Alain de Botton

I just want to collect a few tweets from Alain de Botton, he's a philosopher/writer who you can rely on to produce a useful snippet of text on twitter, and not fill it with ramblings of what he had for tea or pointless whinings. He even sent me a personal reply when I commented on one of his tweets.

The following are all his works. Follow him on @alaindebotton on twitter for more.

We've all had enough setbacks not to be a little relieved by the pains of others.

Despite love, therapy, literature, achievement, few sensations are more difficult to shake off than the sense one is a loser.

The problem with people who would be outstanding in a shipwreck is that there aren't - in the end - so many shipwrecks.

Whatever their value to science, the galaxies are in the end as valuable to mankind as solutions to megalomania and anxiety.

Our sense of what is beautiful is a reflection of what we lack, and as our lacks change, so will our tastes.

She was so private, there were things she even forgot to say to herself...

Developing an adequate response to rejection, neither defensive nor sentimental, lies at the heart of any serious attempt at sanity.

The thought that if one leaves them it will ruin their life can grow so overwhelming that one ends up staying and thus ruins their life.

CSI: Lancaster

Mac: Okay Sid, what can you tell me?

Sid: Looks like a sharp force trauma laceration to the right index finger between the first and second phalanges.

Mac: Did anything come back from trace?

Sid: The brown powder found in the wound tract came back as coffee. Quality blend too - perhaps Illy. I prefer to grind my own blend, the aroma makes me-

Mac: Sid? Any idea what did this?

Sid: Oh yes. Um. The curvature of the incision means we can rule out a straight blade. This was circular.

[CUT TO CGI SLASHER ANIMATION]

Mac: So you're saying he cut his finger on a coffee can?

[DANNY walks in]

Danny: Yes. Why don't you ask him, he's typing this right now.

Mac: What, these words I'm saying?

Danny: Yup. It's called 'fanfic'. Fans write their own versions of the show. All sorts of things happen. There was this time that me and you, Mac, can you imagine this, me and you were-

Mac: Okay, you up there. What happened?

Me: I cut my finger on a sharp edge of an Illy coffee can as described - campus nurse taped it up and a quick trip to hospital confirmed it didn't need any more treatment. I just figured I'd write this to make a drama out of a minor crisis.

Case closed. Horatio?

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One Million

Robotron. It's a video game from 1982. The time when a family holiday meant spending ages in an arcade looking for cool graphics and spacey sounds. I'd played all the classics - the first Space Invaders I laid hands on was in my Dad's Working-Man's Club on a Sunday afternoon. My brother and I played together, me moving the base and he hitting fire.

Graphics improved and sounds got better - Asteroids, Galaxians, Gorf, and then a new level was reached with Defender. Complex controls, multiple aliens with their evil agenda. Increasing difficulty level. Explosions like we'd not heard before.

But then came Robotron. No fire buttons - just two joysticks, one for each hand. You could move left and shoot right, or up, or down. Shoot the evil robotrons that were trying to kill the last humans alive. Save the humans. Don't get shot. Each new level brought new types of robotrons with new ways to kill you. It got difficult very quickly.

I had a couple of versions of Robotron for home computers. There was a ZX Spectrum version called Wild West Hero which had a Western theme (you were a cowboy shooting bandits in a field of cacti), and an official Robotron for the C64. On my Atari ST there was Llamatron, a typically ridiculous re-visioning by Jeff Minter of Llamasoft featuring coke cans, cigarette papers, hamburgers, and cutlery.

With the increasing power of home PCs came the ability to simulate arcade machines. The Mame project has developed software that can run as thousands of different games. Robotron is one of these. The first thing I ran when I first installed Mame was not Pacman, but Robotron. Now I had real arcade Robotron in front of me, and it didn't need a supply of 10p pieces.

I installed it on my little Sony Vaio so I could play on the go. And the legends on the control keys wore out pretty quickly. I scored higher than my teenage self ever did on the full-size machines, and pretty soon level 9 was my target. After a while getting past that was easy, and to be expected. I was scoring a few hundred thousand.

Then about a year ago I moved to the School of Health and Medicine and got a shiny new desktop running Ubuntu. So I put Mame and Robotron on it, and it had the speed to play it in full-screen mode. Things got a bit easier, and the legends on the control keys succumbed to the same fate as those on my Vaio. Good job I don't need to see the keys to type these days.

I would play a game or two every night before going home. My rationale for this was that I needed to exercise my rapid reactions after a day of sitting and thinking, and that I also needed some finger exercise with a different set of muscles from those used in a day's typing. But really I did it for fun. Eventually my high scores increased until I was on 500,000s. With the occasional foray even higher. After about a year I had scored in the 900,000s on a few occasions. Hitting the million mark looked possible.

And last night I did it. Level 43. Score 1142900. I took a screen grab. I tweeted the fact. I cycled home and wondered if I ever needed to play it again.

Of course I'm playing again - in fact tonight before I go home I shall have my Friday game and toast the "Vid Kidz" programming team who made it!

The Last Mud Run Home

It's getting dark at 6 now, so Friday was probably the last chance to cycle home along the canal in fading daylight. I wouldn't normally do it in the rain - this is supposed to be a little treat to myself to mark the end of the week - but as there's only ever one last chance I decided to take it despite the increasing gloom and the possibility of droplets becoming drops.

One advantage of a wet, dark evening ride on the canal is that I have the whole linear feature to myself - except for the wildlife. I startled a couple of moorhens, which skittered off low across the water leaving their little trails of ever-increasing circles on the surface. One heron turned the tables, startling me by jumping out of the bank near me, and flying off.

So that's it for the canal or the river on a weekday. I have cycled home along the towpath in the dark once. Getting to the start was an adventure in itself, the lane to the bridge being in poor condition and it's easy to miss the edge of the tarmac and end up in a hedge. Getting along a darkened towpath is easier with bike lights turned off, so that you don't burn a bright spot into your retina. If there's some moonlight or scattered reflections from cloud, you can see enough from that glow. Not that that stopped me falling over, my head a couple of inches from the edge of the water.

I think cycling home along the canal in the dark is something to be done once. However, I am yet to cycle home along the riverside path in the dark. That could be another adventure entirely.

Help!

It's getting pretty dark by 6 these days, so I'm trying to enjoy the last days of having daylight to cycle home in. This means leaving at 5.30. So today I'm cycling home at the same time as lots of students finishing their lectures and probably staff eager to get home in the daylight.

If I see someone stopped on their bike I often stop and ask if they need any help. Sometimes they're just texting or talking on their mobile (although some cyclists manage to do this and carry on pedalling), but sometimes they have problems with their bikes. I like to help.

The first person I stopped to help today was a foreign student who explained he was looking at the chestnuts on the ground - he'd never seen them before! I told him horse chestnuts weren't edible - but didn't go so far as to explain the rules of conkers.

The next faltering student had a stuck chain. That seems to be the most common problem I help cyclists with. The chain slips off the cogs, jams up, and they're stuck. This guy had a full-suspension bike, and his chain had fallen off his big cog and jammed. I got him to hold the bike while I dug in and freed it. I then explained how to adjust the limit screws - I couldn't do it there and then because I had no tools on my bike. He pedalled off with my instructions to get his bike serviced hopefully ringing in his ear. He'd only just bought it, second hand.

I rolled on home and finished painting the living room walls yellow.

Ferret Rescue

Ready to head off to work yesterday, I opened the bedroom curtains and running along the pavement outside the houses opposite was a ferret. What? A ferret. A woman walking past looked at it in disbelief as it flumped by. It stopped under a parked car, then headed back up the street behind her. Then someone on my side of the street caught its attention and it crossed the road. She had a large dog - a labrador, and the little critter was right in its face, and the dog didn't like it! These dogs are retrievers of dead birds, not hunters. It was clearly more scared than the ferret!

So I ran downstairs to see what was going on, and decided this poor little guy was an escaped pet and I better catch him using my super animal skills. I grabbed a plastic recycling box and jumped out. At that point my neighbour Kate appeared and wondered what was going on. By now the ferret was behind her shed in the side alley next to mine. Now Kate is scared of mice. And rats. And giant rat-like animals. Including ferrets. She bravely tried to shoo it out from behind her shed with a broom, but it ran back towards my back garden.
I ran through the house to try and catch it there. But by the time I got there, it had run towards the street again. I did wonder what the local alley cats would have made of it, but they never saw it.

Now Kate was trying to get it into the street again, and it jumped into the yard next to mine. I followed it in, and he was very tame, just looking around, nosing into flowerpots and eventually walked up to me. I grabbed him (I was wearing one of my work gloves) and took him out of the yard. Kate was now in the middle of the street - she'd rather be run over than approach a mustelid, it seems. I asked her to get the lid of the box and she handed it to me at a very stretched arm's length. I popped the little feller in and snapped the lid shut.

He scratched the box a bit, but I got him indoors and he settled down. Now what to do? I looked on the RSPCA web site and called their advice line, but after five mins on hold I gave up and called a local veterinary. They told me that if I brought him (or her, I don't know how to sex a ferret) in they would check for a chip and try and find its home. So I popped a note on my front window (Found! Ferret!), packed him up into the back of the Land Rover and trundled round to the vet's.

The vet told me it was a very nice polecat ferret, and that they'd keep me informed. I drove back home and cycled off to work.

When I got home that evening there was a note through the door. "Pan" belonged to the family a few doors down, so I went and told them where he was and they very nicely gave me a couple of jars of home-made jam for my troubles, and a jar to give to Kate for being brave.

 The next morning I snapped this picture as Cathy came back from the vets with him. I hope he doesn't get out again!

New blog time

Today I've created a new blog so I can share things I do at work. I've made it a separate blog so I can keep personal stuff here and work stuff there. Not that I write a lot of personal stuff here, but maybe I'll do a bit more in the future.

The new blog is GeoSpaced

It'll cover anything work-related (health, medicine, mapping, geospatial tech). So subscribe if you're interested!

Fixing a dripping tap

Fixing a dripping tap. Its not a big problem.

Of course its not a big problem, its only a paragraph in my DIY book. Turn off mains, unscrew cover, remove headgear nut, remove washer, replace washer, reassemble, turn on mains. There, in one line. How can that be a big problem?

Well, perhaps the cover is corroded on. Never mind, I've got the foresight to borrow some PlusGas from a friend - stronger than WD40, this breaks anything. Eventually. After four sprayings and some leverage with a molegrips its loose and I can lift it up. Now, remove headgear nut. Yeah, but that needs a thin spanner, and the only thin spanners I've got are too small. Never mind, I can take the cross-shaped handle off and remove the cover completely. If I can get the grub screw out. Several sprayings of PlusGas and some GT85 for variety its out. Phew. But the handle doesnt budge. I fill the room with PlusGas vapours and decide ten minutes ago would have been a good time to open the window.

Okay, handle is off, cover is off, and I am presented with a corroded misshapen lump of metal like something recently retrieved from the wreck of the Titanic. I chip off some corrosion to reveal the headgear nut. A small amount of PlusGas and the application of a 3/8 spanner and its off, revealing the crumbly remains of what used to be a washer. Part of it falls off, part of it is attached to the spindle by a small nut.

I soak the nut and spindle in a small pool of PlusGas, then attack it with a spanner and mole grips. It gives way eventually. Now I have the parts of the washer I need.

So down to B+Q where of course they have nothing that looks like the pieces I've extracted. Nor do they have anyone who can tell me if any of the other rubber and vaguely circular pieces with or without holes will act as replacement. I buy three packs of misc washers and valve seats and head home.

The valve seat on the tap looks okay, so I just decide to stick a new washer on the jumper plate. The threads on the small nut are in no fit state, so some persuasion (aka mole grips) is necessary. I put the tap all back together. Down the cellar. Mains on. Run upstairs. Its. Not. Dripping. Hoo. Ray.

Django indexed search...

Zope has its 'catalog'. Any object can register with the catalog, and it gets indexed, then code can ask the catalog for a search and get a list of objects back.

How do we do something like this in Django? There are some existing ideas out there, for example Merquery. That post also has some links to other ideas for python-based text searching. Merquery is pretty much just an idea at the moment, and the examples are SQLObject oriented. What might a Django indexed search system look like? Here's some ideas:

• Every searchable model class has a method to index or re-index instances of it in the index database
• Index updates happen automatically on save() or other updates of the instance
• If a django object is deleted, remove the entry in the index
  
• If you change the object directly with SQL, its your job to call the re-index method
• There must be a way to re-build the index from scratch. This would iterate over all indexable objects.
• Comes with methods for indexing standard fields (minimally CharField and TextField) but extensible to other fields - imagine indexing PDF files...
  

Okay, so we've built our index and hopefully it keeps up-to-date. What about searches? What would be nice?

• Ability to search over multiple classes - for example blog texts and blog comments.
• Ability to restrict search to some or all fields.
  
• Ability to use Fields in queries - so you could search for anyone with firstName Fred and lastName not Smith.
• Ability to specify an ordering - by relevance, or some date field.
• Get from the search result back to the Django object. HyperEstraier stores a user-defined URI with each document it indexes, and this would have to map to Django objects. Best I can think of at the moment is a URI which is a string concatenation of model and id.
  

Perhaps we should have an IndexedModel class that extends the usual Django Model class:

class Blog(IndexedModel):
  name=CharField()
  body=TextField()

by default this will index all fields that it knows how to index. This can be controlled with an inner class in the same way as the Admin inner class does:

class Blog(IndexedModel):
  class Indexer:
      fields=("name","body",)
  name=CharField()
  body=TextField()
  secret=TextField()
  moo=CowField()

This would index the name and body fields, but not the secret field, nor the moo field, since it doesn't know how to deal with CowField types.

I haven't yet thought how to organise the search end of things... Comments on all of this welcome!

B

Lights! Camera! Action!

Yesterday I was on a video shoot. The only lighting was a thermonuclear fusion source located about 93 million miles away, diffused by a layer of water vapour approximately 2000 metres up. The cameras were from a local videographer hire place, and the action came from a variety of waifs and strays. This was Alasdair's access ramp project!

Two years in the making, this project was born with an idea in Al's mind. He then managed to get some funding from the local council to get it made. The original plan was to do it last year, but for some reason it didn't happen. I've been badgering him about it since then. We may be a year late, but it will definitely come in under budget.

Since this was Al's directorial debut I made him a little present. I got a director's chair from Argos and stencilled 'AL - DIRECTOR' on the back. He loved it.

Filming went pretty well - Al seemed to leave most of the direction to me and the camera guys, they set up the shots and Al okayed it. I did most of the shouting of 'Places!' and 'Action!', and waving my prop crutches at the talent to get them moving at the right time. It took us a few takes to get each one right.

All I need to do now is the editing, the sound mixing, recording the voice-over, adding the graphics and titles, burning the DVDs, designing the covers....

Baz

Bicycles I Have Known And Loved

We've always had bicycles in my family. My mother has had hers since she was a girl, its an old indestructible green Raleigh bike. She saved up her money to buy it, and bought it without my grandmother knowing. Its shiny wheels made me think Dad had bought some new wheels for it, but they are stainless steel, they shine like cutlery.

The first bikes I remember were really tricycles. I think we had a couple of kiddie trikes that me and my brother and sister would ride round the garden on. Brightly coloured orange and red, with big flat metal saddles. Today's equivalent would be cheap and plastic, and not last long. These things were indestructible.

My first real bike was a hand-me-down from my big brother. It was a sky blue bike with white plastic handlebar grips and solid, not inflatable, tyres. Only one brake, the front, which was controlled by a lever that connected some rods that went to the mechanism. There was a chain drive to the rear wheel and a freewheel hub, but no gears. As well as riding it, we would tip it upside down and spin the wheels, splashing water on them in the summer sunshine of childhood.

I used to ride this bike around a lot. For a time I used to walk home for lunch because we lived so close to school. I remember cycling round the block past school at lunchtime, looking in at all the kids stuck inside! My bike was my freedom!

My brother moved on to a red Raleigh Chopper. This was something. Big chopper handlebars, saddle with a high-rise back, brakes front and rear, gear lever in the middle with 3 speeds, and a little plastic indicator that said which gear you were in. Gears. It was like a car. When my brother got it I remember having a go on it, but it was much too big for me and I couldn't reach the pedals. I felt way up high, dangerously high, it was scary, wobbly, and even though Dad was holding me I felt so unsafe.

Eventually Rob grew out of the Chopper and I grew out of the blue bike, so I got the Chopper. Now I was right for it. I took my cycling proficiency test in it. By this time we'd moved further from school, and I had to cycle there for my test. I left the bike at Nan and Grandads and walked across the park for school, then went back to get it later for the test. I passed. I used to cycle around the park a lot with my friends. Once I let a friend ride the Chopper and I was on his bike. He had zoomed off and was now round the corner. So I decided to cut the corner across the grass, but my front wheel disappeared into a hole and I went flying over the handlebars. It didn't put me off though, and I remember one day riding from our house almost all the way to Edmonton on that bike.

When I'd grown out of the Chopper, I was ready for my brother's next cast-off. This was a dark red bike with straight handlebars and a three-speed hub gear. Dad had got this from a second-hand bike shop near our new school. I must have had this bike for a few years, but there are no great memories of it. No injuries, despite this being a time in my life when I was in and out of hospital with various cuts, bruises and concussions. I managed to do those without any help from the bike. Perhaps this discouraged Mum from letting me have a new bike. Once I'd grown out of that bike, I didn't get another for a while.

Probably without Mum's knowing I had been borrowing a friend's bike for a while, a Kalkhoff racing bike with derailleur gears, toe clips, and drop handlebars. We used to have races round the streets, and once we went for a long ride up to Epping Forest, where I narrowly managed to avoid falling in a ditch by managing to get across a six-inch wide plank without falling off.

When I went to University I lived on campus for the first year but for the second two years we lived a few miles away. I would often walk to college. It was a brisk 45 minute stroll, which was one side of a C90 tape on my Walkman. I still associate certain parts of specific Pink Floyd albums with locations on the route from Staines to Egham. The last parts of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" take me back to the plod up Egham Hill.

I would occasionally borrow Bill or Julie's bikes. Bill's was a racing bike, and I could get a fair speed on that. Julie's racing bike was a bit smaller, since she was only 5ft 1in, so my knees took a bit of a hammering. Bill once ran into the back of a car and ended up on the boot. He just didnt see it.

When I left London for Lancaster I needed a bike. I bought the Kalkhoff racer from Mark and took it up to Lancaster. It was sky blue with proud German flags. Gear changers on the down tube, brakes with 'suicide levers' - those horizontal levers attached to brakes on drop handlebars.

I had to leave it outside when I lived in Wyreside Hall, and it took the weather pretty badly. When I came back from Christmas break the chain had seized up, and I had no bike oil or WD40 in the flat. So I used cooking oil. It worked well enough to get to town for some of the real stuff. I moved onto campus shortly afterwards and the bike got a lot less usage. Campus life was far too annoying, and so I moved out. The bike was back in regular use, except at this time I was a fair-weather cyclist. In the rain, I got the bus. Which in Lancaster, was quite often.

I remember one fall on this bike. Cranking up the hill to Abraham Heights, my feet slipped and over I went, cutting my leg a bit. Ouch. On another occasion I was cycling home at about 2am from a friend's house in the country when I was stopped by the police. Clearly cycling around at that time was suspicious behaviour. Actually, seeing a bus at that hour would be suspicious. They took the frame number, and checked with base to see if any Kalkhoff bikes had been stolen. One had. Different colour though. Relief. They let me on my way. When I did get home I discovered my flatmate had locked me out, and I had trouble waking him to get in. I had a vision of a neighbour ringing the police and seeing them again.

I moved to Chatsworth Road after a couple of years on Abraham Heights. We had a bike shed out the back, so I would leave my bike in the garden, go round and through the house to get the shed key, go out the back door, put the bike in the shed, lock up and go in. Of course once or twice I would get in and collapse, and forget the bike in the back. And on the third occasion, someone had spotted the bike and nicked it. I was gutted. I reported the theft to the police, and they asked me if I had the frame number. My response was that I didn't, but maybe they did after stopping me in the street that day at 2am. I didn't get the bike back.

A colleague at work was leaving soon, so I offered him 150 quid for his bike. This was another racer, I can't remember the makers name though. It was burgundy red, slightly smaller than my Kalkhoff. This was the first bike I got a cycle computer for. On my first run down the university drive, I hit 70mph. Then I fixed the sensor so it worked properly.

I moved to Coulston Road after a few months in Chatsworth Road, and here we had a garage out the back for keeping the bike. Alex the landlord kept his bike in here too. I was aware that the racer was a bit small for me, so I bought a bike that Lynne, my then girlfriend had. She fixed up the frame, painted it up a nice blue colour. I think it was a Peugeot frame underneath. White tape handlebars, 12 speed gears. This was a speed machine, thin and raw. I remember doing 40mph according to the speedo.

I'd had the blue bike for a short time, and I was keeping the red bike in the garage. On the day I took the computer from the red bike to the blue bike the garage was broken into and the red bike and Alex's bike were both stolen. The thieves had broken down the door during broad daylight and taken both. Good job it wasn't raining, or I would have got the bus and there would have been three bikes for the taken. We suspected someone had spotted the garage open at some point and spied three bikes.

The blue bike was the one I stopped being a fair-weather cyclist on. I'd broken up from Lynne, and I'd had an invite to dinner from a girl who lived in Galgate, a few miles away. It was raining. Buses didn't go that way. So I had to cycle. Turning up wet at a girl's house can be a great excuse to get your clothes off, but I think she just offered me a towel and I dried myself off as best I could. She cooked me some food, we had a good evening, I went home in the rain. We became friends, so it wasn't a total loss. From then on I discovered cycling in the rain was actually quite fun, and I think of her whenever I ride in the wet weather.

But the blue racing bike wasn't quite suited for slippy roads, so I bought a mountain bike from a second-hand ad on the university BBS. The seller had just bought a Cannondale racer, and was selling off his Emelle Cortina. It cost me 250 quid. I now had two bikes for the first time in my life. The Cortina was black, with thumb-shift gears, cantilever brakes, 21 speed gears, no mudguards, chunky tyres. I loved it, riding was so comfortable on the rough streets and up the steep hills, in the rain, the mud, the rocks. I kept the blue racer for occasional use, but soon I was just on the mountain bike all the time.

By now I'd moved out, into my own house on Mill Street, and soon after that I was seeing Julii. She lived in Norwich. Our first weekend together was a cycle treasure hunt in Norwich, so I took my bike down and we pedalled around the country side and got to know each other while looking for clues and spotting signposts. For the next couple of years we would visit each other regularly. She acquired another racing bike so I didn't have to bring mine. She painted it up with a gold snake winding round the tube.

One day out in the Norfolk countryside we were scooting along quite happily when we came to a sudden T-junction at the end of a country lane, where it met a main road. I went for the brakes and the handlebar slipped, rotated, I couldn't get to the brake levers, and there was two lanes of busy traffic going both ways ahead of me. Somehow I managed to avoid the first lane, cranked it right and ended up almost broadsiding a white van.

We found someone in the nearest village with some tools and fixed it up, but from then on that bike was known as The Death Bike!

For Julii to ride in Lancaster I bought her a Specialized Rockhopper mountain bike from a friend. It was a useful spare for me for when the Cortina was out of service. We rode together to Leeds on those bikes, loaded up with camping gear and over the hills and on the trails. I think she took the Rockhopper to Iceland, where it ran over glaciers and lava flows.

Five years with the Cortina was the longest I'd had any bike. For a year or two I had been thinking about buying myself a new bike, a brand new bike, my first ever brand new bike. Then one day on my way home the front fork on the Cortina broke, I hit the road and broke my elbow. Four weeks in plaster and three months off the bike. I fixed it up when I was fixed up, and got back on. I really wanted to get a new bike now. I thought about getting a recumbent bike, or a trike, or a speedy thing with a full fairing and joystick control. I really wanted a new bike.

It took me another six years. In October 2004 I bought a Dawes Edge Team in Bicycle Magic. 24 speed, shiny gold colour, hydraulic disk brakes, lightweight frame, front suspension. Everything I wanted. So I bought it. Since then my Cortina has been in the spare room, waiting for someone I can trust with it. I've had that bike for 12 years, and it became almost part of me. I knew its quirks and problems, I'd customized it to my taste - lights, reflectors and the massively noisy air horn. I'd tinkered with it nearly every week - fixing the brakes, replacing the bearings, hubs, gears, chain. There was very little of it left from the original bike I'd bought - just the frame and the saddle. New forks, new wheels, new cogs and chainrings. I went through Shimano shifters pretty quickly too. Brake blocks and cables - probably changed every two months. The pannier rack is held on with cable ties. The front changer needs a kicking to shift down. I'd probably done over 25,000 miles on that bike - enough to go round the world.No wonder it had a few problems.

I've now done 1000 miles on my new bike - but I have a feeling its less than that and I need to calibrate the speedo properly. The total amount of maintenance I've done on it is to pump the tyres up once and lubricate the chain a few times. I didn't really bond with it until I did that long ride in December, out into the countryside in the winter sunshine and across the ice and snow. Only after that trip - in fact only after washing the mud off an making it all shiny again - did I really feel it was my bike.

My Cortina cost me 250 and lasted me 12 years. The Dawes cost me three times that and so should last me until I am 75. I may never need to buy another bike. But I probably will!

Book Thing

So Taeko wants me to answer these questions eh? Fairynuff.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?

Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. I've not read Fahrenheit 451, but I believe the plot involves burning books. So I'd be happy to be Mein Kampf and joyfully throw myself onto the flames.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Mmmm Lara Croft... Its NOT the pneumatic breasts, she drives a Land Rover, she climbs, she's clever... we'd make a great team...

The last book(s) you bought:

First Overland, the story of the first overland trip from London to Singapore, done in 1955 by some Oxbridge types. Yes, they were in two Land Rovers.

The last book you read:

The Little Book Of Abuse, a present from Jenny on my birthday.

What are you currently reading?

My DVD player instruction manual.

Five books you would take to a desert island:

• Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [R Pirsig]


• Walden [H D Thoreau]


• Illusions [Richard Bach]


• A bird guide book appropriate to the area


• Tao Te Ching (Lao Tse)

The first three are books I can always come back to, I've read them several times each. I
keep Walden and ZATAOMM on my PDA and read them when I have a moment.

The Lao Tse would be useful, since it would take a lifetime to understand what on earth its going on about.

Who are you going to pass this stick to? And why?

Nobody, because I dont know anyone else who blogs!

Earth Day

Al and Susan had asked me if I wanted to come along to Go Ape in Grizedale Forest, and as is my way these days, I said 'yes', and then wondered what I'd let myself in for. A high-level adventure through the tree canopy, featuring rope bridges, slides, and swings. I'd never done anything much like that before. I'd been on a wobbly bridge high up in the Australian forest, but that was a proper bridge. This new adventure required harness, ropes, clips and a definite head for heights.

In the morning I found my Rainforest Action Movement t-shirt and decided it was right for the day. A day to get up there with the trees and see things how they see it. Get their point of view. I bought that t-shirt about 14 years ago, on a conference trip to Charleston. My first trip to the USA. It's mainly white with some green rainforest and splashes of colour from a tree-frog, a jaguar, a butterfly and the beak of a happy toucan. On the back a bulldozer destroys the forest. I treasure this t-shirt, and it has never been in a washing machine. I only ever hand wash it.

So with my Rainforest t-shirt and my army trousers, it was off to Grizedale. We had a little walk round the sculptures in the morning and then some lunch by the pond. At 3pm it was time to sign our lives away and for Zoe to strap us hard into our harnesses. Ouch. A quick safety talk which Zoe rattled off like she'd done it a thousand times and then it was off up the first rope ladder. And onto the first rope bridge. And down the first slide. Woooo. Landed on my arse.

Soon got into the routine for each little trip between the trees. Pulley, blue safety, red safety behind. Go. At the other end, red safety off, onto the tree, blue safety off, onto the tree, pulley off. At all times you are connected to the safety cables by at least one line. The spring carabiners they use sometimes don't close completely, so a final check is always a good idea. Once or twice I found myself checking my clips half way across, 40 feet up, standing on a thin wire or a narrow log. Pointless, if they had been unclipped it would only have scared me, and I wouldn't have been able to clip them back up anyway.

The second slide was huge. You could hardly see the pile of sand that made the landing site. Al went down first. The noise was like a tube train. Crunch - he landed backwards in a spray of sand. Susan did better, and I managed to work out how to rotate and landed nicely.

There was a bit of a traffic jam at the next zone, and we could see why. The stirrups. Ten ordinary horse-riding stirrups suspended on six-foot ropes from two parallel ropes going between the trees. You had to step from one to the other. "Dont look down" was not an option. You'd never see the stirrups! Plus you were having to stand on one foot, wobbling around, hanging on to a rope, 40ft up. The stirrups was the first challenge that rated 'black' - the most difficult rating. We got across it okay, then a few more bridges and another slide down.

The fourth section contained the barrels. You first went up a rope ladder and then ahead of you was a tunnel of barrel proportions. Al was ahead of me, and crawled through on his hands and knees, only to get a bit stuck at the far end. He had to curl up tight to get his feet out onto the platform. I decided to tacke it on my back, and went head first into the barrels, and pulled myself along by the wooden slats that made up the tunnel. At the end I hauled myself out and hanging on to the edge over the gap between the barrels and the tree, brought out my legs and made it to the platform.

The last section of the course contained the big challenge of the Tarzan Swing. Blacker than black. This was 'Extreme Black'. It was this that was causing the vast majority of yelping and screaming from some of the other people in the trees. You clipped on to a rope from a platform. Red clip, blue clip. Then on a count of three from Zoe, stepped off. A leap of faith. A six foot fall and then the rope went taut, a moment of g-force and then you're flying towards a cargo net. Splat, like a fly in a web. Hang on, as the returning rope tries to pull you back. Climb up the cargo net and over to the next platform. Clip on, let the rope fly back for the next person. After another wobbly bridge was the Bosun's Chair, a level wire with a rope for pulling yourself along. If you had enough faith in your safety, you could jump off the platform and glide on your pulley all the way to the other side. I gave it a go, and just made it. A final slide down and we were back in the car park. My anatomy was glad to get the harness off.

So then we headed off to Ambleside, for pizza at Zefferelis. There was only one choice for us, the Zeff's Rain Forest Pizza. No, this did not contain sliced bromeliads, but lots of good veggies and jalapenos. And Zeffs make a donation to a Rainforest charity for every one they sell.

Only when I got home, and went to google for something did I see it was Earth Day. It's not something that's big in this country, but the day's activities seemed strangely appropriate for it.

Rainbows

5pm, Thursday before Easter, the porter comes round the department and kicks everyone out. Its early, its still light, so I figure I can take the long way home along the river. Although its raining a bit, there's a brightness on the horizon where the sun in setting.

I used to hate cycling in the rain, so much so that if there was any rain in sight I'd get the bus. That all changed when I got invited round to a girl's house for dinner one day and it was raining and the only way to get there was by bike. Then I discovered it wasn't that bad after all.

So I set off, and down the country lanes to Galgate, through the farms and over to The Stork pub, and then onto the riverside path between fields of baby lambs and lots of lively birds enjoying the early spring sunshine.

Then with the sun low on my left I saw ahead to my right, at about 1 o' clock, part of a rainbow. I've always got time for rainbows, so I stopped. I looked back to my right, at about 5 o clock, and there was the other end of it. Two ends of a rainbow - two pots of pure gold coloured all the colours of - quite literally - the rainbow. I looked for a secondary bow, the one that forms outside the first bow. It wasn't that bright but there it was on the right-hand side, a small section of secondary bow. But something wasn't right. Secondary bows have the colours reversed - red on the inside, blue to the outside. This was red on the outside, like the main bow. And the angle was wrong. Secondary bows are concentric with the main bow. This was heading down at an angle to intersect the main bow at the horizon.

I looked behind me to the sun and found the answer. Two suns in the sunset. What I saw was a reflection rainbow, caused by the reflected sun on the water shining up and creating a bow. There's a great diagram and picture here.

I didn't have my camera so just absorbed it myself, and then noticed the real secondary bow, with its colours as they should be, outside the main bow and the reflection bow. As these bows faded I noticed the main bow grow really bright from the ground up. First just a small section of shining spectrum just above the green fields, then it grew upwards like a solid pole of colour, until it was about the height of two hands at arms length. Then it, and the other rainbows, faded away and left me.

Shortly along the track I stopped to help a cyclist whose pedal was falling off. He'd managed to wrap his chain up round his cogs and couldn't work out how to get it back. I unsnagged it from the wheels and we put the chainring back on and did it up as best we could. With my new bike being so problem-free I've stopped carrying tools so I couldn't do a proper job, but probably did enough to get him to Glasson Dock.

For some reason this felt connected to the rainbow display. It was like I'd been treated to this colourful spectacle to put me in the mood to help someone out. I don't need that kind of bribery though, I normally stop to help any cyclist with an obvious problem. But if I hadn't stopped for 20 minutes to watch the show, I probably wouldn't have been there when his chainring had fallen off. Someone knew how to best delay me!

And after fixing the bike, I got another couple of rewards in the form of two more bright rainbows before the sun headed low down and I arrived back in town with a huge smile on my face.

The Power of Crystals

Seven years ago a crystal changed my life.

Metals have a crystalline structure. Atoms line up in long rows, the rows line up in sheets, the sheets line up in solid blocks of crystalline metal. When molten metal cools to a solid these crystals grow together until the metal is a great accumulation of crystals. The size of these crystals depends on the purity and speed of the cooling process. Sometimes you can only see them under a microscope, but they are always there.

Under the surface of the paint of my bike are crystals. Seven years ago the crystals of my bike had already had maybe seven years of hammering on the road. Perhaps 8000 miles. On the Sunday after my birthday I decided to take it for a run off-road. As a treat. I found a track on the map, headed for it, and enjoyed the tricky rocky section. It was a grey day, the rocks were slightly slippery, but I enjoyed the challenge and the ride home was enjoyable.

Three days later the crystals turned against me. I was braking hard at a traffic light. Somewhere deep within the structure of the front fork a crystal failed. It split from its neighbours, and within an instant pressure built up along the fault line. A whole row of crystals split themselves away from their neighbours where they had lived happily for the past seven years. In a fraction of a second the tubing that had been my connection from the handlebars to the wheels for the past seven years was no more.

I hit the road, breaking my elbow in a very nasty way. Hospital, a couple of metal pins and three months off the bike.

Of course that's a life-changing experience. I could have been very seriously hurt. I could have lost a lot of the use of my right arm. I could have decided to wrap myself in cotton wool and not do anything dangerous or risky or exciting ever again, but I didn't. As soon as I could I got back on the bike I did, despite the discomfort, and I intentionally cycled past the place the accident happened. The next summer I went to the states on holiday, the one after that I went to Morocco, the one after that I went to Alaska and so on.

You dont have to break your elbow to change your life, you just have to realise what a fragile and precious thing it is.

Baz

Down the gym

I had a good workout at the gym yesterday. If you want to go to the gym in Lancaster you have a few choices - there's the Salt Ayre Pool and Gym, The University Sports Centre Life Fitness, the one in town above where Dixons was, or the place I go to.

Membership fee is zero. Its open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week including Xmas, New Year, and Bank Holidays. You can do cycling, running, swimming, rowing - there's always lots to do. The view is always changing so you aren't just staring at some sweaty lycra-clad butt for an hour (although that may be a bad thing). Sometimes it gets a bit warm, but other times you'll get water gently sprinkled on your head to cool you down. There's also gentle ambient music. You'll find fewer people in the showers afterwards too.

So instead of driving to the gym, just walk through the door of your house that leads straight into Mother Nature's Exercise Palace.

Descending from the mountains

Waking up at 6am. Getting on the bus at 6:30. We're at 2000m up. Mountains all around us. The sky is blue and clear, just bright enough to be starless. The moon which lit the way to the pub last night is long gone down. The peaks are still in shade. And then one distant rocky, icy triangle appears glowing and sunlit at its top. Gradually the higher summits are lit up as the sun creeps over the tops of the other mountains.

The bus descends. We all know how the Romans built straight roads, to defy nature and impose their human will on the landscape. Here in the mountains such behaviour would be stupid. You have to work with nature when it exists on this scale. Roads should follow the curves of the mountains and valleys. Occasionally man will build a tunnel, or a bridge, or some structure to help get us down the mountain, but in the main you work with the form of the land.

As the bus reaches the wide views of the lower hills, the sun is now up but applying its rays selectively. Round one corner is shade, and then its into bright sunshine. If there's no higher mountain in the way then the light floods through. From another angle, there's a peak that casts a huge shadow on a small village until late morning. And all this changes with the seasons.

By the time we reach the flatlands of the airport, the sun is high enough to shine on everything.

The Beatless

I've realised that my role in MonkeyBucket was definitely that of Ringo in the Beatles. I wrote a few songs, mainly unsubtle three-chord stupid songs. I had a few crazy fans who would say I was the best thing in the band. If anyone had asked Al if I was the best bass player in the world, Al would have unhesitatingly replied "He's not even the best bass player in Monkey Bucket".

Al was of course the Lennon and McCartney of the band, all rolled up in one. Steve was a bit George Harrison, quiet, stay at the back and play guitar.

I'm sure if The Beatles were a five-piece with saxophone I'd find a role for Jan and Bernie, but sadly the analogy breaks down. I'm sure Dave Blackwell would be flattered to be compared to George Martin, and indeed he can. Top sounds.

badger badger badger

Ummm I'm going on holiday? Haven't done that for a while, someone remind me what to do.

Oh yeah, pack a bag and get the heck out.

Skiing for a week in France, Marcus has organised it, all I need to do is get to Manchester with all my kit and enough money for the lift pass and ski hire. I think I'll be the only skier there, those guys will be boarding. Maybe there will be some skiers in the chalet I can hook up with so we can look down on those upstart boarder 'dudes' as we elegantly carve our way through the perfect powder.

Slightly concerned about my dodgy thigh muscles, ten minutes of football was enough for my right thigh to seem strained, but it was okay the next day. I'll make sure I really warm up and stretch before playing on Tuesday this week.

Minority report

Virgilio has been visiting the department for a few weeks, and he's off back to Valencia tomorrow. Last night we went out for a curry. There were 14 people there, and I was the only one from the UK. There were a few greeks, some italians, a couple of tres elegante Francaises, one portuguese and a slovenian. And me!

Most of these people spoke one other language as well as their native language and English, so half the time the greeks were talking to the spanish in spanish, or the french were talking to the slovenian in italian. I didn't dare see if anyone would understand my flakey russian!

After the curry, it was off to someone's house for a party - again I was the only brit there, the others being more spanish and a couple of germans and one non-spanish spanish guy - from the Basque country!

I wandered home at 2:30am.