Cycling update

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

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...

...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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

Dusty.

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!

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

Lunch

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

Doughnut!

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!

Newbury!

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.

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