The Joy of Raki

missed typo....

2012-01-21T19:55:00.000Z

......or deliberate? This made me smile today: I was looking through the What'sOn section of GetReading, and saw this ad for a concert:

Now, how do you go around proving that you are qualified for free entrance?

Faffing about.

2012-01-16T23:53:00.000Z

OK, this is one of these posts where I'm not sure where it'll end up, simply because I'm being a bit aimless, and also because it's mid-January, and that is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the month. In fact, thinking about it, January is one of my faffier months. This is probably because of several factors:
1) Resolutions crashing and failing miserably.
2) Lack of money due to Christmas.
3) It's bloody January, and it's dark outside and it's easier to sit in a pit at home, lurking and watching duff TV.
As I have mentioned on this blog before, I tend not to make any solid resolutions as such at this time of year, as they are almost certainly doomed to fail due to the fact that we tend to indulge in far too many bad habits around the winter solstice, such as drinking and eating too much or generally being a bit gloomy.
But one habit I've become more mindful of is mental faffing. Having completed a series of challenges last year, I find myself at a bit of a loose end, and I've noticed how much of my thinking time is taken up with idle speculation and random thoughts. At the same time, I've really noticed how much general faffing I do - at work, at home, whenever I'm on my netbook, whenever I'm standing in a corner and idly staring at drying paint, or whatever. Now, I'm certainly not alone in this - it's amazing how much faffing you can get away with: Boris Johnson appears to have set up an entire career out of being a professional faffer. And, come to think of it, virtually every presenter of daytime TV. But it sometimes seems to me that I've spent too much time in thoughtful idleness, and it leads me to wonder how much more I could do by being more mindful - that is, more focused on doing something rather than let my mind wander.
Then again, this makes me wonder whether it is worth being mindful: Would I actually be doing anything worthwhile, or would it just be Doing Stuff? In which case, it's faffing, but concentrated faffing. In fact, this is a variant on this good old question: 'What If...?' 'What if I'd done more at school? What if I'd jumped to this job? What if I'd stayed?' etc and so on and so forth.
The fact is, it's so easy to flail around in life, and it is extraordinarily rare to find people who focus single-mindedly on things - and it should be borne in mind that such people are committing themselves to a high-risk game - if they fail and fall, they fail and fall spectacularly. And they don't get to smell the roses along the way. There's nothing wrong per se with the faff: it's when the faff takes over from real life and we mistake it for such. But also, when we are jolted into notcing that what we are doing is an act of faffiness, then it is time to do something different.
And that's the end of this bit of faffery.

Christmas Time, Mistletoe and Wine etc.

2011-12-21T21:30:00.000Z

Yes, I know, a long pause between the triumphal entries of my ride into Paris and now, and there is a very good, but rather sad, reason. I'll probably talk about it another time, but it's too personal and raw for now.

Instead, let's talk about Christmas, well, just a little bit. It's a great time of year for broken promises, whether they be New Year Resolutions that last about as long as a snowball in Hell, or intentions to make Xmas Xtra Special This Year, ending up with everything going into meltdown. As ever.

One things I always intend to do is write a short story for Christmas, something festive or spooky or something. I haven't had much joy with doing this so far, and none this year either.
However, I've been digging through my old archives of written junk, and I discovered this little piece from December 1992, so I thought I'd share it here, as a sop to festive writing. To be honest, it's pretty miserable stuff. Oh well.

A BRIEF TALE

It was Christmas Eve, the time towards chucking out, the pubs heaving with beer and nicotine and revelry and sweat and the juggernaut thudding of music, when you could stand at the doorway of a bar and feel the difference between the heat within and the cold without like walls pressing against each other: It was the time to stagger off in search of any parties that might be happening, anywhere awash with alcohol. One such group of people, hot and laughing, were planning exactly this.

- Onl On!

-What,now? Wooh !

-Phil! Are you with us, you old sod?

-C'mon !

-Are you coming Phil?

Phil Bravo, drunk as the next, but his insides remaininq somehow sober, raised a hand in denial.

-Not I. No dosh.Tired. Must wait for Santa.

-Oh, come on!

-No.thanks, must wend my weary soon.

-You sure? Oh all right then.

-See you soon. Merry Christmas.

A chorus of goodnights and kisses flurried briefly, then fluttered into the road with yelps and cheers sidling along, echoing to silence, Ieaving Bravo to finish his pint. The pub emptied, the barmaid

cleaned up around him.

-C'mon now!

-Sorry. Here you go.

-Ta. Merry Christmas.

-And you.

He left, legs heavy with beer, lurching into the street, the cold clear wind scouring. Christmas. It grew less every year, lost its weight, became insubstantial, he thought.

Times I remember, magic, wonder. Transformation. Looking at myself in a bauble on a tree, spinning the little glass orb round on its thread, my reflection rolling over it, ghostlighted. The imminence of the next day, the eager anticipation that kept me awake half the night, sent me hurtling from the bed like a dog out of the slips in the morning.....The fairy castle of lights and turrets and frosted crenellations my father made from blue card and glitter, placed by the tree every year, and I believing the magic, the sheer magic of it all.

What is it now? Another holiday, a long weekend.

Bravo entered the town's High Street and looked up its length. Christmas lights clung to the lampposts, a flotilla of lanterns and decorations harboured in the cold night, feeble in the immense blackness, the indifferent anonymity of unlit shops, the broken reflections from the puddles.

What's missing?

He tried to remember what it was, the formula or the way of seeing things that made it good, that made this time so special, so fecund with maybes and nearly theres. Faintly, faintly, from a nearby church, a high thin arc of song reached into the air, arched overhead, and just as he thought he could almost hold it, the melody disappeared into the gap between the stars.

He couldn't imagine.

The glitter and the goods heaped in the shop windows looked cheap, there'd be rain tomorrow, having to deal with the bloody relatives, the niceties of the season, then back to sodding work. All this intruded into his mind.

Where had the magic gone?

Phil Bravo, disappointed adult, staggered home, his mind on Christmas dinner, the new day’s surfeit.

Elsewhere, as Midnight moved on, some children, somewhere, half asleep, heard the possible clatter of secret hooves, a shuffling on the roof, bells maybe. And certain animals, as they dreamt, found they could speak for a while, spoke and laughed and kept the secret to themselves.

December 1992

The London to Paris cycle ride, part four

2011-09-06T22:09:00.000Z

A thump on the window. Le Campanile's version of a wakeup call. I'd actually woken a little earlier, feeling remarkably good, certainly better than I deserved to. And, contrary to expectations, not particularly sore: In fact, I seemed to be floating slightly, with a faint grin on my face. We were all up earlier than any of the other days, simply because we had a rendezvous with Paris at 2.30. I found I couldn't eat much - too early to eat, or maybe too excited, I don't know. It was a somewhat perfunctory affair, a croisant and a coffee, then I packed my daysack and main pack for the last time, keeping the former as light as possible for the last leg. The morning was cool, with mist hanging around the tree tops opposite the hotel, but it boded heat - you just knew that when the sun got going, it would turn into a hot one. We threw our bags into the support van, saddled up, and, from me -
'ALLONS-Y!'
We pedalled onto the road again, the whole pack of us. The atmosphere was one of excitement and anticipation, of knowledge of a job nearly done. We turned a corner, then another, and then whoosh! into the mist and the forests and the hills. Riding through fog is always a strange and exhilarating experience - the movement into the unknown, the way the opaque curtain closes behind you, the sense of being held in a bubble, the way it emphasises that, as you ride, there is only you and the now and the road.
And what a road! A sheer joy of tarmac: with the exception of our voices and the odd car, we moved on in near silence, a ghost peleton, a glimmer of brief rushing colours passing through the fog. As we came out of Compiegne, I also saw, for the first time ever, a red squirrel. Sadly, little Squirrel Nutkin had not heeded his own road safety advice.
It was splattered across the road.

ENGLISH ROADKILL vs FRENCH ROADKILL
There can be little doubt that roadkill in the United Kingdom exhibits a far greater range of wildlife than it does in the French Republic. Upon the roads of the Green and Pleasant Land, one may observe Hedgehogs, frogs, toads, rabbits, pigeons, squirrels, pheasants, peasants, grouse, ptarmigans (in the north), quail, sheep, muntjac and other varieties of deer, even the odd wallaby. France, however, displays a far greater amount of roadkill. rare is it to go 200 metres along a main road without encountering a flattened rat, or exploded mouse. If one wishes to enjoy sheer roadkill headcount, then France is the country for you.

The roads were fairly hilly, but by and large not excessively so. Well, that's how it seemed at first. We went into dips, then rose again, occasionally climbing up out of the fog into a brief view of a small island above a sea of white, before dipping again. But then, we hit a hill. A big bugger. It went on and on, and then on a bit more. And then a bit extra. Finally, we got to the top. The road was clear of mist, although it still lay in the fields to either side. The sky was suddenly properly visible, the kind of blue that turns gradually paler as the day passes. Turning on to a side road, we waited for others to catch up. A couple of minutes passed. Ross appeared, struggling with a very spongy tyre. Following him was Sabrina, clearly having problems.
'You Ok?'
'No!', she smiled, nearly crying at the same time. She'd done something to one of her legs, and was obviously in quite a lot of pain. We stopped for a breather, and she hobbled off her bike, nearly collapsing. Kris, Glen's trainer, had a look at her leg, and tried giving it a massage. It had already started swelling.
'I felt it go as I came up the hill', she gasped.'I just started off too cold'.
While Kris looked after her, I tried helping out Ross and his back tyre, which had suddenly gone flat. He tried reinflating it with his pump, but it was a screw-in type, and kept on taking the valve out. We tried with three different pumps, with mine eventually getting a bit of air successfully into it. Someone else had also developed a flat. It seemed as if, on the final day, whatever could go wrong, would go wrong. The support vehicle turned up, and Marco got to work with inner tubes and pumps. Suddenly, from out of the mist, there was a tremendous roar, the sound of what I thought was a jet fighter flying low and very, very near.
'Jesus! That plane's close!'
'It's not a plane', replied someone, 'that's the Eurostar - the line's just down in that valley'.
Never heard a train sound like that. I felt my legs were getting cold, so rather than run the risk of them cramping up, I decided to ride on to the water stop, which was only a couple of kilometres ahead, and located in what should have been on the stereotypes bingo list - a lovely, honey-coloured chateau:

what - no bananas?

across the road, over the field, electricty pylons poked their heads through the mist, and down a misty lane with sunlight lancing, a man on an old-fashioned bicycle went by.
He wasn't playing an accordion though.

honest, that's a bloke on a bike without an accordion.

the road on which we stopped was Rue Jean-Paul Satre, which almost counts for the sneering existentialist philosopher in a black roll-neck sweater listening to jazz stereotype.
The rest of my pack came in a few minutes after me, and once they'd had their fill, and Sabrina had been checked over again, the nurse asked her if she'd be ok.
'I've come this bloody far, I'm finishing this!' Good for her.
We carried on into a brighter day, and as we headed towards Paris, we came on older roads, and an older type of road surface: cobbles, or CCCCCOOOOOOBBBBBBLLLLLEEEESSS AAAAAGGGHHH, as all the people on road bikes called them. My cunning plan to use a heavy mountain bike was finally coming to fruition, I kidded myself. It was only in the villages we passed that we encountered this - in between, there was still the baby-smooth EU-subsidised, Tour de France-attracting tarmac. We glided down one hill, across a plain and towards another ridge, on which a ruined turret jutted from the tree tops, looking in sunlight like a ragged face staring towards us. Another uphill, a sudden bout of cobbles, the sound of Sabrina going 'Oooowww!' as she went over them, a brief stop at the top, and then we were in the Oise Valley - the Oise, which debouches into the Seine. We were almost on the final leg.
We rode through a village with more traffic than we had been used to, and there on a corner was -
man with baguette under his arm exiting a boulangerie!
we cheered, much to the bemusement of people watching us go by.
Lunch. At ten o'clock. Did we care? Hell no - there was apple pie, more pasta of various hues, a final melange of options from the previous few days, and 80's music: What more could you ask for from a saturday in France with the sun rising? The nurse gave Sabrina an injection to help with her swollen leg, and within half and hour she was feeling a lot better - well, she could actually walk, for one thing. Lorraine, who had taken the tumble the day before, was sore and riding slow, but still in one piece. In fact, everyone was bubbly and ready for the very last section.

would you like some pie with your cream, Ross?

We thanked the field catering team (Extreme Catering, for those who want to know), and got into the saddle.
And promptly got almost lost. Well, actually, we were in the right direction, but Dave suddenly said,
'Hang on, this must be wrong - we're doubling back on ourselves'.
We looked at our maps, tried to work out what was going on, then went back down the hill, went down a side road, saw that was wrong, saw another group of riders, then decided to follow them. And that was the last example of signage anxiety of the trip. Carrying on up a hill, I ended up ahead of the others, and decided to stop and put on some sun cream - by now, it was seriously hot. The rest of the group came up the hill, and on we went - down one road, through another surrounded by older houses, down a hill, up the other side and then, a couple of kilometres later -
Pylon after pylon, marching across the countryside, all aimed in the same direction. Planes coming in to land, or lifting up into the sky from some as yet unseen airstrip. Glints of glass, roads to the left, to our right, ahead, all with a single destination - the towers and buildings on the horizon, so close -
'PARIS!'
we whooped and cheered, and seemed to get more life into our legs. We were almost there, it seemed. Team Rouge (me, Kev, Sabrina, Dave, Glen, and Ross ) ploughed on. And on.
In fact, there were quite a few more miles to cover. The Banlieus of Paris approached. We went down one downhill, and in front of us were the skyscrapers of the financial district and suddenly, between two buildings, gone in a flash, the Eiffel Tower. Not everyone got downhill in one piece. We passed Dulcie, being helped by the support vehicle, who'd come off in a pothole, bashing her knee.
On went the banlieus, and the traffic became heavier while the roads became narrower. It was time to switch to city-style cycling, slower and more defensive, and after the freedom and speed of the last few days, immensely frustrating. Paris exuded heat: It clung to us, a clammy shirt of humidity, and left us sapped and increasingly thirsty. The traffic meant that it became difficult to overtake or move ahead easily. At one stage, we were forced to crawl behind a guy driving a mobility shopper down the road, who I suspected was thoroughly enjoying reducing our speed. Finally, the Seine appeared, and we moved along its banks, frustrated by the traffic lights - but where was our stop? We still had kilometres of avoiding pedestrians, cars, and parked vans that abruptly pulled out, earning at least two a thump on the side from me.
'Where the bloody hell are we bloody stopping?' I yelled, annoyed.
'There!' said another guy just in front of me, pointing at Marco, who was waving frantically in the middle of the road. At last, the park!
'Well done guys, you're here! Get in the park and have an ice cream.'
I didn't even mind spending three quid on a Cornetto.

Paris! And this, unbelievably, is a public toilet.

Team Rouge!

So, we all got drinks and ice creams and changed into our MacMillan Tshirts, and suddenly no-one really knew what to say. It's always the same when you reach a target or achieve something: there's a moment of anti-climax, of doubt, of 'well, what next?' We stood or sat, relaxing, and actually there wasn't a need to say a thing. We had ridden three hundred miles in four days, and you don't do that too often.
But we hadn't quite finished yet. There was still the small matter of another ride in formation to do, and do THIS:

Holy Shit! We rode round the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs Elysee! It doesn't get much better than that.
Well, actually, it did.
We headed towards the Eiffel Tower, the support vehicle ahead of us, holding us together as a pack. As we approached the Champs du Mars, it slowed right down at some traffic lights, then suddenly roared off as they turned red. We had to wait, and it dawned on us that we had to do a sprint finish. We lined up, poised on the pedals, waiting for the lights to change. One of the Discover Adventure team was ahead of us, waving a flag and beckoning, and the the lights changed, and BOOM! we cranked it as hard as we could, and there ahead of us was a roundabout and friends and relatives all screaming and cheering and waving flags, and Marco was shouting 'keep going round, keep going round!', so we did, everyone whooping and laughing.
Fortunately, there were several little blokes running round with buckets of beer, and by God, they tasted good. The beer that is, not the little blokes. All that was left was the photos and greeting families - and for Laura to fall over on her bike because she couldn't get her cleats out in time. It was time for a last pedal - down to our hotel, The Pullman Rive Gauche, which was definitely a notch better than the other hotels we'd stayed in. I went to get my key and find out who my roommate was for that night - turned out it was Ross once again, but:
'My girlfriend's got a room. No offense, but I think I'd rather spend the night with her', he said, grinning.
Bonus!
I had a couple of glasses of champagne that had been laid on, and checked on my bike, which was in the stack that were being loaded onto a lorry for transportation back to St. Pancras.
'You did well on that', said one of the Discover Adventure guys. ' When I first saw it, I thought, nah, he'll never make it.'
'It's not that big a monster!'
'That is a Claud Butler. I reckon that's one of the heaviest bikes ever to complete this challenge. However, I've seen someone try to do this on a shopper bike.'
Feeling terribly chuffed with myself, I went up to my room on the fifteenth floor, one I could enjoy in glorious solitude, with views across Paris and the Parc des Princes. I poured myself a beer and treated myself to a long, hot, shower, a great big grin spread over my face.
And that's where it ends, nearly. The victory dinner was socially pleasant, but the food was, beyond doubt, a disaster. If I thought the grub at Arras was bad, it hadn't come remotely close to what awaited me here. It was :

shame on you Pullman Rive Gauche! Shame

THEY SERVED ME CAT FOOD.
Well, it was some kind of potted lamb meat, served on a bed of couscous. It's really hard to bugger up couscous, but by God they'd done it. And the lamb - it really did taste as bad as it looks in the photo. However, it was more than made up for by the party in the bar across the road, which went on to past three in the morning, survived a sudden torrential thunderstorm, and saw at least one broken table.
All that was left was a couple of hours walking round a sunday Paris. I ended up in the Tuileries with Kev, admiring the gardens and statues, then headed back by metro to the hotel. And finally, coming up the exit tunnel, there he was:
An accordion player.
Accompanied by a tuba player.
Playing a rendition of The Birdie Song!
What an adventure. What a great five days.
To everyone who made this possible, thank you. To everyone who participated, you're all brilliant. To Sabrina, Kev, Glen, Dave, Ross, and Kris, thank you for making the whole thing so enjoyable.
And would I do this again?
ALLONS-Y!

The London to Paris cycle ride, part three

2011-09-02T00:05:00.000Z

Day Three: Arras to Compiegne
Ahh, I love the smell of Ralgex in the mornings...
The early morning air hung heavy with the aroma of embrocations and unguents, along with the post-storm smell of the earth. We were getting ready to set off again, and I stared blearily up the road.
I hadn't had a decent night's sleep. Strawberry lager, proper lager, Chartreuse and Gin and Tonic were not entirely conducive to nestling gently into the arms of Morpheus. However, I would probably have managed more if it hadn't been for the fact that my room mate was a heavy snorer - or, to be perfectly honest, a heavier snorer than me. He sawed away from about half three to about five, and I finally managed to get a little sleep before the wake up call at 6.10. God, my legs hurt. I stretched one leg out of the bed, reached for the ibuprofen and tried to find a cool spot on the pillow.
'Stretching your legs?' asked my room mate.
'No, hangover'.
Well, it could have been worse. I could have had Glen's Chartreuse and Cognac hangover.
Once again, Sabrina, Kev and I rode out into the day, and once again, it was a cool start, but now promising to get warm sooner rather than later. And my God, it hurt to start off. Ow.Ow.Ow.Ow., went my legs as they pedalled around, but after a few kilometres they got into their stride, and on we went. Glen was somewhere to the back, and we were joined by Dave and Ross as we cycled. The land undulated, the vistas opened up, and suddenly we were in a landscape of tranquil bucolic charm, a scene entirely unrecognisable to someone who'd stood there some 95 years ago.
The valleys that had been fought over, inch by bloody inch, by imperial forces during the First World War. The sky remained grey and the mood among us remained quiet, sombre even, as though this was a place that should be either flitted through with the minimum of fuss and attention seeking, or should be processed through at a funereal pace. Here and there, as we turned a corner, along with the small roadside chapels, there would be a cemetery, neatly tended, its gravestones serried and white, inscribed with the names of boys who'd been sent off to die a long time ago. The whole landscape, despite its sleepy charm, seemed to me to carry a terrible song of sadness. Every building, every stand of trees, every little hillock, every stump, each single little thing had been fought over and had witnessed mechanised, industrialised mass death. We spoke almost quietly, discussing what we were seeing, what we remembered of WW1, what we knew of these wars. I described my Great-Uncle Charlie, who had been in the first push over the top at the Somme Offensive, who got shot and spent three days in the mud before being taken prisoner. I talked about Karen having served in Iraq, and Ross mentioned a friend of his who was in the SBS, and who had been in both Iraq and Afghanistan.On we went, the land climbed, the smooth road unrolled underneath us, more wind turbines appeared, and suddenly we were in the Somme Valley, and approaching our first stop of the day, at the Thiepval Memorial.

I don't want to say much at this juncture - if you've been there, you'll know exactly how it feels. If you haven't, go. The number of names of people who haven't even been found is staggering. I found it deeply upsetting. One of the other cyclists sat quietly in one corner of the monument, red-eyed. We walked quietly around the monument and its superbly-tended grounds, visited the information centre, then getting our fill of bananas and oaty snacks. After nearly an hour there, we saddled up again and climbed upwards, and the sun came out, and seemingly, all of a sudden, this:

look at that view! Not Glen, the green stuff behind him.

look at that view! Not the green stuff, my complete absence of beer gut!

that's what we're heading to - next stop, downhiiiillll!

...and the day just exploded into a joyous one of cycling. I was still aching a bit, but the road and the weather and the company worked together to make it everything not just endurable but utterly enjoyable. We were far more relaxed, I think, and this made it far easier to ride. The land remained ridiculously pretty, and on one stretch I noticed a 2CV shooting along a poplar-lined road. I should also point out that I had spotted not one, but several, discarded packs of Gauloises, so I was doing quite well with my stereotypes bingo. The pace, while still vigorous, was distinctly more chilled out, and people rode sometimes ahead, sometimes behind. I found myself riding by myself for a while, totally absorbed into the Flow - not the flow, but the one with the capital: the same place you find yourself when writing after a certain amount of time, that point of almost effortless effort where there is only the Now, the Here, where you feel you can continue for mile after mile, hour after hour. My legs smoothly pedalled the bike with seemingly the minimum of work, the road held the tyres in a kiss of kilometres, and the landscape flowed from beautiful moment to beautiful moment. By now, our mini-peloton consisted of me, Sabrina, Kev, Dave, Ross, Glen and Carol, the indefatigable 73-year-old. She's quite a fascinating person, not because of doing such an event, but because she is one of those rare humans who can lob a simple question and then you end up compelled to speak without even noticing it - she's a natural listener, a person with a touch of the Jane Marple about her. We'd asked her earlier about why she was doing this.
'well, I decided to do all those things that I'd never done once I reached 60, and keep looking for challenges. I've forgotten how many marathons I've done, now'.
She'd certainly done well in this ride - she was by no means at the back of the pack.
Lunch was in some kind of picnic layby. As well as our group, a family were trying to have lunch on a picnic bench nearby. Glen accosted them, sat down, started chatting and got fed. The rest of us made do with a lunch comprising some of the stars of the previous couple of days' lunches, plus a chicken curry pasta that tasted almost exactly like a pot noodle, with the same effect - you feel a little bit grubby and shameful eating it, but you end up wanting more, a bit like illicit Office Nookie. All this, and 80's music.
While we were stretching, eating, relaxing and finding convenient bushes, the question of what to wear came up. Not this:

reminds me of wrestling on World of Sport....

but rather, when cycling, do you wear pants or Go Commando? I won't mention who brought it up, because I'm being possibly unusually tactful, but she was clearly suffering from Tight Pants Syndrome.
'I tried both ways over my training - Commando is definitely the way to go', I said.
'Really? It's been really painful today'.
'Imagine what it's like having some meat and two veg down there'
'That's right', said Dave. 'Get 'em off, let the air circulate'
I should also point out that the lunch break was where I would apply:

BUM BUTTER
also known as Udderly Smooth, an embrocation originally designed to be applied to cows' udders to prevent sores and injuries, Bum Butter is not actually made out of either bums or butter. That would be perverse. Instead, it is a paraffin and glycol based compound that, when applied, brings to mind the 1970's pop song 'Slip Sliding Away...'

- that is, I would apply it if I could find a secluded spot, which fortunately I did on this occasion. We didn't hang around too long on this occasion, and before long we were once again on our way. The Tight Pants Person wafted along with a look of bliss on her face.
'Oh my God! That feels so much better! Wow!'
On we went, and things started to get a little silly. Another knot of riders, lead by Laura, stormed past us, laughing noisily. In Laura's case, actually laughing like the Wicked Witch of the West. We carried on at our own pace, through a few villages and up a couple of hills, then down some wonderful downhills. We came towards some huge golden fields, hay baled in tall towers, and we noticed four figures in one of them.
'Why are there so many scarecrows in one field?' I asked.
As we got closer, it became clear - Laura and her group had stopped and were posing in the field, arms outstretched and heads lolling. From a distance, it would have been easy to fool, except that they were heaving with laughter. The ride continued, but there was now no sense of tiredness - we talked easily and the miles melted away. A few miles before the last water stop, we cycled over a little bridge with a picturesque duck pond to one side and a stream issuing out of the other. We stopped so that some of the group could take pictures.
'God, that water looks really nice', said Glen.
A minute later, he was wading bare chested down the stream, splashing along. and trying to catch fish in his hands.
The next water stop came in due course, next to probably the prettiest of the places where we took a break.

what do you mean, the bananas have almost run out?

There was even a bloke with a fishing pole and a fag dangling from the side of his mouth.
By this time of day, it was pretty hot, so we made sure to drink and replenish and set off at a relatively leisurely pace for the rest of the journey. By now, everything undulated, rather than climb in bloody big spikes, but somehow we stilll managed to get these wonderful downhill sections. Laura & co whizzed past us again, and again laughing like drains, so we were wondering what they were planning up ahead. We climbed a bit, then a bit more, then reached a plateau looking down into a village and the prospect of a good downhill, and then
THUMP
Lorraine, who had a constant supply of drugs and Lanacane, took a tumble. She'd come too close to the side of the road, hit a pothole, and ended up arse over tit on a grassy verge. She'd been remarkably lucky - the way she'd fallen could have resulted in a broken neck, and a little further on would have seen her fall down a 30-metre slope. Several of us stopped and made sure she was OK.She was deeply shaken, and her bike, while not exactly buggered, wasn't entirely damage-free, but after the support van had arrived with the nurse she rallied. Actually, she rallied when some slender, muscular olive-skinned bloke in jodphurs came riding past on a horse. He slowed down as he reached us, then when Glen (who had caught up with us) said to him 'wou;d you like to help her?', he gave an almost imperceptible shrug, then galloped off across the fields.
Once the nurse arrived, we carried on. A couple of miles down the road, we found Laura and co, lolling on a haystack
'We've been here ages! what happened?'
apparently, they were going to do some kind of display for us, but instead they just got bums full of straw. Oops.
Compiegne was visible from their field, and it wasn't long before we entered the town. We cycled past the centre and headed towards the outskirts. Because of problems with hotels, we were split into two groups, with the majority heading towards Le Campanile for the night. It came nto sight, and didn't look too bad - a kindof Travelodge-type thing. I found out that I was sharing a room with Dave. I also found out that they were charging lots for a large lager. Anyway. Several people had already arrived when we got there, and had scouted out the local supermarkets for bargain beers, and were lolling on the front lawn with cans.Sabrina went off in one direction with Pat, who was visibly fuming about something being fucked up, to a local petrol station. I went in the other direction, following someone else's advice, going past all these wonderful boarded up villas, or places guarded by snarling dogs, then, as I was about to turn into a road with an offy, what do I see in the evening sunlight?
Two blokes playing boules while smoking gauloises and complimenting each other.
Parfait!

I came back, had beer, showered, and went to dinner. Tonight's dinner wasn't as bad as the dinner in Arras, pretty much in the same way that the bombing of Dresden wasn't quite as bad as the bombing of Hiroshima. It consisted of something that was recognisably pork, though from which bit fo the animal was impossible to guess. It even had a few sad and lonely slice of some kind of pickle shoved apologetically underneath.
Fortunately, there was plenty of booze on supply, despite the fact that we needed to get up even earlier the next morning. Kriss (Glen's personal trainer, no less!) helped massage Gemma, and I played the Elephant on a Moped Trick on Laura, although I was laughing so hard I buggered up the punchline.

All in all, it was a wonderful day of cycliing. I got to bed at late o'clock, wondering about the final 55 or so miles to Paris that lay ahead.

The London to Paris cycle ride, part two

2011-08-29T18:34:00.002Z

DAY TWO: Calais to Arras
I was woken by a courtesy wake-up call at just before 6.30. I picked up the phone to hear a pre-recorded message in French bellowing over some jaunty, jingly wakey-uppey type of music. Then I stretched my legs.
Ow!
Yes, definitely a tad on the stiff side: my knees and the sides of my thighs ached, but actually not quite as bad as I'd feared. I tried doing some of the in-bed stretching exercises Karen had recommended to me. Several of the moves looked like some kind of solo sexual position, so I opted for the one that was basically 'lolling one leg out of bed while suffering a screaming bastard of a hangover and trying to find a cool bit of pillow'. Karen had said that it was a good way to stretch out thigh muscles. It seemed to do the trick a bit. I reached over to the bedside cabinet and grabbed a couple of ibuprofen to help matters along. Ross woke up and looked over from his bed.
'You alright? You got a hangover or something?'
Breakfast was ok - a choice of croisants, pain au chocolat, and various bits of charcuterie and those slices of rubbery cheese you only see on breakfast buffet platters in hotels on the continent, or bacon, eggs, and a type of muesli that had the consistency (and quite possibly the taste) of cat litter. We all had our fill quite quickly, then got our bags and bikes, and set off at 8.00. Once again, I rode along with Sabrina, keeping a steady pace. About two kilometres in, we went past a field full of cows, plus a fat beaming guy with a moustache and, indisputably, a beret at a jaunty angle on his head! This kind of bucolic French stereotype, so early on in the day, prompted us to compile a French Stereotype Bingo scorecard.

Sabrina and Paul's French Stereotype bingo card
score a point for each one spotted. If you get all of them, shrug in a cooly non-committed way and don't give the impression of being too pleased with yourself, while exuding cool smugness.
Guy in Beret
Car or moped beeping horn enthusiastically while driving past the peloton at about 300 kph
A discarded pack of Gauloises
Some bloke carrying a baguette under his arm as he exits a boulangerie
Someone riding bike while playing an accordion
Actually, any kind of accordion player
Surly and/or indifferent table service
Two blokes playing boules on a path
Sneering, world-weary existentialist philosopher in roll-neck black sweater listening to jazz
Avuncular, slightly mad man in a town square
A 2CV rolling down a road with tall poplar trees at the side
Some guy with a fishing pole and a fag dangling from the side of his mouth

Well, we'd already scored one, and we cycled along in the cool morning along roads that were thankfully flat, for the first twelve miles, anyway. Marco had informed us that the day would be 'undulating'. Now, when someone says 'undulating', you imagine a serpentine gradual rise and fall of the landscape, nothing too challenging really. Marco's definition, as it began to turn out, had more in common with some of my Academic English students' descriptions of 'fluctuations' in a graph description - not so much minor changes, as BLOODY ENORMOUS hills. And so it proved. You can tell you're heading towards high land when you suddenly see loads of wind turbines, churning merrily away. The other thing that you can tell when you see loads of wind turbines is this:
It's going to be windy.
Fortunately, because we started off relatively early the wind hadn't really kicked in. We ploughed on, with Kevin now joining us, his legs frantically pumping up and down whenever we hit a hill. Sabrina's bike was still stuck in the middle front ring, so I was the only one finding it relatively easy getting up the hills. After 27 miles, there was a big downhill, followed by a big uphill through a forest and then the first water break.

Sabrina feeling an eensy bit chilly

mmm bananas and oaty snack bars

Despite all the riding, it was still cold in the wood: The sun was only just beginning to get going on the clouds, and what was clear was that everyone was still feeling stiff from the previous day. My thighs and knees were hurting, but I suspected it was more to do with the cold start than anything. I didn't want to to hang around too long - what warmth I'd managed to squeeze into my legs I didn't want to lose - so after ten minutes or so, Sabrina and I saddled up, accompanied by Kev and Glen, the extrovert South African who'd been showing off his grazes the day before. The landscape carried on undulating, by which I mean it carried on going uphill, with the odd downhill to make it all worthwhile, and the wind turbines proliferated. And the roads! God, I could carry on about them, but the quality....
'See?' said Glen, as we pedalled along 'that's what happens to all our EU subsidies - wind turbines and roads smoother than a fresh Hollywood waxing!'
'Yeah, and fuck the Greeks...'
By this time as well, the landscape of Northern France had really opened up - great wide fields and views stretching for miles. I suppose I could have included this as part of the French Stereotype Bingo, but it's a bit hard to regard land as a cliche: it's just there, and it is down to the observer to endow it with beauty.
Of course, one steretype I should have included was Lycra-Clad Cyclist Having A Piss In a Field of Freshly Harvested Stuff.

Glen watching a lycra-clad cyclist having a wizz...

Camp pose racheted up to the max! Peeing lycra-clad cyclist just to the left

the field in which our micturating velocipedist was

By the time lunch arrived, the sun had finally come out properly, and the heat suddenly leapt. Because it was so humid however, Thunderheads began to grow, and it was obvious that there would be a few sharp downpours at some stage. the lunch stop was in a field full of deep, lush clover, next to a shuttered up house. In fact, we'd already passed quite a few villages where house after house was closed up - of course, mid-August, and all the locals had disappeared to the south for their hols. This would also explain the relative paucity of traffic. Lunch was good - hot meatballs and pasta, tuna salad, several things from the previous day, a really good pate, fresh bread and the 80's mix tape.

a good lunch, a good stretch and about 300 ibuprofen - sorted!

A thunderstorm growled past nearby, and after about an hour we set off again - Kev, Sabrina, Glen and me, along with Pat, Ross and Dave. The thunderstorm growled on, and the sky was punctured by some spectacular flashes of lightning. As we cycled along, we became strung out along the road, coloured beads running on a line of tarmac, the smooth thrum-thrum-thrum of the wheels on the road.
Pat began racing ahead. I found myself in a really comfortable rhythm going along with him, so I stuck by him for a while.
'Hey, Pat - you're caning it a bit!'
'It's fucked!' He yelled in his Brogue.'Me bloody gears are fucked! I either get stuck in the top ring or the granny ring, and nothing inbetween! And this bloody lot (by which he meant Discover Adventure) can't bloody fix it!' And he continued to pedal furiously.
A few raindrops fell, then more, then there was a gradual increase of rain - not too bad, but still enough to soak you through eventually. After a downhill, I decided to take a bit of cover next to a statue of the crucifixion that was under some lime trees. Pat thundered on ahead, and after a few minutes, Kev, Sabrina and Glen appeared. I got back in the saddle and joined them.
'Ross' wheel is buggered, and Dave has had his seventh puncture', said Glen. 'They're being looked after by the support vehicle'.
The rain eased, and on we went over the miles, and the riding became easier, despite the aches and pains. By the afternoon water stop, I was feeling exhilarated, partly because it marked the halfway mark of the entire journey, and also because the sun had come out. The ride into Arras itself was absolutely fantastic - it was over land that I would say could be defined as undulating, rather than hilly, and the temperature was just right for pedalling along. Sabrina and I got chatting again, about family and children. She's been married for a few months, and was speculating about kids in the future.
'The trouble is, it's all a bit scary.'
'You're not wrong', I said. 'There aren't any Instruction Manuals for them when they arrive, and you end up freaking out when they have their first temparature or fall over or whatever. They first few weeks are really intense, then it's pretty calm and sweet for a few months.'
We pedalled along in now-warm sunshine.
'And then there's nothing but worry for the next twenty-odd years.'
I talked a bit about my job, then she described hers. 'I'm an event organiser, but my real passion is cake. I do wedding cakes, birthday cakes and so on, but I've been thinking of whether to set up something new..'
I asked her what it was.
'Basically, it's a mobile cake business. I buy an ice cream van, convert it, and sell cakes at markets, events and things.'
Now, I'm not a cake man myself (except for yours, Sabrina, of course!), but I got into her description of what she wanted to do, and the possibilities it entailed.
'As far as I can see, there's only one problem' I said.
'What's that?'
'What kind of jingle will your converted ice cream van play to announce the arrive of the Cake Lady?'
Cue silly discussion about what would and would not make a decent jingle, very much in the vein of one I had with Lee several weeks ago.
We arrived in Arras at around five, Glen booming on over a hill and on to the centre.
And we promptly got lost.
We'd already been warned that there wouldn't be the little orange arrows in the town, because the locals tended to pull them down. As we neared the centre, one of the DA team was waiting at a corner to point us in the right direction. Unfortunately, we got it a bit wrong - we raced up a hill, then stopped. Where was the hotel?
'Do y'know where it is? said Pat.
'No - I'm following you'.
Sabrina and Kev both shrugged shoulders.
'Oh jeez...this is fucked. Let's ask'.
Pat went up to someone.
'Hey! You speak English? English? Holiday Inn? Where?'
A gallic shrug. He tried again with several other people, one of whom gave instructions - in French, which lead us directly to the central square - a thoroughly pretty early rococo confection, but no sign of our hotel. We pedalled round it for a bit.
'Oh, for fuck's sake! This is fucked!'
Eventually, we found someone else who gave somewhat better directions, and we finally arrived at the hotel. Pat stomped in, fuming. I was just glad to get there. I got my room pass card, and discovered that I was sharing with Dominic, the faller from the previous day.
I went to my room, showered and changed and went back down to the bar, where Glen was waiting with a pair of gin and tonics. You'd think beer would be a better idea than G&T, but my God, it was an absolutely brilliant idea - it really hit the spot. After three of these, it was time for dinner. The starter, a quiche, was alright, but the main course....
There was gloopy, rubberised pasta. There was a slab of meat from something that had lived a sad and awful life, and had clearly expired a long, long time ago. It had more than the whiff of equine to it. There was an indifferent sauce that had been made several months earlier. And it was all served up with the due amount of indifferent service. Glen got through about half of his, then made his excuses and left. I was a bit more enduring and managed to chew my way through it, and listen to the speeches from Gemma and Marco, before deciding to go out and explore the town. Gemma had said that the town centre was well worth seeing at night, and I'd already scoped a couple of promising-looking bars earlier on. As I left, I came across Glen, smoking a miniature stogie and drinking a cognac, looking pensively over the fountain towards the rail station. I sat down with him, and we chewed the fat a bit. Across the road, in another hotel, the silhouette of a woman appeared at a top-floor balcony, dressed in a nightdress and looking down the road. She leaned elegantly against the wrought-iron balcony railings, then turned her head as someone called her, before sidling, feline-like, back inside.
'Now, how French was that moment?', said Glen, who'd been as mesmerised by it as I had. Another Stereotype for the Bingo card, then. He drained his drink, then we went together to the town square.

Glen took this one.

see? pretty, isn't it?

We found a bar pumping out French heavy metal music, and went in. I just pointed at a pump of beer, and out came a red concoction - strawberry lager! Oops. Glen was about to have a beer when he spotted a bottle behind the bartender.
'Is that what I think it is? Yes - Chartreuse! I love this stuff.'
He ordered a green Chartreuse, and we went outside to sit on the square.
'Ah, this is the life! I've never got why you guys in England always drink the way you do - necking it like that. It's so much nicer to sit outside and chat and enjoy it all. Here, have you tried this?' he asked, proffering me his drink.
I had a try.
Hmm, best described as an, er, acquired taste. He taold me how it was made by Swiss Monks, and how noone knew exactly what was in it, but it was 57% proof. I could imagine exactly how it was made - it came across as one of those cocktails you invent really late at night after far too much booze:

Sometime in the Middle Ages...
First Monk: Oh God...how much have we drunk?
Second Monk: I dunno...is there anything round here to eat? And is there more booze?
First Monk: There's half a bottle of Martini...
Second Monk: There's always half a bottle of Martini! Oh look, I've still got some pizza stuck to my habit.
First Monk: OK, I've got, let's see....some kind of ethanol - you can drink that, can't you?
Second Monk: Yeah, but it needs some flavour, doesn't it? Look, just pour it in this bucket....right, what can we shove in it?
First Monk: I know, I know! Let's get some of this mint.....and some of this - what's this?
Second Monk: Tarragon? I don't know....Oh look, some cheese cubes on sticks!
First Monk: Right, mint, tarragon, and......Oregano!
Second Monk: OREGANO? Are you sure?
First Monk: Yeah, totally - just think, it'll make it go all green, and it'll give you really fresh breath even if you do heave it up afterwards!
Second Monk: well, if you're sure...(tries some. pukes)....bloody hell! You're right! Genius!
First Monk: Ain't I just? (pukes)....ah! Minty fresh!
Second Monk: Hold on, I just found some lager with strawberries in it...
First Monk: Oh come on - that's just wrong....

we chatted away, discussing out respective jobs, and me probably going into somewhat too much detail about language learning and acquisition theories, although Glen seemed fascinated by it. I went to get more drinks, and when I came back found him chatting in French to a couple on the next table. He was talking animatedly and warmly, happy to converse despite making mistakes. With my schoolboy French I could folow the conversation, but found myself unable to really participate, so just sat there, doing the dumb smiling and nodding thing everyone does when they are listening to someone talk in another language. After about twenty minutes, a man staggered up, pushing a bicycle. He was clearly known to the couple, and sat down heavily with a boozy smile on his face. He spoke English, and began to tell me about his travels as a chef in various countries, and of his children, and how well they were doing.
'Burt now I erm retarred, zo I tak it eezy, burt I still need monnaie, zo I 'ave this...' He pointed to his bicycle. It was no ordinary bike. It was an electric one, but with a remarkably unobtrusive battery. He explained how he'd bought fifteen of them, and 'I ave an accord with the tourisme office here...we shall make tourist tours round Arras!'
'Let me have a go!' said Glen, and he got on it. Suddenly, he was whizzing round the town square, literally squealing and laughing.
'Oh Paul, you've got to have a go!'
So there I was, biking around the centre of Arras at half past eleven, with loud French Metal music pumping out from the bar, and Glenn was all of a sudden animated, and running round with another glass of Chartreuse in his hand, persuading other people to have a go on the bike. He jumped over to another bar where some other cyclists from our group were sitting and bought them a round of Chartreuse, then got one to have a go. He whizzed off, laughing, and said as he went past me 'These are way better than Boris bikes!'
As you can probably tell, it was a somewhat memorable night. We left around one, Glen slightly the worse for wear from the Chartreuse, and headed back to the hotel.

The London to Paris cycle ride, part one

2011-08-26T15:49:00.000Z

Oh, my aching legs.

Not.

In fact, I feel remarkably well, and well enough about the whole experience to consider doing it all over again - but more about that later. In the meantime, here's how it went.
DAY ONE: LONDON to CALAIS
Woke up at about 4.15 am in Karen's house, and had a steaming bowl of porridge. Well, I wouldn't have a cold bowl of porridge, would I? That would be like chowing down on beige puke. No, porridge must always be steaming, cliche though it may be. I may be talking about cliches and stereotypes later on. Anyway. Part of my feeding plan while on the go involved eating items largely based around oats and bananas. I was helped in this by Karen giving me a small sack of energy bars consisting of these two items. She also gave me some energy jellies and energy drinks, several of which I decanted into my luggage, and several into the bag I'd be using while riding. After careful consideration, I'd decided to eschew panniers, especially after seeing photos from the previous cycle challenge of people of ultra slimline road bikes seemingly consisting of straws and dental floss, and use a daysack, containing one fleece, a hi-viz jacket, repair kit, one inner tube, one pump, food supplies, ibuprofen, paracetamol, hand wipes, hand cleansing gel, vaseline, sudocrem (the stuff you put on babies to control nappy rash), some antihistamines, and a large tub of Udderly Smooth, aka Bum Butter, used to prevent certain areas being rubbed rawer than a carrot on a grater. I began to wonder whether I may have overpacked. Still, I didn't have much time to reflect on this, as we had to be on the road by 5.
The journey to London went without incident - the sun rose over a cool morning, and the traffic gradually intensified the more we approached the centre. There were plenty of early morning cyclists around, probably enjoying the relatively quiet streets of the capital, and the sight of them made me feel more apprehensive about the challenge ahead. I knew in my head that I could do it, but even so....what about the traffic? what if I got injured? what if I just couldn't move my legs by the third day? I was also feeling somewhat lonely - I didn't know anyone else on the challenge, and wondered if they were going to be ultrafit athletes, gliding miles ahead of me while I ploughed a lonely furrow at the back.
Yes, I know, all total balls, but let's face it - when we stare at a task ahead of us, it's far easier to imagine all the worst things about it than the possibilities, and I reminded myself of this, but even so....
We arrived in Blackheath just before 6.30, and there were already several other cyclists there. I registered with the person from Discover Adventure (the company organising the trip on behalf of MacMillan), and had a look around at the other cyclists, and felt heartened by the fact that amongst the young whippets there were also a few riders who had clearly never been averse to a pint or a pie or ten.
Karen was ogling the road bikes. 'Look at that one!' , she said, 'that's about two grand's worth of carbon frame!' It was clear to me that my saddle probably weighed more than some of these bikes. Fortunately, I also saw a few mountain bikes and hybrids as well, as well as one with panniers attached. Clearly, it was going to be a lot more eclectic a range of participants than the worst case scenario in my head. A few more people rolled up, then we were all called to huddle round one of the support vans for a briefing. First of all was Gemma, the MacMillan rep, giving some info about the day, and lots of encouragement and thanks for doing this for MacMillan. Next up was Marco, one of the Discover Adventure team, telling us to follow the little orange arrows all the way along, which were apparently attached to anything static the team could find every few hundred metres along the way. 'And don't forget', he said, 'it's quite hilly, so don't attack the hills too early or you'll get too knackered to carry on'.
Hilly? I'd looked at the route profile beforehand - it hadn't looked that particularly hilly to me, certainly no worse the anything I'd tackled in training.
Oh deary, deary, lordy deary me. How wrong can you be?
We set off at seven o'clock, and were almost immediately introduced to our first little hill of the day - namely, Shooter's Hill, also known as one of the biggest hills in bloody London. Thanks, Discover Adventure. I got chatting briefly with another cyclist, Pat, who was wearing a Heathrow Airport Hi-Viz yellow jacket, but then we got separated by traffic lights. Oh, what fun they became. It seemd that everybody got stopped by every single traffic light on the route leading east-south-east. It was pedal-pedal-pedal-stop......pedal-pedal-pedal-stop....and so on. Fortunately for me, I wasn't using cleats, so I didn't have to unclip myself from the pedals every time.
The traffic wasn't too bad, considering it was London, and I've seen worse in Reading, but I was glad to see a sign saying 'welcome to Kent' and the gradual thinning down of houses and businesses and the appearance of first greenery and then countryside proper. Pedalling along, largely by myself, I didn't feel that the route was too bad - certainly, there were a few hills, but nothing like the route up to Cooksley Green. Well, that was up to a couple of miles before the first water stop, when everything suddenly decided to go more vertical. Not horridly vertical, just decidedly more uphill, in a way that implied there were the mummies and daddies of hills lurking ahead, along with lots of little baby hills just for the hell of it.
The first water stop appeared after 21 miles, a gazebo with a table full of cyclist goodies - namely, bananas and oat-based snack bars. I was quite gratified to see that there were only ten or so riders ahead of me - looked like I wouldn't be the slowest then. I overheard someone say that one of the riders had fallen off their bike right at the beginning, smacking their face against the kerb, thanks in large to being cleated in. I filled up on water and snacks, and at this point I'll just preempt the rest of this report by saying these stops were an absolutely brilliant idea, well-executed and throughly timely - they broke the days up into achievable targets, gave mor eor less just the right time to rest, and ensured everyone was well fed. I stayed about ten minutes, then ploughed on. About a mile or so on, I got my first good vantage view - a spectacular panorama of the Kent countryside from high up, looking over our route southwards. And then -
woooooh!
The first big downhill, a real sinus-opening plunge through a woodland road and towards a village, designed to put a grin on your face. We came into a village and then I encountered for the first time a phenomenon that haunted me for the rest of the first day and for part of the second:

SIGNAGE ANXIETY n. the sensation that one has missed a crucial little orange arrow and one is now headed towards Slough

I almost missed a turning - in fact, I was pretty sure some other riders behind me did. Fortunately, I stayed on the right road, and the route to lunch wasn't too bad - a little hilly, yes, and getting hillier by the time we stopped in Charing, but still doable.

lunch was in a church hall, next to a picturesque church - well, obviously next to a church, or it would just be a hall, wouldn't it? Anyway, it was a good place to take a break. The food was good too - loads of pasta, salad stuff, a platter full of what turned out to be grated cheese and pickle, cake, some hot pasta stuff and an 80's compiliation CD that came to typifiy the entire lunch break experience.

The London to Paris Lunchtime Listening 80's Experience Compilation CD:
Gold - Spandau Ballet
Karma Chameleon - Culture Club
Down Under - Men at Work
Toy Soldiers - Martika
Welcome to the Jungle - Guns 'n' Roses
Everybody Wants to Rule the World - Tears for Fears
Fast Car - Tracey Chapman
...and many, many more! BUT NO DURAN DURAN - we don't tolerate that kind of crap while catering to hungry cyclists

After lunch, I felt a bit stiff for the first mile or so, but then got back into rhythm, still pedalling along quite contentedly. As I was ploughing my way up a hill, however, I had a sudden attack of signage anxiety and looked behind me. Sure enough, I saw two cyclists pootling away down another round road a village green. There was a turning just ahead of me that would allow me to join up with them. One of them was the rider with panniers, and the other a young woman on a red bike. These turned out to be Kevin and Sabrina, who I ended up riding with for the rest of the ride, as we were all doing more or less the same pace.I raced ahead of them for a while, then Sabrina came up alongside as we hit a hill. We talked about the other riders - she was sure a big group had gone ahead of us, and had taken the same wrong turning. We carried on chatting as we plodded up hill after hill, including one beast that went on for well over a mile and a half. Her gears had got stuck in the middle front ring, so she had to power her way up, while I could comfortably get down into my lower set - even so, it wasn't the easiest uphill.
These undulations went on, and on, and on until finally we saw the third pitstop, manned by a single person.
'Has everyone else come through?' I asked
'No!' replied the woman, whose name has completely slipped my brain, but she has curly hair and works in TEFL in Spain and sorry for forgetting your name if you're reading this, 'You're the first in'.
Wow! Leading the peloton! Sabrina and I gave each other a high five, then attacked the bananas and snacks. The next in was Kevin.
'That was a bit bloody 'ard' he said. 'You know what? we passed the top of the road where I live earlier on - I'm from Maidstone - should 'ave gone in for a cup of tea'.
Gradually, more riders appeared, including the group who had got lost. Sabrina and I were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves, so after we'd rested, we set off ahead of the others.
...And very quickly got lost.
Kev had set off a couple of minutes earlier than us, as well, and was nowhere to be seen as we cruised through the Kent landscape. After a few miles, we hit another spectacular downhill, turned left and pounded down the road. We were talking about why we'd decided to do the challenge - for me, about the family members and friends who'd had cancer; For Sabrina, it was to honour her dad.
'This is his bike', she said, patting the machine she was riding.'I do have a carbon fibre one, but there was a problem with it and I decided to use this. I've spent months training with his old friends - we've done all these long distance rides. The distance for this doesn't bother me - it's just going up all these hills and doing it in time!'
As we went on, the wind decided to get a bit friskier, and the clouds gradually darkened. After I while, I said, 'when did we last see an orange arrow?'
Signage Anxiety was beginning to creep over me once more.
'Ages ago. There's a road sign at the top of the hill - let's look at it'.
So we pedalled up the hill. The road sign pointed to a few local villages and Canterbury via an A road.
Suddenly, Kev appeared, pedalling madly towards us.
'We've gone the wrong bleeding way! I've ended up halfway to bleeding Canterbury!'
We stopped to check on our road maps - the one I'd hardly bothered to look at. Sure enough, it seemed to show a route turning about four miles earlier. So, off we turned and after four miles, there was the little orange arrow, flipping round in the wind. We got back on the correct path, and followed a route that was more undulating than hilly, and finally, a road sign saying 'DOVER'.
We arrived at the ferry terminals just before five, with a lick of rain just starting and an expensive coffee waiting in the ticket sales terminal. Most of the cyclists had arrived, all with their own tales, and a couple bearing a few cuts and bruises. Dominic, the guy who'd fallen off at the beginning, was sporting a really nasty bruised face and cuts, while another rider, Glen, was showing off an elbow he'd grazed up twice. Several of us were grumbling about the signs, but overall, the sensation was of quiet exhilaration, of a job done.
And then we had to go and wait for the ferry, on our bikes, in the rain.
For an hour!
I have to say that this was, on reflection, quite easily the lowest point of the entire jaunt. It was a just a miserable and increasingly chilly wait, and when we finally boarded, our spirits lifted somewhat, just to be dashed by SeaFrance's catering efforts - which leads me to another theme during this ride:

REALLY CRAP FOOD IN THE EVENING
For your delectation on this, your first evening meal of your four-day quest, we have:
A rubber cheesburger-delicious hot or cold!
A chicken 'Curry' - it's beige!
sausages and chips - mmm, stale!

I had the chicken 'curry' and 'rice', most of which could quite happily be bounced across the floor.
The ride across the Channel itself was smooth, and I chatted with some of the other riders about how they felt it had gone so far - everyone still came across as enthusiastic, albeit knackered. Eventually, we arrived at Calais, along with the rain. We had to wait until all the motor vehicles had disembarked before we were allowed off en masse, into an evening full of swirling rain and wind. The Discover Adventure truck was waiting for us, and we followed their instructions to follow it in convoy through the Calais night to our hotel. We bumped across the ferry terminal road, out onto the main street, and all of a sudden my bike started purring, as it had its first ever encounter with French tarmac, smoother than any road I've been on before.
After five miles or so, we finally arrived at our destination - a Holiday Inn. I got my room keys, and found I was shairing with Ross, a tall guy from Aberdeenshire who I'd been chatting with on the boat. After having a shower and a truly well-deserved and expensive - 6 euros!)beer, I crashed out after what can only be described as a bit of a long day.

ready for the off....

2011-08-16T20:41:00.000Z

Well, I hope so. After eight months of cycling, the day has finally arrived. I think it'll go well, but there are times when you just know that the Cycling Gods don't want you to proceed - as my last training ride proved.
My last ride was meant to have been at least a 60 miler. I intended to head up to Oxford then either carry on towards Banbury, or head back to Wallingford. However, several things queued up to militate against this. First, it started tipping down - no problem, I've pedalled through rain before. Then it started hailing. Nice. After that, a large pothole while going downhill that gave me one hell of a jolt. And then, Cows. A herd of them. With calves. And a bull. I encountered them in a field just outside Radley,through which NCN route 5 runs. They were clearly on the nervy side, so I had to gingerly pick my way through them, especially past the bloody bull, which looked at me in a distinctly suspicious way. After about 10 minutes, I finally got on my bike again, got to the suburbs of Oxford, and developed a great big flat, courtesy of a stone piercing right through the thickest part of my brand-new rear tyre. So I started repairing the tyre while getting soaked by another heavy shower.
Oh well.
This I do know: I can ride 190 miles in the space of a week. My top speed is 40 mph, and cruising speed of 14-15 mph. I can ride on the flat for hours without breaking sweat. I should be able to ride from London to Dover in about six hours of continuous cycling. And I haven't succumbed to much to the siren lure of ridiculous amounts of lycra.
AND, I've gone through my funding target!

New Wheels.

2011-07-21T21:54:00.000Z

So far this year, I've changed the chain, the rear gear cassette, two inner tubes, the saddle and the headset on my bike. I've now changed the tyres completely. I'm beginning to think I should have changed the bike entirely. Ever since I've had it, I've used big, chunky bobbly tyres; I've now changed these to a pair of Continental semi-slicks that are a good inch narrower and a half-inch thinner. In theory, I should now be gliding along in unimpeded comfort on the road - so why does it feel like I'm doing more work? The whole bike moves differently and the way I'm riding it feels different too, as though I have to work harder to propel it along on the flat, in direct contradiction to what should be happening. I just don't seem to be moving fast enough, even though going up and down hill is distinctly easier and the two timed runs I made suggest otherwise. Maybe I just miss the noisy hum-hum-humm-hummm of the tyres as I increase speed. Anyway, I'll be doing a long run this weekend which should tell me what difference they've made. Now, all I have to do is change the front forks, the front gear set, the brakes (again), the gear cables and the frame, and I should be ready for London-Paris.....
Talking of moving along, I find myself once again moving office at work, for what I think is the ninth time in ten years. We are being heaped into one staffroom with teachers from other groups to create one large, amorphous Adult Learning department. Or something like that. I'm also supposed to be starting a new contract from the 1st August, one that guarantees that I'll have more work for less pay. Yet I've still to have a sniff of a contract to sign. I don't even know how much I'm supposed to be paid. If there's anyone out there who might advise me about the legalities of this, please let me know.

The Violent, Brutal World of Interview Selection Procedures in a Further Education College

2011-07-15T09:52:00.001Z

We all know that it's a tough old job market out there these days - and in some places, even if you have a job, it can be hard. Several colleges, for example, are re-interviewing their staff for their own jobs. But do any have a job selection procedure quite a brutal as this? This email was recently doing the rounds:

Dear Colleagues,
Further to yesterday’s email from the Principal and to the documentation on the Portal regarding lecturer positions, number of positions and salaries, and following further negotiations with the union, there has been an urgent update on how candidates for jobs shall be selected should there be more than one person applying for any given post.
It has been pointed out that the weighting scheme previously favoured may well be detrimental to the abilities and interests of the applicants. For this reason, we have suggested that an alternative approach shall be deployed in order to choose the ideal person for each post available.
From 27^th of May, we will be conducting interviews by cage fight. The cage shall be set up in the college’s front garden, affording a view of the interview to all onlookers. The Principal and Vice-Principals shall be on the balcony overlooking proceedings, while premium views will be available for ticket holders only. It is to be hoped that ticket sales will go some way to mitigating the current budget deficit.
Candidates will be matched as far as possible according to height, weight, age, strength and gender in order to comply with all Equal Opportunities regulations. Each match shall consist of three-minute rounds, continuing until one of the candidates is incapacitated or dead. Weapons, by mutual consent, may be permitted. However, due to Health and Safety considerations, home-made weaponry shall NOT be permitted. In addition, the interview shall be subject to weighting depending on fighting technique, choice of combat clothing, and ability to gouge lumps out of an opponent with a single finger.
In the case where there is only a single candidate, he or she will have an informal fight with wild animals. Again, this shall be weighted, with interviewees required to fight anything from a small, mildly asthmatic rabbit up to an enraged tiger, depending on the interviewee’s age, health and strength.
I hope that you all understand that we have to make wide-ranging changes in order to procure the survival of the college, and this exercise in interviewee selection is the best test of the maxim ‘survival of the fittest’.
Cage fighting training will be made available in due course, and you are all encouraged to attend at least one session. If you survive the first session, that is.
Thank you, and see you all in the fighting pits!

Awful. Absolutely awful. ;)

Mixed Bag.

2011-07-13T21:45:00.000Z

This is going to be on of my more meandering posts, as I'm in a meandering sort of mood , something that's fairly typical of me late in the evening. I rarely get as much done as I expect to do, especially when faced by a computer screen. It never ceases to amaze me that I have in front of me a machine that is perfectly capable of launching and running a space mission, or crunching huge amounts of data, or accessing virtually all the knowledge that has been amassed by mankind, and I end up playing Angry Birds or watching a video of a cat falling off something.
In a way, home computing has become far too easy, and with that it makes it too easy to use a computer as just another way of entertaining us. I remember my first computer - a VIC-20, back in 1981. It had an enormous memory of 3kb, which I enlarged to a staggering 16kb by way of a plug in module in the back. It had a tape recorder for storing and downloading programs, and you could download a program in the incredibly fast time of five minutes. And it had 8 colours! Yes, it was limited, and as for the very notion of the internet....well, there was the possibility of dial-up modems, but they were a) bloody expensive and b) nowhere near what computer nerd movies like War Games suggested you could do with them. Yet I learned more from that machine about what computers could and couldn't do than I have from years of being logged on, surfing and blogging and generally playing with the net. The most important lesson was this: You Get Out What You Put In, or, more succinctly, GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). If you dick around on a computer, you just get dross in the end - good outcomes very much depend on remembering that a PC is a subtle, highly flexible tool that can enhance the work you do or open worlds of opportunities, provided that you're willing to work with it.
Talking of garbage, I won't be weeping any time soon for News International's problems. I feel sorry for the journalists who've lost their jobs through no fault of their own, but in the end the revelation of who had had their phones hacked was too disgusting to be ignored. It's been actually quite interesting to see Parliament actually stand up to Rupert Murdoch - it makes you realise that, by and large, the British Parliament is a remarkably feeble and supine creature much of the time. They've only moved in for a decisive kill because they saw that NI was wounded and they could smell blood. I also suspect that our brave and noble MPs had a bit of a schadenfreude moment, and decided it was payback time for all the bollocks they've had to put up with from Rupert Murdoch's stable of media outlets.
However, NI should not be blamed alone. As has been pointed out by several newpapers, the Guardian in particular, the media and politicians have enjoyed, or possibly endured, a weird symbiotic relationship over the last few years. The journalists know that the MPs are spouting arrant guff most of the time, the MPs know they are spouting arrant guff most of the time, but beacuse of their relationship they carry on with this daft gavotte, one side bleating out sundbites and the other side not just writing it down, but positively encouraging it. In some ways, it was inevitable that newspapers would end up deploying the same kind of espionage tactics traditionally associated with spies - get the story, after all, and you have something that will sell your paper.
And let's not forget that someone buys papers or watches satellite tv - the consumers, who see their media as something to entertain, not to inform, as something to keep them amused and tittivated rather than make them think. Of course, it's entirely human nature to watch, listen to, or read about something shocking, amazing, astonishing or whatever - such things take us out the mundane grind of life. Yet there's entertaining someone and doing actions that are clearly morally reprehensible, to put it mildly.
If you look for garbage from your papers, you'll get garbage. If you want to be informed, ignore papers that just produce sensationalism.
well, seems we're back to the start of this entry in a way.
In other news: my cycling is kind of back on track - I did a somewhat tedious fifty-mile ride down to Basingstoke and back, which served to confirm that I'm pretty much at the necessary fitness levels for the ride to Paris. I was hoping to do a few 1-hour lunchtime rides during the week, but various bits and pieces have prevented me from doing so. And the fundraising seems to be doing OK, as you can probably see from the chart on the right - on which I would ask you to click and sponsor me!

this week's ride..

2011-06-27T20:23:00.001Z

I haven't been posting as much as I could, mostly due to work commitments which have left me feeling pretty drained, as well as rather discouraged about things in general. Anyway:

That's the ride, that is. Once again, I've been using My Tracks on my mobile, but I've noticed that it seems to be doin weird things when I put it into Google Earth - the elevation profiles seem to be out of kilter in particular. For example, Cookley Green seems to be a varying heights above sea level. Since I don't think this region of the world is undergoing much in the way of tectonic movement, it would appear that the GPS is dodgy. I was quite pleased with this ride, as it was 50 miles in 3:47, on the hottest day of the year so far.

more cycling

2011-06-05T20:44:00.000Z

This week's route:

I've also included the elevation profile for this ride - as you can see, Cookley Green/Christmas Common is pretty much the peak for this ride, although there's a very tough uphill on the way to Henley - one that goes past a vineyard. This was a decent run of 42 miles, but I had been hoping for something a little longer. The weather forecast, however, militated against it, so settled for what turned out to be a verys satisfying ride.

this is what we do to spam in these here parts....

2011-05-30T23:02:00.001Z

...wordle them!

Ouch!

2011-05-30T22:16:00.001Z

the route I took on sunday - a 59-miler. I was trying to emulate my disgustingly healthy little sister's ride of a couple of weeks back, and in fact I think I may have outdone her in terms of uphill bits - there's a particularly nasty pointy-uppy bit in Bradfield on the way to Theale. The worst thing about this ride, if you don't count the bunch of smug wealthy people in identikit lycra with identikit expensive road bikes drinking identikit expensive coffees outside a coffee shop in Henley, braying smugly at each other, was the headwind going west, especially from Cookley Green to Wallingford, then down south towards Streatley. The high point (quite literally) was the descent from Cookley Green - a magnificent 35 mph view of the countryside. If you say, 'why only 35 mph?' then you have either a) not seen my bike, b) not seen the lane down which you do the descent or c) have a far too expensive road bike ;)
edit - as you can see from my comment, the above pic is not actually the route - but this one is:

Bits and Pieces

2011-05-04T21:41:00.001Z

Just a short one today, as a) I'm knackered, b)I'm studying and c)I've got a twelve-hour day tomorrow.
Cycling update: I'm not doing as many miles at present as I'd like, but what I have done has convinced me that I'm pretty close to the fitness levels I'll need for London to Paris. Sunday saw me cycle down to Kingsclere for the family golf trophy day. I didn't actually participate myself - a good decision, in the end, I think, as there was a very cold north-east wind blowing strongly for most of it. The ride was only 26 miles or so, but it was a very good ride - down to Silchester first, then through a forest to Tadley, then down the Wolverton road. I'll be trying for a longer ride this weekend if the weather holds up.
Fundraising update: well, I'm ten per cent of the way, and I've got a few plans up my sleeve. I'll be holding a yard sale sometime in the next couple of weeks to raise funds, and I've got my ESOL students also roped in - we'll be doing a coffee morning and a summer fair-type thing towards the end of term. And to publicise it, I'll be going on the college radio in the next couple of weeks! But, more importantly, is this - the first print edition of A Guide To Reading, available for £8.99. I've finally got round to publishing it! OK, it's lulu.com, a self-publishing website, but the manuscript has been languishing for the past few years and I reckoned it's high time I did something with it. This way, I can contribute more to the fundraising. Feel free to buy a copy....
I could say more, but I'm feeling somewhat knackered at the moment. More soon.

Cycling update

2011-04-18T22:25:00.000Z

Managed to get in the saddle on sunday - a fifty-miler to Windsor and back. As you can see, the weather was fantastic - temperature just slightly above optimal, but still great. This photo was taken from a field of rape (that's a field full of the crop known as rape, not a site of some ghastly mass atrocity) at Knowl Hill, looking towards Windsor. I'd recommend visiting it just to see, although you'll need to go on foot or bike to reach it.
The only thing that ruined it was the broken headset on my bike. It'd been growling at me for a few months, but yesterday it went completely. This left me with the alarming sensation of feeling unbalanced every time I turned a corner, went above thirteen miles an hour, or indeed, moved, thanks to the steering post wobbling inside the frame shaft. The fact that I still managed to do the whole distance is down to the fact that I know the bike and sheer bloody-mindedness.
As to fitness, I felt pretty comfortable for the distance, and the time (4 hours in the saddle moving; 5 hours for the total ride time) was just slightly under what I'm aiming for. Overall, I'd say I'm fairly close to the fitness I need for the London-Paris ride in August (for which you'll see a link over here on the right). My only issue with how well I feel is my left knee, but I suspect that's just because of the saddle height rather than anything serious. I need to play with stuff like post heights and cadence to get it all right, along with doing different distances.
Right now though, my priority is to fix the bloody headset.

An example of Meronymy

2011-03-23T00:46:00.001Z

With a title like this, this should be over on my EFL blog, and I may well copy it over: However, it can start here.
Meronymy: in linguistics, referring to part-whole relations, and where the part of something may be used to refer to the whole.
On my desk, right now, is a knife. I have no idea how old it is, but old it is. Its handle is some kind of white plastic, imitation bone or ivory: its blade, only 6-7 cm long, is serrated, and on the left side is printed, in fake cursive script, 'Stainless Steel', and under it, more bluntly pushed into the metal, the words 'SHEFFIELD. ENGLAND'. I would guess that it was produced in the 1950s or 1960s, and that it has lain a long time in several different cutlery drawers.
I am, however, interested in only one, because it is the one place that I am interested in. Let's begin to rebuild it.
This knife nestles against other knives and forks and spoons in a drawer. The drawer is the second one in as you enter from the dining room of the house into the kitchen: it's there, on your left, see? It's not a big kitchen. on your right, there's the sink, beneath the window, which looks out onto a large, well-tended garden. This kitcen is one that's always alive - there's always someone in it, something cooking, something being done. We'll come back to that later. For now, let us say that it is a room full of light, maybe the brightest room of the whole house. Anyway, from the knife to the drawer to the kitchen and you're facing the kitchen door right now. Take a step out - watch the jolt down, it gets everyone by surprise the first time. You're in what used to be outside: Nowadays, though, it's been made a fabric of the house by the simple, but effective, expedient of some good joinery, plastic corrugated roofing and a bit of masonry and plasterwork. On rainy days, the roof drums loudly - you can't hear yourself talk in this hinterland between indoors and outdoors, but it's an oddly calm place. Anyway, take another step forward - do you see the room in front of you? Gloomy, isn't it? Turn on the light - that's right, it's a toilet! Can you imagine what it must have been like when it was an outside loo? There'e the cistern above, with a long, rusting chain, on the end of which is a large yellow rubber ball, pocked and notched by years of being bounced against the wall; And take a look at the toilet roll holder. I love the phrase on it, cheesy though it is: 'You won't get rich, sitting around here all day!', in jaunty red letters, some of which are scratched.
Well, let's not sit - let's wander out into the garden for a bit. Do you like the shed there, on your left? It's really interesting how its gloom contrasts so strongly with the light of the greenhouse to which it's attached, isn't it? And look at te greenhouse - sturdy, well-built, and full, at this time of year, of seedlings, impatient to grow. Anyway, do you like the pond there, on your left? It's said to be bottomless, you know. The cupid statue in the middle? Yes, cute, isn't it? No, I don't know if the pump works any more, don't know if it still smiles under an umbrella of water. Do you see all that duckweed? Always the case, that. And the rest of the garden: Well you probably can't see much, thanks to the big rigid-sided swimming pool blocking the view, the pool we all jump into in summer despite how cold it is.
Anyway, let's get back indoors, through the kitchen door, back to the dining room. Do you know, the table seems to have shrunk since I last saw it: I could have sworn it was huge, but then again, I used to think this house was enormous. There's the bookcase with the secret drawer, all dark wood stain: Above it is the coat of arms for the Pantlin family. On the far wall is a copy of Gainsborough's 'The Blue Boy' in a gold frame, staring over the whole room, and a corner display unit with trinkets. Turn left now, and go through the double doors- what do you think of this room? It's the living room; immediately on your right is the electric fire with real imitation logs. The TV's in the corner, next to the door, then, on your left, is one comfortable couch, then another corner display case, and another sofa under the window, next to a large wooden bureau with glass doors protecting bookshelves, which are lined with books. Most of the books are either reference or to do with carpentry.
Let's go on a bit: through the living room door, you come into the hall way, where the half-grandfather clock ticks solemnly. It's quite dark in here, even whne the chandelier light, all twinkling glass lozenges, is on. What's that, you like the picture? It's quite charming, that one, a young toddler smiling on a carpet, or some kind of coverlet - I'll tell you who that is later. Upstairs? OK, then....tread softly, even though the stairs don't creak much. Right in front of you is the bathroom, and that thing above the mirror is a big halogen heater, which makes the room hot quick. And THAT - it's a polystyrene head. Yes, I know, I find it a bit creepy, too. Turn to your right: there's a bedroom in front of you, then another, and a small bedroom at the end of the landing. And do you notice how cold it is up here? It's freezing, even in summer! Let's go back down, down the stairs, and out through the front door. Do you see that - the Leylandii that's grown so big by the porch? The hedge? And here's the house number.
123.
123, Blandford Road, Whitley, Reading.

And now, do you smell that? Hot, homely food: Sunday dinners roasting, usually beef, inevitably with carrots and cabbage, and the sweet tang of a steamed pudding; suddenly, there's the aroma of a gorgeous Christmas lunch, all turkey and trimmings; and now, there's condensation running down the windows of the living room, but it's still womb-warm, and now there's sunday Tea of crab paste sandwiches and tuna sanwiches and toast and cakes, and then, can you hear it? There's the susurrus of the TV - saturday afternoons, World of Sport, or Sunday with Antiques Roadshow - hold on, that's Mandela being freed from prison! - but someone's just run past the telly and brushed past me holed up in my corner with one of the books, and now someone's just laughed, and now, there's Reg and Glad, up from Southampton, sat on the couch, looking like a Hampshire version of the couple from that painting American Gothic, and all of a sudden they've got incongruous christmas hats on, and Uncle Reg is pressing a 50 p coin into my hand.
And now it's a glorious chaos of children, my sister, my cousins, all playing, and I can't tell if it's Christmas, or Easter, or Summer or whenever, and there are my mum and dad and Penny, Peter, Sue, Jim, Julie, all of the family, in a whirl of life and colour and sound. In the middle, there's Grandad, laughing, but behind him, always working, patient, kind, unceasing, uncomplaining, ever talking kind words, ever in the kitchen, ever helping, ever caring, is Nan.

I asked for one thing from Blandford Road to serve as a memory of a place and a time and of a group of people for whom I have nothing but love.This knife is my memento mori, and the springboard from which I can recreate whole days, months, years of time spent .Just a knife, but it holds a whole world from the past, and it will always remind me of you.

Safe Journey, Nan.
Vera Florence Gallantry, nee Pantlin, died on the Ides of March, 2011.

once again...

2011-03-18T22:57:00.000Z

...apologies for not writing. It has been an exceptionally fraught and difficult time these past few weeks. I can't go into too much detail about some of it right now: I will in a couple of weeks. Instead, I'll just mention two things that are occupying my time right now.
1) I'm finally, after many years in my job, on a DELTA course. Previously I've either not had the money or the circumstance to do it. I'm pleased on one hand - on the other, there's a distinct possibility my job may disappear in the next few months, which would render having the qualification somewhat superfluous.
2) I've just registered to do the London-Paris Cycle ride in August with Macmillan, and I'm in training for that. I'll be posting a link to a justgiving.com site very shortly: I need to raise at least £1400, so any and all donations will be welcome.
In the meantime, I'm knackered and off to bed.

Uncle Adrian.

2011-01-26T23:11:00.001Z

My uncle Adrian passed away last week. He was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas a few weeks before Christmas, and the prognosis was not good from the outset. I suppose it was a mercifully brief illness, but a cruel one nevertheless. I've spent the past week thinking what I knew about him, and the outcome was - remarkably little. This is mainly because he lived in Deepest Essex, along with my aunt Margot (my mum's sister) and my cousins, and we only ever got together at rare family dos.
Adrian was a kindly, quiet figure, who, in my experience at least, had the ability to make himself unobservable - not quite invisible, but rather the capacity to make himself so comfortable in a place that he became part of the furniture, and thus unremarkable.
He suffered from considerable health problems for a very long time, but I don't intend to go into any detail about that here, as I don't feel it's my place to do so. It's customary to say 'he battled against this or that' or 'she fought bravely with..' at this stage, but I don't think that is the correct vocabulary to use here - rather, his health problems became a part of him, something that had to be lived with, and that is probably a truer description of all those that live with chronic problems.
I only went to their house once: To be honest, I don't think Roald Dahl could have dreamed up such a place. It was a large Victorian house set between farmland, a quarry and a golf course. It had fences thirty feet tall surrounding it, mainly to prevent golf balls from said course smashing the windows. To my eyes, the word 'rambling' could have been invented to apply specifically to the building. I ended up staying there for a week, and it is from that time, thirty years ago now, that this poem below springs. It's a snapshot of one event, and of a man before his health began to fail, whe he was younger than I am now. I've been fiddling with this poem for a week now, and I'd rather put it up now before I fiddle it to death. I've already shown Aunt Margot, as I felt she should see it before I go displaying it to all and sundry.
Safe Journey, Adrian.

Adrian

Gun’s back broken, carried and cradled

In one arm with weak Essex sun gleaming

On barrels, on stock, over trigger,

He stopped. His head bobbed, then lips pursed,

Kissing the air, the sound of a frantic dry kiss:

‘That’s the sound a wounded rabbit makes’, he’d said.

I was following him, stepping in his steps

Through broken backs of dry grass, old flowers,

Last summer’s weary remnant, slowly letting Spring

Jostle them aside. The place was full of eyes

And dry sounds scurrying –

Birds, vermin, rabbits, I guessed.

Three days I’d been there, and pestered them

To go out hunting. At last, he said yes, and

We set out early from the house, trudging through

Nearby fields, he with the gun, me and my cousins

Trailing.

An hour passed. We shuffled on, while he

Walked the field – no farmer’s gait, more

The heron’s considered, deliberate stepping –

Stone untouched, stalk unbent.

Silent as boys can be, we were only silenced

By that sudden urgent noise.

The gun’s back straightened and the stock nestled

To his shoulder. A face appeared above some

rotted, mossy stump, called into being

by his dry loud kiss of air:

Feral black beads of eyes, half a

Snarl, sunlight on sleek fur –

A mink!

The air exploded, an acrid bloom rose,

The gun bucking against the man stood firmly.

Too late.

‘Gone’, he said, shrugging,

His face of lean angles unreadable, before

Calmly folding the weapon,

Coddling it in the crook of the arm.

Gone, now, that day,

That day before broken days:

But there he is still,

Younger then than I am here,

Jacket, boots, shotgun slung bravely,

Striding through fields

Filled with Easter sunlight,

Trailed by children, avid to hunt.

dust.

2011-01-03T23:27:00.000Z

Finally, the bus arrived, its wheels banging against potholes and through ruts, even though the road had only recently been upgraded. Once thing I'd learned in my few months in Turkey was that roads and pavements tended to get repaired and almost immediately ripped up again, as some new pipeline or cable was installed. The weather, which had suddenly switched from 'freezing' to 'bloody hot' one day in April, had been steadily getting hotter and drier, and now it was only possible to stay outdoors if one stood in the shade.
We got on the Izmir-bound bus. I'd been spending a couple of days away from work in a cheap pansiyon in Cesme, but now it was time to get back to the chalkface.I joined the scrum of people and found a seat at the back, wedged between people politely perspiring. I was in a foul mood, partly because I was going back to work, partly because of the heat, but largely because I had a raki hangover, something I certainly do not recommend. Raki is a wonderful drink, but too much really leaves you feeling grim. The coach was absolutely full and almost immediately became stiflingly hot, even with the windows open. It started off, bumping and trundling along the road, and the ticket guy came round, taking our fares and handing out little paper tickets. Behind him, a kid, about thirteen or fourteen I guessed, was splashing lemon cologne into the travellers' hands, holding a paper napkin underneath to catch splashes. He doused my hands and I rubbed them together, then rubbed my facewith them, allowing the rapid-evaporating alcohol to briefly cool me.
Shortly out of Cesme, the coach suddenly slowed down. From my seat, I could just see that someone was standing in the road, waving it down with both hands. It came to a halt, and the rear door opened. The ticket guy leaned out and I heard a few words of Turkish. At that time, I didn't understand the language that well, especially when it was spoken quickly, but I managed to get the gist. A voice outside was asking to get on, and the ticket guy replied that there were no seats. The other voice said it only wanted go somewhere a few kilometres down the road, and it would pay. The ticket guy hesitated, then looked, then hesitated again, then said, 'come on'.
I wondered to myself where the voice would sit. The voice clambered on board, attached to a person I can only describe as being the closest to a chimpanzee I have ever seen a human be. And not just a chimp: A full-scale PG tips chimp. He was wearing a greasy red baseball cap, advertising Marshall Paints; His thick black hair poked this way and that from underneath, and a pair of dark, small eyes stared brightly out of a scruffily-bearded, corrugated face; his shirt was stained with oil, and his trousers were baggy and far too big for him, held in place with an old leather belt. He clambered in on bow legs, and holding his hand was a young boy of about four, who was looking around with wide, limpid eyes and had an uncertain smile flickering first on, then off. The man looked at me, and smiled with a lot of gum and very little tooth, and what tooth there was was stained and carious.
Ticket Guy produced a small plastic stool from an overhead locker and an I got the answer to my question about the seating arrangements. They would sit at my feet, or rather, just to the side of them, after Ticket Guy asked me to shift over a bit. I found myself cramped up with this bizarre-looking chap on the stool with this boy on his lap. You can probably imagine how much more irritated I felt - my space was being taken up by someone, who, it now transpired, wasn't paying! He offered a tattered note to Ticket Guy, but it was waved down.
The bus set off again, and I tried to take my mind off my annoyance by listening to some music on my Walkman. A Madness song, 'The Prince', started playing, but after about a minute it came to a sudden, strangulated halt. I opened the player to find th beginnings of a manic bird's nest of stretched and broken tape. Now I had nothing to do except feel grumpy and resentful. I thought I'd take it out by looking sullenly at the man and boy sat on the stool.
They weren't aware of me. The boy was talking rapidly in the high-pitched fluting way many Turkish children do, and I couldn't really catch much of what was being said, apart from 'Baba' (Father). I was a bit surprised: The man easily looked old enough to be the child's grandfather. He was smiling and laughing, and stroking the ragged beard. However, it was the man who held my attention. I saw that there were whole stories of pain and worry etched into that face. His skin had been darkened by dust and dirt and sun, it had been beaten and wrinkled by work and poverty; He was hunched and aged before his time, clearly unhealthy, someone who would sooner rather than later return to the dust. And yet his dark glassy bullets of eyes blazed and his whole face was creased with pleasure - at what? The boy on his lap, his son. He murmured words of love; He said 'my son. my son' almost constantly; every single thing the child said seemed to make him smile or laugh, and he held him with such care, such love, as though the little boy were the most precious and fragile thing of all; He stroked his hair and his face, and the child in his arms was clearly a new and astonishing and wonderful discovery, a piece of pure joy.
I went from irritation to my own wonderment, watching this interaction between father and son. There was so much love between the pair, such a tangible sense of the simple joy each took from the other that it was impossible to stay annoyed. It was an important lesson for me at that time - that one should never be fooled by appearance, nor should you let your mood determine how to judge someone or something.
Then, a couple of kilometres later, the man called to the driver, the coach stopped, and they got off. As they did, a sudden hot gust of wind kicked up the thick, chalky dust at the roadside, and man and boy disappeared into it, the door closed, and both were lost to sight.

Another year done.

2010-12-31T18:41:00.000Z

It has been, it is fair to say, a long year. I don't mean by that that it has been necessarily a bad one: It's felt like 2010 has stretched out more than usual, that it's been more replete with incident. I'm not too keen on doing retrospective stuff - I find then when I indulge in looking backwards, I tend to over-indulge as it were, and end up feeling depressed. With that in mind, I'll keep this entry fairly short and sweet.
Good Stuff:
-doing a lot more cycling, and completing the Reading-Bath run in a day;
-delivering a third presentation at the English UK Teachers' Conference;
-being caught completely by surprise by the letter than announced I could put letters after my name (MIfL, since you ask). I doubt I'll use it much, if at all, however;
-Sean and Angus and watching them grow;
-Snow. Lots of snow.
Bad Stuff:
-TORIES.TORIES.TORIES.
-the ongoing ructions at work - this is a running story, and bodes to be an ongoing problem in 2011;
-dad's health in particular, but people getting ill in general, including me;
-BLOODY TORIES.
this is of course, just stuff off the top of my head - were I to give it more thought, I'd probably come up with a more considered list.
And for the future?
Well, that would be dangerously close to a resolution list, so I'm going to leave that for now.
Have a happy New Year, all of you.

I Believe in Father Christmas!

2010-12-25T01:15:00.000Z

Can't you see him? There he is, thundering across the cold Atlantic wastes as I write, with a jing-jing-jing and a ho-ho-ho, destination Greenland. And of course he has a big tummy and a white beard and a red coat and is on a sleigh pulled by reindeer.

Then again, maybe he wears green, and it is the Coca-Cola Corporation's interpretation that put him in red. Or maybe Father Christmas is old One-Eyed Odin, the Trickster God, in disguise, riding his six-legged steed towards Yggdrasil, The One Tree, while wear the inverted flayed hide of a deer.
What do you mean, you don't believe? Shame on you! You'll be telling me next that you don't believe in the Tooth Fairy, or its teenage version, the Zit Gnome. And from there it's only a hop, skip and a jump to not believing in Buddha or Jesus or something.

And after that, you end up not believing in your parents, or teachers, or politicians.
So, if you are one of those hardened souls who are truly non-believers, could you do something? Give me your money. Obviously, it means nothing, as it's just pretty coloured pieces of paper or brightly stamped metal. I'll take any gold you have lying around as well, as that's just another bit of old toot you got. Oh, and any bright-looking stones you possess - you know, those worthless ones called diamonds.

As you can probably tell, my tongue is firmly in cheek, but with a serious point. We live in a world that is based on trust and faith, whether we like it or not. This faith takes many forms: For some, it's about God and Religion; For pretty much everyone, it's a faith that the piece of paper we carry in our pockets is worth five pounds of something. For those of you who say it's trust, not faith, I say look at what happened in the Financial Crisis of 2008: wasn't that a sudden loss of faith?
For some reason, people need faith, they need to believe, they need to trust. Of course, the flip side of this is gullibility and credulity, things that the powerful, knowledgable and ruthless will use to their own profit, but still we need this. God knows why, if you'll forgive the phrase. Even our material world is a testament to faith: look at the maginficence of churches and cathedrals, to the great buildings and monuments of any great city. Built from faith and cash, which is itself another form of faith.
Herein is the trouble: It doesn't matter how rational you consider yourself to be, you are immersed in faith and belief, and you cannot truly escape it. The best that you can hope for is to understand it for what it is, and use it accordingly.
And right now, Father Christmas is landing on a roof, there is a certain ruffle and jingle, and a child somewhere shifts in their sleep and fleetingly catches the comforting sound of laughter.
Happy Christmas, all of you.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

2010-10-04T21:39:00.000Z

First of all, the Good - actually, two things. I have to start by congratulating my kid sister, Karen, for successfully completing the Challenge Barcelona Triathlon - 4k of swimming, 180k of cycling and 40k of running - in 13hours 30 mins, which is a new family record.

It's a record as a) nobody else in the family has done a triathlon and b) I don't think anyone is mad enough to try to challenge it.
Well done, Karen - I bet your legs are hardly working at the moment.
It just leaves the question of what she'll be planning next.
The other strand of Good is about me - I've been chosen to deliver a paper at the English UK Teachers' conference in November. This time round I'm up against no less than Jeremy Harmer (in the EFL God corner) and Phillida Schellekens (In the ESOL Goddess corner). Two falls, submissions or a knockout to decide. I'll post more about this on my almost-defunct ELT Journal weblog. I'm pretty pleased about this - although this will be the third time I've done this, I think what I have to say (about the possibility of a linguistic hierarchy of needs and the way it affects learner motivations) will be interesting.

OK, now the Bad. And I bet you just skipped over the stuff above, didn't you? Everyone prefers to read Bad/Ugly.
Anyway. It isn't actually that bad, not in the whole scheme of things. I had to give my Xperia X10 Mini Pro to the phone shop as it had suddenly stopped connecting while making calls. I'm really annoyed, as it's a fantastically useful phone - I've only just started to really to get to grips with what it could do, but it won't do the one thing well that it's meant to do - take bloody phone calls. So, off to Sony Ericsson with it. Having used it for the past few months, I love the size of it most of the time, but could easily see myself with the larger version as well for some of the things I do, such as review documents. Oh well, for the time being I'm back to using my trusty old K810i.
OK, the Ugly. Considering I almost put my foot through the television this morning, I will, unlike the BBC, give a warning before I proceed, so that those of a more, er, choleric disposition may choose not to read the following, rather than start beating up your monitor.
I'm about to mention a Senior Tory and a social group who think pinstripe shirts, bouffant hair, a braying voice and two nostrils full of cocaine are good things.

George Bloody Osborne and Bankers.
Honestly, I wanted to punch the bloody screen when George's smug features appeared on BBC Breakfast. He started blethering on about how many cuts were required in public spending, and how much it would change society, as though it were a good thing: He sounded like a particularly vicious, sadistic senior public school boy about to unleash his frustrations with a whip on a dormitory full of trembling year 7s.
Actually, that's probably not too far from the truth. However, it was notable for what he did not say - about how profoundly damaging these expenditure cuts are going to be, who they're going to hurt the most, and who they will not.
Not for the first time, the guilty parties will not only not suffer, they will actually be rewarded. For the bankers, it's more or less business as usual - Salaries up, Bonuses being spent, champagne and caviar being quaffed. and of course, this shoddy bunch of white, incipient-middle-aged, wealthy curs who are the current government will do nothing to upset the dogs of Threadneedle Street, for fear of -well, what? That they'll bugger off abroad and make somewhere else rich?
If what they've done to this country is their idea of wealthy, then somewhere esle can bloody have them.
However, It only seems right to me that the bankers, the economists and businessmen who generated this mess should be punished. If a man takes the bread from my mouth, isn't this theft? So isn't it more so when it is done to an entire nation? The cuts to come will end up killing the weakest, the oldest and the most vulnerable, yet it will not be a shot or a knife in the dark or a sudden unseen blow to the head that slays, but a slow, sadistic breaking that murders them by a thousand degrees.
And the rotten bunch of bastards in Whitehall and The City will not even notice the blood spotting their hands.
So, how to punish them?
Simple: Make them work off their debt. Take one thing from them that will ensure obedience and a focus on what they should do to put things right.
Take away their passports.
It's simple, really, when you think of it - a passport doesn't actually belong to the holder: rather, it is a state document that the holder may be required to relinquish when compelled. The idea is that, by not being allowed to travel abroad, a banker will be compelled to work in the UK. He won't be a slave as such - there will a decent, but not extravagant, salary, and once the son of a bitch has paid back to the taxpayer that which he has stolen, he can get back his passport. Until that time, the bankers would belong to us, as those who work in the nationalised banks should do. Limiting a person's freedoms for the public benefit may seem a bit extreme, but when you calculate what this self-appointed elite of sneering boys has cost us, it seems suddenly not so bad.
And I, for one, would happily pay money to see the look on of their faces as they're told they can't jet off for a skiing holiday, and that the wage they'll earn won't even keep them in cocaine for a month.

A description of a ride and two of the tribes of cyclist.

2010-09-13T22:31:00.001Z

This blog is in danger of becoming intermittent again, although to be fair I've been fairly busy at work and fretting. It's also in danger of becoming a cycling bore's blog, as that is the main thrust of this entry. Actually, it's a long held back and promised description of some of the various breeds of cyclist you tend to meet on the roads. In one way, it's highly encouraging to see so many more cyclists, as it means increasing numbers of people are staying fit and also keeping the British lycra industry afloat; on the other hand, it's highly discouraging to see so many cyclists behaving so badly on the roads and keeping the British lycra industry afloat.
However, before that, I'll describe the route. My cycling partner, Rob, suggested we do part of the Chiltern cycle route, a 170-mile circuit that encompasses the sublime (Ewelme) to the ridiculous (Luton). He wanted to try out a section of the route, short-cutting it at a point in order to make a single 50-mile loop. He wanted to do this because he is one of those people brave enough to actually write to companies and organisations to complain about things and challenge them to do things right. In this case, he'd written to the organisers behind the Chiltern cycle path to complain about the fact that their guide book is only available in one shop on the outskirts of Henley that opens at weird hours. They apparently apologised, sent him a free copy of the guide (now in my possession) and asked him to write a review of the route.
I agreed to go along with him. The track starts just outside my door anyway, so that made getting to it nice and easy, and followed NCN route 5, which takes you up to Oxford, affording the spectacular views over Didcot I've mentioned before. Once out of Ipsden, however, you hang a right to Ewelme. I'd never visited the place before, but the only reaction possible to anyone seeing it as they come down the long hill towards it, as it appears through the trees, is a surprised 'wow!' It really is a tiny gem of a place, with possibly the most spectacular primary school, based in a full-scale early Tudor mansion, I've ever seen. It also has an absolutely cracking cricket pitch, positioned in a natural basin with a wide grass bank for spectators.
Following that, we made the long slog up to Christmas Common, which I believe is just about the highest road point on the Chilterns, then over the M40 to Stokenchurch. After a break there, where I snacked on chocolate-smeared hydrogenated fat bars and Rob ate the greasiest slice of pork pie I've seen for ages, we decided to alter the route slightly. We crossed the M40 again and headed first for Fingest, then Hambledon. I have to say that this route ranks right up there with the best I've ever done: It's more or less downhill all the way, including a spectacular 10% hill. The views, in particular, were fantastic - you could almost see yourself in the Yorkshire Dales from the top, while as anyone who knows the valley in which Hambledon is set, it's almost a little slice of Heaven. Coupled with the weather - a wonderful, refulgent light with clouds scudding across clear blue sky, not too hot, not too cold - it was fantastic. I also largely managed to rein in Rob's innate desire to stop and strip the fruit off any tree or bush he passed - apparently, it's a very Polish thing to do. He did escape from me for a while, as I was struggling up Harpsden Hill, but I found him stuffing blackberries in his face. We finished the ride at the White Horse, Emmer Green, for a well-deserved cider. So, overall, a very satisfying 45-miler.
Satisfying, that is, except for certain other cyclists.
There was a time when gentlemen of a certain age would buy an open-top sports car and array of polo neck sweaters and try to impress the local au pairs with it while holding onto their wigs.Nowadays, it seems to be de rigeur to buy a top of the range carbon fibre composite bike that weighs about 5 grams, squeeze a bloated gut into improbably coloured and gender-bending lycra and attach a helmet to the wig. These are what are called Gear Wankers: People who buy the best possible gear, and are only ever seen cycling downhill. The annoying thing about super-lighweight bikes is that they are fast. My cross-breed MTB/Roadie looks like a tank next to them, and I use a fairly heavy knobbled wide tyre,all of which means I can't go particularly fast - the best I've managed out of it is 35 mph. Two such gear wankers passed us by on the downhill. One turned to me, smugly, and said 'morning! lovely light ride, isn't it!' and went on ahead. Maybe it's the pack chasing instinct, but it always feels incredibly galling to be overtaken on a bike - I always want to give chase. Anyway, the road bent to the right, then went straight on past a pub - but no sign of the gear wankers. The fact that the road was not only straight, but uphill, and they couldn't have got out of sight that quickly (it was a long straight) made us speculate what had happened to them. I reckoned that their support team had dragged them off road to administer oxygen, cpr and adrenaline.
Despite the Gear Wankers, generally the world of the sunday cyclist is a friendly one. As you pass other cyclists going in the opposite direction, you are always sure of a friendly nod and a 'good morning/afternoon'. The pastime unites people of many different persuasions, whether they are relatively normally attired, lycra fetishists or people with a distinctly sideways view of what is appropriate or good to wear on a bicycle; and from all walks of life - Software writers (Rob), Language lecturers (me), Professionals, Animal Molesters, Mass murderers, you name it, they're all out on their bikes with a friendly wave and a nod.
All apart from the Cycle Nazis.
This group are the Waffen SS of bicycle based activity. They are its shocktroops, hardened, vicious bastards to a man. Many of them have even worked as cycle couriers in Central London. Their bikes may look grimy and battered, but that's only because they're spattered in the blood of a thousand other cyclists. Their tyres are kevlar impregnated with puncture-proof inners. Their clothes are sere and shredded by the thousand winds that blow them. For some reason, they believe that plaited goatee beards are somehow an attractive facial feature. And they are, to a man, total absolute bastards. They're worse than white van drivers. They don't just believe they're better than other cyclists, they believe they've more right to the road than an F1 driver who's just been given a huge dose of amphetamines and crack. Quite possibly they too are on crack and speed. What makes them such total toss bubbles is the fact that they will happily ride other people off the road and will happily endanger other people's lives.
Should you ever come across one of them, you should do the only sensible thing: Shove a stick through their front wheels.
Anyway, that's probably enough for now - I'll deal with other more urban types of cyclist another time.

knackered.

2010-08-26T09:44:00.000Z

Bloody hell.

I'm knackered. In part, this is due to this:

View Reading To Winchester in a larger map
A 54 mile cycle ride from Reading to Winchester. Now, 54 miles isn't that bad, but two things militated against it. First was the amount of climbing Rob and me did. Now, perhaps it's because we were heading south, but for some reason I was expecting it to be a relatively flat ride, or even possibly downhill. Far from it: Once we'd left Reading it gradually climbed and climbed, then went down a little bit, but then lots more climbing. In total, over FOUR BLOODY THOUSAND FEET of ascent. That was painful enough, but then reason number two:
THE WEATHER.
We had a constant headwind all the way down, blowing in at between 15-30 mph, plus a few delightful torrential showers just to make us feel really happy. I recorded the journey using My Tracks on my mobile phone, a brilliant little bit of software - just one drawback that I can see, which is that I can't seem to download the speed/climb chart, which is a shame.
Anyway, that explains part of the knackeredness. The other reason is just the fact of being on such a long holiday. As the days have gone by, I've found myself slipping into the kind of torpor induced by not having a tight schedule and the ready availability of daytime TV. Currently, 'Homes under the Hammer' is on and I'm half watching it with a kind of disgusted fascination. The presenters and the people buying knockdown house at auction all seem to have the same kind of glassy-eyed greedy aura about them, rubbing their hands over additions to portfolios, calculating how much money they can squeeze out of their new properties, and happily overlooking the fact that almost every house represents a family thrown out because they defaulted on a mortgage.
brrr.
Well, at least I'll be back to work next week, which means I'll be liberated from the horrors of the broadcasting schedule. However, it'll mean nose to the grindstone for the new lords and masters of Reading College. No, I haven't changed workplaces; Instead, my workplace has transferred, a bit like a football player (probably somewhere down in division 1) being sold from one place to another. We were absorbed by Thames Valley University. Now we belong to the Learning and Skills Network and Oxford and Cherwell Valley College, operating under the new (or rather, old) name of Reading College. There's plenty I could say about the former owners, but I think I should be prudent at present and keep that for another time.

A Holiday for some, hard work for others.

2010-08-12T11:18:00.000Z

Spent a somewhat nostalgic week's holiday down in Devon. We stayed in a bungalow in the Welcome Family holiday camp, a place I thoroughly recommend if you've got kids, in Dawlish Warren. When I was a kid, we spent several holidays down there, and I was gratified to se that some things hadn't changed, most notable of all being the banana fritter stall just before the railway bridge - the smell of deep-fried bananas has the same effect on me as madelaines and tea had on Proust, and wafts me back to a 1970's childhood redolent with hot sunshine, flares, cheesecloth shirts, findus crispy pancakes, casual racism and punk music.
The bungalow we stayed in had been recently renovated and given a vaguely Spanish makeover, including a small patio area in the front. It was part of a small open-sided quadrangle of apartments with a patch of grass for the kids to play on. Angus and Sean, the latter especially, made friends quickly, and spent much of the time outside.
Although there was much to recognise, the Warren has clearly seen plenty of modernising as well, from the rows of new houses on the site of the old Peppermint park, to the new facilities and sea defenses by the beach. Overall, it is a really good place to take the family. Even the holiday camp, a staple of the British Holiday experience, managed to seem up-to-date. All with one exception: the on-site club and evening entertainment.
The best thing that could be said for the club is that the smoking ban has made it safer to sit in. Apart from that, walking into it for the first time felt as if I'd gone back to 1977. It was an enormous barn of a place, packed with classic pub-style tables, stools and chairs. The carpet was an ancient red patterned job, the type found in old bars up and down the country. The decor on the walls was an eclectic mix of 1930s-style cruise liner posters and art-deco-style bas-reliefs, and vaguely Egyptian-style things, including a rather badly-designed and battered pharoah's head, none of which had seen an attempt to move them in at least 20 years.

Crammed into the place were the holidaymakers on the camp, and again it felt like little had changed; There were children running everywhere, a few old relatives being pushed around in wheelchairs, a man with a toothless grin, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, seeking some opportunity to relax, people focused on having one drink too many or trying to enjoy the indifferent bar food, the noise level pitched at just under shouting. Oddly, I found it quite comforting, simply because it reminded me so much of the past - it was a mileau I understood.
And then the entertainment began.
To say it was cheesy would be an insult to the dairy produce industry.This wasn't your bog-standard block of supermarket own-brand cheddar: This was a magnificent chunk of Stinking Bishop, this was the Durian fruit in the friuit bowl of family entertainment, this was the Corpse flower in the botanical garden of holiday camp entertainment. It was an utterly, utterly magnificent thing. It had casual, unwitting racism. It had a 1970's style Gay Stereotype, so camp that you could have put Boy Scouts on it and called it a Jamboree. It had tatty sets. It had a surfeit of innuendo.
But what it had, most of all, was an incredible amount of hard work put into it. We only went two or three tiimes, and didn't stay to long, but what really impressed me was the sheer amount of sweat and labour that had been put into producing something so, well, average. The Bluecoats had clearly spent months planning, rehearsing and performing their routines, and clearly believed in what they were doing. None of them were outstanding performers, but they really sought to entertain. The compere knew how to work the room, the singers managed not to mangle any tunes too badly, the set changes and costume changes were rehearsed and seamless, the comic business and audience participation pretty much faultless. One of the bluecoats had been working there for twenty years.Clearly, he must have both enjoyed the work and got something out of it, otherwise why stay so long?
And this is the point of this entry. As I've got older, I have come to admire more those people who really work at what they do, who strive to be the absolute best they can be at their thing. These chaps were making the most of what they did, and around me in that club I knew there would be people who sweated their backsides off, day in, day out, striving to be the best they could possibly be at what they did. It doesn't mean that they are THE best, just they're filling their own niche. While there will always be the superstars, be it musicians or actors or chefs or top academics, the majority will never attain the peaks. It's the fate of most to be average, and in fact there's absolutely nothing wrong with this, despite the exhortations of lifestyle magazines. The important thing is to do one's best and be content with the knowledge of having done that.
To my undying shame, I have not done that. I have rarely striven to reach as high as I can, and as I get older, I realise that this is not only a disappointment to myself and others, it is a betrayal of myself. Now, I could just curl up in a guilty little ball and feel sorry about the past, but that won't do any good: Nor will beating myself up about the present and excoriate myself for torpor. Instead, it's much more important to try, and try well.

Hands up who wants to join Dave's Big Society.

2010-07-19T22:09:00.000Z

Apologies for not writing sooner - rather a hectic time at work.

I've spent the past few weeks trying to make out what I think of the Con-Dem coalition, and how far they should be rated on the Thatcher Hatred Scale. Today, David Cameron announced his 'Big Society' idea, calling it the 'greatest devolution of power' to the people ever. This largely seems to involve volunteering to run the soup kitchens the soon-to-increase numbers of jobless and homeless will need.

Is it a devolution of power? Of course it isn't. Centralised governments have absolutely no interest in actually giving real, tangible power to Joe Public. Instead, they are far keener on giving people more work for less money. By calling it 'volunteering', they're hoping to appeal to people's better side.

In fact, this sums up the profoundly cosmetic nature of the policies announced by this government so far. On the face of it, they all seem pretty good - seemingly communitarian, seeking to involve people at grass roots level in a variety of activities. However, they all rely on goodwill and require people to assume responsibility without wielding any real authority. The Conservative party is playing a long, careful game, hiding under the face of social concern, while getting on with what it likes doing best - saving the wealthy and not giving a damn for the weak, the poor, the ignorant, the unschooled.

However, it isn't entirely fair to solely blame the Tories. Fault lies also with the Labour party. The problem with the left wing is its desire to totally control and nanny everything. This was shown way back in '97, where every message and every speech by even the lowliest parliamentary activist was ruthlessly controlled. This need to have overarching power backfires spectacularly once things start to go wrong - the party falls apart in recriminations and in-fighting. The current leadership race is somewhat ridiculous, particularly the sight of the Milliband brothers trying to point out idealogical differences between each other, which mainly come down to which comic each one read as a kid (Beano or Dandy?). And once the Labour machine has broken down, it tends to stay broken for quite a while.

The Tories, by contrast, seek to minimise apparent government involvement while focusing power and control on select social groups. As long as they breathe gentle, acceptable polite words, they will stay in control. If you're middle class and slightly, but not too, worried about your income and the future, the siren call of Big Society, and the chance to (forgive the capitals) Control Your Destiny is rather appealing. In fact, it will be a case of I'm alright Jack. People who set up their own schools and schools that becoime academies will divert money away from other schools. This will exacerbate, not alleviate, the problem of failing schools. In other words, whole areas of towns and cities will become more or less educationally arid zones, where any child unfortunate enough to be born in the wring postcode zone will stand little chance of accessing a decent education. And if someone doesn't get an education, how can he or she be expected to understand their choices, rights, powers and responsibilities?

And so on to the Big Society. The main problem is that David Cameron seems to think that the whole of the UK is comprised of genteel villagers all eager to lend a hand at the village fete, erecting marquees, selling jam, running the tombola and whatnot. Running libraries, education services, housing services and so forth requires expertise, no matter how willing and eager the help. It comes down to power, basically. Now, don't get me wrong - volunteering is a good thing, and has a clear and valuable place. Unfortunately, this volunteering looks like it will be at the expense of people who be being paid for it. And what will happen to those areas where no-one wants to volunteer? What will happen to those areas of towns where people who have not had a good education or access to decent services decline to participate in the Big Society? Are we facing a situation where there are islands of happy participation floating in an ocean of no-go zones where people are left to drift helpless, bereft of direction and assistance?

If David Cameron (or the next Labour leader, or Nick Clegg, if he has the courage to break free from what is slowly proving to be a toxic coalition) is sincere about devolving power, then it should be genuinely so, not some cosmetic, patronising handing-down of a few paltry gobbets of central authority control. That would be a genuinely brave and almost unprecedented action in British politics. The problem is that real, local democracy is a long, tortuous and difficult process, but one that ends up yielding genuinely democratic decisions. Central government doesn't like this, simply because it's on a tight five-year timetable. All goverments have a vested interest in keeping people at least slightly anxious, if not downright afraid, in order to control the electorate and pursue their own agendas with little interruption. British democracy is, in reality, probably better described as an elective dictatorship, in that we willingly abrogate our own democratic voices in the cause of the speedy and convenient expidition of political decisions. So, if we do not engage locally in politics, if we do not raise our voices to question, if we do not involve ourselves with our schools, our communities, our councils, our neighbours, how then can we say that we are particularly democratic or even social?

In the end, if we do not seek to create our own Big Society, we will have some mellow-faced man with a shark's hunger impose his Big Society on us.

Reading to Bath peleton...

2010-06-26T17:01:00.003Z

Job done! 90 miles and time for cider....

Dusty.

2010-06-26T14:55:00.002Z

70+ miles of road crap. This is what happens if you cycle without a front mudguard, on dusty towpaths in 30 deg.C heat. This is on the way to Bradford-on-Avon

Devizes!

2010-06-26T14:11:00.002Z

The bag Julie is holding is actually her pannier bag. She cycled the entire 90-mile distance with it tied to her handlebar.

Lunch

2010-06-26T12:31:00.002Z

This is a roadside ditch somewhere north of Pewsey. There were sheep behind us, but I guess Rob freaked them out.

Doughnut!

2010-06-26T12:27:00.002Z

Rob waves his doughnut at Great Bedwyn. The reason for his triumphant baked confectionary gesture is that the baker's shop was actually open at midday. Apparently, it tends to close at exactly the times you would most expect a baker's to be busy. That's small town English shops for you.

Hungerford!

2010-06-26T10:21:00.002Z

Newbury!

2010-06-26T09:16:00.002Z

10.00 am - not a bad time on a towpath that was so-so. I seem to have my 'camp pose photo' dial stuck at about 3-4 these days.

Angus and Harry.

2010-06-24T21:26:00.000Z

A.A.M.G. Wylie (b. 1910, d. 1992) and H.M.Gallantry (b. 1922, d. 2004) were my grandfathers. Angus Alastair (or possibly Alastair Angus) McGregor Grey was born in Fort William, lived in Perth, and came south just after the second world war. Harold Montague, or Harry, was born in Southampton and moved north. Both of them ended up in Reading. Both of them served in the R.A.F.; The former as a weather observer at an airfield in Scotland, the latter as a fitness instructor, having been a carpenter (a retained trade, and vital for the construction of aircraft parts) prior to that. Following the war, Angus worked in the Post Office, while Harry went on to work in his own carpet shop. Angus had seven children, two of whom died in infancy, and Harry had four, and thence numerous grandchildren.
What a bald, dull summary of two lives. Two lives that I knew, two real people who lived, breathed, loved, did the right thing and made mistakes, who filled an unmistakable space, who were missed when they went - indeed, still are. Grandpa Angus, to me, was a strange mix of warmth and distance. He smoked pipes, played golf, and talked in a loud, warm Perth accent that could rise into sudden storms of power - a voice not to be crossed. Once he took me on a visit to the Science museum, and, on a stop in a cafe, grimly showed me the variety of pills he was forced to take for various ailments, the most grievous of which was the arthritis that cut short his sporting prowess - as a young man, he had been a champion rower, amongst other things. Later, indeed, the last time I saw him, when he had lost all sense of time and space just before he died, he sent my mother out of the room after she'd fussed over getting him a cup of tea ('You and your damn cups of tea!'), then asked me to help him get his socks on. I helped move him round so that he could sit on his bed, then, bending down, I pulled socks over feet and calves that seemed to have been withered by time and fire. The skin from knee to toe was a bruised, tired brown. As I pulled up the socks up, our eyes locked, and he gave me the look of a man who has suddenly understood the joke after a long, long, time. We smiled; we both knew that this would be the last time we would see each other, but strangely this was suddenly alright and nothing to fret about, nothing at all. There was no need to say a thing. My mother and my aunt then came in, and the moment was lost. Grandpa died two days later.
While both my grandfathers seemed old to me, Grandad Harry was, in my young eyes, younger, despite having less hair. He was a warm, booming presence, with a truly distinct Hampshire dialect that years of living in Reading never leavened. He always seemed much more approachable than Grandpa. Whenever I saw him, he seemed to have a smile like a split melon and would always say 'Hello!' with a heavily aspirated H, as though he were genuinely greeting you with a breath taken from the deepest parts of his soul. I loved rooting around in his shed and greenhouse, or among his books, or, when he still had the carpet shop, going into the basement. He'd also take me and my sister upwards; He told us that the shop had once been a police station and that they'd used to execute people there, pointing to what I can now recall as a rather frail looking pulley anchor point.

I never got to say goodbye to him. Before I could go to the hospital, he'd died, several hours after my birthday.

There is still too much to say about both of them, but perhaps for now I should explain why I'm writing about them. Apart from both being my grandparents, apart from both having served in the RAF, apart from both having ended up in Reading, one other thing connected them. They both had prostate cancer. In Grandpa's case, it was an illness he died with; In Grandad's case, it was a disease he died of.
In both their names, I'm doing this cycle ride to Bath on saturday. If you can sponsor me, please do - the link is in the right sidebar, or just click on this - http://www.justgiving.com/kennetpc

More cycling and the joy of views

2010-06-14T23:46:00.000Z

Just a brief one, because it's already late and I've a heavy day tomorrow. Went for another ride on sunday, again up to Oxford with Rob - a good steady rate of just under 15mph all the way. The one difference was our route. Last time, we took a more direct road to Ipsden, involving a spectacular downhill. This time, we took the official NCN route 5 road from Stoke Row to Ipsden. All that can be said is
woooooooooooowwwwwwwwwww
the view! I would put a photo up, but it simply would not, could not, do it justice. It just has to be seen. From our vantage point, we could see the whole of the Thames Valley up to Oxford and beyond, a magnificent, marvellous view taking in Wallingford, Abingdon, the Wittenham Clumps, and, of course, Didcot. Didcot, with its bloody huge power station cooling towers slap bang in the middle of everything.
But there it was - the view of the whole rolling green place, with ample evidence of human industry protruding like a strangely graceful lump in the middle of all. It was a view that said 'This is England!' as much as any view there is to be had here. Looking over it, I started hearing Vaughan Williams playing in my ears.
Then I told the annoying idiot in the car behind me to turn down Classic FM.

Stretch Limousines - What goes on within?

2010-06-08T17:42:00.000Z

I just saw one of those white stretch limousines pass by the college where I work, and, it being the idle stretch just before the evening classes start, I began to speculate about the inner workings of the thing. You can see these limos most friday and saturday evenings in and around Reading, usually booked for someone's birthday or a hen night or something. Once, one of these would have been seen as glamourous, a whiff of Hollywood on a rainy street; However, once they became more available to hire, they went instantly from Cool to Chav. Alongside the white vehicle, they are available in lurid shades of pink. You can also get a pink stretch Humvee, taking tacky excess to new extremes.
But what goes on within? Here are a few bits of speculation:
1) the inside is covered in easy-to-clean pink satin and pink leatherette seats
2) there are little twinkly lights and a very small disco glitter ball. Possibly there is also a tiny tiny dancefloor.
3) there is a loud sound system, playing stuff like 'all the single ladies' on an unremitting loop.
4) there is a fridge containing 'quality' drinks like bacardi breezer and lambrini
5) there are at least 6 women in various costumes, one of which involves wings. They are screeching with laughter.
6) there is some kind of floor show. I speculated it might involve Shetland Pony Horsejumping, but that's ridiculous. No,
7) They have midget strippers doing a reprise of the ending to 'The Full Monty'.
8) After 2 am, a little man (possibly one of the dwarf burlesque artists of earlier on)pops up at the back, ladling out doner kebabs with extra chili sauce to anyone still standing.
Sheer class.

Oh my God - You haven't changed a bit! (apart from the grey bits and the saggy bits) - and by that, I mean me.

2010-06-06T21:42:00.001Z

No cycling this week, which was a bit bad of me, considering that there are now only 20 days to go till the Reading to Bath run. If you'd like to sponsor, please go to the link on the right. However, I had a perfectly good reason not to. Yesterday saw me go up to meet an old university mate of mine, Jo Halstead, though I suspect she'll object to the 'old' bit of that description. She'd come down to Oxford to stay with her sister (who's a Research Fellow at Christchurch) for a few days, and we arranged to meet for the first time in twenty years.
You might ask why so long; well, it's a combination of work, life, happenstance and fortune - in other words, just normal everyday thingys. I couldn't quite believe how much time had passed since we'd go together for the UCNW Drama department reunion, an event recorded in my old diary, and I'm sure there may be some of you out there thinking, how is that possible?, but there it is. What seems like the work of moments is a thing of years - and, sometimes, vice versa.
Anyway, Jo and I met up and had what is best described as a Very Pleasant Time Indeed. I have to say, in reference to the title, that I mean me - it seemed to me that she really hadn't changed at all. Actually, this was one of the things we chatted about, along with what had happened to old university friends, who had died, old gossip, reminding each other of who said or did what and possibly with whom, families, and an awful lot about our respective teaching jobs and respective grumbles about said jobs.

In all, a really good day, and one that I hope to repeat sooner rather than later - and certainly sooner that another twenty years!

if in doubt, shoot.

2010-06-01T21:58:00.000Z

As you might imagine, there has been some not inconsiderable anger in our house regarding the botched Israeli raid on the aid flotilla yesterday, and the subsequent fudging and flummery that Israel has stammered out since then. It's like watching a kid holding a bloodied hammer behind his back while standing next to the battered corpse of a kitten, yelping, 'I didn't do it! And anyway, it scratched me!'
There's a dramatic enough image. Honestly, why does the Israeli state do this kind of crap? It's hardly winning friends and influencing people. They could have waited till dawn and until the ships had entered territorial waters, after which they could have boarded entirely legitimately and with maximum visibility, thereby minimising risk for all. By abseiling from bloody helicopters in the middle of the night, they were clearly steaming for a fight. Imagine someone bursts into your house in the darkness - what would your reaction be? The Israeli authorities claim that the people on the ship beat the soldiers with poles, clubs and knives, and admittedly in the video released by them, it is clear that some people are waving and hitting with poles of some kind, but nothing else is evident. What hasn't been released is the moment when the soldiers opened fire and killed.
Now Israel has lost its one Muslim ally in the region, and the one that it really does not want to piss off - Turkey. Turkey, a country with over a million men under arms. Turkey, an important trade partner with Israel. Turkey, a NATO member and thereby a country that can call upon all other NATO members in times of crisis. Turkey, a country with a military hierarchy, gradually having its political influence and ability to interfere with the democratic system removed by the ruling AKP, that is absolutely gagging for a fight.
The best thing that could happen now is that the absolute idiot who was in charge of this operation is arrested and tried, along with a full inquiry. Better for cool heads to calm angry hearts. It would be better if the blockade of Gaza was lifted, but this being Israel, that's probably wishing for too much.When will these bloody-handed politicos realise that people only bite back when they've been pushed into a corner and have got nothing left but anger to keep them alive?

short circuit.

2010-05-30T14:08:00.000Z

No, I have't blown a fuse - I'm just referring to today's cycle trip, a very pleasant, but hilly twenty-mile ride. I started off from home, then headed towards Stoke Row, down to Highcliff, then Rotherfield Greys and Henley, followed by Harpsden and up to Binfield Heath, Emmer Green and back home - an hour and a half all told.

Bleary eyed

2010-05-27T23:50:00.000Z

I'm feeling knackered. It's been a fraught week, and things, work-wise at least, are going to get fraughter. Yes, I know it should be 'more fraught', but if Lewis bloody Carroll can get away with 'Curiouser and curiouser', then I'll bloody do as I like. The trouble with this season is the exams: I'm responsible for organising the things for my department, and it all gets on top of me somewhat at this time of year. It is not helped by having to do two twelve and a half hour days. And, just to add to that, there is also the small matter of training for a 90-mile cycle ride to Bath at the end of June, hence the reason for the last post.
Last sunday saw me and my cycling partners (Rob Podolski and Julie Shepherd, plus her boyfriend) ride to Guildford via the Thames Path, route 4 and the Wey towpath route, all on the hottest day of the year so far - up to 29c. It started well, going along the Thames to Sonning, then turning off towards Charvil and the Wargrave, followed by a truly spectacular piece of riding through fields of bright yellow rapeseed overlooking where the Thames Valley descends towards Windsor, then a trip through the suburbs of Maidenhead and into Bray, past the Fat Duck and then deep into Becoming Lost. After recourse to a couple of maps, we got under way again, just in time to get lost once more. Finally we got to Windsor and into the Great Park, where we had a lunch of bananas and shortbread, before descending through Bishopsgate towards Egham and Shepperton, where we took an exorbitantly expensive ferry towards Weybridge, and thence onto the Wey Navigation Towpath, which also included an oportunity to get lost one more time, just before what I can only describe as a mostly HELLISH 20-mile ride over rutted, dusty, hard, knurled and knuckled and tree-root-twisted towpath, cycling against the flow of some kind of cross-country run and old people walking unfeasible numbers of small dogs that seemed to be fatally attracted to fast-moving cycle wheels.
Overall, I covered just about 100 kilometres, so I'm pretty pleased with that.
But the real reason I'm feeling bleary eyed is twofold: being woken up by birdsong at 4.30 and my bloody hayfever, which has reduced me to a red-eyed mess despite medication over the last week. bluh.

Robert Podolski is fundraising for PCaSO Prostate Cancer Network - JustGiving

2010-05-13T23:15:00.001Z

Robert Podolski is fundraising for PCaSO Prostate Cancer Network - JustGiving

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Bloody Elections... and cycling

2010-05-11T23:10:00.000Z

I've avoided posting anything for the past week simply because so many other would be posting on the subject of the General Election results. By and large, it's been rather depressing - actually, seeing David Cameron's posho smug face outside no.10 tonight, very depressing. As an aside, will it be a requirement of all future PMs to have a sprog born in the Prime Ministerial residence from now on? First Blair, then Brown, now Cameron; it's like the British version of porphyrogenita.
I don't know about you, but there is something utterly maddening about the current batch of Tories. The fact that three of them - Cameron, George Osborne (the newly-incumbent Chancellor), and Boris Johnson (Mayor of London)- were all in the Bullingdon Club at the same time seems suspect, but more irritatingly is their smug belief in their innate, almost god-given, right to govern others. Says bloody who? Cameron had only one or two short-term jobs prior to becoming a politician, selling advertising, and George has never held down a proper job in his whole life. What the hell makes them think they're bloody qualified to do a damn thing?
As for Nick Clegg - well, I think he was given a terrible choice, and he (and the Lib Dem leadership) chose terribly. Once the spending cuts and tax hikes that are inevitable are announced, they are hardly going to be popular. However, trying to be positive, if they are seen as full coalition members of goverment, they may provide a decent check on Tory policies.

Sorry, I thought I just saw a flying pig there.

OK, enough about politics for now. In other news, I cycled from Reading to Oxford via NCN route 5 (approx 40 miles) on sunday, doing it in three and a half hours. Far more enjoyable than trying to strangle a TV because David Cameron's face is on it. I will be atempting a 90-miler to Bath in June - I'll be whacking the link to a justgiving page on here soon.

It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.

2010-05-02T11:27:00.001Z

You may be wondering,perhaps, why I haven't commented much on the General Election, considering that politics is a frequent subject of this blog. It's a combination of exhaustion, lethargy, geberally avoiding Doing Things and a degree of puzzlement. By nature, I'm more of a Labour supporter than anything else, but this election has thrown everything up in the air. I have the feeling that whoever gets into government come next thursday will decide the way this country is going for many, many years to come, far beyond the lifetime of a single Parliamentary cycle. Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, may well be right when he says 'whoever is the government this time around will be out of power for a generation after'. He says this because whoever gets in will have to make cuts and tax increases of such severity that they will not exactly be Mr. Popular with the electorate.

Perhaps it's precisely this issue that is haunting all the three main parties to the extent that not a single one has a Big Idea - a single, defining thought for change. By and large, they come out almost sounding the same, bar one or two bits here and there. Having listened to and watched the Prime Ministerial debates over the last three weeks, I can't say that anyone come out on top - certainly not David Cameron. I really don't understand why opinion polls put him consistently ahead. He didn't say anything of substance, just anecdotes of dubious provenance and the phrase 'We've got to...' repeatedly. It's all very well saying that something has to be done, but how? that's the real question, and Cameron didn;t answer it. Gordon Brown was much better on facts, substance and method, but he has all the charisma of a sock full of thistles. Clegg was a revelation, only because he hadn't made any impression whatsoever beforehand. Some of his ideas were, I felt, on the naieve side, and he would certainly get a shock if he tried to implement them in the febrile, jumpy atmosphere of government.
There's only one idea worth going for that two parties have suggested - electoral reform. Both Labour and the Lib Dems have it in their manifestoes. Whether it would ever be put into law within a parliamentary cycle is debatable, to put it mildly, and it certainlt won't cure the economic woes of the country. What it may do, however, is open governement to a new democratic paradigm within the UK. It would also force the Big Three to alter, in some cases radically, and open them up to new ideas and policies, rather than have the Same Old Politics again and again, and which seem to end up getting all of us into the Same Old Mess eventually.
And as for the person who said to me that they wouldn't vote because it was against their beliefs, I say that making no choice is still a choice and often the worst one. When faced with a decision, avoiding it does not equate to a good thing. Vote, and vote according to what you have read, understood, want and need. Don't vote in a particular way just because you've always voted for this or that party, or your parents have, or someone's told you to. Vote and know you've done it for the right reasons.

everyone has to start somewhere

2010-04-21T21:35:00.000Z

Sean's splodges. Good, aren't they? In a blobby, Rorscharch ink blot test kind of way.

Above us only sky....

2010-04-17T09:49:00.000Z

See that? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Just a perfect blue sky. Not a single contrail to be seen, thanks to the Volcanic Ash cloud currently floating over Europe.With the exception of a few small airplanes, the only sound of flying things is that of birdsong.

Death of an Anarchist

2010-04-08T19:02:00.000Z

Just heard that Malcolm McLaren has died. There's nothing quite like the death of a figure who loomed large in the public eye during your childhood to make you feel old.

And they're off!

2010-04-06T20:48:00.000Z

So we have a month to the General Election. I think you can surmise, from previous entries, which way I'm likely to vote, but I still have my doubts. The problem is the manifestos published by each party - they're not all that inspiring. The BBC's web coverage already looks set to be excellent, and well worth checking out. Looking at the key priorities, Labour seem to be edging it in terms of stats to back up their targets. Both the Tories and the Lib Dems offer the scrapping of the ID card scheme, which is commendable, but hardly a key priority right now.
The trouble with the Tory manifesto is that it looks like it was scraped out of a Daily Mail editorial. It reads more like a wishlist than a set of concrete proposals. The most absurd, coming from my own career background, is the idea of Academy schools run by local communities and independent of local authority control. At first glance, it looks quite appealing - after all, it's the notion of communities helping themselves. Unfortunately, whoever dreamt this one up omitted to ask a very simple question: Why aren't local communities already investing themselves in the schools that already exist? Why not invest in them? In fact, I suspect the proposal is probably thoroughly unworkable. For starters, it would involve the diversion of budgets to establish the schools, whatever the Tories may say about private funding; Second, the chances of these academies ending up being run by private businesses or rich institutions with their own agendas is incredibly high. Public accountability would be limited (an opt-out school would not be subject to OFSTED inspections)- and don't we all want to know what happens to our children at school? Finally, I suspect that the whole scheme would eventually crumble - that, or we go back to a model of education that was discredited a long time ago.
Labour's Cancer notification plan is just an attention-grabber, and I suspect impossible to deliver within the time-frame of the next parliament. The same, probably, goes for the adoption of the Alternative voting system - any governement wishing to put through such a change to electoral procedure would need a solid majority.
The Lib Dems 'Identify £15bn of lower-priority spending and cut' is highly suspicious - define 'lower-priority spending'.
And this election is set to be the most personality-driven ever. So, based on what the potential PMs look and sound like, I'd say:
David Cameron: Posho Fake. Tony Blair Lite. Just does that sincere semi-frown thing like he's about to fart out a mini-turd of a policy
Nick Clegg: A man in search of someone who's got a mate who bought a dog off a bloke down the pub who knows where he can lay his hands on a nice bit of gravitas.
Gordon Brown: He's the bear, these are his woods, and damn if he isn't going to crap just where he likes.
And of course, all these politicos have to convince the electorate that they aren't bent, not like those expenses-fiddling lot last ti....oh, sorry, it was them, wasn't it?
If I were doing a campaign, I would start by this:
Each constituency candidate, in their publicity, states what their aims are, both on a local level and on a party level. They limit this to just a few key items - whatever local issues there may be, and stuff like economy, defence etc.
Next, they state, explicitly, the steps required in order to achieve these aims, and the time frame required. next to this, they state as accurately as possible the amount of money required to complete these aims and each stage. That way, candidates can demonstrate a) value for money, and b) whether they're being fiscally realistic.
After all, good government comes out of good finances.

demigods and demons!

2010-03-28T22:11:00.000Z

It was Angus' birthday yesterday - his twelfth! I find it hard to think that he will be gearing up for his first driving lessons in just over five years' time. And possibly moving off to university just another 18 months after that. They say children keep you young: However, it is in the counting of their years that you start to feel old. The fortunate thing is that this sense of impending senescence can be shared quite freely with friends and colleagues.

He wanted a fairly quiet birthday - no parties, no jelly and ice cream - so we went to the cinema instead. Actually, it was an early introduction to the cinema that probably hastened his birth. Nur and I went to see Face/Off, and the volume on the thing was cranked up so loud (a typical feature of Turkish cinemas) that he started kicking and moving around violently in his mum's belly. He was born a few days later. Anyway, we went to see Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, the first of what bodes to be a long series of films. Angus has read the books, and had really wanted to see this. I wasn't too sure about it, even though I'm a great fan of anything fantastical and mythological, but how could I possibly disappoint my son on his birthday?
I have to admit, I struggled somewhat through it. For starters, and for various reasons, I'd only had an hour and a half's sleep the night before, so you can imagine how I struggled against the morphean dark and warmth of a cinema. The film itself - hmm. Perfectly decent teen fodder, actually, although at odds with the book, as Angus couldn't help loudly pronouncing at various points throughout. However, I couldn't help but get annoyed by some of the extraordinary liberties taken with Greek mythologies. The worst was the portrayal of the Underworld as a place of burning torment. The ancient Greeks saw it as nothing such - rather, the place, with the exception of the lucky few who made it to the Elysian Fields, seemed to be rather like a particularly dismal office party somewhere in Croydon, except everyone had forgotten why they were there. This is still a step up from the Sumerian view of the Afterlife, however, where the soul was seen a limed bird, scratching futilely at dust forever. And I thought the portrayal of Hades as a dissolute ageing rock star was one of the laziest pieces of stereotyping I've seen in ages - you know, rock is the Devil's music etc. Obviously done with an eye on the pious God Botherer market, just to cater to their perception of what the underworld is.
Two other things bothered me. Firstly, it was way too much Harry Potter, but with Ancient Greek Bits. It was the Destiny of the Orphan Boy story, where he is revealed to be far more than he thought. Now, this is a great meme - it has universal appeal: After all, who hasn't dreamed that they are some kind of Secret Prince, waiting to be revealed? Apart from Prince William, possibly. Which leads me into the second botherment, if you can survive such an ugly neologism. Why do we need Special? Why do we need Demigods? Why Gods? Why are we so ready to abrogate responsibility? Why do we need to to find the Get Out Clause and say 'I need a Hero?'
As far as I can see, the vast majority of Heroes in mythology are generally impetuous, not prone to introspection, eager to dole out violence, and mostly a bit dumb. But not quite as stupid as those who follow them, or look to them to solve their problems. You see, that's the problem with people - they're perfectly happy to hand over responsibility to some loud shouty fellow who says, 'I'm a leader, I've got the answer', rather than decide things for themselves, simply because they're a) lazy, b)busy with the minutiae of their immediate concerns, and c) stupid. After all, you wouldn't hand your valuables to a theif and expect him to look after them for you, so why hand over something far more valuable to someone who claims to lead - namely, your responsibility and your freedom?
This is precisel why I'm such a cynical bastard. I have no heroes. I never will. That doesn't mean I don't admire and respect people: I'm just aware that they are people, and thus frail. And they more they protest their strength, the more I see their vulnerability. I follow no flag, I follow no leader. I'm on no-one's side per se, since to do so would be to unfailingly accept all that they proclaim to be true, and that I can never do, for the reasons above. You might be on my side - but I will always point out my own doubts and weaknesses, and your own, too, and always this one phrase:
The Buck Stops With YOU. Deal with it.

Spring! Sprung! Racists abound!

2010-03-21T22:07:00.000Z

The daffodils have finally put their trumpets out, the hazel trees in front of our house have their first tentative show of green budding leaf, there is the busy rat-a-tat-tat of woodpeckers in the stand of woods and the playful quarrelling noise of sparrows, red kites wheel overhead and sound their unearthly shriek, Easter eggs are half price and I've just spotted my first Nazi of the year.
I went up to our local Tescos this morning to fill up the car with petrol and to buy some croisants. I had some problem getting a pump, as half of them were out of use - probably waiting for a delivery. Anyway, I got a pump, filled the car, then went inside and got the breakfast stuff, then waited on the surpisingly long sunday morning queue. Like most Tesco Expresses in the area, this one was staffed by young Asian men. In this case, Nepalis and Indians, guessing by the names. In the queue was a thick set man of about sixty, with what is most charitably described as a florid complexion, although Alcoholic's Red Face would also do nicely. His hair, though grey, was fairly full, as was his beer gut. He had on a blue Abbey Rugby Club tank top and checked shirt, and was wearing a face full of thunder. His turn came and he lurched towards the cashier. What followed was a load of very nasty invective, that began with 'Why don't you speak English?', to 'Are ye calling me a liar, paki?' (he was, I'd guess, an Ulsterman originally, judging by the accent), to other NF classics such as 'what are ye doing here?', to 'that's the problem with this place is youse lot', before stomping off to his car. The staff remained remarkably calm in the face of this. what was somewhat astonishing was that no-one in the very long queue said anything to stop this really rather nasty tirade. As it happened, it was my turn at the cashier who'd borne the brunt of this, and I said, rather loudly, 'morning. Sorry about the racist idiot', to which the guy smiled and said 'it's OK - he can come to my country and learn the language and see how he likes it', while the woman next to me said 'too right!'. I glanced back at the queue: Sorry to say, I got some hostile glances from two or three people, mostly those of the potato-shaped, shaven-headed variety.
I should also say, much to my own shame, that I only said the 'sorry about the racist idiot' line after the prick had left -I very much wish I'd said it to his face.
Anyway, if you happen to go to Abbey Rugby club and meet an alcoholic sixty-year-old Ulsterman in a blue ARC tanktop, tell him what I think. Actually, give him a good kick for me.

And if I were to stop right now...

2010-03-15T22:56:00.000Z

...how would I be seen?
Yes, I know, a very mid-life-crisis-type subject, and one that is born of a general dissatisfaction with myself and what I'm doing at present. Well, let's see: married, two boys, live in a nondescript semi-detached, degree and teaching diploma qualifications, steady job at the local college, moderately successful career, cycle to work, relatively fit, lived abroad for 7 years, speak a foreign language, aaaaannnnd that's it. Rather, that is what it looks like from the outside. And, measured against other people my age who have had successful careers etc etc (and who doesn't do it?), utterly bland.
And yet....photographer and photo editor for a magazine, contributor of poetry to a publication,writer of articles, writer of a novel (completed in 28 days), actor, enabler of others, creating the alchemy that allows people to suddenly function in another language, seeing my students go on to universities around the world, including Harvard, researcher, fluent in another language to the extent that can identify different accents and dialects, and able to understand more or less a family of languages that stretch from Edirne to the Western stetches of China, theorist, often of absurd theories admittedly, insatiably curious, completer of the 3 peaks challenge, teller of corny jokes and deliverer of witty ripostes, analytical, strategic-minded, someone who mostly seeks to do the right thing rather than the easy thing.....
Well, that sounds better.

Even so, there's only me to vouch for most of the above - it's true, honest! Yet what annoys me is that there is so much, much more to do, see, complete, and I feel that there just isn't time enough. And I also can't help but be waylaid by the notion of the general futility of everything. Here we are, little bright sparks thrashing briefly against the huge indifferent darkness, flash of fish scales in green gloom. Oh well, if futile it is, let it be positive futility. However, I'm far too adept at filling my time with nothings - being busy to no good purpose.

Kids' TV and applied physics.

2010-03-11T23:26:00.000Z

I'm going back to an old topic of this blog, children's TV programmes. Currently, I'm watching an awful lot of these, thanks to 3-year-old Sean, who is an avid watcher of CBeebies. Actually, he's a tyrannical watcher, especially at the weekend. God forbid anyone should change channel while 3rd & Bird is on.
I'm an amused and cynical watcher of kids' TV, but I have to say that British-made kids' stuff is largely better than the well-intentioned mush that emanates from the States - for starters, it's generally more whimsical and anarchic, and the only way to appreciate a majority of it is to either a) be three years old or b) have ingested huge amounts of drugs.Some of the older stuff on CBBC is actually quite good - 'Sorry, Ive got no head' is genuinely funny, especially the Witchfinder General sketches. And Horrible Histories is a truly Reithian piece of broadcasting.
However, watching one programme today invoked an idle scientific question: What happens when someone shrinks? The programme was 'Grandpa in my Pocket', which is not, as the name might suggest, a child using blackmail in order to keep their grandparent under control, but the adventures of an old bloke, played by the indestructible James Bolam, who shrinks whenever he puts his Shrinking Hat on. Obviously.
Now, I began thinking, what would happen to someone if they did shrink to about a tenth of their height? Anyone more familiar with physics and chemistry than me out there, please tell me if I'm right or wrong, but I suspect the results would probably be somewhat disastrous.
Imagine: you've got a person of roughly 1 metre 75 cm, weighing perhaps 75-80 kilos, with an average temperature of 37 deg. c. Now, if we say that the act of shrinking leads to a concommitant loss of weight, it still leaves us with a significant problem - where does all the heat go? you have a body pumping out a constant temperature and radiating over a constant surface area of skin. Now, if you reduce the surface area suddenly, wouldn't the result be that Grandpa would either a) be instantly cooked to a crisp or b) due to his blood boiling, explode?
Hmmm. That wouldn't make good kids' telly.
Mind you, I am half fearful sometimes when watching In the Night Garden that Upsy Daisy will stamp on the Pontypines, and have to scrape them off her shoe.

Normal service resumed

2010-03-09T16:29:00.000Z

Phew!
A link to the hit counter had been hijacked, so I've removed the offending item..

Not much to write about at the moment, as I am currently in the middle of invigilating an exam, and keeping one eye on this and one on a particular student who I know can cheat in the blink of an eye.
I'm just going to give the thumbs up to Mangal Restaurant in Reading, a Turkish place that opened recently. If you're in town, try it - the food is pretty good, although I'm not too sure of the wisdom of tahini in an aubergine puree. Plus they sell raki, which can only be a good thing

WTF?

2010-03-06T22:45:00.002Z

This blog seems to have been hijacked somehow - apologies. Hopefully, normal service will be resumed ASAP.

A correction.

2010-03-03T09:44:00.000Z

It has been pointed out to me that it was Dr. Johnson, not Swift, who first uttered the original 'patriotism' quote.
Of course.
It doesn't make Cameron any less of a smooth-faced posho twat, however.

more on politics.

2010-02-28T22:17:00.000Z

Apparently, David Cameron feels that he 'can turn this country round'. I bet he does - turn it round so he can screw it up the backside, like the last time the Tories were in. The Conservatives have apparently identified six key areas to campaign on, beginning with the deficit. What they do not have is any clue of a coherent political or economic strategy. And you can tell Cameron is a man out of ideas when he says:
"It is an election we have a patriotic duty to win because this country is in a complete and utter mess, and we have to sort it out."
A patriotic duty?
To paraphrase Swift, 'Patriotism is the last refuge of the politically clueless'.
Cock. Total cock.

Headline of the year?

2010-02-22T22:17:00.002Z

Even though it's only February? And yes, it is for real:
Butler Handjob gives Wheatley Semi
It's about someone giving away a quarter final by handball, of course. What did you think?

Ill.

2010-02-18T17:26:00.002Z

I feel terrible. I have a rough bloody cough and no energy whatsoever, plus blocked up ears. Just thought I'd give it a mention.

The Tory Imagination Isn't Working....

2010-02-16T21:43:00.002Z

as I said in my last post, devoid of ideas.
Forgive the crappiness of my picture editing skills.

faffing round.

2010-02-15T22:37:00.002Z

I'm just fiddling round with this at present. How many times do we actually do that - fiddling round? I'd say the vast majority of life, our working/study lives included, is a load of faffing round. Only the rare few actually bother to concentrate and work hard enough, and then for not entirely honest reasons. The latter refers to the majority of politicians and sneery-faced slimeballs who work in the city. What do you think - wouldn't life be better for politicians and financial analysts who were a little more laid back?
Actually, it sounds, on the face of it, a little counter-productive: after all, we elect politicians to dictate our daily lives and trust bankers to guard our wealth, and so we should expect them to be upright, honest and irreproachable - very much like priests, in fact. Or gods or something. And, when they behave like the humans they actually are, we get all spluttered and outraged, when in fact there is collective fault, and a terrible number of errors within the system.
Let's start with politics. Now, a politician should in fact refer to anyone involved in 'politics', i.e. 'the affairs of the city' - in other words, everyone. what we live in is not in fact a democracy - rather, it is an elective dictatorship, where political decisions, for the sake of expedience, are given to a minority of people to make. And of course, a certain type of person understands this, manipulates it to his or her own ends, and gets duly elected. By 'understand this', I mean the fact that the vast majority of people can't be arsed to think for themselves and involve themselves in their own communities. These are often the same people who whine about the politicians they have installed. It's the way that the Blairs and Camerons get elected. However, there is a difference between these two very modern titans of political rectitude - the former just wanted to be loved by the audience, and duly pulled out rabbit after policy rabbit from his magician's hat, while the latter is a bland copy who is seen as a safe face by those who bankroll him.
And talking of bankroll, let us look at the financial market. What this really shares with politics is the atmosphere in which it operates; a febrile, crazed miasma in which each decision must be instant, kneejerk, unconsidered. We somehow expect our bankers and politicians to take calm, measured, and considered decisions, yet when one looks at the bearpits of Westminster and The City, it is absolutely clear that this cannot possibly be the case. And of course, when you put your average, typical person in such a heated atmosphere, how can we expect them to react?
Yup.
Let's face it - we get the politicos and bankers we deserve.

far too long

2010-02-08T22:53:00.003Z

..between posts. well, yes, I know, I posted yesterday, but you know what I mean. Sheer Inertia has hindered me - the torpid, leaden weight of Not Doing that stops me from doing a thing. That and watching crap movies on the telly.
There is also the problem I have of wondering what this blog is actually for - after all, it's not as though I have a huge readership - and thinking, is this just another way of distracting myself from all the other things i could profitably be doing?
the main other thing being writing, and that's something I'm not actually doing at present, much to my chagrin. Why, I can't begin to say: there seems to be far too much pointlessness to things at present.
Then again, there are things to bemoan: the government's new rules on student visas, for example, which threaten to put me out of a job. A brilliant example of really poorly thought out legislation, by people who don't even begin to understand what language acquisition and learning mean, and don't care, just as they can keep The Little Brown People out. totally unquestionably racist: if I'd wanted to elect the BNP potato scum into government, I wish I'd been informed of the fact that Labour had gone all Nazi beforehand.
Talking of elections, there's one up and coming, and anoter cause of depression. Who to vote for? there's Brown, the imprisoned beleaguered bear; Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem Homunculus; or David Cameron. The best that can be said for this man is that he's a cut price Tony Blair, sans the 'sincerity' and fake empathy, a man who fell out of the middle pages of a Daily Mail editorial; a man who hasn't had enough time to go morally bankrupt, yet is so utterly hollow that one could, to quote Conrad, poke a hole quite through him and find nothing within save a little dirt. And anyone voting for this fool would be even worse that hollow.
rant over and out for now.

2010-02-07T17:41:00.000Z

just trying something with Picasa. Normal service, by which I mean actually writing on this damn blog, to resume soon.

Diaries.

2009-11-26T22:49:00.002Z

I'm passing this blog over to me,from twenty years ago:

Sunday, 26th November, 1989
Well, here it is, the first entry in this diary! At least, I hope it is going to become a regular occurence. It's about time I got down to some writing, and perhaps by doing this each day (or whatever), it'll instil some literary discipline in me. Today is a sharp, bright morning, a contrast to the blotchy, semi-forgotten haze of last night. Outside, the air is as sharp as the teeth of some small vicious animal, and the frost makes everything spangle briefly in thebrilliant but ailing winter sun. The house, however, is warm, like a loved jumper, except for the kitchen, whose cool atmosphere reminds me of a wintry toilet seat one would rather not sit on. Next door has been emanating a considerable deal of shouting again, most of it issuing from the sewage-infested gob of the drunken harridan. Still, she's leaving. I pity the people who're going to be her next door neighbours. She herself is really rather sad: V. lonely, I think, likes the bottle demons even more than I do, screwing a chap of dubious quality young enough to be her son. Then again, she did marry a psychoanalyst. Perhaps it's to be expected. No getting away from it, divorce is a messy thing. Affected us bad enough.
The pub was the same old boring thing, the same old drunken stench of nicotine and beer. I really don't know why I bother going up there: I know what it's going to be like , everybody sitting around drinking , sayng very little. There'll be that little weasel R, snickering and smirking, playing cocky and laddish; there's SC, trying the best he can to work out the vagaries and dumb chances of the world; IP, angry and silent, thinking where he might have gone wrong with women, trying to keep his sullen calmness; DT, fat and cheerful, a regular loadsamoney type, who doesn't give a damn about the future and continues merrily with the three basics, eating, drinking and shagging.
Then there is all the rest of that merry crowd and always the smell of violence, just waiting to erupt. You can feel it: a presence as tangible as cigarette smoke. I hope I'm not there when it happens, 'cos it's going to be one hell of a scrap. Still, it's a place to drink. I just miss the university bar conversations, that's all. It was such a relief to see Eunice the other saturday. All that had been bottled up inside came spilling out, and I could get a load off my chest. Hopefully I'll see her before long. In the meantime, I really should be writing! There is this poetry competition, I've got four days in which to write a poem and send it off in the vain hope of getting £5,000, which I could do with right now. I can't think of anything else to write at present, so I'll sign off. One thing I've noticed over the past few hundred words is the change in my writing style. Normally, when I'm writing to friends, I'll write in a far more open and flamboyant manner, rather like this, but as in this, I notice my writing more resembles some frantic spidery crawling over the page. Oh well.

Bloody hell. the past is truly a foreign country.
However, I can still identify some aspects that remain the same. One thing that makes me laugh is how much I had my eye on future publishing opportunities - the references to a back story and so on.

2009-11-25T22:15:00.002Z

mnurg. I feel a)ill, and b)knackered. In particular, my shoulders ache, as if I've been carrying a heavy weight all day. It's become far more noticeable to me that certain parts of me ache far more if I don't sleep properly, noticeably my legs. Since I was woken at 3 a.m. by Nur coming to bed, then by Sean an hour and a half later, after which I couldn't sleep, you can imagine how I felt at 6.30.
Getting older seems to be a mixed blessing: on one hand, I can see far more clearly the fears and errors that made my younger life so much harder, and where necessary act upon them - by which I mean, I do not need to be ruled by those fears. On the other hand, I have become acutely aware of the slow physical accretion of age - eyesight getting blurred every now and then, reaction times on the slide, injuries taking just that little bit longer to heal, and the utterly galling appearance of myself in the mirror in the morning when I can see increasingly wider patches of pink skin gleaming through my hair. It's a bugger.

Here Come The Girls - run for your life!

2009-11-22T21:56:00.004Z

I'm going to return in this post to one of my favourite topics - adverts. I've shyed from this subject for a while, simply because The Guardian Guide does demolition jobs on them so well. In a way, I feel writing on the same or similar topic feels just like aping, even though it's a tried and tested literary thing. Now, of course Advertistan is a fairly easy target, comprised as it is of stereotypes, models, cliches, fantasies, lazy thinking and fatuous claims, all played out under an eternal sunshine, but it's a sunday evening after a long tiring day and I can't be arsed aiming at anything else. Besides, I just want to put my own point of view on something.
The object of my ire is Boots' 'Here come the girls' advert. OK, it was a memorable ad a couple of years ago, but this year's version (and the scary thing is that this campaign seems destined to run and run) pokes a finger through the thin membrane of what we laughingly call reality and finds nothing inside, save a little dirt (apologies to Joseph Conrad for that stretching of a phrase). In other words, it's totally unrealistic. Here's the premise: an elderly couple are having a meal in an otherwise abandoned restaurant, possibly Italian. Next to them is a large table, clearly reserved. Suddenly, in burst a group of what are mainly women, obviously on an office do. I say mainly, as there does appear to be at least one bloke among them. They give each other gifts. One of the women is pregnant, and gets a gift of two 'In the Night Garden' hand puppet, to which all the women coo. the token bloke gets a beard clipping kit, the waiter (Italian? Greek? Spanish? but clearly Good-Looking Dopey Foreign Bloke) gets a present, even the elderly couple who have had to endure all the festive bonhomie on the table next to them get presents. The waiter gets a note from one of the women. Then all the girls march out, arms linked and four abreast, singing 'Here come the girls'.
And it's bollocks because?
Not a single one of them is honking, screaming, gorilla-butt drunk.
In reality, they'd all be off their tits on lambrini and Bailey's and vodka and Cava ('cos that's class). They'd be throwing food round the restaurant. Two of them, previously best of friends, would be beating seven shades of shit out of each other, while The Fat Ugly One With Chafing Issues would be seeking to be the peacemaker. The Mousey One would have trapped the Token Office Bloke in a corner, earnestly telling him about her cat and her stash of chocolates and her box collection of Ally McBeal and her mum who calls her up twice a day, while trying to relieve him of his trousers. Meanwhile, two of the really fat office ladies would have Good-Looking Dopey Foreign Bloke pinioned down in some dark corner of the restaurant, doing and suggestig unspeakable acts. Finally, they'd all stagger out, chanting 'here come the girls' while any men with any sense would flee for their lives. and trousers. Then our troop would move into the nearest nightclub to cop off with blokes called Wayne, or Carl, or Danno.
And this is why Advertistan is crap.

2009-11-21T16:39:00.002Z

Huh. It's been one of those days.
I took Sean shopping and decided to withdraw some money from the cash machine. Just after slipping the card in, I noticed that there was something awry with the thing - the screen was out of kilter and the plastic slot where the card feeds in and out looked like it had been battered. After I requested my dosh, the machine tried to spit my card out, but the thing got stuck. After frantically trying to rescue it, the machine, with a final high-pitched 'beep' swallowed it. I swore, then went to complain to the customer services.
'well, we can't touch it, because it belongs to the bank, not us', replied the customer service bod. 'It's done that to several people now'.
'So why haven't you put a sign on it warning people not to use it?'
'Oh, we're not allowed to do that, because the machine doesn't belong to us'.
After a couple of minutes' spluttering on my behalf, I managed to get the duty manager to promise to put one up.
I went home, nearly running out of petrol on the way, in order to pick up my chequebook. It was only after I'd got home that I realised that was no use, as I now didn't have a cheque guarantee card, it now nestling safely in the metal bosom of a dodgy ATM. So, shopping done on the credit card instead.
I had intended to start my crimbo shopping as well this week, in a bold attempt to break with my past habit of flailing around lethargically until the last minute.
And now it's raining.
Bah.

The road to Hell...

2009-11-17T23:30:00.002Z

...is paved with good intentions. 'I meant to do this', or 'I didn't mean to do that', or more often 'well, that's totally buggered - how'd that happen?'
In fact you could say that the road to Istanbul is paved with good intentions. One thing that you can never level at Turkish people is that they mean or selfish. I've never met people who are so willing to go out of the way to help, even if it means considerable personal discomfort or inconvenience for themselves. The problem is that no matter how good the intention, the execution of the act seems to go totally tits up. Often this is no fault of the person offering to do the good deed: Generally speaking, Istanbul seems to contrive its own ways of ensuring that the best laid plans of mice and men get torn up, eaten, thrown up and flushed down the Bog of Fate, simply because it feels like it. However, there is also the fact that people say they'll do something, as they feel obliged to, and don't actually think about how they will do the act - which leads to all kinds of totally screwed-up episodes. The daftest thing is that it leads to all sorts of extravagant lies in order to justify something, or the lack of something happening.

The most common one involves estimates of times it takes to get anywhere. If someone says, 'it'll take us 20 minutes to get to Sisli', you should, being pragmatic, allow at least an extra hour to get there. And, while you are either stewing in a marinade of humid heat and petrol fumes or shivering at a foul, miserable and rainy day, the driver will inevitably say something along the lines of 'well, just yesterday, it only took me fifteen minutes to get here...', and to be honest, this should be accepted as the good-natured bullshit that it really is. I think it's one thing that British people really don't get - this need to lie to cover up organisational screw-ups, and to have them accepted for what they are.During my recent foray to Istanbul, I'd totally forgotten this aspect to the culture, and so spent a large chunk of the time simmering with anger and frustration at things ot working. It's not as if anyone deliberately set out to bugger up the holiday - everyone was full of the best intentions: it's just everything got buggered in one way or another.
Actually, we Brits are just as bad. We're full of good intentions: We're just better at covering up the reasons for buggering things up, such as The Wrong Type Of Leaves, or Adverse Financial Conditions. In other words, we create an official reason for things going all crap, as it were, rather than relying on an informal and far more inventive way of explaining why things haven't gone as planned.
I suppose that we all have our own cultural-specific ways of buggering things up.

ride the horse.

2009-10-08T21:09:00.003Z

Apologies for not posting for so long. The truth is, I just haven't felt like writing anything, and I haven't had the will to, either. Each time I've opened the 'new post' page, I've stared at the screen and slunk off like a man with a pocketful of air, staring at the shop window display at the things he wants to buy. Still, I want to get back into the saddle, so I may as well start from wherever I can and go on, even if that leaves me sounding like a disjointed drunk on a soap crate.
I've felt myself getting more and more frustrated recently - the outcome of several things, I suspect: Coming to the end of a very intense period of work, worries about the increasingly rudderless senior management at my workplace and what that may mean for my job, worries caused by the credit crunch and what it's doing to my money, worry about money itself and the perennial difficulties about saving, mild depression engendered by the fact that the next Prime Minister will be a tory version of Tony Blair, a smooth-faced careerist with his eye on the main chance, a mountebank pretending to Care with a capital C, worries, worries. Plain and simple I feel anxious!
Yet when I just focus on the now, I should really wonder what it is that I'm worried about - after all, I do have all the perceived trappings of having a good life, along with my health, most of my hair etc etc - from an external perspective, so far, so great. However, I can't help but focus on the future - in fact, it's always been a thing with me, to ignore the jam today and fret about famine tomorrow. And then, of course, I look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.
I am beginning to think that it's time to move on, career-wise, and not necessarily stay in teaching. I haven't moved at all in several years, and all that seems to be happening now is that more and more work is being laded on with little or no reward of any kind. But what should I do next?

wine and computers - just say no.

2009-07-02T20:45:00.003Z

Buggeration. My netbook (an Advent 4211) decided to have a drink last saturday - a nice refreshing glass of red wine. While I managed to turn it upside down fast enough - well, you don't want good wine to go to waste - the keyboard's buggered, so now I'm writing using a cheap old USB keyboard. So far, the only replacement I've managed to find costs £32, for a component that probably costs only a fiver. And I can't find the receipt for the computer, so I can't get anything done under warranty. Bugger.

a new toy for word fans

2009-07-01T12:20:00.003Z

I was pointed in the direction of Wordle, and wondered what would happen if I put my 2004 novel into it.

Lacunae

2009-06-30T21:09:00.002Z

I'm in the midst of a lacuna - and no, that's not a make of car. Having finished doing my Diploma in Teaching in the lifelong learning sector (DTLLS) and my Level 5 ESOL Specialist Qualification, and currently waiting for the results, I feel at something of a loose end. Even though I'm still busy at work and have plenty to do, I can't help but feel that I'm not doing enough, and I don't seem to have any interest in anything. hence the reason I feel that this is a lacuna - a break between things, a pause between actions.
In fact, it would be easy to say that my life is one long story of frenetic bursts of activity followed by lengthy periods of torpor, longeurs if you will (they're certainly not shorteurs). For some reason, once any given period of intense activity ends, I find it immensely difficult to become engaged with something new, or the next phase of a project. I'm damned if I know why, either: it's not for the sake of my health. One thing that becomes immediately apparent once I finish something is that I become extremely irritable, bad-tempered and generally depressed. My assumption on this is that this is probably a result of an alteration in brain chemistry - I suspect that the stress of an intense work project makes me produce a shedload of endorphins, and once the pressure is off, production subsides, leaving me feeling as I do - withdrawal? If it's the case that I feel so crap after finishing something perhaps it leads me to feel reluctant to move on to the next thing.
What is always worrying is the fact that it takes me so damn long to move on to that next thing. I'm far happier working hard than not - so why these breaks in the action? And, as you can see, it means that I don't write on this thing as often as I would like. Forgive the most recent lacuna.

What are you thinking?

2009-05-08T23:29:00.002Z

"what are you thinking?"...
The car zoomed down country lanes last sunday. I looked out of the window as a gated estate was flung behind us, a quick glance at an advert - 'new development exclusively for over-55's only!' - and thought how the self-imposed ghettoization of a group, in this case of a specific age group rather than an ethnic, religious or cultural group, while seemingly desirable at first glance, is actually more likely to foment more overarching cultural problems. for the subgroup in question, of course sticking together seems to be ideal - any given community that shares a relatively common set of ideals tends to be healthier and longer-lived, according to several statistical studies - yet this leads to the identification of any other given subgroup within society as a whole as 'the other', as Sinfield sublimely investigated in his exploration of Shakespeare's plays, following on from other studies. In other words, these putative 55+ - year-olds would typify anyone below the age of twenty as aggressive little thugs, and the same under-20s would typify them as doddery old fools, feebly waving sticks from behind the compound gates.
This lead on to consideration of how we tend to identify various social groups as 'the other' , and ascribe all our social ills to them, and then to how it is that true evil begins when we see our fellow humans as nothing more than numbers or units or selling markets. This in turn made me consider the unit cost for a pair of jeans in Primark, and wondering how much of that final retail cost actually reaches the person who made the things - considering that a pair of jeans there costs about £7, it's highly likely that virtually bugger all gets to the person in whose sweat they were made. In other words, I perpetuate what is effectively a slave system whenever I buy cheap clothes.
Zooming down the road, impatiently overtaking a Rover (how do I know it's a Rover?) I remark upon the wonderful fresh green of the trees, a miracle of chlorophyll, and think how they will become a darker green thanks to a pigmement that renders the wonderful reds and ambers of autumn; then I consider the fact that, before the advent of the high-speed steam engine, somewhere in the middle of the Victorian period, no-one had ever travelled faster than 25 miles per hour, apart from those unfortunate few who'd managed to fall off a sufficiently high cliff, and even then they wouldn't have been able to reach the average terminal velocity for a falling human body. A couple of phrases from Milton then intruded, then, for no discernible reason, Andrew Marvell's 'the garden', followed by a snatch of The Ancient Mariner...
...and my answer?
'Oh, nothing'.

Brilliant bike ride!

2009-04-29T23:04:00.006Z

While my sister was puffing and panting round London in the marathon (and getting a perfectly respectable time), I decided to go out for a ride on the bike. The weather was utterly perfect: sky a wonderful bright bluey silver, the temperature just about right, the landscape filled with the freshest, brightest green you could imagine - it was about as close as it is imaginable to cycling through Heaven. With added alpacas. I cycled past this farm outside Whitchurch and had to do a double take - I thought the farmer might have been exceptionally cruel to his sheep at first glance, but then realised he'd shrunk his llamas. as I was scooting down the lane, thinking it couldn't possibly get more bucolic, it did - two boys with stripped willow switches were walking three bullocks down the lane! After that, I passed a wonderfully pastoral scene involving sheep, then woods with bluebells and bright blue skies.
It wasn't a long trip - only twenty miles or so - but it was utterly wonderful. The only shame was that no-one else was tagging along with me.
And of course, the next day, it was absolutely tipping it down and I found my rear tyre flat as a pancake, and somehow I'm managed to run out of tyre cement and couldn't repair the thing.
pictures: Mapledurham House, with added cows; Alpacas; sheep being pastoral; bluebells; English woodland doing an impersonation of rainforest.
(edit) sorry, forgot to say the route - started out, went over Balmore Park, down to the Thames, went as far as Kennet Mouth, changed my mind, followed the Kennet to the town centre, cycled back to the Thames, went to Caversham Bridge, then through St Peter's and down through the Warren, off to Mapledurham, then followed the Bridlepath to Whitchurch; following that, went up the hill until the turning for Goring Heath, through there and past The Sun pub, then uphill and through the forest past the King Charles Head, then up to the Mapledurham crossroads and back home.
(another edit) I've added the route on here from Google Earth.

something in my ear.

2009-03-22T22:34:00.002Z

I seem to be suffering more than usual from tinnitus, a perpetual buzzing and ringing in my ears. For starters, it's ongoing to the extent that it makes it dfficult to fall asleep and secondly, it seems remarkably loud - to me, anyway. I've had it at this time of year for quite a few years now, and I suspect that it's possibly due to having spent the best part of the previous few months in rooms made arid by central heating. It's probably something to do with ear wax. What seems different this year is the sheer persistence of the damn thing, and the fact that each ear seems to be slightly different - my left ear is a high-pitched whistle, while the right is more of a ringing sound. It's bloody annoying.
More annoying, however, is having a tune lodged in one's head. The German phrase for it translates as 'earworm' - a persistent piece of music repeating itself ad nauseam. For some reason, the current earworm is Beyonce's 'All the Single Ladies' (Aka 'If you liked it you should have put a ring on it'). It's annoying because a) it's a catchy repetitive rhythm, but mostly because b) it's a load of infantile drivel. It'sthe kind of song that you just know some dickwit of a DJ in a nightclub would put on just after Gloria Gaynor's 'I will survive' and just before the Weather Girls' 'It's raining men'. It's the kind of stuff a bunch of drunk women, one or two of whom have just split up from boyfriends/husbands/feckless idiots, dance to: the first song with defiant faces put on, the second whooping it up, the third celebrating drunkenly - just before the Dumped (Dumpee?)/Dumper breaks down in tears, mascara and Chardonnay-flavoured vomit.

What really pisses me off about Beyonce's song is the notion it implies: that a woman is only fulfilled by becoming engaged/married ('If you liked it you should have put a ring on it'), thus reducing one half of humanity to the status of chattel. It's demeaning and thoroughly infantilising, and the singer should be thoroughly ashamed of herself, if she has an ounce of intellect.
And the damn thing is still buzzing round my head.

"Farewell to the flesh"

2009-02-24T21:11:00.002Z

Today is Shrove Tuesday, and, befittingly, I am stuffed on pancakes. I was discussing this with my students this morning - it being Pancake Day, that is, not my being stuffed - and we looked at traditions in verious other countries. The Polish contingent mentioned feasting on herrings, while the Germans mentioned the carnivals in various towns, in particular the one in Cologne that begins in november and continues until today. The Italian student mentioned perhaps the grandaddy of all these public festivals, the Venice Carnival, and she mentioned the festivities, the costumes and the riot of licence that pervades it.
The word 'carnival' derives from the latin Carne Vale - literally, 'goodbye to meat', or less prosaically as I have titled this post. It is the last chance before Lent to have a blowout, a bit of a party, a bit of fun, before the forty days of fasting and penitence that is Lent. It might seem strange to have a period of abstinence just as spring is round the corner, but think about it: in European latitudes at least, and certainly for our ancestors, this is the time of year when there is dearth and lack, when food supplies are at their lowest, when there is still the long and anxious wait before crops begin to sprout forth, animals grow, things to ripen. Now, as you traipse down the aisles of Tescos, buying strawberries in the dead months, you might not automatically make this connection, but there it is. By making a virtue of starvation and lack, lent creates a sense of communality - after all, everyone is (or rather was) supposed to follow the rules about what you could and could not consume - hence the reason why all the fat in the house had to be used up before the beginning of the period.
In Islam, of course, you have Ramadan, which follows very much the same principal - a month of conscious fasting and abstinence, with people coming together for Iftar at nightfall. The main difference from Lent is that it follows the lunar calendar, so it moves forward by ten days or so each year. This means that someone will always experience the discomfort of a long, hot summer of fasting at least once during their lifetime. It doesn't have the literally visceral connection to food production and lack of the Christian tradition, but it does focus the mind on how it feels to starve like the poorest. Its message is ' here's what it's like to have no food at all', while Lent reminds us of how little we need to actually live on.
And at the end of both? A great big blowout on sweets and chocolates.
All we are asked to do is say farewell to the flesh for a brief time. And, as ever, my birthday falls right at the beginning of the period! So, as I say Vale to my forty-first year and Ave to my forty-second on this planet, I wonder what new things, what changes will happen, and what else shall come.

Head in the clouds.

2009-02-22T18:32:00.005Z

a day out at Popham airfield, in a two-seater microlite, courtesy of Nur's birthday present to me last year for my 40th. Just in time for my 41st.
[edit] - I forgot to say:
I WANT TO SO DO THAT AGAIN!
the microlite looks, from the front, much like any other small plane, but it really is tiny - the fuel tank is directly behind the seats, and the whole thing is more or less made of plastic. It took off in an incredibly short space - less than 50m - and got up to a thousand feet in just a couple of minutes. Michelle, the pilot, was very helpful and explained a lot in the short space we were aloft. what really surprised me was how receptive the controls were - they just required the touch of fingers. The way the plane bucked and dipped was a bit unnerving at first, but it was just, in the end, like riding rough water.

5 minutes

2009-02-16T21:30:00.002Z

That's the title and theme of this, and for how long I will write this particular post. It's based upon something I've been trying out with students, which in turn was based upon something I read about the novelist Anthony Trollope. Apparently, before going to his job at the post office, he would write for exactly three hours every morning. If he finished a novel at, say two hours and ten minutes, he wouldn't stop: He'd start a new novel.
Well, I wondered what would happen if I let my students write for five minutes, no more, no less, about a given subject, and tell them not to worry about spelling or grammar - what would happen? In fact, it has so far been an interesting exercise in what happens - newly learned vocabulary appears to be produced with far greater ease, while certain errors, mainly of spelling, disappear.
I then wondered what else can be done in five minutes, so I've just done a load of mini-tasks so far today - clearing up a letters tray, phoning the council about a grant, choosing a couple of birthday cards - and so far, it seems very productive. And there's my five minu

music

2009-02-13T01:53:00.002Z

get spotify. I've been listening to it while working on some rather tricky stuff, and it's kept me going for nearly four hours. That's all.

Hard day at the office...

2009-02-10T22:55:00.002Z

he actually fell asleep standing up, with his head resting on the sofa.

Annnnd.....breathe.

2009-02-10T00:00:00.002Z

It's an automatic process, of course: the exchange of gases within the spongy sacs that fill our thoraxes, the gentle rhythmic pull of the diaphragm, drawing air in, expelling the voided gas. Did you know, however, that with any given breath or exhalation, you only expel, on average, about 10-15% of the used up stuff? Athletes do a bit more, but not much.
Yet when was the last time you really, really focused on the act of breathing, or noticed it? There are days when the air really is like wine, a intoxicating heady rush, eager to fill your lungs; there are times when air blasts through you, cleaning you out - I once experienced this in spectacular fashion, while climbing Carnedd Dafydd, and I encountered a sudden updraught of pure, stromg cold air that didn't just clean my sinuses, it seemed to fill me with an wild, cold fire, and I felt I could have run for hours and hours; then there are days when the atmosphere is laden with perfume from honeysuckle and jasmine and late flowering trees and all is a lavish, luxurious drug of drowsiness. And still we breathe.
Yet when do you focus on the act of breathing itself? Try it: close your eyes, and carefully count the breath in, the breath out, diastole, systole. Feel the air moving through your nasal passageways, in, then out: sense how it feels against the mouth, the throat, the nose, the lungs. Feel your chest rising and falling, then become aware of how your pulse has slowed, and how much slower you are, all of a sudden, breathing. Now, if you're brave enough, stop counting the breaths, and let them flow, and now watch the show inside your head of your thoughts rising and falling, vying with each other to be heard, some gentle, some strident, all needy.
I must admit at this point that I've stolen this idea from Marcus' journal. The act of counting your breath, that is. And what I've found is remarkable. As I seek to focus on the breathing, suddenly I become aware of tens, hundreds of voices, all striving to be heard over the bell-toll of my counting my breaths, or the magisterial silence as I try to let even counting go. And eaach voice is a bit of me, all parts of me articulating worries, fears, anxieties, boasts, terror. Yet while I'm in counting mode, I can look at all this shouting audience and understand, REALLY understand, how trivial or important something is, and get it done if necessary.

ch-ch-ch-changes

2009-02-08T00:11:00.003Z

I have, for my sins, or possibly just out of sheer torpor, just been watching the 1995 romcom The American President, featuring Michael Douglas as a singleton POTUS wooing Annette Bening. God I'm sad. There's one scene that stuck with me - the bit where the president is ordering an attack on some building with the full knowledge that a lot of innocent people will die. Just got me thinking: right now, someone, somewhere, is doing something that will have an impact on your life. It might be major, it might be minor, you might barely notice it, but because of someone else the course of your life has been changed, just because someone has said this or done that, or possibly because they HAVEN'T done this or said that. It might not be as dramatic as having the shit bombed out of your house, as Hamas and Israel between them have managed to concoct between them for the poor sods in Gaza, but nevertheless the path has been altered. And a small turn here ends up as a big diversion later.
Of course, this is a continuation of the theme of the last post. Who knows - maybe this entry has changed the course of someone's life by just a bit.

Do? Don't do? Mean to do? Do be doo?

2009-02-06T10:43:00.002Z

And still the snow falls, and still the students straggle in. I was half hoping that no-one would turn up. Well, no, I was fully hoping no-one would turn up actually, but there you go. In fact, from what I've seen, my class is the only one with anything near full attendance today. Bah.
I've been sat here for the past hour, thinking over ideas for lesson plans, but distracted by other thoughts, mostly along the lines of 'I meant to do this and that, but..' I suspect it's the trip up to North Wales that's got me in this vein of thought. How much time have I spent pondering this very statement? I meant to study more. I didn't mean to become a teacher. I meant to do this. I didn't mean to say that. And so forth and so on... The fact of the matter is, we are who we are because of what we do, or don't do. Inaction is as bad as action, sometimes. Whenever I say 'Oh, I meant to do this (but didn't)' , isn't this an admission of some kind of failure? Isn't it me owning up to being an inert lump?
My failure, as a person, has been to be too analytical, too cautious in moving towards action, and thus end up not doing anything much. I have been afraid of action, its consequences and possible harm to others, to the point that not doing seems safer. Yet not doing is harmful in its own way, to myself in my self-esteem (because I don't do the things I want or should do) and to what others need from me, especially my children.
My aim this year, and yes, I know this seems like a late new year's resolution, is to move away from saying 'I meant to do...' and just do it, and avoid 'I didn't mean to do...' by doing the right thing - for myself, at least.

More Ice

2009-02-04T09:26:00.003Z

Walked up to school with Angus this morning. There'd been a hard frost, and the hill that we have to walk up was one solid gleaming sheet of polished ice. It wasn't too bad underfoot, but cars were having a torrid time getting up. There was a queue of Mummy Tanks going nowhere quickly, stuck on the steepest part of the hill. Quite frankly, I felt absolutely no sympathy for them. These were people who were just driving a few hundred metres to take their kids to school before turning right round again.
Regular readers will know that I have no small antipathy to people in big cars, especially Mummy Tanks: These huge, seven-seater 4wd vehicles that are used solely for the ferrying of a couple of small children and the week's shopping, have never been used in an environment that would require 4wd (except today, of course, and then the Mummy Tank drivers didn't have a clue how to use it), and are there as sops to the egos of fearful, fret-filled souls. Why the hell use them? All you do is literally burn money in order to drive an extra half-tonne of metal around. All for the sake of showing what aBIG car you have, what a LOT of money you must have, what an IMPORTANT person you must be. And also, it shows what a bully you are, and how little you care for your own kids' future as you burn up just a bit more fuel and pollute just a bit more, just because you can.
I also despise them because they are the most poorly-driven cars around. Most of my near misses have been because some arrogant bitch in her Mummy Tank thinks she can drive any which way she likes - she's not going to get hurt, because she's in a big tank, and damn everyone else. However, they are not the only tits on the road. Men who drive vehicles with names like the Mitsubishi Warrior - they're high up on the list of Road Twats. why on earth do you NEED to drive a car called a Warrior? to show that you're a MAAAAAN? That you're macho? Or that you're a sadly deluded middle-aged fatty who's overdosed on pies? 'cos you ain't a warrior.
One of my favourite names for one of these stupid vehicles is the Pajero - this is because, in Spanish, it's slang for 'wanker'. And that sums it up nicely.

A weekend away

2009-02-03T21:02:00.002Z

Oh my thumping head. I've spent the weekend in Bangor, attending the UCNW Stage Crew 25th birthday bash and going up a mountain. I went up by train last sunday: I was going to hire a car, but after working out costs and petrol, it worked out cheaper to go by rail. Besides, it allowed me to have a drink or several. And, when I got to my destination, to have several more, and then some. I stayed at the Eryl Mor Hotel, which conveniently enough was directly opposite the pub. It also boasts, as I found out the next morning, a spectacular view across the Menai Straits, Bangor Pier and harbour, and the wide, snow-flecked sweep of Snowdonia.
It was great to meet up with a few old faces - I wasn't sure that I'd recognise anyone, or whether they'd recognise me. In a couple of cases, it took a bit of intent peering behind fading hair and wrinkles to work out who was who. Besides, alcohol was involved, which didn't exactly help things at times. I'd half-expected that we'd be meeting up at the Student's Union, but no: apparently, it's hardly open anymore, it's losing money and it's about to be pulled down. It was a bit of a shame, because I would have liked to have seen the old place one more time. However, its failing state suggests that its heyday had been when I was a student there, in the times when a room with a fire safety limit of 125 persons was regularly filled with more than 4 times that amount, where the air was thick with cigarette smoke and cheap 80s perfumes and body spray and beer fug and a frantic joy. Whether this is a good or bad thing, I'm not sure. I did walk past the place as I went home, and I could see the toll of the years - if it didn't get pulled down, it would fall down. Some things hadn't changed: the faded Welsh graffito on the wall of Jock's bar, the signage painted by green algae, the curtains on the upper floors in their half-open, half-torn, mostly stained state - even a half-drunk bottle of Newcastle Brown, placed behind a pillar and visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows, could have been there since 1989. Overall, though, I think we did best to stay in the comfort of the Tap and Spile.
On Saturday morning, nursing an aching head and a stomach full of a Full Welsh Breakfast (that's an English Breakfast, coooked in Wales), I took the bus up to Llanberis for a climb up Snowdon. My intention was to get the Sherpa bus to Pen Y Pass, then go over Pyg Track and down the Llanberis Path. Once I'd arrived at Llanberis, however, I quickly revised my plan. First, there was an awful lot of snow on the mountain: second, there was a freezing cold hard wind blowing gale strength. I realised that meant my original plan would be impossible to undertake because of the wind direction and strength and because the snow on the Pen Y Pass side would probably make any Snowdon ascent extremely difficult, even if well equipped. Instead, I took the Llanberis path, which is a tedious, dull, hard and very long slog up the mountain. There were plenty of other people going up the path, and it didn't cease to amaze me how poorly equipped some of them were. I went up with my trusty Berghaus boots, waterproof trousers, winter jacket, walking poles and a backpack with map, lights, food, medical pack, water and other useful bits; One chap I saw, while wonderfully coordinated in his clothing choice, had skimpy pixie boots, a lightweight summer jacket, a tastefully chosen bandanna and a jaunty little knapsack. Others were plodding up as though they were just popping back from the shops, including carrying a plastic shopping bag with a few bits and pieces in.
After getting past Clogwyn Station, the snow appeared, but it was deep snow that had been lying for quite a while and had turned into a very hard crust, with soft and rotten snow below. It had blown into drifts in some areas higher than my head, and left only very thin paths up, especially at the point where you walk under the rail line and look over Pen Y Pass towards the Glyders. I trudged on up, fighting my hangover and the wind and the cold, until I go to the point where the path deviates higher up from the rail line, under Carnedd Ugain and towards Clogwyn Coch, and saw a few groups of people sitting on the snow. Some where shuffling gingerly upwards on their bums, while others were shuffling gingerly downwards. After a few more steps, and not without a slightly rising sense of horror, I realised why: the snow had turned into an extremely dangerous sheet of ice, pointing down towards a sheer fall. I tried probing the snow, but it was quickly obvious that it was a solid icy crust. I also realised that I would have to be extraordinarily careful in order to turn round and get the hell out of there. It was brought home to me how you need crampons and ice axes whenever on the side of a snowy slope like that. Amazingly, some idiots with minimal equipment were still trying to get higher up. I decided to turn back, with lots of very small, careful steps and judicious use of walking poles. I wasn't helped in this by the wind, which was doing its best to unbalance me. What was also worse was the wind direction - from the south, meaning that it was relatively warm, meaning it was melting the snow, meaning that it was a rapidly increasing avalanche risk - if not that day, then later. Anyway, as you can tell, I made it off safely.
The next day, two brothers, in their 30s and both married, fell and died, less than 100 metres away from where I reached.

I don't fancy yours much..

2009-01-28T23:10:00.003Z

This is what happens when you pour alcohol down my mum and sister's throats. These were taken at dad's birthday dinner, at Picasso's on Caversham Bridge. Mum's put far nicer pictures on Facebook.

that's about right...

2009-01-12T13:22:00.000Z

Your Word is "Why"

You see life as complicated and intriguing. The only thing you know for sure is that you haven't figured it all out yet.

You question everything and believe very little. And whatever you believe is likely to change.

You are interested in theories, philosophies, and religions... even if you don't buy into any of them.

You are also fascinated by how things work. You'd like to understand as much in the world as possible.

What's Your Word?

12 months, 12 pictures part three

2008-12-31T22:36:00.003Z

..although, as you may notice, there are in fact fifteen pics, in reverse chronological order. I was surprised to find that I'd taken well over 500 pictures on my mobile phone this year: I thought I'd done bugger all. Anyway, these are all mobile phone pics, and I've chosen them just because they speak to me. I haven't necessarily gone for those shots that I love the best, although I must admit the november pic of Angus is one of my favourites.
And Happy New Year to everyone!

12 months, 12 pictures part two

2008-12-31T22:31:00.001Z

12 months, 12 pictures part one

2008-12-31T22:26:00.000Z

2008-12-09T22:40:00.002Z

I've been somewhat remiss of late, thanks to work commitments, so it seems only fitting that I return with an old favourite of this blog, namely children's tv programmes. The prompt for this has been the death of Oliver Postgate, creator of Bagpuss and The Clangers, amongst others.
Being a 70's kid, Bagpuss and The Clangers loom large in my childhood memory, right up there with Pipkins (It's.......................TIME! for a story), Crystal Tips and Alastair, Charlie the Cat and his mad musings on health and safety, Mary, Mungo and Midge, and of course, the titan that is Rainbow. Now, it should be pointed out that children's tv programmes at this period were downright weird and occasinally deeply disturbing. I know I've mentioned Roly Poly Fucking Olie before and The Bloody Weird World of Richard Scarry (involving a worm in a wheelchair), but these are American programmes and bloody idiotic by dint of being far too wholesome. And Crap. Home-grown British kids'tv however...weirdness abounds, alongside some deep political commentary and drugs references, or somewhat disturbing sexual connotations. Captain Pugwash, ALLEGEDLY (that's for the benefit of the lawyers), a tale of salty seafolk on the high seas, contained a Seaman Staines and Roger the Cabinboy. Fingerbobs, a programme involving really duff finger puppets, had a presenter who looked like he should have been confined to an institution that dealt with all kinds of strange...urges. Mary, mungo and midge? Searing indictment on the miserable solitude of modern life, where a single girl is trapped in a high-rise block of flats, with only a mouse and a dog as friends. Crystal Tips and Alastair? a pair of Acid-tripping freaks, giggling and chasing butterflies. Mr Benn? Well, what can you say better than it does itself: 'all of a sudden, the shopkeeper appeared and said, 'fancy a trip, mannn?' and Mr Benn found himself embarking from a UFO in the middle of some mushrooms while all the fairy people danced around singing about the Age of Aquarius...'
Bagpuss is different. Now, i thought I'd already mentioned this in an earlier post on this blog, but I'm damned if I can find it. Bagpuss is actually a communist dialectic. Let's look at the facts. It's set in a junk shop - an Edwardian junkshop. this is clearly symbolic of the collapse of capitalism. Bagpuss himself is a symbol of the Communist revolution. Why? Because 'When he wakes up, EVERYONE wakes up!' that is, all true revolutionaries heed the spirit of the time.
the mice? they are the GLORIOUS PROLETARIAT. Their song is 'we will fix it, we will mend it', that is, they shall rebuild all society into a fair and just place for all.
The frog is the minstrel, composing poems in celebration of Bagpuss' achievements, while Professor Yaffle is the intellectual, guiding with a wise wooden beak the works of the proletariat.
See? it works.
Don't ask me about Ragdolly Anna though. She's some kind of Commie Groupie.

I told you I was ill.....

2008-10-31T20:34:00.002Z

Happy Hallowe'en!

Snow

2008-10-28T21:31:00.003Z

Brr, it's cold. Earlier on, returning home, I had one of the worst bike rides I've ever experienced, weather-wise. I got literally drenched to the skin by heavy rainfall, and the temperature was close to freezing. By the time I got home, I could hardly hold my house keys, and once I got in the house, I started shivering like buggery. And now, outside, it is snowing! Great, fat, wet clumps of snow, but snow nonetheless. I don't recall it ever snowing in October before, not this far south anyway.
What is it about snow that fascinates so much? Is it its texture, its evanescence, its seeming purity? Is it the way it blanks out all sound and leaves the earth a quiet and brooding place? I remember being enthralled as a child whenever it snowed, and always wishing that it would continue on and on, and always feeling a sense of baffled disappointment as the flakes would suddenly weaken, then lessen, then stop altogether.
In fact, I can count the number of times I've been in significant snowfall on the fingers of one hand. Even when in Istanbul, I never experienced the joy of a Snow Holiday, when the entire city becomes locked in deep drifts heaved down from the Black Sea. And now, here I am, one eye on the screen, another on the picture outside, of great white flakes drifting lazily through orange street light, wondering when it will stop, half-hoping it won't.

2008-10-20T21:26:00.003Z

God, I hate being ill. Still, that is how you find me - dosed up on Lemsip, ginger tea and lentil soup. I literally ache all over. I couldn't sleep last night whatsoever, and each time I tried, I felt a wave of panic sweep over me: For some reason, all I could see in front of me was my workload and a feeling of helplessness in the face of it. Unsurprisingly, I've spent the day feeling rougher than a badger's badger. And while I don't feel quite as I did last night, every single joint, especially in my hands and feet, feels as if they've swollen up.

On this day in history....

2008-10-05T22:19:00.001Z

I've just installed Sunbird (a calendar/task application) on the computer, and was playing round with the dates, when one came up: Sunday, October 5th 1986. Exactly twenty-two years ago to the day, I was on my way to university for the first time. Indeed, it was my first time away from my family, if you except a week at scout camp and another on a school trip. The weather was actually not too far removed from what it has been today: cold and grey and damp, although the rain then came in gobbets and gusts rather than the fairly solid downpour of this morning. My going was not exactly what you could call a cheery affair: for starters, I was feeling extremely apprehensive about what I was heading to, and about what I was leaving behind. My parents had only just split up, and there was a lot of pain and rancour floating around. Dad had moved out, mum was trying to keep it all together, and my sister was going to have to face all the emotional maelstrom by herself. In a way, I was glad to be going – I could shut out all the hurt. At the same time, I really felt for Karen and mum, and was worried about what would happen.
Anyway, I'd packed my bags the previous night. Actually, I should say bag: An enormous blue rucksack, stuffed to the gills with clothes, books, a kettle, some fruitcake crushed in the bottom, a sandwich toaster donated by my aunt, a few items of cutlery, various bits and pieces and, on the outside, a collection of pots and pans, meaning I'd clank as I walked. I say walked, I mean staggered, as the thing weighed a ton. My dad had promised to bring up the rest of my stuff, including my camera, later on in the term. I'd gone up to the pub and said bye to my mates, and had, if memory serves me well, a fairly good night's sleep. Then, early on that cold Sunday, my dad turned up on the gravel drive in his company Volvo, and loaded my stuff, and we all set off for the station in an atmosphere of tense, nervous bursts of talk interspersing the tense nervous silences. We picked up my girlfriend en route, adding another layer of emotional unhappiness to the mix.
We arrived at about eightish at Reading station, and I remember it being surprisingly busy for a Sunday morning. The entrance at that time was through a narrow door in the old Victorian station building, past a grimy, grey ticket office with scratched plastic panels separating the vendors form the public, and a station guard in the old BR uniform, his grey hair slicked back beneath his cap, busily checking tickets and pointing people in the right direction. We crossed over to platform 8, and my dad insisted on us all having coffee in the depressing little tearoom. As we waited, announcements floated through the air, then there was one relating to my train:
'Due to works, the 8.50 to Birmingham New Street will terminate at Didcot. Please alight there and take the connecting train to continue your onward journey.'
My mum looked at me with a wave of first, shock, then disappointment, then concern, then brief anger passing over her face. I just shrugged. Well, we all just waited on that platform, me smoking with Jo, Mum, Dad and Karen stood around, and no-one really knowing what to say. The wind picked up a little: it was cold, and flicked rain at us. Eventually, and with some feeling of relief on my part, the train arrived. I hauled my bag onto the train, kissed mum, hugged Karen, said goodbye to dad, and then Jo burst into frantic tears, but what could I do? I hugged and kissed her and said goodbye and that I'd call that evening, then she abruptly pulled away, sobbing. I got on the train, and pulled the door to behind me. The guard walked up and down the concourse, and blew into his whistle. I leaned out of the door window and said goodbye again, then there was a soft judder and the whole engine strained forward, each wheel rolling first gently then gradually picking up speed. I waved to mum, and karen, and Jo and dad and blew kisses, and they waved back as the receded into the distance, and I saw Jo suddenly turn her back again and sob. The train pulled out of the station: rain flicked into my face. I saw a line of shirts on a washing line, waving goodbye, I saw the graffiti on walls and alleys, the industrial units lining the train tracks, train carriages in sidings, and then I went to sit down, dragging my rucksack with me. I don't recall much of this part of the journey – in fact, it didn't last long, before it pulled into Didcot station, in the shadow of the power station chimneys, and I had to run, or rather stagger with greater alacrity, to catch the connecting train.
What I recall of this journey was first, how long it seemed to take. The train crawled all the way through Banbury, Leamington Spa, Coventry, Birmingham International and Birmingham New Street, Wolverhampton, Stafford and finally Crewe, where I had to change again. Next, I recall the cheery voice of the train driver, who happily recounted the names of the stations and any and all delays and cancellations due to works on the line, and who whistled and sang to himself, having left the intercom on. Over the next few years, I heard his voice many times, and always associated it with that journey into the north. The carriage always seemed to be mostly the same, and in fact seemed to contain pretty much the same people: there were always several students, pretending to read something academic, somebody, usually male, talking loudly and self-importantly, a little old lady, and a group of Glaswegians drinking McEwans and playing cards. On this first occasion, there was also a group of Japanese tourists, taking photos out of the window. Incongruously, sat right in the middle of them, was a fully-blown hippy, with long frizzy ginger hair, John Lennon glasses, and purple corduroy flares with yellow loons stitched in. Considering that this was 1986, it was retro to say the least.
At Crewe, I had to wait nearly an hour in the freezing cold before my connection arrived – the train to Bangor. I got on, and somehow got talking to the hippy, who, it turned out was an ex-student at UCNW Bangor. Anyhow, I spent the journey talking, and the sun suddenly appeared and mountains rose like waves suddenly, and my heart rose, and I realised that I was entering a brand new chapter of everything.
At which point, I think I should stop for now and leave the description of what happened next for another time.

2008-10-04T22:23:00.003Z

not much to actually write here - just that I'm doing this on my new Advent 4211 Netbook, which so far seems to be working a dream. Considering that it's less than half the size of my good old Dell workhorse, and only about a kilo in weight, and that it does pretty much everything I need a computer to do - surf stuff, hold documents and do writing on - I'm pleased.
Here's a picture of me looking ecstatic taken using the inbuilt webcam.

six or seven degrees of separation?

2008-09-29T22:45:00.002Z

By how far are we divorced from ourselves? What is the distance between the person we show ourselves to be, and the very core of our souls? How many steps does it take to step out, walk the paths of other people's lives and return to us?
Sorry, I came over all philosophical there. In fact, I'm just going to try a little blog game. You've probably all heard of the idea that we are only separated from any other person by six degrees of separation - you want to find someone, you talk to a friend, then a friend of a friend, that that person's friend, then their friend, then their friend, and a friend after that, and voila, the person whom you seek - but how many steps does it take to get back to oneself? To be exact, how many blogs would I have to go through before finding a link back to this site? And what kind of blogs would I pass through on the journey? Let's see how many I have to go through. There's a single rule: I can't return via the first blog I link to.

Far off signals

2008-09-23T21:30:00.004Z

I've found myself a little busy this past week or so, and at the same time strangely reluctant to do much, hence my not posting anything, somewhat ironically considerring my previous post. Anyway.
Last tuesday, I returned home, panting and sweating from another evening spent dodging vehicles as I cycled from work, and as ever parked the bike in the garden. Coming back out of the garden entrance, I looked up, and noticed that the Satellite Dish Fairy had been. Alongside our humble Sky minidish, through which the house receives the standard terrestrial channels and about 15,000 other channels of what is mostly mindglop, there was a bloody HUGE new satellite dish. It probably has the ability to pick up signals from TV stations beaming from Arcturus. It only took me a few seconds to surmise what had happened: Nurel had been hankering after Turkish TV ever since coming across a programme, via the internet, called 'Asi' several weeks ago. She spent the best party of two weeks, almost NON-STOP, watching it in 8-minute bursts courtesy of YouTube. To that end, she'd been scouring eBay and Gumtree for cheap satellite dishes, and had even mentioned ones up in North London, over in Yorkshire, even in Wales.
It turned out that she'd actually bought one via eBay for £50, driven up to London (with Sean in tow), collected it, driven back, phoned a local friendly Turkish Satellite Installation Guy to install the bloody thing, and left me to come home gaping in surprise at the whole thing. Which she did: I have to admit I admire the speed and efficiency with which the whole deed was accomplished. So now we have about 15,000 additional channels, this time in Turkish.
Now, this is actually no bad thing, for several reasons. Firstly, it means the boys are getting some badly-needed additional Turkish input - not just the language, but also exposure to Turkish culture, or perhaps the Turkish media's interpretation of what Turkish culture is. What I mean by this is that, for example, watch Eastenders and say that that is an entirely accurate description of what British culture is. However, it can only be useful. Second, Nur's clearly suddenly much more comfortable and happier. Third, while watching snatches of it I can indulge in mentally translating things and also indulge in my love of wordplay and mockery. Next, by having it on in the evenings it makes me much more inclined to go and do something more productive - I become far more aware of how passive I feel in front of a TV when I'm watching something in a foreign language. And lastly, our house suddenly feels like a little corner of Turkey, and that is no bad thing at all.

'My friends, I have wasted a day'.

2008-09-09T10:37:00.002Z

Or, What Have You Done Today To Make You Feel Proud?
The quote in the title is from Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars, and is reputedly what the Emporer Titus said one day at a banquet when he realised that he had done nothing that day to help others or improve their lot. Had he ruled longer, he may well have gone down as one of the better Roman Emporers - however, his apparent generosity of spirit could well have buggered up Imperial finances and undone all the hard work of his father, Vespasian.
The alternative title is that of the song, and is one of those upbeat catchy things they do at sporting events, e.g the Olympic party in London, and an exhortation to positivity with a capital P. In fact, capital O-S-I-T-I-V-I-T-Y, as well. It's the kind of music that goes with videos of people smiling and laughing on sunny days, or waving their arms in sporting triumph, or quite possibly as the background music to an advert showing some bloke who has sucessfully managed to shave his face with some new multi-bladed razor without ripping through his jugular, and is now getting admiring looks from his significant other, before heading off in his private jet helicopter to the golf course.
On the whole, I prefer the melancholic air of Titus. How is it possible, each day and every day, to do something to make you (sic) feel proud? Make yourself feel good, yes, but proud? The problem with exhortations like this is that, while they sound like good ideas, they in fact set you up to fail. Imagine examining your day at the closing of it; You look at what you have done, and ask, 'what have I done to make me (sic) proud?'; What if you've done things that make you feel Okay, but not outright proud; Wouldn't you feel a bit of a failure? And imagine that day in, day out - you'd end up feeling like a total loser, decide there's no point, and probably rip through your jugular with your new multi-bladed razor.
We cannot possibly aspire to do uplifting things on such a regular basis - such demands finally lead us top failure. So how about a slightly different question - 'What is the difference between this morning when I woke, and this evening before I sleep?' If there is even just a slight difference - a new thing learned, a task completed, a fear faced - then that is good. If the answer to the question is truly 'nothing', then we can sigh like Titus, but then look ahead to ther next day, when new chances may arise.

2008-09-01T10:05:00.003Z

Back to work today. Bah. Actually, it's not that bad: At least I'll be able to keep myself fully occupied with something other than child-centred activities. I can't say that I hugely look forward to the summer holidays, simply because I find myself flailing around for things to do, and also because I can't get any concentrated work done because of aforementioned parental duties. In addition, this year money has been horribly tight, which has meant that we haven't been able to get away whatsoever. We were considering just taking the tent and pitching somewhere, but the weather's been so bloody miserable it's just as well we didn't - I can't envisage it as having been anything other than a very damp experience. However, I am determined that next year we'll have a decent jaunt in Turkey.