (usually Dutch Gold or vokda) and drink it in woods or the side of the street parks are also popular… It’s usually pissing rain and you go home feeling like shit and wet… but it was a night out and you don’t feel the wet cause you are so drunk. All is well until some night the guards catch you and you are brought home in the back of the cop car or your stomach gets pumped’.

I never really did much knacker drinking when I was younger. A friend and I did attempt it one night  a few years ago though. Hopelessly middle-class types that we were though we did so not on some dingy allotment but on the grounds of a stately home. With a bottle of champagne. A bottle that neither of us were drunk/socially irresponsible enough to smash after we had finished it it. I can’t remember if we just put it in a bush somewhere. We may have taken it home. And recycled it. Huzzah!

The new series of The Apprentice is a bit rubbish. It’s still entertaining and all (and hilariously tone-deaf to the current economic climate) but I’m not sure I’ll bother watching the rest of the series. Too many obvious set-ups, too many disingenuous edits, and contestants that – far from being a selection of Britain’s best and brightest -  just look like any other bunch of reality TV chancers, equally at home competing on Big Brother or Deal Or No Deal. That said, this weeks episode did produce this rather spectacular turn of phrase:

‘James couldn’t pour shit out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel’.

Poetry.