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.

jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash...

We had a royal visit at work today.  For those of us trying to get some work done, it was a massive pain in the arse, to be honest.  There were Special Branch policemen all over the place and various parts of the building were completely off-limits for several hours.  Not to mention, of course, that lots of people in the building took the opportunity of the visit and the speeches by the various dignitaries to waste as much time as possible. There's a certain kind of person, I find, who derives an enormous amount of self-importance from the simple proximity to a VIP, even if they're only giving them coffee and holding their coat.  There were lots of those people around too.  We also had a memo sent round explaining what the protocol was if we should happen to meet the royal visitor.  Apparently it's Ma'am to rhyme with "ham" and not Ma'am to rhyme with "palm", if you were wondering.

I was particularly inconvenienced because the visit coincided exactly with the time slot given to me for the delivery of my Avonex.  Every month, I have the prescription for my weekly injections delivered to me in the office.  Usually, this works pretty smoothly and I have a good relationship with reception and they're happy to make an exception their usual rules about signing for packages and take my meds in until I can get down to pick them up.  They also know the drill about not accepting a new sharps bin (they try and give me a new one every month, when actually one will last me a couple of years) and they also pretty good about not taking the vast outer packaging with chill packs and at making sure the drugs get into the fridge too.

The royal visit kiboshed all this quite nicely, and I had to fight my way through a massive crowd of gawkers trying to catch sight of the royal party parking up and walking into the building to get across to a side exit to meet up with the courier (who was struggling to be let onto the site by security at the gates) and to sign for me drugs.

Sadly, the courier was super-helpful and persistent, so this whole process didn't take anywhere near long enough to stop me catching the speeches on my way back across the building to my desk.

I'm not a royalist, as you can probably tell.  I will however concede that the purpose of the visit was a good one: my company has helped to put together some wash bags that are given to women who have been raped and have been through the further indignity of a medical examination by police doctors looking for genetic evidence... it's an initiative that is patronised by this particular royal, hence her presence.  For some reason, I was taken aback by quite how posh she sounded when she spoke.  In fact, she had a surprisingly deep voice and sounded a bit like Tim Nice-But-Dim with a heavy cold.

Later, as I was in the changing rooms getting ready for the cycle home, we cyclists naturally chatted over the events of the day:

"Well that was fun, wasn't it?"
"Splendid, although they could have sent a better royal"
"What, you mean like Prince Philip?"
"Well, you have to admit, he would have been more entertaining because you couldn't ever really be sure what would come out of his mouth"
"Whilst representing a charity for rape victims?  What's the worst thing that could happen?"
"Hmm. Maybe that's why they didn't send him"
"Well, it could have been worse. This one was at least a little further up the pecking order than Sophie Wessex"
"Joey Essex...?"

Joey Essex?  Now you're talking.  His speech would probably have been more memorable than the one the Duchess of Cornwall managed (which was fine and vastly more comprehensible than the utterly impenetrable speech of one of the other VIPs).

The building also smelt of wet paint all day.  It's easy to believe that most of the royal family think that this is how the whole world smells.

What a weird job that is. What a weird life that is.

don't know much about geography...

I work with some intelligent people.  I say this now because of what follows....

One of my colleagues isn't a driver and has a somewhat tenuous grasp on geography, thinking that Leeds lies between Nottingham and London. As you can imagine, this causes much amusement in the office.

Because of this, someone shared this map that was drawn by someone in their team.

Um.

It's hard to know where to start, isn't it? What's happening to Northern Ireland up there?
"Other Citys"?
"Devon/Yarmouth etc"
What?

Perhaps stung by the insinuation that she might be *this* kind of idiot, my colleague took it upon herself to draw her own map of the UK.

This is what she came up with.

Detail on the East Midlands is quite good, but it's probably best not to dwell on much of the rest, especially if you're from Bristol, Somerset or Devon.  This splendid effort also prompted a conversation with another member of my team, also an intelligent person.

"My geography isn't very good, but I always know which direction I need to travel in."
"Really?"
"Yes, so if I want to go to London, I know that I need to go south."
"Well, that depends on where you are."
"Does it?"
"Well, if you were in Dallas, which direction would you need to travel in?"
"Oh.  East! I know that one!  Although Dallas is hotter than London, so it must be further south."
"But the South Pole is also south of London, and that's pretty cold...?"
"That's true."
"And how do you account for the fact that the sea to the east of England is called the North Sea?"
"No it isn't. That's the English Channel.  Does London have a beach? It's on the south coast, after all.
"...."

Like I said: intelligent people.

Well, no one knows everything, do they?

mad world...

Terry Pratchett was a very wise man. He died in 2015, but it’s somehow comforting to look back on some of his writing now and to see what a clear-eyed grasp he had of what it means to be human. His characters were often trolls or dwarves or vampires, but they were nevertheless all acutely observed, clear-eyed character studies of the human condition.

I started reading his books when I picked up the first Discworld novel quite by chance at the age of thirteen, and they were a pretty solid staple of my reading life from that moment onwards (although I haven’t been able to bring myself to read the last few books, partly because I don’t want to see if his writing deteriorated towards the end, but also because I don’t want to read them knowing that there will never be any more to read). People often sneered at him as a writer of fantasy books, as though the genre itself made the writing somehow less worthy, but I can honestly say that I can’t think of another author who has quite the same grasp on humanity; how ridiculous and petty and cruel and wonderful we are.

The world currently seems to be a very scary place indeed. Indeed, as Pratchett’s Death notes in “The Thief of Time” , the chief aspects of humanity are ARROGANCE, PRIDE AND STUPIDITY… a point we seem to be proving rather well just now.  Rather than dwell on some of the more depressing aspects of the week’s news (who would have thought it would be possible to bring one of world’s leading democracies to such a state of crisis within a mere fourteen days?), let’s just laugh along with pterry about quite how ridiculous we are.

“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some caves somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.”

The point is not that we will push the button to see what happens, it’s the fact that this is so achingly predictable and that we’ve pushed that button before, many times across history. We fuck things up because we are idiots and fools, but somehow, who knows how, we still muddle through. These things will pass and these idiots will be replaced by other idiots.

“Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people”

It’s easy to dwell on the “evil” of men like Adolf Hitler… but to demonise them like that simply makes them seem like one-offs that could never happen again. What does history tell us? That if we don’t learn from it, then we’re doomed to repeat? Hitler was elected as a patsy that people thought they could control. They were wrong. Sound at all familiar to you?

Here’s one for Mike Pence and anyone who thinks that we should legalise the right of people to discriminate on religious grounds: “Goodness is about what you do. Not what you pray to”, or, to put it another way, “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things”

One last one – my favourite:

“Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life”.

Terry Pratchett was a one off and I’m sad that there isn’t going to be a Discworld novel about Ankh-Morpock voting to secede from the rest of the Sto Plains. One can only imagine what the patrician would have to say about that, or indeed about the very idea of asking people for their opinions in the first place.

He is missed, but his name will live on in the clacks.

I got distinctly misty-eyed reading this tribute by his daughter this afternoon.

parklife...

I’m tail running at Colwick parkrun tomorrow. I haven’t done this particular volunteer role before, but it seems fairly straightforward: you sweep up behind the last runner in the field and make sure no one is left behind.

If the first over the line will take around 16 minutes, I’m expecting to cross the line in about 50 minutes. Comfortably a personal worst for the 5km, but it matters not a jot. I’ve done a few volunteer roles at parkrun now: barcode scanning, timing and acting as guide runner for Terry, and all have been pretty good fun (guiding Terry and tailrunning also have the added bonus of counting as a run and adding to my growing tally of parkruns as I head towards my first milestone t-shirt).  It seems that I'm becoming the kind of person who volunteers.

Someone asked me the other week if I was worried that these volunteer roles were affecting my average time (which is apparently available on my parkrun profile). Um. No. I’m interested in my PB and trying to lower it, but even that’s not really all that important in the grand scheme of things. Over the last few months, I’ve got a great deal more satisfaction from running with my wife or from the volunteering roles. The time really doesn’t matter much at all.

The Colwick parkrun core team run an interval session on the Victoria Embankment every Wednesday evening over summer. We essentially run round a coned out track until we feel sick, with the overall aim of improving our time over 5km. It’s hard work, but it’s really good fun too (well, "fun" might be stretching it a bit....). The organisers run the event completely free out of a love for the sport and a desire to help other people improve. When I first started going, I hadn’t actually done a parkrun at all, and after a few weeks of attendance felt slightly sheepish and made my way to Colwick Park on a Saturday morning because I kind of felt that I owed them for all the work they put in.

 32 parkruns later, the vast majority of them at Colwick, and I now seem to be a regular member of their pool of volunteers. Without volunteers giving up their time on a Saturday morning, parkrun will die. They’re a great bunch of guys and it’s a really valuable and valued part of my running routine now, so I’m more than happy to help out where I can. As a result of this, together with my running club, I now seem to know an awful lot of runners in Nottingham. C. was very surprised the other week to be cheered across the finish line at Rushcliffe parkrun by name by a person she had never met before. I knew him through running and he therefore knew who she was. This demonstrates, so she tells me, that my social capital is high. Whatever that means.  She also tells me that this means her Facebook feed is clogged with people posting stuff about running.

Chatting to Helen, one of the Colwick parkrun core team, as we walked back to the start of the track for another interval on Wednesday evening, she mentioned that one of the reasons that they started running the sessions on a Wednesday evening was to increase their engagement with the local running community and to hook people in as regular volunteers. Two more parkruns opened in the Nottingham area in the last couple of weeks, meaning that we now have a really high density, with no fewer than 6 in the immediate locale. Each one that opens takes a few runners from the others in the area.  This is usually a good thing, because it keeps the numbers manageable.  Colwick gets about 170-200 every week, but has peaked at over 300.  Each new parkrun also drags away volunteers though, so it's more important than ever to make connections with people who might volunteer.

So you started these interval sessions to attract new volunteers? Well, that totally worked for me, eh?

make me wanna scream....

Maybe it’s because I’m not a parent, maybe it’s because I’m a miserable bastard…. But I find that the noise of a crying baby cuts right through me. I look around, and pretty much everybody else seems to be looking over at the wailing infant with happy, indulgent smiles, but for me it’s like fingernails down a blackboard. Only much, much more grating.

Am I weird? Am I perhaps missing some important nurturing part of my genetic makeup?

Or maybe – just maybe - it’s bang out of order to bring your screaming child into an open-plan office environment and then sit around chatting with your mates for nearly an hour.

Yeah. I reckon it’s that.

Take it away and don’t bring it back until it has learnt how to keep its unhappiness at being in that building locked away inside.

 We all feel like that, but the rest of us have learned to internalise our pain and to suffer more quietly.

It's a love story, baby....

Today, someone in all seriousness explained to me why the project to merge two teams together was called “Project Windsor”. Apparently it’s because the love of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson was so great that they were able to overcome all obstacles and opposition that was preventing them from being together, and this project was just like that. Well, what the person actually said to me was something like:

“I’ve just been in this incredibly boring meeting where some bloke explained how the project to bring our teams together was called Windsor because of the love of two people or something. I’ve no idea what he was talking about”
“Windsor? You mean Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson? The Duke and Duchess of Windsor”
“Yeah. That was them”
“And he was using them as a good example of love conquering all?”
“Apparently”
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Don’t most people think they were pretty unpleasant people and Nazi sympathisers?”

Seems a bit of a strange example to me. Of all the star-crossed lovers you could have picked through all of history and literature, and you chose those two?  I suppose at least one person in the world has seen that apparently godawful Madonna film about them then, eh?

People are weird. I bet he’s probably seen that Diana film too.  Hell, even "Wessex" would probably be a better choice: the untold love story of Edward and Sophie.  No?  You're not buying that?  It would make an amazing film.  Especially that bit where he tells his dad he's leaving the marines to set up a theatrical production company.

(My wife - who is kind of a big deal and knows this sort of stuff - tells me that project names should be picked at random from the dictionary and have absolutely nothing to do with the thing you’re working on, no matter how obliquely. For that reason, I’m code-naming this post “Project Insulsity”)

make it count...

I watched a couple of things on TV this weekend that both made me a little emotional.

The first I saw by accident when I was snoozling in my chair on Saturday afternoon.  The athletics from Manchester was on in the background and, between races, they did a little profile of one of Paula Radcliffe's runners.  Apparently, Paula ran a competition to pick six women who want to get active and inspire others by taking on the Great Manchester Run (which took place on Sunday).  Presumably they've been profiling the others too, but the one I saw was a profile of a lady called Lynsey Moores.

As this article says:

Lynsey, a single parent from Old Trafford, has been unable to see, speak, swallow and walk at times because of her uncertain condition. Lynsey, who was diagnosed shortly after youngest son Jacob, now seven, was born, said: "I've decided not to live in fear of MS. I won't be beaten by it any longer and let it rule my life as it has done for so long. "Fortunately, I've not had a major relapse for quite a while and do count myself as one of the lucky ones. I hadn't done any exercise but am now gradually getting fit.  The most important thing is to complete the course and raise as much money as I can for the MS Society."

The BBC profile showed Lynsey running and talking to camera, and it was inspiring to see her determination to do this 10k and also quite moving to see how proud her two kids were of her and what she was achieving.

Clearly, all this is quite close to home for me.  Close enough that I looked up her JustGiving page and made a donation.  If she is anywhere near as determined as she sounded, then I think she will have smashed it in the race yesterday.  I like (and recognise) her attitude.

And then, on Sunday, I caught up with The C Word on iPlayer.  This was screened the other day and tells the story of Lisa Lynch and her battle against breast cancer.  Sound familiar?  Well Lisa wrote a beautiful, funny and very popular blog called "AlrightTit".  She was a brilliant writer and she was one of those people who just seemed to broadcast life and the joy of living....even when facing up to an ultimately incurable cancer.  Sheridan Smith did a great job of capturing Lisa (if you don't believe me, ask her family), and it was a very emotional way to spend a Sunday evening.

Lisa was a friend of this blog, and she was kind enough to put me up in her (quite small) list of links to "blogs I like", which was - and still is - very flattering.  Since the screening on the BBC over the Bank Holiday, I've been receiving a steady flow of referrals from her blog via that link.... presumably from curious people who are quickly disappointed at the sudden drop in the quality of their reading.   Lisa died on 11th March 2013.  I don't make much of a habit at looking at my blog stats, but every time I see a referral from Lisa, it reminds me of how awesome she was and how she's still making a difference to people's lives today.

We were supposed to meet at the Cider Bus at Glastonbury the year she broke her back (it's a long story).  As I have done every year since then, I'll be raising a pint of Burrow Hill cider in her memory when I get to the festival in June.  Much missed, kid.

humbled...

Raising money for charity is a truly humbling experience.

When we knew we were going to be running the marathon, I thought about what kind of a target we should set.  I've raised money running half marathons before, and I like to think I've been pretty good at it.  If you included gift aid, when we ran the Robin Hood half in 2011 we raised a little over £3,000.  When I entered the same race the following year, even though I only had a few weeks to go before the start, I still managed to raise more than £1,250.

Not bad going, I thought.  We can top that, can't we?  Running a full marathon is a much bigger deal, after all.  Shall we start with a target of £3,000 and see how we go?

Well, with a little over a week-and-a-half to go before we line up in London, we've raised over £3,600 (including gift aid) with something like £900 to add from offline fund-matching from work, the money we raised at the cake sale earlier this week and things like that.  There's still time to chase out a few more last-minute donations too.

I reckon that, by the time we've finished, we will have raised something approaching £5,000.  That's a huge amount of money that will make a huge difference to the MS Trust and will help them to reach even more people affected by multiple sclerosis, providing information and support.

I'm delighted.... but it really is humbling.  That money has come from all sorts of people, who have put their hands into their pockets and put an enormous vote of trust in us.  Many of these people will not have heard of the MS Trust before; some may not know that much about multiple sclerosis; it's likely that lots of them might not even know why we're running for the charity.  Hell, some of them are barely more than acquaintances.... but they still decided to make a donation to our charity.  Some went further than that: they baked cakes for us; they chased donations out of people who don't even really know who we are; they took the time to talk to us and to find out about the charity and to see how we were doing with the training.

It's humbling and it's inspiring.

I find it emotional watching the London Marathon on the telly.  With the tens of thousands of other runners and the hundreds of thousands of spectators cheering us on, never mind the legs, you can pretty much guarantee that I'm going to be an emotional wreck by the time we cross the finish line.

You can still sponsor us here!

my body is your body, I won't tell anybody....

A good friend of mine put up a post on Facebook today:
“I just saw a quote on a photo of a beautiful plus-sized girl calling her “a real-sized model.” Because it’s not enough that slender models are insufficiently womanly, they now apparently DON’T EXIST”

She elaborated in the comments: “If I may, and this could be controversial so I have my apology ready, I would compare it to racism against white people: there IS such a thing as thin privilege, which makes it ‘okay’ (in some people’s minds) to be utterly horrid to thin people….slender=vain, superficial, overly self-controlled. Fat=lazy, slovenly, undisciplined, can’t stop eating. I had a stranger in the pub once poke me in the ribs, exclaim ‘what a side on that one!’ and then advise me to ‘stop eating hamburgers’. This was when I was running 5km five or six times a week.”

I kind of know what she means. I’m pretty thin, and plenty of people feel the need to advise me to eat more, because if I’m not constantly reminded, I might forget. Some people go further and feel the need to give me a poke, as if their touch will somehow drive home the point that I’m too thin. Most of these people mean well, but no matter how well they might think they know me, absolutely none of them have any idea of my own body image or the how I see myself or how hurtful some of these remarks might be. Larger people sometimes seem to view my build as a criticism of their own.

Body image is a very strange, personal thing. I have a vivid memory of being about eight or nine years old and having an older boy at school wrinkling his nose in disgust when my backside wobbled as I towelled myself off in the changing rooms after gym. I doubt he meant anything much by it, but from that moment on, I had an image of myself as being big. Of course, at around 6’5” in height, I grew to be tall, but my experience of growing up was that I always needed to have bigger clothes than everyone else: my school shorts were “chunky fit” and I needed a bigger cap than everyone else at cubs. Maybe that all makes sense now that I am simply taller than most people (after all, puppies have huge paws), but that was actually quite difficult to deal with when I was still actually growing up. I have weighed over 100kg at my heaviest, but even now I’m more than 20kg lighter, I still find it incredibly difficult to see myself as thin, and still find it weird when people tell me that’s how they see me.

In nineteen days’ time, my wife and I will be running the London Marathon. My wife ran 22 miles with me on Sunday and will complete the full 26.2 miles of the race when the time comes. She’s done brilliantly with the training and she looks great on it too. She might not be able to fit into her boots any more, thanks to her newly developed calf muscles, but everyone has been telling her how great she looks. And yet, and yet…. She seems mildly disappointed that the scales are telling her that she hasn’t actually lost any weight. What’s the point of all this bloody training, she half-jokes, if I’m not going to lose any weight? As if the ability to run a marathon and raise thousands of pounds for a brilliant charity *and* looking great are somehow not enough.

Your own body image is a funny thing, and whenever and however it got set, it’s clearly not a straightforward thing for people to re-programme.

other people's lives....

I've mentioned before how I've met some amazing people since I joined my running club and started to parkrun regularly.  I've met tireless fundraisers like the lady who raised over £50,000 last year for bowel cancer research or the guy who ran 5km every single day for a whole year to raise money for a local hospice.  I've also met people who are incredibly generous with their time and, often good runners themselves, selflessly give up their own runs to help other people reach their goals and to encourage them along the way.  Running with other people has transformed my own running, but meeting some of these other runners along the way has been inspiring and regularly tops up my faith in humanity.  In a small way, it's people like these that have inspired me to do more to help out myself.  Helping a blind runner enjoy a parkrun every once in a while isn't that much of a hardship, to be honest - I enjoy spending time with Terry - but I suppose it's giving something back to a community that's been so good to me.

Lisa, one of the regular runners at my club approached me this week.  She's another fundraiser and is raising money for a local shelter to help women and their children escape from domestic violence.  It's a charity that's very close to her heart - a member of her immediate family was killed by an abusive partner - and as she got into the London Marathon at the sixth time of trying, she's got a site up and is raising money.  Naturally, I made a donation.  It's a small thing to do, right?

Although I'm fundraising myself, and although Lisa specifically asked me for the link to my page, I made the donation with no thought to getting one back for myself.  That's not really what this sort of thing should be about.  My donation had no strings attached.

Anyway.  Lisa came up to me at running club on Monday to tell me that she'd had a chat with her partner and felt that neither of them could afford to make a donation to us anywhere near the size of the one that I'd made to her the other week.  Well, of course that's completely fine..... but what she said next really floored me:

"I've got a day off on 13th April.  As it's a running club night, are you alright if I arrange a cake sale here and give all the money we make to your charity?"

Bear in mind that this lady is chasing her own fundraising target for her own intensely personal charity, and here she is offering to give up her time and energy to raising money for me.  I didn't really know what to say, but while I was rendered temporarily speechless, she went ahead and checked with the venue where we meet that it would be okay and gave me the thumbs up to say we're definitely on.

Lisa comes from a totally different background to me and clearly has a completely different set of challenges and priorities in her life.  She's nothing like me and probably isn't the sort of person I would meet in the normal walk of life.  In fact, if I saw her in the street or in a pub or something, I'd probably make some rather hasty assumptions about the kind of person that she seems to be.

But you know what?  Those assumptions would be completely wrong.

How can you not be humbled by someone like that?

everybody feels entitled...

I'm cross.

Cycling home from work this evening, I came over the Suspension Bridge at the Trent and headed down on the final half-mile stretch towards home.  There's a corner here where the road turns and joins the much larger road that heads over Trent Bridge.  The traffic flow is to the left, and to turn right, you have to cross the road at some traffic lights.  To get to those lights (and also to a pedestrian crossing), you have to hop onto a little stretch of pavement and head around the corner.

As I came off the bridge and up onto the pavement there, I could see a lady with a toddler and a pushchair coming in my direction.  I'm lit up like a Christmas tree with lights and fluorescent clothing at this time of year, but she had nothing to mark her out.  Still, I saw her and immediately slowed down and moved right across the pavement to take up as little room as possible and to be as far out of her way as possible.  As I passed, she paused to remonstrate with me for riding on the pavement.  She was pompous in her manner and used suitably patronising hand gestures as she told me in no uncertain terms that I had no business riding on the pavement.

To some extent, I understand where she's coming from, especially with a toddler in tow and a pushchair.  I get it.  The thing that's riled me is that:

a) She was absurdly pompous
and
b) Actually she's wrong: the pavement is dropped here *precisely* to keep cyclists off the road on a dangerous corner with traffic on the main road flowing in the main direction.

I didn't bother starting the debate with her and just kept going, swearing under my breath.

I saw her, assessed the danger, slowed down and gave her as much room as possible on a piece of pavement I have every right to be cycling on.  Maybe there are reckless cyclists around here, but I honestly don't think that I'm the problem here.  Be sure to have a lovely evening though, you sour-faced, supercilious cockwomble.

Grrr.

crosstown traffic...

Nottingham was absolutely gridlocked this evening.  Traffic has been bad for much of the last two years because of the ongoing tram works that seem to have dug up every road in the city all at once, but tonight was even worse than usual.  Apparently there were several accidents around town around rush hour, and it served to bring all of the arterial routes through town to a grinding halt.

As a cyclist, I'm usually fairly oblivious to this stuff.  People tend to assume that people who commute to work on their bikes will be unbearably smug every time the traffic is bad.  Perhaps many are (I assume many drivers are also pretty smug when they drive past a cyclist slogging through the wind and rain of a winter storm).  To be honest, traffic congestion quickly became completely irrelevant to me.  It takes me around 16-17 minutes to cycle from work to home, depending on the two traffic lights that I have to go through.  Almost all of my route is on cycle paths and the volume of traffic has basically no bearing on me at all.  I'd maybe love to be one of those guys who waves at stationary cars as they sail past, but I'm far too busy thinking about what I'm having for my tea.

This evening though, it was pretty hard to miss the congestion, even when I was still sitting at my desk.  My office is based on a large industrial site with a couple of main gates out into Nottingham, one at either end.  There are several thousand people onsite who drive to work, and the roads out of the site are often completely blocked when all of those people leave work at about the same time and then queue down to the roundabouts that drop people onto the main road.  When something happens around the ringroad, this has a knock-on effect back up these access roads and onto site.  On a bad day this can mean that people will queue for hours to even get off-site, never mind getting home. Tonight, people were leaving their desks for their cars and then coming back half an hour later when they hadn't even got out of the car park.  Many glared at me slightly resentfully because they knew I was a cyclist and could leave at any time I wanted.

Perhaps I could and should have been smugger, but as I was still hard at work at my desk at half-past six having arrived this morning before 8am, I didn't really feel that I had all that much to be smug about..... and when I did finally finish up and head out on my bike just before seven, the huge queue of idling cars meant that the air quality on my ride home was appalling.

Mind you, judging from my Facebook feed, some of my colleagues were still queuing to get home in the time that I'd left the office at 7pm, cycled home, changed, nipped out for a quick 5km run and then showered.... so I probably shouldn't grumble.

I like cycling generally, but tonight it was really handy.  I'm not smug, car-driving friends, I just got home an awful lot faster than you did this evening.  Perhaps we should take a leaf from Nigel Farage's book and blame all this congestion on the increasing number of immigrants?

but I won't take anything less...

There's a guy at work - and I'm sure you know someone just like him - who is absolutely obsessed with technology.  He's about fifty and has a wife and a couple of kids, but his real love is clearly the pursuit of technology.   If there's something new out, he wants to have it.  It's not just the obvious stuff like smartphones and tablets, which might cost a few hundred pounds each, it's the really high end stuff like home cinema systems, stereos... the kind of things that are likely to set you back thousands of pounds.  He doesn't only want new things, he wants the very best things.  He's a nice enough guy, but you never want to accidentally stray onto one of these subjects, because he will be able to go into miniscule, infinitely tedious detail about the important technical stats and the identity of the very best thing on the market that money can buy.

I accidentally got caught in a conversation with him about music players when I was passing by his desk the other day.  I can't even remember what got him started, but before I knew where I was, he was showing me the £900 lossless music player that he had personally imported from Korea.  He explained in great detail how he had shifted his whole music collection into a lossless format (which had taken weeks and weeks and required special storage) and then insisted on picking up his enormous headphones and getting me to have a listen to how good it sounded.

"Of course, it won't be quite as good as what I get through my £50,000 of stereo back home (!!!), but it isn't too bad.  What do you like to listen to?"
"Um.  Mostly heavy metal"
"Well, I've got some Iron Maiden, will that do?  Seventh Son of a Seventh Son?"
"Perfect".

He cued up "Moonchild"

Bruce Dickinson started to sing.  "Seven deadly sins.  Seven ways to win.  Seven holy paths to hell and your trip begins...."  And you know what it sounded like?  It sounded like a heavy metal album produced in the 1980s.  I'm sure it was a flawless reproduction stored in a lossless format, but really all that technology served to do was to reveal the limitations of the original source material.  Perhaps it's not the best demonstration.  We tried some jazz, which sounded absolutely amazing, but I couldn't help but wonder what the point was.

If you've ever listened to a CD alongside and MP3 of the same tune, you'll already know that the difference is incredible.  CD is not a famously warm sounding format, but through a decent stereo, it sounds streets better than the MP3 and you start to understand exactly what you lose in the compression.  But then again, I'm prepared to trade off a certain amount of quality for convenience.  I do like a good pair of headphones, but I can tolerate digital downloads from iTunes or Amazon just fine.

Not this guy.  You do wonder whether his ears are even really capable of picking up the differences at the very highest end, but perhaps he didn't spend his teenage years listening to heavy metal and that might just be me.....à chacun son goût.

As you might imagine, this guy is not a big fan of vinyl and really sees no attraction at all in the warmth of a 180g record.  All he hears is the imperfection.  For me personally, I'm learning that technical perfection is far from the most important thing when it comes to music.  And besides, as we were browsing for something to listen to on his very expensive and high-end device, I got a decent look at his record collection.  James Blunt in a lossless format is still James Blunt, right?  I mean, how good could that possibly be?

At completely the other end of the scale, I was telling my team the story about how I tried to buy "The Holy Bible" by Manic Street Preachers on the way home after seeing them at the Reading Festival, but it was a bank holiday Monday and all the shops were shut.

"Why were the shops shut?"
"Why would you need to go to a shop to buy music?"
"Who are the Manic Street Preachers?"
"How old are you?"

etc.

problems with drinking milk....

I've heard people joking that, now that the Scottish referendum is over and done with, what the hell are we supposed to talk about now?  Well, let me tell you, that hasn't been a problem in my office, that's for damn sure.

Why?  I'll tell you why. Because they've only gone and replaced all the milk with a powdered skimmed milk, that's what.

I should probably explain: I work in a large office building with lots of other people.  That building is divided up into sections, each section with a hub containing a fridge, water-cooler, water boiler and all that kind of stuff.  Up until a few weeks ago, those fridges were stocked up each day with semi-skimmed and skimmed milk.  Apparently, that adds up to something like £90,000 a year, and the company has decided to make a saving.

I'm with them so far.

Here's what they did: they carried out a trial in a few hubs where they replaced the milk in the fridges with a stainless steel urn which they filled with reconstituted powdered skimmed milk.  The trial went down like a lead balloon.  Well, we're English, aren't we?  How on earth can anyone with an ounce of sense believe that reconstituted powdered skimmed milk is in any way an acceptable thing to put into your tea? We're not fucking barbarians.

They ignored the feedback, extended the trial and rolled the urns out to every single hub in the building.  Almost immediately, it was all that anyone could talk about.  We wondered how buying 50 stainless steel urns, filling them a powdered milk mixture every day and cleaning them every night could work out cheaper than filling the fridges with bottles of milk; we wondered how skimmed milk powder was an adequate substitute for semi-skimmed milk; we marvelled at the communication that told us that, although the powdered milk mixture was perfectly safe, because the urns weren't chilled, it was probably better not to use them before 8am or after 5pm.... in fact, we talked about this all the time, around the printers, in meetings, over coffee....  It was the number one topic of conversation, especially when they confirmed, on Monday this week, that they would be making the trial permanent.

By Wednesday, all the urns were empty and we had proper milk back in the fridges again.  Why?  Because a member of the executive team exploded in a meeting, marvelling that we were approaching our most important trading period of the year and, instead of concentrating on that, we were all talking about bloody reconstituted powdered skimmed milk.  She apparently stormed out of the meeting immediately and demanded that this nonsense was brought to an end and that proper milk was brought back.

I reckon she's a tea drinker, don't you?

let's talk about it....

How's my evening going?

Oh, you know.  The usual.  Arguing with a friend of a friend on Facebook about Scottish independence.  As you do.

I got sucked in at the point she said:

"Well, the one thing I will say is that if past is prologue and "Aye" carries the day, there could well be outbreaks of Loyalist violence not just in Glasgow/Edinburgh, but in Belfast and adjacent areas as well. I hope that doesn't happen- but that community doesn't like it when uppity Celts insist on their Independence"

Loyalist violence, "that" community, uppity Celts.

Ugh.

When I suggested that this referendum was a triumph for democracy and pointed out that the history of the English in Scotland is hardly the same as the situation in Ireland; that the Scottish king became the king of England in 1603; that the acts of Union a century later were passed by the Parliaments in England and in Scotland; that the Scots had hardly been subjugated by an invading force....

I was wasting my breath.  She put up a wikipedia link to the Highland Clearances, which proves everything.

I pointed out that, in all the coverage I've seen of the campaigning, I've not seen a single mention of sectarianism or the threat of violence over the result.  The campaigning has been passionate and occasionally fractious, but the issues under discussion have largely been about the challenges facing a modern Scotland, and not so much about the past.

But what would I know?  I only live in Britain and have visited Scotland in the last month or so, where I saw largely Scottish crowds in quintessentially Scottish arenas like Hampden and Ibrox chanting for England and English athletes.  I'm a citizen of Great Britain and could easily wake up tomorrow with the map of my nation literally redrawn.

How could my insight on this subject possibly compare to that of a Californian? (who is, of course, entirely entitled to her opinion).

If you've got 15 minutes to spare, I would encourage you to watch this clip of John Oliver on the subject. "Scotland and England have been involved in something of a 300-year arranged marriage... and I will be the first one to acknowledge: England has been a little bit of a dick since the honeymoon...."

Very funny.

People, eh?  Fascinating.  As my friend said in her original post that started this little disagreement, whatever our views on Scottish independence, let's celebrate that we can settle this kind of question without bloodshed.  You're very wise, Kari.  Apologies that I seem completely unable to bite my tongue.

Let's see what tomorrow brings.

lost in the dangling conversation....

I was minding my own business in the canteen at work the other day, waiting patiently for a friend to join me so we could have a coffee and a bit of breakfast at the end of a long week, when a voice hailed me:

"Tim!"

Naturally, I turned around, only to see a young lady, perhaps in her early thirties,  bouncing enthusiastically towards me with a huge smile on her face.  I didn't immediately recognise her, and from a surreptitious look at the (upsidedown) ID card clipped to her belt, I didn't seem to recognise her name either.

I smiled.  Winningly, I hoped.  God, I hate small talk.

"You probably don't remember me, but we worked together a few years ago, in the offices in town.  I was temping, and it was my first ever job.  I was there for about eighteen months in all, but then moved away from Nottingham.  I've just moved back and started a new job here.  Today's my first day!"

I looked at her and, now that I thought about it, she did look kind of distantly familiar.  She was now looking at me expectantly, and it dawned on me that it was now my turn to say something to hold up my end of the conversation.  I decided to pitch at something welcoming, but slightly off-hand and debonaire with perhaps just a hint of insouciance.

"That was twelve years ago!"

Brilliant.

To be honest, I was a bit taken aback.  I'm not wonderful at making small  talk at the best of times, but I'm absolutely terrible at it when I'm taken by surprise.  That job seems like a lifetime ago, the other girl we both worked with back then now has two children and lives in Madrid.  What with the passing of time and me growing a beard, losing weight and most of my hair falling out, I was somewhat surprised that she recognised me at all.  I was certainly surprised that she apparently thought of me fondly enough to bound over to say hello.

She was perfectly delightful.  If I see her again, I shall make a point of asking her about her new job or another normal conversational builder like that.  With a couple of week's advance warning, I should be able to come up with something spontaneous.  It probably would have been better if I could have thrown those in when she re-introduced herself to me like any normal person might, but it's better late than never, eh?

na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na.....

I see plenty of idiots on the road.  We all see them. I've always known that they're there, but somehow now I'm spending so much more time on the roads on my bike, or out running, I seem to suddenly be much more aware that they're there.

I went running this evening, just as the sun was setting but before it got dark.  The roads were pretty quiet on the whole, so the idiots stood out all the more clearly when they went roaring past me.  All the roads around here are 30 mile an hour limits; they're residential roads.  Some of these morons, all of them driving large-exhausted cars with unmuffled engines, and all driven by young men, were travelling at probably double that.

Idiots.

My favourite idiot today though was one that I saw a little earlier, when I was cycling home from work.  I heard him before I saw him, his stupid engine growling as he pulled out of a junction.  When I looked over,  I saw a pimped up Range Rover; black with tinted windows and decorated so that it looked like a Batmobile, complete with the bright yellow bat symbols.  It was quite the most ridiculous car, and looked like it had been designed and decorated by a seven year old.  It must have cost an absolute arm and a leg, and yet every penny spent on it was surely actively taking value off it.  It was an extraordinary car.

It was driven by an adult male.

Well, I say adult.  Only chronologically.

People are fascinating.

...or maybe it *was* Batman?  Gotham is only around the corner, after all.  And Wayne Manor.

just try and have a little patience....

I was in Dublin with work on Tuesday. Since we’re not allowed overnight stops, this entailed a 04:45 start to drive to Birmingham to catch a flight. It was a productive day, but as I actually didn’t get back through my own front door until a little after 9pm, it was also a very long one.

It probably didn’t help that our return flight was delayed. We were all boarded on time, but didn’t move until, about ten minutes after our scheduled departure time, four people boarded the aircraft with a load of shopping bags and made their way to their seats. As they were clearly the cause of our delay, their arrival was met with death stares from all the other passengers I didn’t join in. I was as anxious as everyone else to be on the way home, but I remembered a story that someone once told me:
This person was on another flight that was held up in similar circumstances, and when a very flustered lady finally got onto the plane and made her way to her seat, she joined in with the hate lasers. As the lady was about to sit down, the elderly gentleman in the seat behind her spoke up:

“Are you okay? You look like you’ve had a tough day”

This simple flash of humanity stood in stark contrast to everyone else’s petty impatience over a delay of a few small minutes.

I try to remember this, just as, when I’m stuck in traffic, I always try to remember that someone at the front may well be having a much worse day than me (we once sat completely stationary on the M1, grumbling, when an air ambulance landed on the road ahead. When the traffic finally started moving, the firemen were still cutting someone out of the wreckage.)

So, I kept that in mind as these four latecomers took their seats on the plane.

When we got off at the other end, the colleague that I’d been travelling with, who had been sitting in another row, waited for me on the bus before we went through passport control.

“You know when those four guys got onto the plane late? Did you see the bloke sitting next to me?”
“No. Why?”
“He was going absolutely mental. Apparently, he travels on this flight every week, and every single week those four same people hold up the plane. He was absolutely furious”

Ah. Sympathy withdrawn. They’re just selfish arseholes then.

Now that I think of it, they didn’t look particularly flustered or apologetic about the whole thing either. They also appeared to have been doing a lot of shopping, although quite why you would travel from Birmingham to shop at New Look and River Island in Dublin when you might just as easily have popped to the Bullring is beyond me.  Take your time, eh?  It's not like you're keeping anyone waiting.

So much for my patient, zen-like stoicism, eh?

I've been locked out....

I've been cycling to work for nearly a year now, and in all that time, I think I've only used my car to get to the office twice - both times when I had to get to an appointment in the middle of the day.  We're pretty lucky with the facilities at my office, to be honest: as well as a changing room with a decent set of showers and my own locker, we've also got a secure bike shed that requires a pass to open the shuttered door and contains metal loops bolted and concreted into the floor to lock your bike against.  

At this time of year, as you'd expect with the nicer weather, there are quite a few more people cycling to work.... but as there's plenty of room, this hasn't really been a problem.  I usually arrive at around 07:30, well before most people, so I have my pick of spots to lock up my bike.  When the place gets busy and you have to share a post, the form is for bikes to top and tail on either side so that you get as little in the way of other cyclists as possible.  It's just common sense, right?  Some people are clearly a little possessive of "their" post, and leave their locks on them all the time, but there's nothing really wrong with that, and generally it's a pretty harmonious community of cyclists feeling smug when the traffic is appalling to get offsite in rush hour.

Imagine my surprise when I went to the bike shed to cycle home the other day at around 18:30 and found another bike chained to the frame of my bike.  Not around the post, just around my bike.  I looked at it for a moment, not quite believing what I was seeing.  I then actually unlocked my bike from the post, as though somehow I thought that I would be able to take it out and ride home.  Sadly, no.  Some idiot had managed to lock their bike directly to mine and make it impossible for me to cycle home.  Brilliant.  I imagine it was an accident, but that didn't stop me trying to work out what I had done to warrant such an act of antisocial stupidity (my bike was a lot bigger than the one locked to it, so I assume only a moron would want to come back to the bike shed to find an enraged much larger man waiting for them).

My options seemed somewhat limited: wait for the guy to turn up and move his bike? Walk home? Ugh.  What a massive pain.  More in hope than expectation, I went round to reception before they closed and explained my predicament.  They called security.  Security turned up with bolt cutters.  They checked my ID - presumably to make sure that I wasn't a splendidly inventive thief - and then spent the next five minutes cutting through the cable of the bike locked to mine (I guess those locks have improved over the years, huh?).  They then put the bike into their truck and took it away.

Well that escalated quickly.

On the one hand, I'm delighted with the result and the idiot had it coming.  But I can't help but feel a little bit bad about what must have gone through his head when he knocked off work, changed to ride home and found his bike had completely disappeared.  

Well, let's not overdo the sympathy though, eh?  What a plum.

[This kind of post is the reason you read this blog, right?  Insightful, funny, thoughtful, challenging..... none of these things.  It's not even quite an amusing middle-class problem.  Well, look... I nearly wrote about how awesome Metallica are.  Again.  So count your blessings.  I've saved that for tomorrow instead.  Something to look forward to]