alles ist revisionism April 30, 2005  

I stood up and was counted once. I'm number 854.

Anyone else read Richmal Compton's Just William books when they were kids? Good, clean fun, full of "cripes!" and skinned knees, and messy boys tearing around the place with catapaults. Right. Now, does anyone remember reading the story "William and the Nasties"? The one, written in 1935, where William and the Outlaws hear about this movement in Germany, the "Nasties"? Who chuck Jewish shopkeepers out of their shops? And start up a UK branch to try and chuck out the local Jewish shopkeeper, who runs the sweet shop? Ringing any bells here yet? Of course, in the end it's all OK, with their half-hearted attempts to kick out the shopkeeper (with William using the name "Himm Hilter", as "Herr" sounds too like a girl) ending up with them foiling a burglary and being fulsomely rewarded by the shopkeeper. But still, y'know - they were playing at being Nazis and trying to strong-arm a Jewish shopkeeper.

Not quite some wholesome boyish fun now, is it?

It's interesting how you occasionally get sudden flashes of memory from your childhood and think "good god, that was exceedingly dodgy". I remember reading about the Homosexual Law Reform Bill's passage in 1986, and a discussion of the incredibly dodgy petition that was raised against it, which included huge numbers of invalid signatures. Including school children's. And then I started thinking "hang on, I'm sure I remember being told to sign a petition against bad stuff back when I was at school..." - and then you start wondering.

Anyway, stuff the past, stuff the Density Church, and yay civil unions. NZ's now got 'em, they're perfectly solid, and good stuff. It's moments like that that I feel immense pride in my country. And Canada hasn't done this at a federal level, only within certain provinces. So I think we're still a world leader, a la the vote for women thing (1893, for all those of you who didn't know - first country to grant women the franchise).

If you don't believe me about the William story, by the way, check out this article from the Telegraph. All very Baden-Powell, I suppose.

very pet shop boys, track 2 April 29, 2005  

At Steve's request - one of those interweb meme things.

So there we go.

Snapped my gear cable on the way in to work yesterday. Had a bad moment when I realised that I was basically stuck in top gear; I think this is the universe's way of telling me to get my finger out and strip my drivechain down and clean it off. Cycling: not just a form of exercise, a fully-fledged hobby. You're rarely without something to fettle.

self-pitying ill person April 27, 2005  

I've been laid well low for the last day and a half by one of those colds that rampages through the entire family. I caught it last, having nursed Heather and Rebecca through their own large-scale mucus production operations. I'm now suffering quite a bit myself. The best word to describe how I feel at the moment is "debris".

That said, being at home ill during the day with a toddler to entertain means that I'm now more au fait with various improving bits of children's television. The Koala Brothers I rate particularly highly. If you get a chance - like, you're at home during the day, or babysitting, or a student, or something - catch an episode. I particularly enjoyed the one where the Koala Brothers encountered a penguin who was hiking across the Outback. Sensibly, the penguin had a map and one of those Foreign Legion-style hats with the bit to stop the back of your neck getting sunburned, and did a good line in near-Teutonic efficiency. Except, of course, for running out of water. All good stuff, I must say.

Finally got our new pushchair the other day. Thank you, Debenhams: only a month after ordering it for the first time, thanks to an online ordering system that I've seen bettered by amnesiac turtles. Suffice to say that I wasn't impressed with the online ordering system, nor particularly with the phone line that I had to call repeatedly. Nor with the other outsourced phone line that I was then directed to call, which supported both the Debenhams gift card and the store card - but connected you to an automated phone system that required you to enter a store card number in order to move forward. Not having a store card, I couldn't use it - and the main phone support line were apologetic, but couldn't do a bloody thing. The third time we logged the order, they finally deigned to process the gift card payment, and the pram arrived a couple of weeks later. On the up side, they didn't hvae the model we ordered in stock, so they ended up sending us an upgraded model to shut us up. And now it's arrived, it's bloody brilliant. Was just a bit of a drama getting it in the first place.

I'm currently re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's definitely one of those books that you tend to get about fifty pages into, it all gets a bit odd, and by that time you've probably copped off with whichever young thing you were trying to impress in the first place by reading it. I still think it's a pretty good read, but the near-mystical aura it's acquired (particularly among IT types) still escapes me. Take your time, care about what you're doing, and make the effort to understand what you're doing. Why bother with all the neo-Platonist twaddle on top of this? Honestly.

So Lance didn't win the Tour de Georgia this year, with the win going to his teammate Tom Danielson. Normally I'd say that this was a bit early in the season, and that his training was designed to peak during the Tour de France, but given that all of the talk coming out of the team earlier in the season was that Lance would try to ride several of the classics early in the season, I'm not sure quite what's happening. Could be a psychological game, or it could just be the demands of the high level cycling finally coming home to roost. Either way - I still reckon that T-Mobile's Andreas Kloden is going to really be the rider to watch at this year's tour. Though Floyd Landis is also looking on excellent form at the moment.

Stop press! Exclusive breaking news! Rebecca's just toddled up to the computer desk, reached up, and bashed the keyboard a bit. Here's an exclusive transcript of the results, courtesy of a handy text editor session:

q

,
ko;o| uyyyyy kkkkwsbbb \\\\\\\\

From such tiny acorns &c. Occcasional line feeds added for clarity.

jesus i was live April 20, 2005  

Had a very nice long weekend. The Saturday was pretty typical - I took Rebecca out to the supermarket, and then looked after her for the afternoon while Heather went into town for a wander. The main distinguishing characteristic of the day was that Rebecca managed to fall over in the back garden, and cut herself on something sharp that was lurking in the grass. Cue floods of tears, bloodied hand, etc. The worst bit was when I put her down on the floor while I got the band-aids and Savlon out of the cupboard - she was bashing the floor (and, it turned out, the dishwasher) with her hands, leaving little bloody handprints behind. Distressing and a half. I eventually calmed her down and applied pressure to the cut, and managed to get a band-aid on. Of course, she removed it about an hour of dedicated picking later, but the cut had stopped bleeding so I figure the job was mainly done. Still a bit fraught though.

Sunday was most lovely. It turned out to be a brilliantly sunny, reasonably temperate (13c or so) day. The ride went ahead well; I spent the first 20 miles riding mainly on my own, and then fell in with a group of people riding at about my pace. We had the traditional moment where the oldest member of the group took the front and proceeded to make the rest of us suffer (average pace went from 16mph to around 23) for a while; we also had one memorable comedy moment where the bloke on the flashiest bike (nice bloke, younger than me, in the Met) didn't quite unclip in time at a busy junction and had a calm topple into the grass verge in front of rather a lot of traffic. Great ride, though. At one point about ten miles in, I was riding by myself, couldn't see anyone else around. I was riding along the crest of a hill, looking over the rolling Bedfordshire countryside. The oilseed rape was in flower, the sun was belting down on us, a light breeze zephyred through the trees, and I passed an old Victorian red-brick water tower. I had one of those beatifully euphoric moments where you think "Yes! This is why I do this! This is what I love about this sport! This is what I love about living in the UK, when you're quietly coasting through a perfect spring morning in this beautiful rolling countryside! Oh yes!". In fact, I cried out something to that effect - and then noticed someone's bike propped up against a hedge (presumably while the rider was having a quiet Paula Radcliffe moment behind said hedge). Ooops.

Anyway, I made good time, learned about a few handy new routes, and met some highly personable people. A very good day.

Monday, Heather took off for London and I took off work to look after Rebecca. We spent a happy day burbling around the house, cleaning (me) or dirtying (her) things, and exploring the world. No major injuries to anyone, though Rebecca didn't half get dirty romping around the playground on Jesus Green. Heather eventually arrived home once Rebecca had gone to bed, having had a shufti at the Rosetta Stone. Not bad at all, and we're going to have another crack at doing that fairly soon. Now I just need to spec out a decent 150k ride for mid-May.

Unsurprising news, but a pity nonetheless: Lance is retiring at the end of this racing season. Hardly unexpected, and you can't say he hasn't had a good career. I'll be interested to see what he comes up with next. I'd say it's a reasonable bet that Trek will be producing bikes with an Armstrong marque in a year or two.

Things I've learned about technical writing, number 185 in a periodic series: if you have a set of instructions including a step of the format:
Enter the following in the dialog box: example_command -ab
...some people - educated, intelligent, capable people - still won't know what to enter in the dialog box.

The sixties - weren't they a great time of progress and social change? Well, at the absolute maximum, one million people bought the number 1 record in any given week. At this time, 20 million people were reliably tuning in to watch the Black & White Minstrel Show. Progressive? Don't make me bleedin' laugh.

blistering pace April 16, 2005  

It's always slightly worrying when you realise you have a moderate injury and have absolutely no idea where it came from. Wednesday lunchtime, I was at the gym and realised that my left hip was quite sore. Examining it I discovered that I had a noticeably raised tender spot about the size of a goose egg, which hurt like heck. I have absolutely no idea where this came from. I'm assuming it's some kind of bruise or other soft tissue damage (although it's not discoloured), but for the life of me I can't recall how I might have got it. It's at the right height for me to have walked into something, but that's not ringing any bells. Two days later, it's still sore, obviously raised, and a complete mystery. It's not even like I've been drinking much (2 glasses of wine and about a litre of beer this week in total), so the lack of recollection isn't alcohol related. It's an odd one.

Have just finished reading The Luxury of Time. No, it's not the extended sequal to A Brief History of Time, it's the autobiographical book by Jane and Mike Tomlinson. Jane Tomlinson is fairly well-known for having been diagnosed with incurable metastasized breast cancer (spread to her bones and lungs) some years back, and having been given a very short period to live. She took up running, competed in some shorter events, and ended up running the London Marathon. And then the London Triathlon. And then the Great North Run. And then tandem cycling from John O'Groats to Land's End. And then tandem cycling from Rome to London. And then entering the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon. Over the past four years, since her original diagnosis of incurable cancer and sub-12 months to live prognosis, she's kept incredibly active, has entered a frightening array of endurance events (the list above is edited highlights), and has raised over a million pounds for charity. Inspirational stuff. The book is written by her and her husband, and is an interesting work of cancer survivorship. She was originally diagnosed with breast cancer, and given a mastectomy, over a decade ago. The book basically starts out then, and charts the time between that and her being given an honorary award for achievement at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2002. She's done a fair bit since, mind, but the book doesn't cover it.

The general tone is very warts and all. Jane and Mike take it in turns to write their own sections, giving their own reactions as things happen. It's very human: they can be incredibly dense, petty, and petulant at times. The book could have used a thorough editing - the pace is very uneven. Early in the book, it lingers on small details and spends pages describing fairly minor incidents; later on, it skips over quite major stuff very lightly (training for the maraton despite having not merely cancer, but in fact bone cancer that makes her more susceptible to fractures, for instance). This is quite frustrating, as a lot of the later stuff is very interesting and would benefit from a bit more in depth examination. You do get the impression that they're very serious about creative control (the afterword mentions that they flatly refused ghost writers), and I would imagine that this extended to the editorial control. Overall, the book needed a good solid edit to even out the pacing and to add more of an emphasis on the later sections; however, from the way they describe themselves in the book, I imagine that editing them would have been hard. You need to be pretty bloodyminded to go through what they've been through and do the stuff they've done, and while this may occasionally be annoying, you've still got to admire them for the bloody-minded determination. Iron will, ho! That said, the book's still a worthwhile read. It concentrates more on the living with cancer than on the amazing sporting achievements; start reading it for the latter, finish it for the former.

In other news: I was ill yesterday, I'm still feeling a bit crap, I've got the aforementioned mysterious bruise on my hip, the weather forecast for the weekend is just a diagram of a cat and a dog falling onto an umbrella, and I'm riding a 100k audax on Sunday. Could be an interesting one.

if they didn't always witter on about 17th century battles April 14, 2005  

Mea culpa, and a nod to Steve for pointing it out; of course Paddy Power are Irish (the clue's in the name), hence the betting on Father Dougal could not be strictly held to be an example of the British sense of humour. Whoops! In my defence, you could argue that Ireland is part of the British Isles, though Eire is not part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland... but that'd be pretty pedantic, and flying in the face of accepted usage. So I won't.

But on a somewhat related note - an example of colloquialisms not travelling well. An American grower has created a very nice Sarracenia (North American Trumpet Pitcher plant) cultivar, with an impressive deep coloration at the top of the pitchers. He has duly named this cultivar "Purple Helmet". And wasn't quite sure why half the people on the CP mailing list collapsed into titters. Reminds me of the Nepenthes cultivar shown in Peter D'Amato's The Savage Garden, Nepenthes 'John Holmes' - though in that case, it was a pretty direct reference to the shape and size of the pitchers.

Actually, my favourite phrase clash is "bum bag" vs "fanny pack" - both the US and UK think that one phrase is rather rude, and the other one's completely innocuous. They just disagree about which is which.

Cool things: it's still perfectly possible to navigate York via a map of the original Roman town. Of course, you don't know where anything built after 150AD is, but the layout of main streets hasn't changed. I love that stuff. I love caning it down a lovely long straight A or B road, through rolling countryside, knowing that I'm cycling down a road originally built by the Romans to facilitate the movements of their legions (and possibly built on the site of an older, existing road). Great stuff.

itty bitty bitsy April 13, 2005  

Rebecca's been rather ill for the last few days. She's currently producing mucus at a prodigious rate, and becoming most irritable when you wipe her nose. On the other hand, she's toddling around the place like a good 'un. She shows a great curiousity in the outdoors, coming and standing on the back step and peering out at the garden. She has yet to actually walk across that step herself, but it won't be long now. She also has a great fondness for my cycling gloves, which feature a plastic section across the back of the hand (for mild protection from branches). Every morning, when I leave for work, she grabs my hands and examines the gloves closely. Only once I have passed muster (or rather, pulled my hands away from her) can I leave.

And while we're at it: congrats to the Runhams on the slightly overdue appearance of wee Dylan. He's a braw wee baby, and I'm sure he'll bring them much joy.

Oooh - someone needs to explain the British sense of humour to the staffers at the Washington Post (see para 5). Whoops!

My nomination for the single most useful static web page on the internet would have to go to the Park Tools Threaded Fastener Concepts page. A lot of very technical detail explained neatly and concisely in a logical order; handy as all heck. Or: what it means to say that M5 bolts tend to have a 0.8 pitch.

Note the stipulation of static web page in the previous paragraph; that gets around all the highly handy dynamic web pages around (of which, my favourite is Google's calculator function, which does incredibly handy on the fly conversions).

The fine weather has brought out the idiots. I've had about four near misses in the last week, either pedestrians stepping out without looking, or scooters just being chancers. Feh.

oscillating across the road April 11, 2005  

Today has mainly been very, very slow. Rebecca has now started toddling around the place, and has suddently developed the temperament to go with it. More seriously, she had a really broken night last night (we suspect the aftereffects of her MMR vaccination), which meant that no-one got much sleep. So today she's been toddling around the place with growing confidence, and then pausing to break into ear-splitting shrieks for no apparent reason. She's also got a streaming nose - possibly due to MMR, possibly an unrelated cold, but either way she's a bit unhappy. Having only got about 4 hours sleep ourselves, we've been taking things very light too. The most strenuous thing I've done all day has been to mow the lawn. I then took Rebecca out onto the lawn and continued introducing her to the Big World Outside. The high point, for her, was at attempt to grab a ladybird. The ladybird say what was coming and legged it as fast as possible.

Ended up having a very, very good ride yesterday. 40 miles in the by now regulation time of a smidgeon under 3 clock hours (= about 2 2/3 saddle hours), down to Audley End and back. Absolutely lovely. Fine day, but a bit windy. The route itself was great - basically, you get onto the B road down from the Shelfords that parallels the M11, and just keep heading down. It's the simplest navigation I've done for a while: go straight ahead and each junction, and you can't go wrong. Especially in the last five miles (past Ickleton), where the roads become country singletrack through fields. I saw one deer (twice - it was still there when I went past on the return leg), a stoat, and a cock pheasant. Especially lovely was the final two miles; a nice, slow downhill on very minor roads, dipping under the railway line and then the M11 via lovely old Victorian-looking bridges, complete with moss-covered brickwork and crumbling old brick walls in the middle of beech woodlands. An absolutely lovely ride for a spring day, and would be even nicer in summer. Sections of the ride were rather exposed, however, which did make for some annoying crosswinds. Apart from that, though - lovely.

preparation, ho! April 09, 2005  

This evening, I cycled home in what I can only describe as a howling gale, complete with huge blowing snowflakes. In shorts. It was easily the most unpleasant commute I've ever had; I'm just quietly hopeful that the pain in my left knee goes down a bit. Still, grr.

Got my entry for the Willington Wander back yesterday, and just spent a happy half-hour in the kitchen after dinner tracing out the route on a map. It's basically from just outside Bedford, to down near Royston, then along to Barton (i.e. only a couple of miles out of Cambridge), then back along to St Neots and then back down to Bedford. This means that I've already ridden about half of the route already; basically, from Melbourn through to Barton and then on through Comberton, Toft, Bourn, and to St Neots. Indeed, one rather large section (basically, from Barton to St Neots) is identical (barring a slight detour for a control) to the route I put together a couple of weeks ago to do a quick 50 to St Neots and back. I was tracing the route on the map and chuckling - "there's Chapel Hill, there's that nice wee road down by the radio telescopes, there's that cut-through in Bourn that takes you through the ford..." Good stuff. The route does include a worrying number of turns every 300 metres at the start, but that'll be when I'll probably still be riding in a reasonable sized group anyway, so no worries. Roll on the 17th!

tour du kitchen April 08, 2005  

Rebecca is now taking semi-confident steps around the place. Within a week she'll be tearing around at a zillion miles an hour and doing aeroplane impressions. It's really cool. Last night, when I got home, she whizzed into the kitchen and uttered a glad cry when she saw me. Great feeling.

Annoyingly, the Pope's death has caused the royal wedding to be postponed by a day (and, in domino style, to delay the start of the Grand National by 25 minutes). A million quid more cost on the policing (last-minute switch to a weekend day = lots of coppers getting called in unexpectedly for time and a half), and it's completely ruined the beautiful synchronisation with Coronation Street. Ah well. I'll have to content myself with waving a little Union Jack or something.

Pet hate: snotty know-it-alls who go all superior and, with gravitas, inform you that it's called the Union Flag, ekchually, and that the Union Jack is in fact a particular British naval flag incorporating the Union Flag design. No it's not. Everyone refers to the British flag as the Union Jack, and stuff what it originally referred to as. So what if "union jack" started out with one particularly technical meaning? It's expanded and shifted definitions through common usage, you annoying pedants. Get some fresh air, some vitamin c, and stop wasting my bloody time. You occupy a circle of hell next to the idiots complaining that those nasty, icky homosexuals have stolen the perfectly innocuous word "gay", without knowing that it was already in slang use to refer to prostitutes ("gay women" - and I've seen the Punch cartoons from the early c20th confirming it).

Related: anyone who complains about split infinitives - have some sense of priorities, man! We're fighting a desperate rear-guard action to save the apostrophe here, and you're concerned about obscure Latinate grammar rules?

On the headphones: lcd soundsystem, Atomizer, and Holst's The Planets. Tell you what, I reckon I've heard that Jupiter somewhere before - and as for Mars, well.

If you've got access to a computer and an internet connection (and if you haven't, how are you reading this? Telepathy?) I can highly recommend that you get onto the BBC web site and listen to this week's episode of Mitch Benn's Crimes Against Music. Absolute, absolute genius. Recommended for anyone who's been vaguely passionate about popular (or, indeed, unpopular) music during the last 20 years. Notable for playing a Sisters of Mercy parody on Radio 4. I can't recommend this lad highly enough.

The forecast for Saturday is for snow. Excellent; I'm planning a quick 50 to Audley End and back on Saturday morning, and snow would add an element of challenge to the proceedings. From a look at the map, it's possible to put together a pretty direct (as in, not far off a straight line) route straight down from Cambridge to Audley End via sneaky B-roads and back roads. I reckon the straight line distance there can't come much over 20 miles, and I'm going to have a crack at proving it. And there's some very nice villages around that part of the countryside to pootle through on the way back, anyway. But snow? could get hairy.

Did I mention that I'm back on the booze? One week back in and counting. So far, I'm taking it pretty easy: I'm averaging about a bottle of wine a night. And a quiet whisky before bed, of course. And some small beer in the mornings, for my digestion. Ah, it's good to be back in the same bowl as the rest of the UK, marinading myself nicely.

saddened but not particularly surprised April 05, 2005  

So is everyone going to watch the big wedding on Friday? Should be excellent. Second weddings are always a bit touchy for the family, and you can guarantee that some members of the extended family and friends (not to mention some unrelated members of the public) will cause a bit of a ruckus.

What? No, no - not Charles and Camilla, Ken and Deidre! Coronation Street, ducky!

Yes, ITV has gleefully followed up Ken & Deidre's first wedding (originally broadcast two days before Charles and Diana got married back in 1981, trivia fans!) by scheduling their second wedding to broadcast against the BBC's highlights program from the Charles & Camilla beano. Genius. Mind you, this is probably the last of Charles' worries: the pope's funeral has also been scheduled for Friday. Uh-oh. Charles is now coming to the harsh realisation that his second-time-around nuptials might not be the same draw card for, for instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury (though since he's technically second-in-line to be head of the Church of England, you'd have thought that Rowan Williams'd get some face time in) or Tony Blair. Looks like you're going to get that quiet family do you wanted after all, Charles.

A brief comment on the Graham Capill affair: it certainly adds credence to the theory that those most vehemently against something are those who are fighting a prediliction towards it. I always considered Capill and the Christian Heritage Party a pack of annoying rentaprotest fundie loons, primarily concerned with railing against such indecencies as the unveiling of an ankle: finding out that he was, in fact, a kiddy-fiddling perve came as a bit of a surprise. Since the CHP would certainly have considered a number of my lifestyle choices as flagrant and unrepentant sin, I should probably be expected to be glad that Capill has been exposed as hypocritical, lying, abusive, hideous and twisted. Or, to use the term the CHP would happily have used about many activities which I regard as nothing more morally laden than healthy aerobic exercise, evil. But I already thought he and his ilk were vile, bigoted, unthinking nutbars: having that evidentially confirmed doesn't particularly change my opinion. Frankly, I'd have rather that Capill hadn't committed the abuse; most sane people would still have regarded the CHP as a pack of loonies anyway, and the childin question wouldn't have experienced the abuse. That said, since he did commit the abuse, I'm bloody glad that he was caught - and that it's knocking the wind of the sails of the fundmentalist resurgence back home. When's Brian Tamaki going to be caught doing something a little more - um - fleshly than just putting the bite on his church members for 10% of their incomes, eh?

One of the best ways of thief-proofing your bike is to lock it up next to one more expensive but with a worse lock. In that vein, I'm quite happy that the bike rack I tend to use at work has acquired some new inhabitants with the recent warm weather. I seem to get in earlier than most of the other cyclists who use this rack, so it's pretty empty when I lock up in the mornings. When I come down to go home, however, I'm usually sandwiched in between a severely pimped-out Orange P7 (tricked out maximally for about 1999 - 8-speed XTR, top of the range about 6-7 years ago, sort of thing), and a brand new and very shiny Marin Muirwoods. Since I've not washed my MTB for a while, and the grips are getting pretty scruffy, I am in the happy position of having a high-quality bicycle that is considerably less thief-attractive than the other stuff parked near it. Result!

In other news: biometrics - quite apart from the whole, y'know, not as secure as they're often made out to be thing - might just not be such a crash hot idea.

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