ready for the off....

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.

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

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.

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..

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

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....

...wordle them!

Ouch!

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

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

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.