ink: it does a body good October 07, 2004  

As we all know, tattoos are absolutely brilliant and the mark of a good human being. However, not all tattoos are great. A large number of them aren't even good. And a distressing proportion of those are, quite simply, absolutely terrible. Not necessarily from an artistic point of view (although that's often the case) but because the person getting the tattoo has made a ghastly mistake in selecting what they want to wear or how they want to wear it. You frequently see these people around and want to shake them while screaming "What were you thinking? Are you insane or just a complete idiot? What on earth possessed you to get that put on you when you could have got such a better tattoo? Schmuck!" So here are the top five things that make me start quietly grinding my teeth:

1. Armbands that don't go all the way around. OK, you've got an inch-high celtic knotwork pattern running horizontally around your bicep - and then it stops just when it hits the underside of your arm. What's that about? It's obviously supposed to be a complete armband. All this says about you is "I'm too much of a bloody wuss to get the full tattoo, so I'm going with this half-assed effort and hoping you don't notice." Putz.
2. A dolphin, holding a rose in its beak, jumping over a crescent moon. Yes, I've seen this one.
3. Any tattoo in a language in which the wearer is not fluent. The most obvious one here is Chinese/Japanese characters. So you've got the character for "Bear" tattooed on your shoulder because you "saw it at the shop and liked how it looked". Is bear the only thing that character means? Does it have any other denotation, or indeed any connotations? You don't know? Well then you're a fucking idiot. You were born in the Chinese year of the Rabbit, and you've got the characters for "Little Rabbit" tattooed on your shoulder? Pity that it also means "rent boy", isn't it? If you're not 100% sure of the meaning of a particular character/phrase in the original language, then don't get the ink.
4. Tattoos obviously intended to make the wearer look well 'ard, where the wearer has bottled out and asked for it to be done quite small. Most tattoos under about an inch square fall into this category. Good examples are tattoos of dragons or tigers that are about the size of a domestic mouse, Satanic goats' heads the size of your thumbnail, etc. Many of these designs would work quite well if they were done big enough, but the wearer is clearly a bit nervous and so ended up with soomething that could be mistaken for a birthmark or an odd friction burn until you look quite closely. It's a tattoo, not a bloody button - get it sized large enough to have a bit of impact.
5. Logos - not good. That football team, that band - they'll be shit in ten years, mark my words. And what sort of a sucker will you look like then?

It just makes me so baity.

One thing I've really realised upon spending a bit of time around kiwis again is that New Zealand English really is different from UK English. Specifically, the casual use of Maori terminology. Talking about Rebecca having a full wee puku (stomach), about stopping to get some kai (food), seeing the whanau (extended family) back home, having a quick hui (meeting) to sort out what we're doing that evening... all words that I'm perfectly familiar with but which I just don't use over here. It's good to hear NZ English again. I like the way that NZ English is casually embracing Maori terminology - I particularly liked the fact that when Charlotte was staying with us, she used the phrase "he was doing a bit hoha", and when asked to define hoha she had to think for a few seconds to say how'd you express it in standard English. Of course, she actually ended up saying that it was like the Chinese "ma ma hu hu", which I understood perfectly. Deep structure, eh?

a more exhaustive treatment October 05, 2004  

It's been an interesting couple of days.

Thursday, I took the afternoon off work to drive Charlotte back to the airport. I bowled home, had a very pleasant lunch with Charlotte, Heather and Rebecca, and Charlotte got lots of last-minute cuddles in. Then off ho and away we went to Stansted. Drive this time wasn't as bad as it could have been, but there was a moderate amount of rain. I was feeling a bit under the weather, but nothing too bad. Dropped Charlotte off (not too heavy a departure, as we'll be seeing her in 3 weeks anyway), drove home. Felt a bit worse. Checked the long term weather forecast for Sunday, and had the comforting site of the little "Heavy Rain" icon.

Friday morning I woke up feeling like I'd been poleaxed, as did Heather. The cold had gotten much worse. I called in sick to work and spent most of the day tag teaming Heather between baby wrangling and lying in bed going "oh god". Lemsip Max Strength is our friend, and we dosed ourselves up massively in order to keep going. The weather deteriorated again - which conspired with our general malaise to keep us from venturing outside much. The general themes of the day were Mucus and Exhaustion. Shortly before going to bed, I checked the long term weather forecase again. Sunday's "Heavy Rain" has now been upgraded to "Heavy Rain with Gale Force Winds". I start to wonder if signing up to ride 75 miles was a really great idea.

Saturday morning starts off promisingly. Rebecca wakes us with her singing; I feed her, we have a bit of a play, then we lie down for a little nap (so I can actually get enough sleep). Rebecca wakes up from the nap before I do, and decides to wake me up by grabbing my nose and squeezing hard. I am thus awoken from a dream about running around a lay-by on Mount Victoria and being passed by an old lady on a unicycle, by a severe pain in the snout. Ow. The day is looking brighter, however, and I was feeling much better (although Heather wasn't particularly). I spent as much of the day as possible playing with Rebecca, and taking her out to interesting places. About 2pm, I took her out to Pet Paks (local pet/aquarium shop) to buy some fish kit, and so she can have a look at all the other fish. Rebecca is rather fond of our goldfish (or at least, spends a lot of time staring at them), so I thought she'd like to see some others. We spent a happy half hour staring at fish, and then we hopped into the car to go to Tescos. I wanted to pick up some supplies for Sunday, as well as the fact that we simply needed to do a bit of shopping. Sing hey, and off we went down the A14.

Coming off the A14 at Milton, a funny thing happens to the car. I shift down in to second and there's an odd clunk. We coast through the roundabout, and I notice that the engine is really revving for not much actual oomph. Drifting down the descent into Milton, I try shifting into any other gears and notice that the shift action is incredibly light, the engine is revving like a madman, and that we actually have absolutely no drive power. Shit. At this point, I become terribly, terribly aware of my infant daughter in the back of the car, and that I really don't want to have a breakdown on a heavily-used single carriageway road. I manage to coast the car down into the Tescos carpark, around the various traffic calming measures (ha!) and pedestrian crossings, praying that I won't have to brake at any point. Miraculously, no-one steps out in front of me, and I manage to park up near the recycling bins. Several quick phone calls (mainly to Heather, who does most of the actual calling) later, we have an RAC bloke out who tells me that the clutch has gone. He is surprised by this - particularly since the car is under 3 years old, as your average clutch apparently lasts around 70,000 miles. Anyway, he ends up towing us to the garage, and then sitting around and playing "let's smile!" with Rebecca while I went in and sorted out the repairs. No word on cost yet, but since it's still under warranty we should be OK.

I dashed out to Budgens, where the checkout boy didn't know what an avocado was. Too late, I missed my chance to tell him that it was an onion.

Checking the forecast that night, the BBC has replaced the "Heavy Rain with Gale Force Winds" icon with a little picture of rain of frogs and a tornado.

Sunday morning dawned at about 6:45am. I can tell you that, because I was outside the coach departure point at 6am sharp (as instructed), just in time to stand around for an hour before the coaches depart. It wasn't raining yet, but surely it was just a matter of time. The coach journey to Oxford took about two hours; unfortunately, the truck with the bikes on took two and a half hours. This meant an embarrassing delay, while we stood in the middle of a muddy field and were given cheery exhortations over a loudspeaker. The loudspeaker also imparted the information that they'd slightly underestimated the ride distance, which was closer to 80 miles. Eventually the announcment came that the bikes had arrived, and that the accepted protocol was to walk across the start line and start the ride on foot. This we did, though not before being told that the people who actually had bikes were about to be filmed for the local news - bastards. 100m down the road, we picked up our bikes from the truck and started the ride proper. The weather was holding on "not the greatest morning you've ever seen, but not actually raining". Donald and myself were a bit nervous about the distance - 80 miles being a long way. We decided to get to a moderate pace and stick to it. The speedo was duly set to a constant 15-16mph, which meant that we were passed by a number of speedy, race-harded whippets who were clearly treating this as a slightly longer-than-usual training run. The general atmosphere of the ride was quite different from the London to Cambridge; there were a quarter of the participants, and a much heavier emphasis on the serious racing fraternity. Far fewer of the "oh what the heck I'll have a crack where's the pub?" crowd.

The first 30 miles passed pretty easily, with a stop at Marsh Gibbon ("...and here we see the elusive and shy marsh gibbon, brachiating through the spagnum swamps...") and another at Swanburne, where we had a bit of scroggan. As we were about to move off, I discovered that I had a slow puncture in my rear tyre - this was to be a bit of a motif for the day. Stone removed from tyre, and puncture changed, we moved off to Woburn for lunch. A baked spud at Woburn, and we were determined to get moving again fairly sharpish, as the weather was looking like closing in again soon. The route then took us through Woburn Abbey, lovely and picturesque but with its own inherent problems. Woburn Abbey has deer roaming the grounds - not your standard muntjack deer (nocturnal, small), but actual old-skool English deer (not nocturnal, big, unafraid of humans). The deer weren't a problem, but the security was. To prevent escapes, the road included three separate cattle grids. Cattle grids for deer are about 10-15 foot long, as deer can jump like the clappers. Going over a wet metal cattle grid (it'd started to rain) on a bike is very disconcerting, because there is an extreme awareness that you don't actually have much traction at all, and it's really easy to lose the bike under you. The golden rule is, get up a bit of speed, hit the grid going straight, and don't try to turn while you're going over it. Three grids later, I'd had quite enough.

The next twenty miles went OK, with a couple of minor hiccups. About two miles out from the penultimate pub, I developed another slow puncture in my rear tyre. Several quick "stop and pump" breaks later, we made it to the pub and I had another crack at the rear wheel. Another thorn removed, another spare tube in, and a plum loaf split between myself and Donald. We looked at the route guide, realised that it hadn't actually started raining too much, and decided to crack on. This was at mile 60; we'd been doing it in more or less 20 mile increments, and it seemed to be working. We decided to zoom on and see how we felt at the final pub stop, which turned out to be in Gamlingay at about mile 70. When we went past the pub, we were feeling good, and decided to flag it. Three miles down the road, we took a right turn, and were confronted with the hideous truth: we were knackered, and we'd had a tailwind helping us for the last five miles. Now the tailwind was a sidewind, and we were schnookered. And lo - we passed a signpost: "Cambridge - 12". Shit. That puts the route total at, oooh, 85 miles or so.

The last ten or so miles were a bit of a blur. Literally; the rain had set in properly, and it was actually quite hard to see. Mind you, at that point, we were in the gritted-teeth we're-finishing-this-bloody-thing mode, and it did the trick. Morale was raised by the fact that we started to recognise the roads, but lowered by the increasingly heavy rain (and dangerous crosswinds). We finally crossed the line in Cambridge at 5:30pm on the dot, absolutely knackered. Still, despite the rain there was a crowd of around thirty people on the line, cheering away (and no, we didn't know any of them from a bar of soap), which cheered us up.

So a good feeling of achievement, and the spirit of bloody-minded determination was the winner on the day. The weather wasn't too bad (much better than predicted, although still quite manky), everyone was very friendly, and the signage was excellent. Ride length could have been a bit more accurate (off by ten miles!), but you felt good once you'd done it. I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a fairly challenging day ride next year - with a bit of luck, they should have ironed out the teething troubles. And maybe got a few more mechanic stops. Take a few spare tubes just in case, eh?

On the way in to work this morning, a tin of diet coke exploded in my bag. I got to work dripping slightly, to discover that I had an inch of diet coke slopping around in the bottom of my bag. Kathmandu kit is more waterproof than you'd think.

left hand numb October 04, 2004  

75 miles, my arse. My odo read 85 when I crossed the line. I am extremely knackered. More details to follow once I have time to get outside a pint and a curry.

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