give me some steam....

I'd promised myself a sauna as motivation to get myself to the gym for a swim.  I dragged myself through the water for 44 wearisome laps and then headed off try to ease some of the aches out of my poor, broken body in the heat.  No such luck: the sauna was full to bursting, so - reluctant to give up the idea of getting a good sweat on altogether - I headed into the steam room.

I'm not really a steam room kind of a guy.  The sauna in our gym isn't what it used to be, it's true.  Gone is the little stand of heated stones that you could pour water onto, to be replaced by an invisible heating element of some kind.  It's not as hot as I'd like, but it's still preferable to a steam room that, if you sit in it for more than about five minutes, seems to drain entirely of steam before refilling.  There can't be many things worse than a bunch of hairy-arsed men sat on wet plastic benches in their towels pretending that they can't see each other when they clearly can.....

Anyway.  The sauna was full and so I entered the steam room.  There was enough steam to slightly obscure my vision, but I could see that there were already four other guys in situ, two engaged in an overly-loud conversation.

"So, his teacher asked is anyone knew what the minimum wage was.  No one said anything, so he stuck his hand up and said 40k.  He was being deadly serious too."
"How did you hear about that?  Did he tell you?"
"No, the teacher told me over dinner."
"You had dinner with the teacher?"
"Not in a weird way"
"When you have dinner with your teacher, it's always in a weird way"

The steam cleared a little, so I looked up from a studious contemplation of my navel.  They were young.  Students, I assumed.  They continued.

"I saw a programme a while back that had different people on and how much money they earned."
"Oh yes?"
"Yeah.  This is John from London, he's a merchant banker and earns 90k.  This is Bob from Bradford, he's a plumber on 20k.  I remember watching it and wondering how on earth anyone could live on £20,000."
"Yeah."
"....But now I'm 20, I find myself thinking that 20k would be pretty nice"
"Absolutely.  So are you ready for Vegas?"
"Sure.  We're going to be getting three times as wasted as normal.  You know they give you a bottle of vodka in these places.  Not Smirnoff or anything.  Grey Goose....."

At this point, they sadly got up and left.  Unfortunately, they continued their conversation in the showers for the next five minutes, talking loudly enough that I could still hear them even from 20m away.

I couldn't help but notice that they'd hired towels too.  As if the gym membership (and the trip to Vegas) wasn't expensive enough.

With guys like that coming through the further education system, I'd say that the future is in good hands.  Or should I say, the International Futures Market will be in good hands.

Good grief.

On a related topic, A Level results came out today, and a colleague of mine was proudly telling me how his daughter had got ABB and would be going to Sheffield University later this year.  She's been something of an awkward teenager, I think, so I could tell that he's pretty relieved that she's going to finally be leaving home.  Sheffield is only a short hop up the motorway from here, so she'll be close enough, but also far enough away..... Apparently she was thinking of living at home, but my colleague has been busy telling her how much she'll be missing out on if she doesn't stay on campus.  Although, he also tells me that she doesn't drink....

Yeah.  Right.  Your 18 year old daughter doesn't drink? Whatever you say.

Pffff.

I wonder if there's anything else about his daughter he might be in denial about, eh?

cooler than the red dress...

I was out running at about half-ten on Saturday morning. It was my usual four-and-a-bit miles around and, like most of the runs that I’ve done over the last few weeks, it felt like a bit of a slog. I consciously tried to run a little slower than normal in an attempt to find a more comfortable pace, and at first this seemed to be working and I was able to focus on the world around me a little instead of disappearing into my own private world of pain. By the last mile, however, it felt like I was towing a caravan. My legs didn’t feel too heavy, but I felt weak right across my arms and shoulders and it was a real effort to drive myself forwards. In the last half mile, as I turned away from the river towards home, I saw something that dragged my focus away from my own misery and kept me amused all the way home.

Like any Saturday morning, the streets around where I live were filled with a fairly steady trickle of people, especially family groupings, emerging from their homes to wander into town with their kids. It was a grey, damp day with a bit of a chill in the air, and most people were wrapped up in coats and hats. I say most people, because as I ran down the street, I could see in front of me a figure wearing an outfit that was causing people to stop and stare: a blonde girl in a sheer, very short, strappy orangey-red dress. Amongst people wearing their drab coats, she stood out an absolute mile, and people were stopping to stare.

As I got closer, I saw that not only was the dress every bit as short and incongruous as it looked from 50m further behind her, but she was walking through the wet, grimy streets in bare feet, swinging her towering heels in her left hand. There was only one sensible explanation: here was someone doing the walk of shame; walking home wearing her outfit from the evening before after spending the night with someone else. There was no hiding it, and as I ran past her, I have to admit that she was walking with a bit of a spring in her step, a smile on her face and a definite swagger. She might have been incongruous in the dull light of a suburban Saturday morning, but she looked good.

Chapeau, mademoiselle. Chapeau.

Here's a question for you: do you think that the very term “walk of shame” reinforces gender sexual stereotypes?  I mention this as I was trying to think if a man walking home under the same circumstances would have provoked a similar response.  As they would likely be dressed differently, I suppose not.  As a man, you don’t tend to wear clothing that would look as jarringly incongruous the morning after… a tuxedo is likely to be from the evening before, but it’s hardly as revealing, and a skinny shirt and a pair of shiny shoes is hardly in the same ballpark as a micro-skirt and stilettos, is it?  It was probably the clothing that attracted the attention to this girl, but was there an implicit,  gender-based judgement too?

If there was, then she looked gloriously impervious to it….

shining light....

The clocks moved forwards this weekend and British Summer Time began. It never fails to amaze me how many people think it's suddenly worth remarking now how much lighter the evenings have become, as though shifting the clocks forward by an hour has absolutely nothing to do with that. Still, there's no denying that the longer evenings are welcome.

As I was driving home at about 7pm last night, the streets seemed to be filled with runners, many of them women.  There are always a few runners around each evening, for sure, but the lighter evening seemed to have dragged an unusual number out of their winter hibernation.  I actually quite like running in the cold and dark of winter, but then I've also started running wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo "Punish Me", so perhaps that's just me and everyone else prefers the warmer weather.  Weirdos.

Longer, lighter, warmer evenings are clearly much more conducive to getting your trainers on after work and heading out for a run.... if only because the lighter skies mean that it's probably safer too, which would explain why there seems to be more ladies out for a jog. Another possible explanation is that we're entering Race for Life season, the series of 5km runs just for women organised by Cancer Research UK to raise money for their work. There are a couple in Nottingham this year, but the first one is in May, and it seems eminently possible that some of the new joggers out on the roads are starting their training for that. Hey, whatever works... not only do these races raise enormous amounts of money for a great cause and help to remember the victims and survivors of cancer, but if it gets people out and running, then that's good too, right?

I managed to find time to go out at lunchtime today. I've felt pretty fatigued after a long weekend and my legs haven't entirely felt as though they belong to me so far this week, but it was a beautiful warm, sunny day and I was happy to get away from my desk for an hour. I actually ran pretty quickly too, coming in at an average pace of 8.01 minutes per mile over the whole 4 miles, dipping under the 8 minute mile barrier on miles 1 and 4 (I always seem to dip in mile 2... no idea why).

It hurt like hell, and it was actually quite hot, but it's nice to know that you're alive once in a while (and...luckily for me... I don't suffer from Uhthoff's phenomenon: the worsening of neurologic symptoms in multiple sclerosis when the body gets overheated from hot weather, exercise, fever, or saunas and hot tubs. Could you imagine a life without saunas?)

haters....

This afternoon, my boss asked me to have a quick look online for an article that was published over the weekend focusing on self-checkout tills in British stores.  Dull subject for a newspaper expose, no?  It's hardly up their with the fake sheikh's finest, is it?  Anyway, it apparently said that ours were the worst in Britain. As we are the team that is responsible for the development of most of the kit we have instore, including the self-checkout tills, we were naturally interested to have a look at this, so I did a quick piece of googling.

I didn't find that article, but I did find another that caught my eye as it mentioned our company and touched on another area that we look after. Apparently, the police have stopped prosecuting shoplifters, and so big companies like ours now have to take alleged offenders through the civil courts to pursue £150 of damages. It wasn't really a very interesting article, and neither was it the one I was looking for, so I was about to move on when the comments caught my eye... the first comment in particular:

"In some ways some countries have the right idea... cut off the hands and make the shame the families....dam we not allowed to that with Human Rights, what about putting them in stocks and us having a fun day humiliating them... dam again Human Rights what about just stopping any benefits and letting them starve....Human Rights? So what about just finding out where they live, and letting the neighbourhood know they have a thief..after alll why stop at shops... the old lady or gentlemen on their own are a equal target to these low life trash...who ar to bloody idle to work for a living like the rest of us...spoilt brats who the earth would be better off without"

Well, thanks for those considered views, Pat in Norfolk (and, amidst all other errors of spelling and punctuation, I love the capitalisation of "Human Rights"). There were 95 other views published too, but as I assumed they were likely more of the same, I left them to boil in their own vitriol.

Have you guessed the newspaper yet?

As someone remarked the other day, if Chris Morris were to invent a newspaper, I'm pretty sure it would look exactly like the Daily Mail.  It's so ridiculous, it must be a satire, right?

there's demons closing in on every side....

I don't do trick or treating.

I'm aware that it's popular in other parts of the world, but it is something that I don't much care for.  I'm not so stupid as to see this as a purely American thing that - like McDonalds - has slowly been absorbed by the rest of a jealously admiring world. Whatever many (although I'm sure not all) Americans might care to think, it's a tradition that's actually been around for centuries.

Oh sure, they've been doing it in the USA since at least the 1950s, but it's certainly not their own idea: it has its roots in the middle ages in the practice of "souling", where children would go door to door singing and saying prayers for the dead in return for soul cakes.  These cakes were supposed to represent a soul being freed from purgatory.  Even the idea of dressing up and going around people's houses at this time of year in the hopes of getting food or money isn't new, and has been around in Scotland as "guising" since the nineteenth century.  So it's not an originally American tradition and nor is it particularly pagan in origin, as lots of people assume (at the very most, it's a pagan festival that has long since been co-opted by Christianity)

The current Hallowe'en tradition of demanding money with menaces does appear to be a US import though.... a British custom that has now taken on a distinctly American flavour.  As recently as 1986, the House of Lords felt the need to debate the "recently imported trick-or-treat custom of demanding money on threat of playing a nasty trick, now being used by youths to obtain money from old people and others".  The BBC described it in 2007 as a "...not particularly welcome import, the Japanese knotweed of festivals".  Certainly, when I was growing up, there was pretty much no such thing over here.  I used to make a Guy for Bonfire Night, but trick or treating simply wasn't on my radar at all, for all that I loved Peanuts and obviously believed fervently in the Great Pumpkin.

I didn't want to have anything to do with trick or treating at all this year, and was fully prepared for an evening spent ignoring any knocks on the door.  C. is a more generous spirit, however, and she had taken the trouble to prepare for any callers by buying a packet of Hallowe'en themed cauldron sour sweets (with no added colours, flavours or preservatives, naturally).  Fine.  As long as it was understood that I wouldn't be opening the door to any of the little bastards.

The weather put the dampeners on most potential callers, I think, but we were paid a visit by one group of kids.

"TRICK OR TREAT!!"

I remained glued to the sofa, but listened with increasing amusement as C. answered the door and the lead trick or treater was offered the bag of sweets.

"Here you go"
"I can't eat them.  They're not halal...."

Ah.  A muslim trick or treater.  What a beautiful, inclusive, multicultural world we live in.

yours sincerely, wasting away....

Perhaps it's my imagination, but at some point in my time away from work, I realized that I looked significantly older. I don't really think of myself as an especially vain man, and I've been balding and greying for at least a decade without giving it all that much thought, but all of a sudden, I looked in the mirror and felt as though I had reached some kind of a tipping point: the odd grey hair had become very definite grey flashes, there were now several white patches in my stubble, and the grey hairs on my chest now had a beach-head and seemed to be massing before an advance.

I also am suddenly aware that it's only a matter of time before I'm going to need reading glasses too. As my surgeon warned me, this is something that short-sighted people don't really notice - you can always look under your glasses to read small text that you otherwise can't focus on.  It's now been 2 years since my eye operation, and I've really noticed the change in my ability to focus on things very close to me. I'm at about 20cm now (which is fine), but I'm reluctantly resigning myself to the certain knowledge that one day my arms won't be long enough.....

Well, perhaps that's what taking 9 months off work will do for you.  It seems that it was only my job that was preventing my an even faster descent into decreptitude. In no way did it cross my mind that it could possibly be related to all the additional quality time that I was spending with my lovely wife.

How could you think such a thing?

I'm 36 years old. What else did I expect to happen as I got older? Why should I be different to anyone else?

As I'm never likely to risk my sexual function for the apparent regrowth of my hair, rogaine was out of the question (who the hell thinks that's a trade off worth making?).   I'm also unlikely to reach for a packet of Just For Men. The grey chest hair is a bit of an affront, but I don't actually mind the grey flashes everywhere else (and no, I've not found any THERE yet, although I must confess that I'm not obsessively looking....) As for the reading glasses I will likely have to wear. Well, so be it.

I guess I'll just have to live with the visible signs of ageing. Well, that and stepping-up my already rigorous facial skincare regime, obviously (it was pointed out to me when I was diving in Australia and wondering why my mask was leaking, that I had deep canyons on either side of my nose heading down towards the edges of my mouth that were channeling water in. They're not wrinkles, they're laughter lines, right?)

I've worked with lots of people in my office for several years, and one of the things that I have noticed since my return is how some of them - particularly the ones around my own age - have visibly aged in the nine months since I last saw them. It's not that everyone looks older or anything, it's just that some people look distinctly older since I last saw them. Of course, when you see people every day, you don't tend to notice the gradual changes that happen to everyone: people gain weight, go grey and lose their hair all the time, it's just that normally you see it happening so slowly that you barely notice. I've returned to work to see people suddenly (to me) looking a bit older, a bit greyer and a little more worn-out than when I last saw them.

I imagine they're saying the same about me. At least they've got the excuse that they've been at work, right?  I've been travelling around the world and look at me....

Being slightly wistful about the ageing process is probably par for the course, but trying to do anything much about it is to be like King Canute trying to arrest the flowing of the tide.  Pah. Give me age and wisdom anytime. I wouldn't be nineteen again for all the tea in China. I didn't know what to do with hair when I actually had it.

Besides, now I'm old, grey and married, I'm apparently much more interesting to the opposite sex (so my wife tells me.  I can't say that I've noticed). Where were they when I was younger and might have had a use for them?  Tell me that.

Ah well, in the midst of life we are in death, etc.

ride it....

I think, without a shadow of a doubt, the single most disturbing thing I have ever seen was one of these:

Perhaps I should explain: it's a machine that mimics the movements of a horse so as to apparently act as a core trainer by maximising the strength of the core body's abdominal, oblique and lower back muscles.   Now, that I don't have a problem with. I choose to get my exercise elsewhere, but I have got no beef at all with anyone who wants to use one of these to get themselves back into shape. Whatever works.

What I found disturbing was not the machine itself so much as the person using the machine. It's an image that I will surely take to my grave, burned forever onto my brain.

Picture the scene: I am on the escalator on my way to the top floor of my local John Lewis. I'm there to have a look at the electrical stuff, but it's also home to menswear, luggage, the shop's restaurant and the sports and games department. Amidst all of the running and cycling machines, as is not uncommon in big department stores at the weekend, they had employed someone to sell a specific set of equipment. Their job is to spend all day by a machine, showing passers-by how it worked, explaining the benfits and perhaps letting them have a go. This particular person, a lady perhaps in her early-40s and a slightly unlikely shape for someone demonstrating fitness equipment, wasn't talking to any customers. Oh no.....Oh, how I wish she had been talking to customers.....She was sat astride the machine in her overly tight black leggings, legs-akimbo and with a disturbingly vacant expression on her face as the machine rocked her rhythmically backwards and forwards and she ground her crotch into the saddle.

This was a saturday lunchtime and the shop was absolutely rammed with people to-ing and fro-ing up and down the escalators with their families as they went about their shopping. Not that this woman noticed any of us; she was lost entirely in a world of her own and we might as well have not been there at all. It felt like we were all intruding on a very private moment.

...like this, only so NOT like this.

It was horrific.

I don't think I'll ever be able to forget it.

I mention this as my office was kind enough to hold a little pavillion session at lunchtime today to showcase some of their "New Year, New You" type products... you know, low fat sandwiches & crisps, vitamins, drugs that make you shit fat help you lose weight.... that kind of thing.

Oh, and they also had one of these things.....with someone aboard, absent-mindedly grinding their pelvis rhythmically into the saddle as the machine gently rocked her backwards and forwards towards ecstasy.

Perhaps by marketing this as a fitness machine, the company have missed their market?

....or more likely they haven't missed it at all.

and we cry when they all die blonde.....

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;"

Ah, probably the most famous Shakespearean soliloquy to be delivered by a man whose very name was a toilet joke. What Shakespeare doesn't go on to say in that speech is that, not only are men and women merely actors, but that in our own heads, we're all playing Hamlet: we're the stars of our own dramas and everyone else in our lives are merely the supporting cast. If you're the star, then the absolute most that everyone else can hope for is that they might get to play Gertrude, Horatio, Ophelia or even Claudius in the drama of your life. More likely though, most people will end up playing the third spear carrier on the left. We Hamlets define the world by how it impacts on us, and not the other way around. When something happens, or when someone does something, we will immediately view it through the lens of how it affects us. Somewhat annoyingly for us Hamlets, then, the supporting players in all our lives are often played by terrible hams; the kind of actors who take it upon themselves to try and steal some of our limelight and to attract attention away from us, the stars of our own productions. It almost as though they thought this play was about them.

Surely this Hamlet complex is the only way to explain why so many people seem to be so wrapped up in themselves and their own lives and so insensitive to the needs of others. I'm sure we all see countless examples every day of our lives: the people who jump the traffic lights, as though red lights somehow don't apply for them and that it's okay for you to have to wait at a green light until they have gone through; the guy in the pool who ploughs up and down the lane you're sharing at a speed of his choosing, showing no consideration at all to your needs or the speed at which you're swimming, wrapped up only in his own requirements; the people you work with who will happily take credit but are quick to duck responsibility and to apportion blame; the guy who elbows his way to the front of the bar queue and gleefully gets served in front of you.... life sometimes seems to be a succession of little acts of rudeness; death from the thousand cuts of someone else's lack of consideration for another human being, or at least by their decision that their own needs are more important. Well, when you're the star of the show, it's you who should be getting the plaudits. Why worry about the little people?

Only life isn't really like that, is it? As Shakespeare goes on to say in the same soliloquy:

"And one man in his time plays many parts,"

He's referring, of course, to the seven ages of man; our journey from "mewling and puking" infant to decrepit old age, "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything". What he might also add is that, whilst we might all be playing Hamlet in the dramas of our own lives, we're also simultaneously playing all of the other parts in other people's dramas. You might be Polonious to your brother, Rosencrantz to your boss and the third spear carrier on the left to your neighbours....Everyone might be Hamlet in their own head, but we'd do well to remember that we're no more than a supporting character in everyone else's. To mix my metaphors, wouldn't we do better to think of life as a team game? No matter how good a Ronaldo or a Kaká might be, no matter how inspirational their individual brilliance on the football pitch might be, they still can't win a game of football entirely on their own. Even people in the apparently individual pursuits like tennis or golf will still rely heavily on their own support teams if they are to succeed; their coaches and their caddies, their physiotherapists and their psychotherapists.... even their families and friends.

As a contemporary of Shakespeare, John Donne, wrote:

"No man is an island, entire of itself
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
As well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
It tolls for thee."

I like the idea that we're all connected simply by being human. We're all in it together, aren't we? Anything we can do to help make all of our rides a little easier have got to be worthwhile, hasn't it? Isn't that a much nicer way to think about the world and the way we relate to each other? We're all ultimately in the same show and not just the stars of our own matinees. Wouldn't it be nice if we all tried to behave a bit more like it?

Of course, the somewhat inconvenient problem with this argument is that I'm not so selfless myself as to be beyond reproach. By railing against traffic light jumpers, swimming pool hogs, unscrupulous colleagues, queue jumpers at the bar and the like, I'm merely casting my own judgement upon them all; a judgement based entirely upon how the behaviour of those people has impacted upon me and how it has inconvenienced me. By acknowledging that fact, am I not also acknowledging that I am guilty of casting myself as Hamlet?

As Shakespeare also said:

"A pox damn you, you muddy rascal, is that all the comfort you give me?"

Pah.

deep in the woods we're undiscovered....

There was a naked man in the changing rooms at the gym yesterday. Now, obviously a certain degree of nudity here is normal as, by its very definition, a changing room is a place where people get changed, and when people get changed, there is that inevitable moment of transition from one set of clothes to the other when you will be essentially starkers, give or take a pair of socks. There's also a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing to the showers, although actual nudity at the showers is generally confined to the actual shower cubicles themselves, with most people either wearing a pair of trunks and on their way to the swimming pool, or firmly wrapped up in their towel. Fleeting nudity, in this context, is tolerable. Brazen nudity, however, is not. You can probably get away with walking to the showers with your towel over your shoulder, but if you don't have a towel with you, then frankly you're just walking about in the buff, and you might just as well have your hands on your hips and your foot on the changing benches as we all try not to catch your eye. Or an eyeful.

I'd just been for a swim, and was just coming down the steps from the pool and on my way into the sauna when I caught sight of this guy: he was walking down the corridor to the showers, butt naked and without a towel, striding purposefully in my direction. Even in an environment where bare flesh is fairly commonplace, his total nudity stood out a mile. Naturally, I frowned my disapproval and turned a sharp right into the sauna as he turned the other way into the showers. I was alone in the sauna, and so, without really thinking about it, I selected a seat on the topmost bench facing the glass door and the shower cubicles beyond. This ill-considered seat selection meant I had a grandstand view when the naked man emerged from his shower cubicle. He had no towel, of course, so he proceeded to attentively and unhurriedly smooth the water from his body. From his whole body. His whole body. Now, I wouldn't do this in the privacy of my own bathroom, nevermind in the middle of a busy gym changing room. Still, each to their own, I suppose..... except now he walked straight towards me and pushed open the door into the sauna.

Now, I know that in scandinavia it is commonplace for people to be completely nude in saunas. I've been to Finland a couple of times, and I know that this is the way things are done and have done it myself. The thing about that is that it is considered ill-mannered and unhygienic to do this unless you take in some paper-towelling that you then sit on. In the UK, at least in my gym, we tend to wear our trunks or our towels when in the sauna. Well, it has wooden benches, so the idea of someone's naked arse and sweaty undercarriage sat on a porous surface like that is pretty horrible, isn't it? Anyway, naked guy came into the sauna, but instead of sitting down quietly, he shut the door and then, still standing up, he pressed his back against the wooden wall next to the door. That was odd enough, but he then proceeded to move his body slowly against the wall, as though he was scratching his back, or, heaven help us, his arse. He did this for about thirty seconds, and then sat down. After another thirty seconds, he then began squirming around again, and this time it was impossible to shift the impression that he was trying to ease some discomfort by rubbing his naked backside against the wooden seating in the sauna..... After about a minute of this, I got up and left.

I don't know how often that sauna gets cleaned, but I'll bet it isn't ofen enough, and I'm not sure that my swimming trunks are protection enough against whatever is being ground into those wooden benches in the sauna. I'm also pretty sure that the shower gel in the showers is not disinfectant enough to provide any real protection either.

There are worse things to catch than swine flu, you know.

Ick.

territorial pissings....

If you'll pardon the lowering of the tone (and there are very few places where what I'm about to say wouldn't lower the tone, and I'm pretty sure that the ones where it doesn't are not really places that people like you or I would tend to frequent)..... it never fails to amaze me quite how disgusting the gents toilets can be.

I'm not talking about those dank squat affairs that you still occasionally find in places like rural France, South America or Africa. Oh no. When you're travelling somewhere remote, a disgusting toilet is pretty much par for the course. After all, hard though it may be to believe, there are still many toilets in the world which aren't systematically cleaned on an annual basis, nevermind on a twice daily basis, and one or two don't have access to fresh running water. I know! No, I'm talking here about the toilets in the head office building of a large, very well known and, you'd imagine, pretty cleanly company. People around here don't generally wear flip-flops and sarongs and have large back packs and horrible dirty white man's dreadlocks; they have neatly cut hair and tend to wear stiff-collared shirts, smart trousers and, more often than not, a tie. There isn't a shortage of clean, running water here. In fact, we have hot and cold running water on demand, and all of the toilets around here are connected to the sewage main and have flushes and everything. There's soap too, and occasionally those little pineapple cubes of bleachy freshness.

So how come they're so disgusting? And they are, let me tell you, utterly revolting. What does it say about the men who work here that we allow these toilets to get into such a state, even when they are all cleaned twice a day? I can understand that, how to put this, sometimes things can come out at an unexpected angle, but I fail to see how that would mean that you might miss a urinal entirely and spray the products of your mecturation all over the wall tiles and the floor. And why spit your chewing gum out into the drain? And am I the only man who doesn't feel the urge to pick my nose whilst standing at the urinal? Is there some kind of unspoken rule that the product of this nasal exploration should be smeared onto the wall next to where you stand?

It's even worse in the cubicles. Is it too hard to lift the toilet seat up before having a piss, or is it no big deal to spray your mark all across the seat and the floor? Is it really? And if you are planning a, shall we say, longer stay, is it really asking too much that you might consider flushing, or even that you might pay a bit of attention to where you are leaving your deposit (no, trust me, the seat is not the right place)? Is it wrong of me to expect that anyone leaving a cubicle might pause to wash their hands with the soap provided before heading back out into the office where they presumably then smear their microscopic particles of shit across everything that they touch? Or that, actually, a small smattering of water sprinkled on your hands after pissing is not really the same thing as spending an extra ten seconds doing the whole thing properly and using a dash of soap? Hell, when the people who do wash their hands throw their used hand towels onto the floor rather than into the bin, perhaps I should be grateful that more people don't wash their hands, else I might not be able to open the door to get inside in the first place.

Quite how people feel able to wash their coffee mugs in here, I really don't know.

Ick.

no more champagne and the fireworks are through....

Judging from the volume of cars crammed into the car park this evening, the credit crunch is apparently having little impact on my gym. It seems that the desire to shed a few pounds around the waist currently still outweighs the need to save a few pounds in the pocket. Only a week ago, in the gap between Christmas and New Year, I had the whole pool to myself, but tonight I was forced to share my lane with three other people. Luckily for me, they were all reasonably considerate swimmers, and I was able to snuffle my way through 42 mildly cold-ridden, ache-y lengths of the pool.

I think it's great that people have made New Year's resolutions to be healthier, even if it means that going to the gym is going to be even more of a pain in the arse for the next few weeks than it is normally. I do the majority of my exercise outdoors, either running or playing 5-a-side football, and I only really go to the gym to use the pool. I might have to wrap up warm against the cold, with a whole pile of hats, gloves, thermal tops and lycra leggings especially for that purpose (calm yourselves), but I won't be spending any time queuing up to use any of the machines in the cardio theatre with sweaty people in ill-advised, overly tight sports kit.

I hope I don't sound snobby, as everybody has to start somewhere, and not so very long ago (well, alright....a decade ago), I was several stone heavier and very much one of them.

Good luck to them, I say.

I hope that for many of them it's the start of a healthier and perhaps happier way of life. Certainly, I think, it's a healthier way of losing weight than the nasty bout of campylobacter that carried away a hefty chunk of my bodyweight inside 10 days and did something to my insides that meant that the weight never came back......

The proof of the pudding, I think, will be how many of them I'm still swimming around come March.

Happy New Year everyone.

Me? I've made no New Year Resolutions, but I have been inspired to start something on the basis of a dream I had last night that featured me having a conversation with Stephen King in my kitchen.... I woke up at 4am and knew what I had to do. It's nothing special mind, but when Stephen King visits you in a dream and suggests you do something, what else can you do? I don't even like the man's books very much, but frankly I'm scared of him and I don't want him to be angry next time he dreamwalks into my head.

it's a fashion that we follow that we should be forgetting...

You know when you walk past someone that you vaguely know, and just at the last possible moment they don't just smile or say hello or something, but they also ask you how you are? They can't seriously be expecting an answer as you both continue to walk in opposite directions, and yet how often do you find yourself stopping, turning around and replying to their ever more distant back, perhaps even going so far as to call out after their back to ask how they're doing? The fact that they keep moving says to me that they're only asking out of pure reflex and they aren't really interested in how you are at all. With that in mind, the logical thing to do is probably to give a quick answer and keep walking, or even to just keep walking. In fact, a smile is probably enough, but no one wants to seem rude, do they? Once the question has been asked, it sort of requires an answer, and conversational norms also dictate that you should follow up your answer with the same polite inquiry. The fact that the other person is now several hundred yards away from you and likely won't even hear you asking is neither here nor there. It's just the way things work.

I sometimes find myself having terrible dilemmas when I see people that I vaguely know standing in a queue that I'm about to join. If I join the line behind them, then small talk is inevitable because horrible, awkward, forced small talk is clearly much better than blanking someone and pretending that they're not there. This happens quite a lot at work, and I have to say that I will quite often delay my coffee for 5 minutes just to avoid a mildly uncomfortable social situation. It's ridiculous. I know it's ridiculous, but there you go.

I don't think I'm very good at small talk. I think I understand the unwritten rules on paper, if you see what I mean, but I have a nasty feeling that my practical application of the theory is woefully lacking. I had to get in work early the other day, so after my first meeting, I joined the breakfast queue to get a bagel. A colleague of mine that I vaguely know joined the same queue moments later. Hiding was not an option, so I resigned myself to the fact that conversation of some kind was now inevitable. I've worked with this person before, so my opening move was a thin smile of acknowledgment. Often that's enough, and far better than a total blank, but I rather think she saw this as encouragement.

"Hello. How are you?"

My usual gambit in conversations like these is to make some weary comment about how near / far we are from the weekend. A shrug and a resigned "It's Monday" will be taken by most people as being a more than adequate response that somehow conveys lots without actually saying a great deal. Similarly, remarking that "things can never be that bad on a Friday" somehow expresses how drab a week in the office is, but also hints at the approaching nirvana of the weekend and all the exciting and possibly nefarious things you have planned. Most importantly of all, neither phrase exactly invites more conversation on either side unless you want it to. A chuckle and a raised eyebrow is more than sufficient. Thus your small talk obligations can be easily fulfilled with one short sentence. This particular day was a Thursday morning though, and still quite early: the weekend still felt a bit far off to discuss. Hm. I tried to keep things simple.

"I'm fine thanks"

I'm aware that the norm here would be to ask my partner in this reluctant conversation how she was in return. I didn't want to leave that door open, so I didn't ask. Is that rude? Do I have to return her feigned interest in me with a feigned interest of my own? Sadly, she clearly expected more from the conversation and persisted.

"Did you have a good weekend?"

Wow. Asking about my weekend on a Thursday? Her grasp of the rules that govern small talk seemed tenuous at best.

"Yes thanks."

Again, no expansion on why my weekend was good and no polite rejoinder to inquire about hers.

"Anything planned for this weekend?"

Sure, the long bank holiday weekend was in sight and this was perhaps a valid inquiry, but she clearly wasn't taking her conversational cues from my increasingly monosyllabic responses. Damn her eyes.

"Nothing much. I've got friends coming up."

There you go. There's some actual information about my weekend. Are you happy? Eh?

"Oh, for the whole weekend?"

Oh for Christ's sake!

"No. Just on Saturday evening"

Luckily, before she could extract from me the vital information that they were coming up around about 7pm and that we were thinking of having a barbeque, her toast appeared and she tottered off to get a coffee, leaving me to wait a few beats longer than necessary when picking up my bagel to make sure that she had actually gone before I went to order my own Americano.

The funny thing is that she actually seems to be a perfectly pleasant person, and I hadn't really set out not to talk to her or anything... I just wasn't really interested enough to have a nothing conversation with her, and ultimately I just wasn't very interested in knowing how she was and what she had planned for the weekend.

Does that make me a bad person? It certainly makes me feel a little socially inadequate.

down by the river....

C. and I went out for a lovely walk up on the moors around Winster in the Peak District on Sunday. It had been pouring with rain when I first woke up, but we decided we would go anyway and, as luck would have it, the weather cleared up nicely around lunchtime. We had originally planned a pub lunch in one of those proper Free Houses that seem to abound in the Peaks, but we were running a little later than planned and decided to just grab something in one of the towns we passed through en-route to the starting point of the walk.

Ripley is a dump, so obviously we weren't going to stop there, and we didn't want to take a chance on there being anything much available in the village of Winster itself, so we stopped in Matlock Bath. This is a small town nestled next to the river in the Derwent valley, with the main street tracking alongside the river as it passes through. It's pleasant enough country, and quite pretty to look at, I suppose, but as we drove into the town itself, I was a little taken aback by what I saw there.

Bearing in mind that we are right, slap-bang in the middle of the country, I was a touch surprised to find that Matlock Bath appears to be rather bizarrely modelled on the classic British seaside town. It's like a mini-Blackpool and the high street is absolutely jam-packed with fish and chip shops (there are at least ten of them over a 400m long strip), amusement arcades, sweet shops selling ice cream, candy floss and rock....hell, they even have some illuminations and make a real thing during 'the season' of having a 'Venetian' parade of boats (which seems all the more remarkable given that the river Derwent at this point is -at most- about 10m wide and is shallow enough that you can see the bottom throughout).

I couldn't help but wonder how this had happened to this little town in Derbyshire, so I looked it up. For much of the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth centuries, it was customary for members of the aristocracy to spend their summers on a Grand Tour of Europe's great cities. As the political situation in Europe worsened and it became unsafe to travel, it became fashionable to visit attractions within England. Warm springs had been discovered in Matlock Bath in 1698, and they gradually became more and more popular as a destination until they were finally given the ultimate seal of approval by a visit from Queen Victoria in 1831. Lord Byron was apparently so taken with them that he compared the town favourably with Switzerland, leading to the nickname "Little Switzerland". Well, the chocolate may be more Cadbury's than Lindt, but I bet you can't get a really good bit of battered cod with proper malt vinegar in Geneva either....

I think it's fair to say that the clientèle has changed a little since then: not to put too fine a point on it, when we passed through yesterday, the streets were crammed with the kind of people who looked like they might like to holiday in Blackpool with a knotted handkerchief or a 'Kiss Me Quick' hat on their heads. Even as they took in the rarified Derbyshire air in their flammable man-made fabrics, more often than not these people were simultaneously sucking the life out of a cigarette and then exhaling a cloud of smoke all over the infant they held in their arms. I know that sounds snobby, and I'm sure many of them were very nice (the guys in the chippie we went into were incredibly helpful and friendly, for starters) but I'm just saying what I saw yesterday. The famous hot springs that started it all, incidentally have long since been turned into an aquarium and the town has taken its maritime pretensions to the logical extreme by having a lighthouse built.... only in this instance it doesn't so much save mariners from crashing into the rocks as supply southern fried chicken to passers by.

Honestly, it was thoroughly bizarre.

Winster, on the other hand, was a lovely village. Not only is it fantastically situated with a view across the peaks and onto some open moorland, but it was also blessed with cluster of really lovely old stone cottages and - the jewel in the crown - a proper pub. "The Bowling Green" is a free house that serves proper beer sourced from within a 25 mile radius of the pub and serves home-cooked food sourced from local shops. Sadly, I was only stopping for a quick pint before heading home, but it was a lovely pub and I will definitely be returning to have a meal by the fire and sheltered behind those three foot thick brick walls.

I'll maybe look to miss the morris dancing though.

it's gettin' hot in here (hot)....

After I've dragged myself inefficiently up and down the swimming pool fifty-two times, I like to reward myself by flopping out in the sauna for ten minutes or so. Generally, I'll just sit there and try not to think about how hot I feel until I start to feel that sticky-outy bit just on the opening of my ear (what is that called?) starting to burn. If there's a paper in there, I'll read it. What I won't generally do is strike up a conversation with anyone who happens to be in there. If someone talks to me, then I'll answer, but to be honest, it's not really somehwere that I want to be making new friends. On the whole I prefer to make friends with people who aren't naked. Well, most of the time anyway. I am, however, quite often entertained by other people's conversations in the sauna. Yesterday was no exception.

Bloke 1 walks into the sauna and spots a guy that he knows. "Hey there, how's it going? Got a job yet?"

Bloke 2: "Well, I'm doing agency work at the moment, but I've got 5 interviews lined up next week."

Bloke 1: "That's pretty good going. You're bound to get one of those."

Bloke 2: "Yeah, finger's crossed. I tend to do pretty well once I get to the interview stage. I've got a job offer on the table already, but I'm holding out for one of these other jobs."

Bloke 1: "Yeah? More interesting are they?"

Bloke 2: "Yeah. I want a job that doesn't have any responsibility at all, if I can help it. I want to enjoy what I do, do my hours and get home. I don't want to get wrapped up in any politics."

Bloke 1: "I know what you mean. So what have you been doing then?"

Bloke 2: "Agency work for Derby Council. Last week I was out cutting people's grass. It's tiring work, but it's a decent job."

Bloke 1: "Right"

So far, the conversation was only mildly interesting, mainly in the sense that it took my mind off the fact that I was slowly cooking myself and that the rotator muscles in my right arm were hurting from the swim. We were about to take a conversational left-turn though.

Bloke 2: "Mind you. You do meet some funny people on this job."

Bloke 1: "Yeah?"

Bloke 2: "I knocked on a door the other day, and this woman opened it wearing only a bra and knickers."

Bloke 1: "How old?"

Bloke 2: "Well, that doesn't matter as I wasn't interested anyway"

Bloke 1: "Yeah, but how old was she?"

Bloke 2: "Mid-Forties maybe. No - late thirties."

Bloke 1: "Okay then!"

Bloke 2: "She asked me in for a cup of tea"

Bloke 1: "And you said.....?"

Bloke 2: "No thanks love, I'm here to cut the grass."

Bloke 1: "Well, you are taken I suppose"

Bloke 2: "It was the first cut of the year though, and it was a bit damp, so I had to tell her that I wouldn't be able to cut the grass back too much. You know what she said to that?"

Bloke 1: "....."

Bloke 2: "Oh, I know what it's like when it's all wet down there. Are you sure you don't want to come in for a cup of tea?"

Bloke 1: "Bloody hell"

Bloke 2: "I know. No thanks love, I'm only here to cut the grass. You get loads like that."

So apparently things like that DO actually happen. Perhaps in the best traditions of Monty Python, she has a spare room filled with council workers who came to mow the lawn....

My ears were starting to burn, so at this point, like all good reporters, I made my excuses and left.

push it real good....

I went to the gym this evening.

I suppose this isn't really all that remarkable an event in that I go to the gym at least two or three times every week, but this was different: I didn't just go for a swim, oh no. I went to the gym and I got changed into some lycra and I went upstairs and I actually used some of the scary machines.

I used to do this all the time, and in fact I have been member at this gym for something like seven or eight years. I've never been particularly into weights (as witnessed by the punyness of my arms), but for at least the first five years of that time, I could regularly be found in what I believe is called "The Cardio Theatre", thrashing my heart and lungs and generally dripping sweat onto some of the expensive machinery. A couple of years ago though, I started making a real effort to go running outside (an activity that had previously been confined to Saturday mornings). As the climate in this beautiful country usually means that it is either dark or pissing with rain or both when I leave the office, I took to getting away from my desk in my lunch-hour and running alongside the river Trent. As I was now getting my exercise outdoors, I only needed to go to the gym for a swim....and the pool is nice enough that I still consider the membership fee well worth paying. The cardio theatre kind of went by the wayside and wasn't really missed at all.

On the whole, I much prefer running outdoors. It's much less boring, for starters, and it somehow feels as though it's doing me more good actually running properly and not pretending to run on one of those spongey machines. I now go whatever the weather, and although it's sometimes a bit of a struggle, I love the righteous feeling I get for having done it and I relish the chance to get away from my desk to blow all the cobwebs away.

For one reason or another though, I found myself back in the main section of the gym this evening........ Oh my goodness, how things have changed. I felt a bit as though I had been taken out of cryogenic freezing and brought back to life at some point in the distant future. The machines have all changed. I just about recognised the bikes, but even then the controls had changed to an extent that I sat there for a good 2 minutes trying to look like I knew what I was doing before I actually started to pedal. The running machine and the elliptical training thing were basically the same I suppose, but the steppers now have people moving their knees at really weird, wonky looking angles that make them look like they're mincing (well, they are on a stepper, for heaven's sake....). As for that odd stepping/walking thing that looks a bit like it has a mini treadmill for each foot that moves independently of the other.... well, I was curious enought to try that one out. It seemed simple enough, but as I confidently upped the speed, I nearly went flying off the back and had to press the emergency stop button. Hmmm. I decided that discretion was the better part of valour at this point and beat a hasty but (I trust) dignified tactical retreat.

Some things never change at the gym though, and as I headed down to the changing rooms and a well earned sauna, I was very pleased to see those tubby looking blokes with moobs and fingerless gloves still desperately trying to lift weights that are clearly far too heavy for them.... yeah, best have a rest for a moment and a sip of that protein shake as you've clearly not had enough calories already today, and that curry is still an hour away in the future.

Anyway.

I think I'll go to the gym again tomorrow, actually..... but I reckon I'll just slink off back to the pool this time.