The London to Paris cycle ride, part two

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

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

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

Sabrina feeling an eensy bit chilly

mmm bananas and oaty snack bars

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

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

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

the field in which our micturating velocipedist was

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

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

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

Glen took this one.

see? pretty, isn't it?

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

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

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

The London to Paris cycle ride, part one

Oh, my aching legs.

Not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

REALLY CRAP FOOD IN THE EVENING

For your delectation on this, your first evening meal of your four-day quest, we have:

A rubber cheesburger-delicious hot or cold!

A chicken 'Curry' - it's beige!

sausages and chips - mmm, stale!

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

ready for the off....

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.