Ian.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ian, these last few weeks. It’s been more than 30 years since I last saw him, and we weren’t really friends, but he still keeps popping unbidden into my thoughts. 

I studied history for my undergraduate degree. Warwick University has quite a reputation in the subject, so it was (and I assume still is) a popular course with maybe a hundred students in total. My own particular specialism in Modern European and Renaissance History was a little more niche than the main course, but we all came together for lectures in the core subjects, and it was here that I met Ian. 

Ian was studying Modern History, I think, but he cut such a distinctive figure that he was hard to miss: he was tall and ungainly, wore aviator style glasses (before they came back into fashion) and a railwayman style cap. He wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, cool and would stride about the campus purposefully in practical looking shoes and an anorak. He also had funny little bald patches in his hair. At the time, it just helped underline how weird a kid he was, but thinking of it now, it looks like the kind of baldness you get when you constantly pull at your own hair until you start to pull it out. But yeah, he was the weird kid. 

At the age of eighteen, I was painfully aware of my own awkwardness, but you know what people are like, I found my own gang and Ian was firmly outside the boundaries of that gang and so we never really paid him any mind and certainly didn’t spend more time than absolutely necessary making small talk with him. In fact, now I think of it, he didn’t seem to have many friends on the course at all. This isolation was probably compounded by the fact that his hall of residence was International House, where all the students from overseas were housed. I have no idea how Ian ended up there, but compared to some of the other, big undergraduate Halls of Residence, he might as well have been on the moon. If there was a bright centre to the undergraduate universe, it definitely wasn’t to be found anywhere near International House. 

One night in my first year, I was knocking about around my own Halls of Residence when I became aware of a group of people sniggering about something. I wandered over to see what was up, and they were laughing at some poor guy who was hanging around the place, mooning after a girl called Sonia. 

It was Ian. 

I remember feeling slightly responsible for him, not because he was my friend, but because he was on my course and because I instinctively didn’t like this group of guys laughing at the poor sod in his anorak, sensible shoes and railwayman’s cap. Before I did anything else, I checked that Sonia was okay. She was not surprisingly uncomfortable that Ian was hanging around, following her about. I don’t think he meant any harm, but he clearly liked Sonia but didn’t really have the emotional toolkit to know what to do with those feelings other than to follow her around. At this point in my life, I don’t think I was anybody’s idea of a knight in shining armour, but I went up to Ian and suggested that I walked him back to International House. He recognised me, of course, and without too much persuasion, I took him out of my Halls and on the short walk across campus. On the way, we chatted. I explained to him that he was upsetting Sonia and he couldn’t just hang around her like that. He seemed to understand that, and we parted on good terms. 

I don’t like bullies, and I suppose I was just awkward enough around women that I recognised some of myself in Ian and wanted to do something other than just point and laugh at him. I didn’t really think anything more of it. 

A little while later, before the end of my first year, it was announced in one of our lectures that Ian was dead. He’d been cycling through Coventry when he had been hit by a bus and killed. A tragedy. His parents had arranged a memorial service for him in the campus chapel, and we were all invited to pay our respects. 

I walked past that chapel every single day on my way to the History Department or to the library. Did I go to the service? No, I did not. I can’t remember why I didn’t go, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t because I had anything better to do. I was eighteen or nineteen years old, and I probably just wanted to be in the bar with my mates rather than attend a sad and awkward service with Ian’s bereaved parents. He was a bit of a strange kid, and he wasn’t my friend. Besides, other people would go, right? 

Wrong. 

Not a single student attended that memorial service. Not a single one of us had the decency to take 30 minutes out of our days to pay our respects. I remember feeling a bit bad when I heard that, but the feeling didn’t last and I got on with the serious business of completely taking for granted the privilege of a university education. 

Now, more than thirty years later, I find myself thinking about Ian quite often. What must his parents have felt when no one turned up? I think about that time when I walked him back to International House; did he have any friends, or did everyone just think he was weird and give him a wide berth? Was he lonely? God knows it’s hard enough just being a teenager. 

I know I can’t change the past, but I do wish that I could speak to my younger self and encourage him to be better; to do better. Of all the things that University did teach me, it seems that it took the passage of time to teach me empathy. 

RIP Ian. I can only remember the names of a handful of people on my course now, but I remember you and I’m sorry.

come on! UGH! COME ON!

Somewhat unexpectedly, I've been very much enjoying running in the Summer League races.  As the name implies, this is a series of races that take place on Wednesday nights across June, July and August around Nottinghamshire.  They're free to run: all you need is your running club vest.  The prospect of running a 5 mile race with some of the fastest runners in the county sounds awful, doesn't it? I trundle around in something like 40-minutes, but the winners are more than ten minutes faster than that.  But running clubs have changed massively, and now the field includes runners who are finishing a good half hour behind me too and I'm comfortably above halfway.  I have a little voice that whispers to me all the time that I'm not a fast enough runner to be a member of a proper running club... but I've decided to not let that voice stop me doing something that I enjoy.

Anyway.  Last week's run was up at Worksop College and the course was in Sherwood Forest.  It was a lovely setting and a gorgeous, sunny evening.  For all that I think that I've been getting slower and slower over the last few months, when I put my mind to it, I'm actually running pretty much as fast as I ever have, and my average pace over this course was something around 7:50 miles sustained over 5 miles.  I'm not going to win, but it's nice to open up the throttle and see that there's still something there.

As you would expect, you end up running with people who are around and about the same pace, and there are always a few people who you seem to be in-and-around for the whole race; sometimes pulling ahead and sometimes falling behind.  In this race, I quickly became aware that I was running with a woman who was a grunter.  I'm a relatively silent runner, but everyone is different... C. runs with a very definite double-huff for every step she takes as she controls her breathing to try and keep the asthma at bay. Whatever works, right?  This lady was making an extraordinary noise, grunting and shouting at herself:"Ugh.  Ugh. Come on!  Ugh.  COME ON!" Each to their own, but this was mildly distracting.  Still, she was running at the same pace as me, so who am I to criticise?

At about the 4 mile mark, the course turned for home up a hill along a narrow, bracken-lined path.  I don't really like hurting myself when running.  I think the way to really get faster is to be prepared push yourself into the red; to bury yourself and to manage the discomfort.  I don't like to do that, and I often find myself crossing the finish line with a little bit left in the tank.  At this particular 4 mile mark, I caught myself holding back and thought that, for once in my life and safe in the knowledge that there was less than a mile to go, I would push a bit harder.  I quickly caught up with this woman as she grunted her way up the hill, still shouting encouragement to herself.  As I passed her, for what I assumed would be the very last time, I turned to her and said:

"Well done.  Keep going."

Pretty standard stuff.  Us runners are pretty encouraging, in the main.  Or so you would think.  Far from being encouraged, this woman turned to me and said in a distinctly sharp tone of voice:

"I prefer to talk to myself"

I was so surprised, it took a moment to register that yes, she had in fact just said that to me.. and by then I was powering ahead, leaving this miserable cow in my dust.

Charming though, right?  Although, whenever I tell this story to other runners, they seem to all know exactly who I mean.  What a way to find local celebrity. 

I bet she's fun at parties. 

Not that runners go to many parties.

...and if they do, they're not drinking much because they have a long run in the morning.

But, yeah, some runners are fun at parties.  

Possibly.

wanna hear you echo...

The internet is an echo chamber.

I realise I’m not saying anything new here, but it seems that pretty much everything I read now has people commenting underneath it, slinging alternative viewpoints at each other, with neither one listening to the other. I’ve just been reading an article on the bicycle helmets and whether or not they make a cyclist safer. It’s an interesting, balanced article presenting evidence on both sides of the debate. The comments are predictable.

“It’s safer”
“No it isn’t”
“Shut up”
“No, you shut up”

etc.

No one is listening to anyone (and, in some cases, aren’t even bothering to read the article they’re commenting on).

I’m as guilty of this as anyone, and I’m seldom able to walk past something on Facebook when I think I can try and talk some sense into someone using a carefully thought-out, nuanced argument. It never works. Brexit was a bit of an eye-opener when the passion of the debate revealed that my comfortable, self-selecting bubble of like-minded liberals was punctured by some friends who actually believed that leaving the EU would be a good thing. They were wrong, of course, and I tried to talk some sense into them and to question the basis of their beliefs… but I was wasting my breath. Did I listen to any of their arguments? Well, of course not. They didn’t make any sense to me, so why should I? …oh. That’s the problem in a nutshell, isn’t it?

I was listening to an MP talking on the radio yesterday in the aftermath of the attacks on Westminster. He was saying that people seem to forget that MPs from all the different parties may have diametrically opposed views politically, but they spend a lot of time together and often form friendships across party lines. Mhairi Black has spoken about how her Westminster “boyfriend” is the somewhat unlikely figure of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Those guys in my feed who supported Brexit? They're not idiots and they're still my friends.... they just hold a different view to me.

I'm just tired of all the bullshit and all the arguing and all the negative energy.  I can't keep living like this.

Whether we’re thinking about Trump or Brexit or ISIS or even cycle helmets, it’s helpful to remember, as the murdered MP Jo Cox pointed out, we have far more in common than divides us. Before you despair entirely at the state of the world, or before you roll up your sleeves to wade into a pointless online battle with an anonymous adversary, just remember that. Most people are, I think, basically decent… whatever the internet may lead you to believe.

Not very insightful and definitely a touch sanctimonious, but there you are.  Be the change you want to see in the world, and all that.

Besides, this post gives me an excuse to link to this, undeniably one of the best clips on the whole of the internet.  No arguments: R. Kelly explains Echo.

a fortress, steep and mighty...

When I first started work, I thought that I was going to be managing director; I thought that it was only a matter of time... ten years at the outside.  I also thought that I liked working autonomously and that I didn't really enjoy being part of a team where it meant I would be dependent upon the work of other people in order to succeed.  For a long time, I worked in a role where I was basically responsible for my own output, and that suited me just fine.

As I grew older, I realised that I didn't actually want to be managing director...not that it was likely to happen. I also realised that, far from being an island, the main reason I went to work at all was because of the people. I'm an introvert by nature in the sense that I derive energy from within myself and find prolonged contact with other people draining, so this realisation sort of took me by surprise.

Not coincidentally, I've also been a lot happier at work since I've had a team to manage.  You can blag your way through a lot of things at work, but people management should not be one of those things; it's the one thing that you shouldn't shortcut and I spend a lot of time trying to make sure that I'm doing the right things by my team.  I've won awards at work, but I think the single thing that makes me proudest is that my team scored me 100% in all the line manager questions in our last company-wide colleague temperature check survey.

I like to think my team like and respect me.

Today I received concrete proof: they gave me this as a birthday present:

I can only imagine that this little beauty must be a bestseller amongst Wolves fans and that literally hundreds can be seen on the home fans every match at Molineux. You'll notice that, I might just turned another year older, but apparently I'm not too old to pull this little beauty out if it's (Spider-Man) wrapping paper and put it straight on in the middle of the open plan office...

I'd wear it skiing, but I already wear a helmet when I'm skiing so it wouldn't really work.

They also gave me a luminously lime green Wolves 3rd strip and some beer.

I'm telling you, those guys are the best team anyone could possibly hope for.  I'm a lucky boss.

one too many overreactions...

I got unexpectedly called a racist over the weekend.  By a white guy.

It was on the internet, obviously.

I'm a member of a very friendly sci-fi group on Facebook.  I didn't ask to join, but someone added me and it's been a pretty good source of reliably interesting links and friendly chatter by like-minded people... so I've stayed.

The post that caused all the fuss was a discussion on the apparent plan to remake Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson in the lead roles.  The Michael Caine and Steve Martin film that most people know was itself a remake, but that wasn't really the issue  There was some chat about the specific casting plans - Rebel Wilson in particular seems to divide people - but mostly about the whole idea of remaking with a gender switch.  You might remember that the rebooted Ghostbusters last year faced similar criticism.

Anyway.  This was the post that triggered me to get involved in the discussion, and you can perhaps be the judge as to whether I said anything particularly provocative.....

I've kept the spelling as it was in the original, but I've modified the c*bomb that suddenly appeared.

---

Angry White Guy on Facebook: I have a problem with REMAKING shit for the sake of it . I have a problem with people not doing things right when they do and this modern era rehash political statement gender swap for the sake of it bollocks . Its fucking stupid lazy and dumb . Sjws radical feminists and black lives matter are the reason trump is in the white house . The next person to say white privilidge needs to be taken out and shot . That shit is fucking offensive . Fuck the supergirl tv series

Me: Because white men have always been the most overlooked and persecuted minority throughout history? I agree that we shouldn't be token about this sort of stuff, but let's not pretend that white heterosexual men have had it bad. They might have failed in the execution (I haven't seen it), but I don't see anything inherently bad about re-imagining Ghostbusters with a female cast. Apart from anything else, I applaud that four 40-something women, one of whom is black and one of whom is gay, got the opportunity to top the billing. I don't think that was only because they were female, black or gay, I think that's because they are talented. For so much of cinema history, the default casting position (and indeed, audience assumption) has been white, straight men. I also humbly suggest (and I know I started this by mentioning Mike Pence) that we keep politics out of this as much as possible.

Angry White Guy on Facebook: Ghost busters remake was the worst film of the past year by far  Stop fucking with things

Angry White Guy on Facebook: Lets not pretend white males have had it bad ? Are you fucking kidding me ?

Me: A shit film is a shit film, Angry White Guy. I won't argue with that. I didn't watch it after that disastrous trailer. It's a good idea, but if that's your ONLY idea, then you're in trouble.

Me: Angry White Guy - not being able to see that is the very definition of white privilege, I'm afraid.

Angry White Guy on Facebook: Swisslet where are you from ?

Me: I'm in middle class, white, suburban Nottingham, mate. Let's not fall out over this, yeah?

Sensible Guy intervenes: Watch Dogs 2 really brought home to me how deeply ingrained my expectation that everyone in media represents me, and when they don't, I'm confused. It brought home how frustrating it must be to not be represented in media (games, movies, tv, stage plays, dance, whatever), and I finally understood what being privileged meant in this regard. Representation does matter, and I am privileged, and it's not right....and by frustrating, I mean, utterly soul destroying in the long run.

Angry White Guy on Facebook: Im leaving this group i cant stand preachy white middle class liberals passing judgement on the world like they know any fucking thing about anyone .

Sensible Guy: Sorry to hear that - I was simply talking about myself, which I'm pretty sure is one area of knowledge I am an expert in. You've got a picture celebrating Carrie Fisher on your wall Angry White Guy, maybe worth having a read of some of her stuff, she's a classic example of why representation is key. Ghostbusters (the remake) didn't suck because of the all female cast, it sucked because it couldn't decide if it wanted to be a homage, a sequel, a reboot, or something different entirely, and it fell down the crack of confusion.

Me: Only one person passing judgement here. Sorry we can't just enjoy a shared love of Star Wars and comics and stuff.

Another Angry White Guy: Swisslet thinks it's unreasonable for anyone to state that anyone has been privileged without knowing that person. But I agree this group is about what unites us our love of Sci Fi peace to all. Even klingons

Angry White Guy on Facebook: The term white privilidge is racist . Anyone who uses it is nothing but an ignorant racist stupid [C*BOMB!] . The end

---

Well, that escalated quickly, didn't it?

So, apparently I'm a racist.

Ugh.

(It's also worth noting as a footnote to this that Angry White Guy on Facebook has not left the group up to now, but I"m seriously thinking about it because I just don't need this shit... what's wrong with people?)

I also sent the guy this picture.  I hope he liked it.

There's only one rule you need for life: don't be a dick.

private universe...

After a day spent with work visiting Worcester, Malvern and Evesham, I travelled home on the train from Bristol Parkway station.  After a change at Birmingham International, I settled down onto the train that was going to drop me off at Nottingham.

Initially, the carriage wasn't too busy, and I was able to take a table seat diagonally opposite the only other person there, each of us with an empty seat beside us.  She looked like she didn't much want to be disturbed and had her feet stretched right out underneath the seat opposite, so I left her to it.  It was rush hour, and as the train began to fill up, I was forced to ask her to move her feet so that I could scoot across to make some room.

The journey was a little over an hour, so I dug out my iPad and picked up where I'd left off with an episode of the West Wing. Occasionally, my attention would wander and I would look up from my screen at the people around me.  The girl sitting opposite caught my eye because she was reading a book on Lucrezia Borgia, but she held my attention because she was also idly playing with her phone and scrolling through songs on her iPod classic.  She was wearing a Gryffindor quidditch team t-shirt and looked a little awkward, or at least very self-conscious; perhaps a little uncomfortable in her skin. She was also clearly trying to keep herself to herself by hiding behind a big pair of headphones and losing herself in her own happy place.

As she hopped between songs on her iPod, she was bopping along with her head and occasionally mouthing along to the lyrics.  She looked really, really happy and content in her own little world.  It was nice to see.

Did I talk to her?  No.  I didn't.  I left her entirely alone because I'm not an arsehole.

slow ride...

I have never really considered myself to be a particularly quick runner. I hated cross-country runs at school and walked whenever I thought I could get away with them (although I did accidentally once end up in the school team, but I don’t like to talk about that). I was a passably decent 400m runner, working out that you could beat most people if you just went out really hard at the gun and just tried to hold on over that awful last 100m. Even then, I was dipping under 60 seconds, but not by enough to consider myself particularly talented.

It’s somewhat ironic, then that I now spend so much of my time running. I started dabbling whilst I was still a student. I’d played loads of sport at school and that all suddenly ground to a halt at university when I realised that most of the people in the university sports clubs – especially the rugby club – where utterly insufferable. I felt I needed to do some sort of exercise, and running seemed to deliver the biggest bang in the shortest amount of time. One short-ish run a week didn’t really become much more for several years, and my running only really took off when I stumbled into a running community. Not only did I discover the joys of running with other people – apparently my assumptions that running was a quintessentially solitary sport were mistaken – but I also started to run further and faster than I have ever done before. I’m not the fastest person in the club, by any stretch of the imagination, but I was probably in the top 10 or 15%.

Mind you, running is such a relative sport: most runners learn pretty quickly that they’ll be quicker than many but also slower than many, and the only person you can reliably measure yourself against is yourself. By that benchmark, I’ve been getting steadily faster over the last three or four years. Not too bad for a 41 year-old guy with MS. At my best, I can run fairly steadily at a pace of around, on a good day just under, 8 min/mile…. Although, to be honest, almost all idea of pace have gone out of the window since I started training for the marathon last year, which has continued into my training for this year’s London Marathon: my focus has completely changed to thinking about how far I run , not just how fast. I’m now rarely running flat out because my objective is now to nurse my body around much longer distances, and I don’t trust my body enough to try and run both far AND fast without breaking down.

Something else has changed too: since I started getting involved with my running club and especially with parkrun, I’ve found that I derive much more satisfaction from the community than I do from simply turning up and running as fast as I can. I enjoy volunteering at parkrun at least as much as the actual running. I’m now a registered guide for visually impaired runners, and on Saturday I took Steve out for his first ever parkrun. We went round in a gentle 50 minutes, maybe 25-30 minutes slower than I might run it on my own. But, you know what? That’s okay. That run was for Steve, not for me and I’m totally fine with that. In fact, I enjoyed it and doubtless derived a lot more satisfaction from my morning’s work than if I’d challenged my personal best.

There’s a bit of tension in my running club at the moment: there are those people who like the community and want to make sure we have enough trained run leaders to keep offering beginner’s courses and to make sure everyone feels welcome and safe, and there are those who like to run as fast as they can and who only want to run with people who can run as fast as they can (with a particular set of initials, apparently. They’d hate to mess up their little team acronym by having someone join with the wrong Christian name. I wish I was joking….). People can run with who they want to, of course, but I find myself increasingly impatient with those runners who swamp our facebook group with stories about how fast they run, and banter about who can or cannot join their little clique. I can probably run fast enough to train with these people, but you know what? I’d rather train on my own. That might be what community is for them, but that’s not what it means to me.

People run for all sorts of reasons. Speed is undoubtedly one of them, but it’s not the key motive for everyone and I’m increasingly realising that it’s not really about that for me either. PBs are nice, but they’re definitely not everything.

Maybe, if I was a faster runner, I’d think differently. Where would Mo Farah be if he had that kind of an attitude, eh? NOWHERE.

smaller and smaller and smaller...

"...I can arrange that!"

There's an article on the Guardian today where Carrie Fisher discusses how she felt under pressure to lose 35lbs before they started filming the new Star Wars film.  This is a difficult issue: would there be a problem if a Princess Leia, 38 years older than in the original films, was two-and-a-half stone heavier than when she was nineteen?  Probably not.  She isn't, after all, very likely to be required to appear in a metal bikini this time around.

But do the director and producers have a right to ask the actors to change their body shape if they feel it is right for the character?  It would definitely be a problem if only the female actors were asked to lose weight, but it's noticeable that Mark Hamill lost a lot of weight before filming too.  Although the role Luke Skywalker is going to play in this film is shrouded in mystery, I suppose it's safe to say that a fat Jedi Master was never really going to work...

Anyway.  Whilst reading this article, I discovered that a Guardian commentator by the name of Nashket has won the Internet for the day with this pearler of a comment:

"Spoke like somebody who does not have a clue about Star Wars.
Princess Leia, the character, is an elegant individual who takes massive pride in her appearance, after all she is royalty and had a privileged upbringing.
She is also son of Anakin Skywalker, one of the most powerful Jedi ever known based on his Midi-Chlorian level and therefore has great discipline and self-respect for the body which is passed down to her by her as a result of her Jedi roots in her character.
She would not of suddenly just abandoned all those personality traits as she got older or developed a cake addiction, when cake may not even exist in the Star wars universe.
I have not seen Star Wars in about 10 years and I remember these basic things.
When political correctness starts to cause you to change some of the greatest stories ever told, you know something is not correct"

So there.

....Although, as another commentator notes a little further down, "No cake in the Star Wars universe?! Then just what are the rebel alliance fighting for?!!"

I actually want to try and avoid spoilers for this film.  I sense that this may be difficult, especially as I won't be seeing it for a week or so after it's released.  Oh well.  I guess I'll live.

yin yang...

I’ve taken a dislike to the man who has the locker next to mine in the changing rooms at work (this is, by the way, the celebrity section of the locker room: Craig Davids and Richard Curtis are both located here). This might seem unreasonable, given that we haven’t exchanged a single word in the year since he moved in, but to my mind, it’s completely justified.

Let me put forward the case for the prosecution:

- He wears full lycra and cleats for his commute. To be fair to him, I have no idea how far he cycles every morning. Maybe it’s miles and miles and this is by far the most practical gear for his journey…. but this brings me to point 2

- He usually doesn’t shower. He comes in, wipes himself down and gets changed into his work gear… in spite of the fact that we have perfectly good showers in the changing rooms and he keeps a towel here. I put it to you that, if he doesn’t cycle hard enough to need a shower, then he definitely doesn’t need to wear full lycra and cleats. You can’t have it both ways

My locker, this evening.  His locker is behind the open door... but it's okay: he'd already gone.

- He’s very possessive of the space around his locker. If my locker door is open when he arrives, even if it isn’t open to the point where it’s over the front of his locker, he pushes it shut. If I have a towel or something hanging in the door of my locker on a hanger, he will move it so it’s hooked up and away from being anywhere near his locker. I wouldn’t mind this so much, except that he doesn’t mind hanging stuff over his own locker and apparently doesn’t see the contradiction

- I don’t like his face. Well, not his actual face as much as the picture on the ID card that’s on the front of every locker. Well, alright, I’m not a massive fan of his actual face either – he seems a bit humourless to me – but his picture is even worse, and I see it every single day even if he’s not actually in the locker room getting changed.

I know I sometimes come across here as excessively stoical and generally seem to possess an aura a little like a modern-day Buddha, but as you can see, I’m actually fairly petty and childish.

Yin and Yang, innit?

rule number two...

Fairly early on into my training course for my PADI Open Water diving qualification, I was introduced to the two golden rules that all scuba divers must live by:

1) Never, ever hold your breath

2) Always look cool.

The first rule is easy to explain: air expands and contracts in your lungs as you change depth underwater. If you hold your breath whilst diving, the air can expand within your chest as you ascend and explode your lungs. Okay. Alright. Important safety tip. The second rule says an awful lot more about divers as a whole: you need to look cool at all times. A heavy wetsuit, flippers, a BCD and a whacking great cylinder of air make perfect sense when you’re underwater, but it’s a damn sight harder to work it as a look when you’re not actually diving. In those circumstances, an excellent pair of sunglasses and an air of studied nonchalance can go a long way.

I’m starting to realise that cyclists have a similar set of rules. It’s probably not so critical that you don’t hold your breath on a bicycle, but there’s a definite sense that you must maintain your poise even when wearing the most absurd clothing. I’m not sure that there is a man alive who can really pull off an outfit involving that much lycra, a padded backside, a bike helmet and those daft shoes that clip into pedals. I solve the problem by not even trying: never wear lycra as a top-layer and stay away from cleats. Other cyclists take the opposite approach: the success of British cyclists at the Olympics and in the Tour de France has led to a proliferation of cycle clubs, and the little drag of cafes where I live absolutely swarms with middle-aged pelotons sat at the outside tables with their legs apart and a pint of Peroni on the table in front of them. Some of them seem to spend a good deal more time wearing their lycra at café tables than they do on actually on their bikes. Sadly, many are also classic examples of middle aged men in lycra (MAMILs), but you have to admire the chutzpah that sees them attempt to style out their bulging lycra in the face of all taste or good judgement.

There are plenty of these guys in the changing rooms at work too, clopping their way in from the bike shed on their cleats wearing their Team Sky lycra. It’s a fifteen minute cycle into work, not a time trial up Mont Ventoux, for goodness sake. (some of them apparently don’t even break sweat on their rides to work in their full gear. At least, that’s why I assume they don’t have a shower before peeling off their pro-cycling gear and putting on their work clothes for a full day in the office, anyway….)

I saw one guy in there the other day, getting changed out of his work gear before he cycled home in the evening. Somehow, he had managed to put his sunglasses on first, before any of his other cycling gear, so he was standing at his locker with his wraparound, mirrored visor on, changing out of his trousers and into his cycling shorts. Now that is an admirable commitment to rule 2…. well, apart from looking entirely ridiculous standing indoors at your locker wearing only your pants and your sunglasses….

Honestly.  People, eh?

keep talking happy talk....

As is now a completely acceptable pastime (and as I mentioned in a comment on yesterday's post), I spent a reasonable part of yesterday evening on Facebook in animated debate with a friend of a friend who I kind of know.  The topic of conversation was that statistic I shared here yesterday about how this government is giving away £93bn a year as "corporate welfare".  That, I said, was the equivalent of £3,500 for every single household in the country.  This didn't initially get much response, but after a bit of thinking time, this:

"But how can it be £3,500 per household? If you earn the minimum wage, then you'll probably only be paying about £500 a year in tax"

Well, it's the *equivalent* of £3,500 for every household.  You don't receive an actual bill, and obviously some people pay more tax than others.

"Yes.  But it can't be £3,500 per household when some people won't be paying anywhere near that much in tax over a year"

Deep breath.

It's the **equivalent** of £3,500 for every household.  They've taken the total number and divided it by the number of households in the country to put it into context and to help show how big a number it really is.

"Well, I think it's misleading to say that everyone pays £3,500 when some people clearly don't..."

At this point, dear reader, I realised that it was better to walk away than to risk upsetting someone who is a perfectly nice person (I've met him and everything) in a conversation about politics.  In the same spirit, today I have declined to get involved in a conversation with the same person about the 20mph speed limits that Nottinghamshire police are going to put outside parks and schools across the city ("But it means that drivers will spend more time looking at their speedometers than looking at the road.  How will the Police enforce it? It doesn't make roads any safer.  Why can't they just teach kids the green cross code in schools?" Can you feel my sacrifice in resisting that kind of provocation?)

I'm only human though.  I'm thinking of striking up a conversation about God tonight, just for the hell of it.