clones...

When he arrived in the office the other day, my boss greeted me warmly.  After exchanging pleasantries about our respective weekends, he told me that he had been watching the football on Friday night on the BBC with his wife. Apparently, when the managers were interviewed, they had the following conversation:

"You know you keep asking me about that guy who works for me and what he looks like?"
"Yes?"
"Well, he looks a bit like that guy's older brother"

Pep Guardiola is 46 next week. He's nearly 18 months older than my older brother.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this.  I think, on balance, I'll probably take it as a compliment.

I seem to have one of those faces. I once ran past a guy standing at a bus stop with his girlfriend, and the three of us stared at each other as we all realised that me and the guy looked almost exactly the same.  Five minutes later, I turned around and we repeated the whole thing when I ran past them again.  A few years before that, I was eating in a restaurant in York when I realised that all of the kitchen staff were lined up behind the serving counter looking at me.  I scanned from left to right, taking them all in, until I got to the chef on the end who looked exactly like me.  He gave me a little wave.

...and before you say anything, if you think that about my dad, then you haven't met my dad.

what's cooler than bein' cool?

I don’t think I’ve been cool at any point in my whole life.

When I was around 8, I jumped a year at school and was generally in classes with people a year older than me. This was probably good from an academic point of view, but it meant both that I was young compared to my classmates and also generally considered a nerd because I was bright. I was made head of school at the age of 12 or 13, and I’d consider this to be the point in my life when I was the most mature. I sat exams and was awarded a scholarship to my next school and I was generally ridiculously sensible and with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.  It's been pretty much steadily downhill ever since.

At my next school, as a scholar, I was streamed with the other bright kids and was generally held in disdain at a school where academic achievement was actively frowned upon. I was only averagely good at sport, so I was generally just the tall guy in the top sets with an older brother also at the school. In fact, for much of my first couple of years at this school, people didn’t even bother to call me by my own name and just called me “Little Dave” after my brother (who is actually shorter than me anyway, dammit!). Even worse than just being in the top sets for everything with the other dweebs, I also marked myself out by being so appallingly bad at maths that I was initially in set 5 (out of 6)….So I stood out because I was the guy who was smart but comically bad at maths.  Perhaps even worse, I was also the guy in maths set 5 who finished his end of year exam with half of the 90 minutes still to go and when almost everyone else was still sweating over their answers. I handed my paper in and the teacher actually began to mark the two finished papers there and then, turning to put down the scores so far on the board.

BOY A: 48%.
SWISSLET: 98%

…You can only imagine how popular this made me with everyone else in the room, particularly when I then demanded to know what I’d got wrong.

This was a mostly single sex school, with girls arriving in the sixth form. I know.  Old school.  Generally speaking, the boys split up into three groups over this:

- high status: guys who were in one of the school sports teams and/or who were generally considered to be cool. These guys were the top of the pile, and some of the girls were drawn to them. It must have been difficult being a girl thrown into this sort of an environment, but an attachment to one of these guys could radically change your status within the school. You became cool and desirable by association.  It's hard to blame the girls that took this option.  These were the sort of guys who grew their hair, played in the first XV, smoked, had copious facial hair and played the guitar

- low status: nerds and odd-balls. In the awful social ranking that took place in the school, if you were one of the girls who were generally – and there seemed to be a general sense of these things – considered unattractive, then these were your people (and, at my school, 13 year olds thought nothing of giving girls aged 17 or 18 an audible mark out of ten, or... below a certain score... just making vomiting noises). These guys probably played the euphonium and – even within the confines of a strict uniform code – managed to look like they’d been dressed by their mum

- the rest: Neither one thing nor the other. I was definitely in this group. Definitely not cool, but also not quite the total opposite end of the scale either.  Not quite, anyway.

It feels ridiculous to even type this, but we even sat like this at the meal table…. cooler guys and “pretty” girls at one end of the table, odd-balls at the other end and me in the middle. I did my best, but aged 17, I was very poorly emotionally equipped to strike up conversation with anything so alien as a GIRL.

It’s one of my biggest regrets from this time of my life that I wasn’t nicer to people at the far end of the table / social scale. A few people I treated very badly, and I’m not really sure why. Generally, I just went with the flow of things and didn’t feel able to just take people as I found them. It sounds like a terribly limp excuse, but I essentially lacked the social capital to stand out; I was clinging on by my fingernails and didn’t feel that I had anything left over to help anyone else out.  Pretty cowardly, but there you are.  I was a teenager.

This theme continued through university too, where I always felt slightly “other” because, having been to a boarding school since the age of 7, being away from my parents and being able to go out drinking and stay up late really wasn’t that big a deal. I wasn't cool here either, but nor was I yet comfortable with myself to be entirely happy in my own skin. I don't remember university all that fondly - either my bachelors or my masters degree. Both were fine, but they just weren't the massive milestones in my life that everyone would have you believe.

And then to work.

I’m still not cool, but at least I’m old enough now not to care. I joined a choir because I like singing; I’m happy to listen to Taylor Swift, Iron Maiden and Bloc Party; “La Reine Margot” is one of my favourite films, but so is “Anchorman”.

I’ve got a framed 7” single of “Don’t it make you feel good” by Stefan Dennis on my desk at work. My team gave it to me because they caught me earworming it out loud at my desk one day.

I’m still pretty far from cool, right?

glow...

My new cycling jacket arrived today.

I'm firmly of the opinion that you can't be seen often enough when you're out riding your bike.  However indestructible you might think you are, if you get hit by something bigger than you when you're on your bike, you're basically toast.  At this time of year, with the clocks just changed, you still see a frankly terrifying number of people on their bikes in dark clothes and with either inadequate lights or no lights at all.  It's as if they were somehow taken by surprise by night drawing in so early.  "Well, it was light enough when I set off this morning..."

It's a form of natural selection.

I normally don't cycle anywhere without more than my fair share of luminous clothing, but to quote that famous scoundrel and cyclist, Lando Calrissian, I've just made a deal that will keep the Empire out of here forever.

What do you think, eh?  That was taken using the flash in a dark room.  Essentially, when I'm hit by headlights or something, I'll light up like a lightsabre.  It's one of these babies.  Not cheap, but honestly, what price do you put on your safety? Plus, you know... you get to glow like a lightsabre and/or look like a member of the Shamen c. 1991.  Sorted.

And because all bloggers are by nature narcissists, here's a picture with the lights on (with Blue Steel thrown in for free...)

Funnily enough, I actually fell off my bike on the way into work this morning, and I've got no one to blame but myself. I came across a dropped kerb at an angle and my wet wheel just slipped away from under the bike on the greasy kerb, and down I came.  

Given that the last time I came off my bike (which we DO NOT talk about), I gashed open my leg and cracked a couple of ribs, I was quite pleased to this come away with nothing more than a grazed knee and bruised hip and elbow.  And a sense of mild embarrassment, of course.

I guess visibility isn't everything.

bye bye them blues....

Today, I have been suffering from a rather middle-class injury.

I've been breaking in a new pair of festival boots, you see.  I've long since rejected wellington boots as practical footwear at a festival as large as Glastonbury.  They're all very well in principle, and obviously they're pretty handy in the muddy conditions that are often found at Worthy Farm, but they're just not designed for wearing all day or for walking the miles and miles you do as you trudge around from stage to stage.  Not to put too fine a point on it, your feet can't breathe, and by the end of the day, you might as well have been walking around barefoot in the puddles.

The solution?  Well, for me, I've found rigger boots to be perfect.  They're the kind of boots that you see on building sites; they're steel toe-capped, pretty breathable with a properly shaped insole and they're more than waterproof enough to wade around a muddy farm.  They're also classed as workwear, so they're sold free of VAT.  My old pair cost me something less than £30, but I've upgraded to something a little bit better and, well, a little bit less bright yellow.

Like any leather shoe though, they need breaking in.  Because I can't think of anything much worse than blisters at Glastonbury, I started putting in some of the hard yards over the weekend.... and now I have the scraped skin on my ankles to prove it.  With hindsight, perhaps I should have worn a better pair of socks, but as there's still plenty of breaking-in ahead, I imagine I'll have other opportunities.

22 days to go.  I might have to start wearing them around the house.

(Incidentally, it never fails to amaze me how people go to Glastonbury without boots.  When it rains, you see people panic shopping for wellies.  I once saw a delivery of boots arrive on the site under Police escort.  Honestly, I just take them every year just in case, whatever the forecast.  It's not like they take all that much room.  Actually, I wear my rigger boots even when it's nice, because they're comfortable). Then again, you also see people with little wheelie bags every year, and then, at the first sign of a bit of mud, you see the same people totally unable to move their bags because there isn't really another way of carrying those bags and the mud has clogged the wheels.  Young people, eh?)

round and round and round...

Spending an hour running around in circles. Round and round and round.  6 x 90 seconds at about one mile pace with three minutes recovery and then one last burst of 2 x 30 seconds at a bit faster than mile pace.

It hurts, too.

An hour running around in circles on the grass by the Embankment, pretty much literally going nowhere.

You'll notice that I tracked it on my garmin.

This is the kind of training you do to increase your speed and your speed endurance.  It's also the kind of training that I'm much more likely to do if there's someone there with a whistle encouraging me and telling me when to run and when to stop.  It's run over summer by the guys who organise the parkrun I attend most Saturdays, and it's completely free.  I did this last year, and although it's really hard and it hurts (if you're doing it right), it definitely makes you faster.  After four months of marathon training, it's just the ticket for shaking myself out of marathon pace and trying to get myself back up to somewhere nearer the pace I want to be running.

It's just how I like to roll on a Wednesday evening.  At least it wasn't raining this week.