Author: kevinrevell

Blogging that is in imminent danger of disappearing into its own middle aged, middle class, middle England hole...

How not to run a marathon.

~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment

Well, Budapest was lovely, thanks for asking. Just about managed to get under the radar of the stag and hen nights, and was able to see some historical stuff that was really, really interesting, albeit tinged with some pretty unpleasant context. So, if you fancy a romantic weekend away, get yourselves along to the secret nuclear bunker underneath Buda castle, and spend a couple of hours at the House of Terror, the former White Arrow and Soviet secret police headquarters. That should quell your ardour for a bit. And definitely get to the thermal baths, first thing in the morning when the steam is coming off the water, and the mist is down low so that you can only see about six foot in front of you. This means that when a mysterious and obese local in Speedos appears in front of you, it feels like you’re on the set of the Ipcress Files. Very strange.

But, unless you’re particularly twisted, probably best not to try to combine the whole romantic weekend bit with running a marathon. Unless, of course, you’re confident about romping round the course comfortably, slinging your medal on and then skipping down to the thermals with the missus for a bit of a splash about. Unfortunately, I went into the weekend with just this level of confidence and my bravado was undone slightly faster than it took Mrs E to win a short game of ‘I told you so’ tennis.

I’ve run quite a few marathons, and I can bore at international level on what you should and shouldn’t do to stay in one piece. So it’s with a certain amount of embarrassment that I present to you here a guide to some of the most gormless things that a marathon runner can do, with a few lowlights from one of the most gormless runners in the Budapest 2014 starting lineup.

1. RTFM, or read the manual, as we help desk people used to say….
Even though you might have seen something a couple of weeks before that said the marathon was starting at 0930, it might be a good idea to check the night before. Then you’d know that the time had switched to 1100. Then you wouldn’t have had to wake up at 0530 for a 0600 breakfast on your own, never mind irritating your partner by going to bed stupidly early. An early ‘I told you so’ from Mrs E, and the score is love 15.

2. Watch your step.
When you get to the start, and you’re wandering around in the dark, speculating why there’s nobody about (see above), watch where you’re walking. Because you might bang your foot very hard and very painfully, on the fork of a fork lift truck. And it might hurt so much that you swear really loudly, at which point you might be aware that there are actually quite a few people around, it’s just that they’ve been relaxing inside the volunteer tents. Love 30.

3. Relax before the start of the race.
Don’t feel the need to jog back two miles to your hotel, just to tell your wife that the race start is 1100, not 0930. That’s a 6 mile warmup, never a great idea. Also, she’s not stupid, she’s read the programme by now, and will greet your arrival at the breakfast table with a solemn shake of the head. Love 40.

4. Don’t make your head hurt.
Every single training session you’ve done is based on minutes per mile, right? So just because this race has kilometre markers, and just because you’re in a pen that says 4:30/km, doesn’t mean you should change the settings on your watch five minutes before you start. Cos if you do, you’ll spend the whole race trying to calculate your splits into something you understand. Also, there’s a fair chance you’ll start off at the wrong speed. First game to Mrs E.

5. About that ‘fair chance’.
You feel great at the start of a marathon. You’ve trained, you’ve tapered, you’re pumped up. All is good. So you set off at a comfortable pace. Which is, of course, too fast to maintain, but even though you know this, there’s a little voice telling you that you can gets some minutes in the bag now, so as to give you a buffer later. Ideally, you need to tell that little voice to do one. Second game, love 15.

6. Not having a plan B exhibits stupidity.
I’ve had cramp in my last five marathons. I’ve not done anything particularly different training for five years and guess what? I’ve had cramp in my last five marathons. Honestly, how bloody stupid is that? Anyway, if you know you’re going to have a problem, and you know, at 20 miles, that a combination of stopping, stretching, walking and jogging until you get cramp again is just going to make you miserable and not able to walk properly for the next three days, why not have a plan B? Like walking off the course and getting a bus. Or training properly in the first place. Love 30.

7. Maintain your inner monologue.
If, at 26.1 miles, you’re overtaken by the pacing group who you really ought to be miles ahead of, and you just can’t lift your legs to jog over the line with them because every time you do, the cramp feels like Edward Scissorhands is giving you a deep tissue massage…keep your thoughts to yourself. What ever you do, don’t shout out in a really loud voice ‘Oh, For F***’s Sake’. Apart from anything else, quite a few Hungarians can speak English. Love 40.

8. Be prepared.
You know your legs are going to be sore, don’t you? Now you might not have planned that when you took your shoe off following the race that you’d have a lump like an egg on it, courtesy of the forklift, and that you’d not actually be able to walk…but you really should have packed some sort of pain relief. What you probably don’t want to be doing on a Saturday night in Budapest is taking a series of trams and metros on the off chance of finding an all night chemist. And then having a difficult conversation with your partner about possibly having to stay in bed the following day if you were unable to walk. This bit has a happy ending, as it happens, as we managed to get hold of some anti inflammatories that, according to Mrs E, would definitely be banned in the UK, but which she encouraged me to take anyway, which had me springing around like a mountain goat the following day. Almost.

Two games to love on the ‘told you so’ front. No doubt these are all lessons for the future, and I firmly expect to have forgotten them all by the time the next marathon comes around.

Oh, and if you’re reading this dear, you were right. Next time, of course, it will be different x

Bullets for my baby

~ kevinrevell ~ 2 Comments

As with last week’s posting, this is a blog I’ve written for work, but as it’s not going to be published until December, and as it’s about something that’s going to happen this weekend, I thought I’d bung it up here now, with a few tactical edits…

I’d like to start, if I may, with three pieces of paper fixed to the wall next to my desk.

The first is a picture of Steve Prefontaine, probably the greatest American distance runner that never was, and the first ever rock star athlete. He had proper All-American good looks, he was incredibly gifted as a runner, he pretty much inspired Bill Bowerman to invent Nike, and just before his life could get to be in the least bit ordinary, he turned his sports car over after a party, and created an even bigger legend. Any footage you see of him running not only show a mop of shaggy blond hair bouncing up and down as he effortlessly leads from the front, but also a full moustache. It’s very rare that you see anyone these days who looks good with a moustache, as you’ll witness if you spend any time in any office building in the last week of November, but Steve Prefontaine was always something of an exception. Anyway, his picture is on my wall to remind me that the best runners don’t bother to look behind them.

Next to that is a copy of a cartoon from the Eagle, showing Alf Tupper, the ‘Tough of the Track’. The Eagle was a comic that celebrated all things British, in that post-war period when Britain was pretty much on top of its game, and you couldn’t get much more fantastical than the fictional story of Alf Tupper. Born on the wrong side of the tracks, Alf’s natural athletic ability ran into bad luck on a weekly basis, often because he was running against cheating ‘toffs’ or evil German milers. Deprived of any decent training conditions, Alf had to work sixty hours a week as a welder to make ends meet, and lived entirely on a diet of fish suppers. One of these days, I’m going to start a running club called the ‘Alf Tupper Harriers’. For full membership, you’ll have be a fully qualified welder, be capable of running under four minutes for an imperial mile, and prove to the admissions secretary evidence of a chips only diet for a given four week period. Unfortunately, I’ll be ineligible to join on all but one of the entrance criteria, so will have to settle for bronze membership.

And the third piece of paper is an email to my wife from a couple of months ago. The domestic arrangements in the Emu household are such that we end up emailing and texting each other quite a bit, in lieu of ever being in the same place at the same time. It’s an interesting challenge this, as I spend so much of my life writing emails at work, that it’s easy to mix up your styles. For example, Mrs R has never really forgiven me for sending her a link with a message of ‘FYI’. And I’m pretty sure I once sent an email to my boss with three x’s after my name, although it’s never actually been mentioned.

Anyway, this is an email that I sent in May, just off the back of yet another marathon that really could have gone a bit better. If I’d sent it to someone at work, it would have had four distinct, direct and punchy bullets, and, possibly due to the confusions above, it had four distinct, direct and punchy bullets:

“Dear Natasha*
– I’d like to take you to Budapest in October
– this is the hotel we’re going to stay at (link to expensive hotel)
– and on the Sunday afternoon we can go to Margetsziget and watch the well heeled Hungarians walk their Vizsla puppies**
– the only catch is that I’d like to run the Budapest marathon on the Sunday morning
What do you think?
K x”

Well, to my surprise, I got a reply within about half an hour:

“Yes. Do it!”

To be honest, I was expecting a little more negotiation. Mrs E/Natasha is tolerant of most of the whining and moaning that’s associated with marathon running, but tends to draw the line where it impinges on any child-free weekends. But, always one to follow a direct instruction from my little Soviet double agent, I booked the flights and hotel that evening.

When I got home a few days later, I mentioned how chuffed I was that she’d agreed to the weekend. She seemed a little surprised that I was surprised, and after a bit of skirting around the issue, asked what bloody marathon I was blathering on about. Switching seamlessly from doting and grateful husband into full defensive mode, I tried the obvious line:

“Didn’t you read the email?”

“Yes, but not after the bit about the dogs. I lost interest after that.”

So, the email is next to my desk, for two reasons. Firstly to remind me to get a bit of a wiggle on with some training, otherwise I’ll have another embarrassing, cramp ridden marathon, albeit one with a nice walk watching some little Hungarian puppies afterwards.

And secondly to remind me how to communicate with people. If I can’t hold my wife’s attention after three points on reasonably interesting subject matter, it’s fairly unlikely I’m going to do more with some of the slightly, err, drier, topics that I might have to cover at work, for example.

So my top tips are:
– never have more than three points
– make it interesting to the reader
– make it direct and to the point
– feel free to ignore this one

I’m off now. Got a plane to catch with Natasha. TTFN.

* Not her real name, but I’m trying some options out. Gives her a bit of cold-war glamour, no?
** This is not a euphemism. But appreciate it might need a bit of explanation some time.

Running on, and on

~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment

I got asked a few weeks ago to write a piece for my work’s inhouse magazine. Not entirely sure why, but I suspect whoever it was who had this bright idea hadn’t read the blog. Anyway, there was a bit of editing before it finally landed, and, partly because of this and partly because reader demand on this blog is currently  outstripping time to write anything especially new (ahem), here’s an edit all for you, gentle reader.

And in the spirit of an workplace magazine, designed to bring out the best in operational efficiencies, controls of a growing business, strategic thinking and investment in people, what better opportunity to write about…running

This, in itself, is a shameless rehearsal for a future career, where I hope to clear up one Christmas with a slim volume entitled ‘Everything I Know About Life, I Learned From Running Stupid Distances At A Decreasing Pace’. Or something slightly snappier. People will buy it in huge quantities, and I’ll be able to use the profits to fund a full time physiotherapist, who will bring me back to race fitness, while I pen my follow-up volume ‘Every Single Thing In My Body Is Completely Knackered Because I Don’t Appear To Be Able To Stop Going Out Running’.

Incidentally, I already have an idea for the front cover, to boost sales. The late, great, Alan Coren was once told by his publisher that the only subjects that ever sold books were Pets, Golf and Nazis, so he called his next volume ‘Golfing For Cats’, with a picture of a swastika on the front cover. Expect something similar in the shops around November.

Anyway, here are some lessons in life from a bloke who runs.

1. You can learn quite a bit from hitting your head on a tree

Well, kind of. I was running with a friend through some woods one day, and I managed to totally brain myself on a tree branch. Using my forehead as a pivot, my whole body swung forward and I landed upon a heap on my back. At which point, my friend turned round, pointed, laughed, and then fell over a tree root. So, watch where you’re going, never look back, and don’t laugh at other people’s misfortunes.

2. It’s hard to look good in lycra

More specifically, it’s hard to look good when you’re at the end of a long hot run, your face is the colour of beetroot, and there’s flies buzzing around your head like you’re PigPen in the Peanuts cartoon. Although, of course, you don’t necessarily realise this – I’ve been rattling along on a run in the past, thinking I’m the living embodiment of Steve Cram in the third lap of the 1980 dream mile, then I go past a shop window, look in the reflection and there’s some arthritic old twit shuffling back from the pub after four pints of Broadside, having forgotten his zimmer frame. Learning to not really care what you look like, a particularly valuable skill when those bloody car drivers point and shout at you, is an essential part of running. And other parts of your life. Two other things, while I’m here. If you’re reading this and you’re one of those gormless car drivers, please, please, please try to think of a better heckle than ‘Run, Forrest, Run’. And if you’re a runner and you’ve decided not to worry about what you look like, just go particularly easy on the bargain shorts that you think you’re going to shrink into. There is a limit to not caring what you look like, and it will be crossed with the wrong size of lycra.

3. Be prepared, be very prepared

Every runner you meet will have stories of little scrapes that they’ve got into by not being well prepared. Personally, I’ve found myself completely lost, in a foreign country with no language skills, a sketchy knowledge of where I last left my family several hours before, and no means of contacting them. I’ve fallen into an ice cold river in the middle of nowhere at 6am on a winter morning, thinking I’d broken my leg, with everyone else in the world safely tucked up in bed. Other runners I know have great stories about being chased by bulls, and getting into fights with pedestrians or car drivers mid-run, being bitten by dogs, or even shot at.  And you hear these stories and ask whether the runner took a mobile phone or told anyone where they were going, and of course, the answer was no. So, be prepared, plan for the worst and hope for the best.

4. Every A has a B

Or, think about the consequences. A friend of mine was training for his first marathon and struggling to justify the long runs to his wife, who didn’t really ‘get’ the whole running thing. So he booked a romantic weekend in a hotel, unfortunately not thinking about the need to fit in his scheduled long  run. So he woke up really early on the Sunday, and snuck down to the hotel gym, to get a two hour treadmill session in before his wife woke up. He was alone in the gym for the first hour and gasping for a drink, so was delighted to see another gym-goer come in, and asked if he could get a cup of water. This was duly passed to him and my friend made the cardinal error of stopping to drink it. The treadmill was set some way forward from the wall of the gym but he still managed to hit it with some force, ending up with an injury that kept him out of the marathon and a fairly testy discussion with his wife over breakfast.

5. Understand your limits

Most runners will tell you that they keep running because it makes them feel good, but you do need to understand the bits that you can’t do as well.  My eldest son ran his first marathon in 2013, and had to go to work the next morning. He had a job at a outdoor sports shop, and was posted on the door that day to greet people as they came in, and tap on the shoulders of the shoplifters as they left.  One lady of about 70 left the shop with a jacket over her arm, set off all the alarms, and he asked her politely if she’d like to go back into the shop and pay.
“No, not really”, she said, and walked off across the car park.
So my boy gave chase. Unfortunately, post marathon, ‘chase’ might have been stretching the point. He tried to walk after her with pigeon steps, each one punctuated by the word ‘ow’.
Seizing the moment, the woman looked behind her, saw this bizarre young man looking like he had nails in his shoes, occasional seizures and a bizarre speech impediment, and slowly walked away to freedom.

So, there you are. Might need a bit of padding out but you get the general picture. I’m still searching for the right title for ‘lessons in life from running’. But it might be along the lines of ‘Keep your head up, and don’t forget to breathe’.

My left foot

~ kevinrevell ~ 3 Comments

You might have seen the film ‘My Left Foot’, if you haven’t, it tells the harrowing and heroic story of Christy Brown, born with cerebral palsy, who learns to paint with his left foot. If you have seen it, then a key piece of trivia for you is that many of the scenes with Daniel Day-Lewis playing the lead role, were shot using a mirror, as DD-L was unable to manipulate his left foot adequately enough for the part. Which sounds, given the context, that he wasn’t really trying hard enough on the old acting front, but I may being overly critical.

But, with apologies to the throngs of Daniel Day-Lewis fans who flick to this blog on a regular basis (ahem), what follows is solely thoughts on my left foot, rather than the more accomplished work of Christy Brown’s one.

Because, if you really want to know something about someone, take a look at their feet. Alright, I just made that bit up, but in the unlikely event that you really wanted to know something about me, that’s where to look. And if you don’t, or if you’re of a particularly nervous disposition, you might want to stop reading now.

Still with me? Still not got anything else to do with your time? Then I’m snuggling up to you with a virtual embrace that’s warmer than Sir Terry Wogan, but stops just shy of the Hairy Cornflake. Apologies to the many international subscribers to the Emu who are shaking their heads at this point.

In an ideal world, I might show you a picture of my left foot as illustration. However, I’ve been strongly advised against this by my wife, who has been unfortunate enough to share most of her life and marital bed in the company of this foot and considers it something that really ought to be covered up at all times. Which is fair enough I suppose. After all, if I’m to be her trophy husband, I may as well cover up the ugly bits. (And that’s why I’m currently modelling the UK’s first male burqa, tee hee.)

Do let me know if I start rambling, won’t you. Anyway, back to the foot, and reading left to right…

We’ll start with the little toe. The one that bizarrley turns in on itself like it’s pointing to the right. That’s Joe Strummer’s fault. Just as my sister’s chums had to align themselves to either David Cassidy or the Osmonds, so my choices were either the Clash or the Jam. And, although I only really properly appreciated how wonderful London Calling was as an album years later, the style of the Clash would always win out. Paul Weller had some brilliant things to say, but Joe Strummer, who’d been around a bit longer, and probably long enough to realise that punks were really just hippies with attitude and short hair, was talking about the exotic worlds of Brigade Rosse and the Sandinistas. He also said what, to young teenage ears, were impossibly cool and meaningful things, like ‘The future is unwritten’ and ‘Being honest with yourself, that’s much tougher than beating someone up. That’s what I call tough.’

But, just as important was Strummer replying to a reporter asking him why he wore pointed shoes.

“You’ve got to wear pointy shoes to know which way you’re going”

Which is amongst the most meaningless quotes in rock and roll history, but because he meant something to me I made it my business to wear pointy shoes (and, wherever possible, George Cox flats with the DM sole and the teddy boy uppers seeing that you’re asking) for as long as I could get away with it. Which turned out to be as long as it took to point my little toe in the wrong direction.

Next one along, and the toenail is missing. That’s as a direct result of a hockey ball hitting it head on during an indoor game some time in the 1980s. After the toe went an unpleasant black colour for several months, I went to the doctor, who gravely announced that he would have to operate. And as far as operations were concerned, the removal of a second toenail was pretty minor, they even let me watch as they cut the toe back and then went about hacking away at the nail to get rid of it. A couple of days later I went on holiday with my student nurse girlfriend to America, where she dutifully dressed the toe every day and exercised far more than I deserved in the tender loving care department. I can’t help feeling that if the nail had come off the other side of four childbirths then she might have delivered a bit less TLC, but our love, as Joe Strummer never said, was blind to the future.

Third one along, and you can see the start of a really horrible blister. This is because I’ve just gone for a long run in new running shoes that I bought recently which are almost certainly the wrong size. But I’ll keep wearing them because I can’t abide waste, or because I’m tight. Or both. Which means that I’ll probably have that, or a similar reminder blister, for years to come.

Fourth one along, and a very unpleasant black toenail indeed. This one is going to fall off very soon, and as it does so, I’ll be quite rightly chastised by my own family for letting something so gross happen in the same room as them. This toe (and no other one) will always go black straight after a marathon. A few weeks later it will fall off, then a new one will start growing back. This, for me, is a bit like one of those weather machines where the woman comes out with the umbrella when it’s about to start raining. So when my toenail grows back with a normal colour, it’s time to do another marathon.

And so to the big toe, which, because I’m a runner, is almost always down with some sort of infection which turns it yellow. Again, this is a bit of a signal, and if it’s horribly yellow and infected then it’s time to have a rest from the running lark. Looking at it now, it looks relatively healthy, which can only mean one thing…it’s time to go for a run.

Hunter S Thompson, a man who managed to be impossibly cool not just during his life but at his own funeral, once wrote that:

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

Too bloody right. Just ask my left foot.

Abbatoir Blues (part three)

~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment

In which we witness the miracle de l’abbatoir, discover untold depths to our french vocabulary and find that smoking can be very damaging to your self esteem.

If you’ve not been following the story so far, it basically goes: drive, sick, clean, drive, run, get lost, get unlost, drive, rain, puncture, fret. For a more detailed explanation go to parts one and two.

So, I mentioned that we were at our wit’s end, and that darkness had fallen, it was hammering it down with rain, that we had an undriveable car and three small hungry children who were, as we like to say in our house, all ‘on the turn’

And just then something really odd hapened. We heard it before we saw it – the scraping of metal and the grinding of industrial wheels. And then we saw it. Remember the bright light in the church that shines on Joliet Jake in the Blues Brothers? That.

The doors to the abattoir were slowly opening, and a great yellow light spilled out onto the road. And into the light came the abbatoir workers, at the end of what looked like a particularly bloody shift, walking out into the street.

Jumping out of the car, I ran over to them at a pretty reasonable clip, while trying to remember all the all-important vocabulary that I’d need for them not to think of me as some drenched and deranged twit. To my surprise, they seemed to be comfortable with the concept of a pneu crevée. They even seemed to get the concept of me needing a util that was slightly moins poxy that the one qui arrivée avec le Renault.

“Allons-y” said the foreman (I assumed he was in charge as you could still see some of the white of his coat through the blood).

Mrs E rolled the car in through the huge gates and into the abbatoir’s garage. The foreman told us that he was just off home now, but that we should help ourselves to tools and to shut the gates behind us when we left. We told him that we were more grateful than he could possibly know, if he was ever to visit Norwich in the near future, to drop by, offered up #3 as a potential godchild and promised that we’d be away before you could say humane stun gun.

And, true to our word, we were. There was a proper wrench in the garage that got the wheel off straight away, and we were rolling out of the abattoir and onto the road moments afterwards.

Driving home to dryness, warmth and food, we passed through a village with a Tabac. I mentioned that after the day that we’d had, we’d probably picked the wrong week to give up smoking. I said I’d go inside and buy some tobacco. Mrs E readily agreed and pulled the car up. I grabbed my coat, and ran back and into the Tabac.

You know those westerns when the piano stops playing when a stranger goes into the bar? Well, it was very much like that. There were perhaps a dozen or so old boys, none of them under 60, chatting and playing cribbage when I walked in. As soon as I got in through the door, everything stopped. I swear that there was a card being played and it stopped halfway over the table. Figuring that they might just not get many strangers in these parts, I stepped over to the bar.

“Bonjour Monsieur” I said, confident of my opening gambit.
“Bonsoir”, he replied, seeing my opening gambit, correcting me, and putting me right onto the back foot.
“Je voudrais achêter le tabac”, I parried.

He looked puzzled and I heard a half-cough, half-snort behind me.

Now, what I had meant to do was ask for some tobacco. What I’d inadvertently done, and frankly it’s a mistake anyone could have made, was offer to buy the bar.

After a certain amount of toing and froing (he was talking about 20 year lease terms, I was trying to think of the French for ‘ready rubbed’ without getting into any more trouble), I think we finally ironed out that 25 grams of Drum tobacco would see me out into the night, and, more importantly, out of his bar.

Then I had to ask for ‘les papiers’, and we had to go through the whole process of rejecting the offers of l’Equipe and Le Monde, before the art of mime took over. I didn’t dare ask for any filters, particularly as there still hadn’t been anything more than the occasional cough from the merry gang behind me.

My only thought was to get out and leave, sharpish. Roll a couple of fags as soon as we got back to the house, sneak them out the back door while the kids were in the bath, then swap roles with Mrs E. I grabbed my wallet from my coat pocket to pay, which in turn, dislodged the can of ‘Jus de Femme’ which I’d stuffed in there the day before. It bounced along the uneven floor, and came to rest under the boot of one of the cribbage players. It was a reasonably dark bar, but, as luck would have it, the can had rolled into a ray of light that lit up the logo to perfection.

I wandered over to retrieve the can as nonchalantly as a four hour run, a monumental family crisis and a cringeworthy tabac encounter would allow.

“Ce n’est pas pour moi, c’est pour les garçons”, I reasoned with the owner of the boot as I leant down, possibly doing nothing to counter my image as the mad foreigner.

I left the bar as casually as I could, and got into the car.

“You were ages”, said Mrs E. “Are you ok?”

“Leg it”, I said.

And she did.

Abbatoir Blues (part two)

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We rejoin our story of mid-life torpor as our intrepid family travels south towards the Pyrenees, in a car which mingles the sweet smell of toddler sick with the strangely scented and even more strangely named ‘Jus de Femme’, a product from Joe Bloggs’s very own perfume department.

If none of that made sense, you might want to read part one.

And, after very little incident (Mrs E did drive into the back of another car quite early on in the journey, but by leaping out and shouting very loudly “I’m really sorry but my toddler has been really sick”, caused the driver to jump back into his car and drive off with a really frightened look on his face), we arrived in an absolutely brilliant village at the foot of a Pyrenean mountain, and all was right with the world. Boys all assigned bedrooms, provisions unloaded, and all was well.

The next day, being a Sunday, necessitated a long run. I was going reasonably well on the running front at that time, and lining up for an autumn marathon, so I cheerily waved goodbye to the family. After setting off, I was swiftly recalled to the start line by Mrs E, who quite reasonably asked if I knew where I was going, I confessed that I had absolutely no idea.

“Tell you what”, I said/busked, “I’ll run in the direction of that mountain, look to run around it and head back. And if I can’t see a way back within an hour, I’ll retrace my steps”.

She gave me the sort of look that I knew then, and know now, to mean ‘yeah, right you tw@t’, and waved me on my way.

And I really did think that would work out. After an hour, I was pretty in my sure I could see a way back to the village. After a couple of hours, I realised that a) I was wrong, and I actually had no idea how to get back b) it was getting quite hot and I hadn’t taken a drink with me and c) I hadn’t actually seen anyone since I left the house. Oh, and d), that if I had any chance of retracing my steps then I was going to be at least another two hours.

Then, like a mirage, on the road about half a mile ahead, I could see some men working, laying tarmac. Quickly, I remembered pretty much everything I could get back into my head from Longman’s Audio Visual French. Jettisoning the bits about Jean-Paul launcing le ballon, and Marie-France trapping le ballon, I reckoned I could ask for directions back to the house. Slowing to a gentle jog, and trying to look like I did this sort of thing for relaxation most Sunday mornings, I tried out my best French vocabulary and my best French accent on the leader of the road crew. After a certain amount of head shaking, I came to the sad realisation that I was speaking to some of northern Spain’s less enthusiastic road gangs.

Oops, must have crossed the border, I thought, realising that e), I had no passport, no id, and no address.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I managed to get back to the house after a epic four hour run. I’m not sure what sort of wounded soldier welcome I’d been expecting, but the general gist of the reception committee encompassed the full set of points a) through e) above, and then added a couple for good measure. As far as I remember, they were : f) that I might want to start taking the odd parental responsibility myself rather than bugger off into the foothills of Spain whenever I fancied it and g) that it wouldn’t have been quite so bad if the angelic tousle haired fruits of my loins that I’d waved goodbye to half a day earlier hadn’t turned into three living embodiments of Damien from the Omen. Apparently the final straw had been when #2, keen to retrieve a Lego model from the top of a set of bookshelves, had used the shelves as a ladder, and consequently destroyed the entire unit.

After what is known in financial circles as a ‘cooling off period’, shelves were mended, showers were had, lunch was eaten, and a tense quiet settled over our perfect family, broken only by Mrs E, who made it clear that the only way that our marriage was likely to survive the next two weeks, or possibly the next two hours, was by ‘getting out of this bloody house’.

So we went for a drive, to the nearest town, which was St Gaudens. We took our usual positions, Mrs E at the wheel, me navigating. This is almost always the best way for us to travel, as it matters slightly less when I go to sleep, which I tend to do immediately in any moving vehicle.  But I was sure to be on top of my game this time, and laid out maps and guide books and kept an eye out for rogue Spanish road gangs. I had a Rough Guide to Southern France, and looked up St Gaudens. It pretty much recommended driving straight through without stopping. In fact the only items of any interest were the St Gaudens abbatoir (one of the biggest in southwest France, apparently), and the Restaurant de l’Abbatoir, situated handily on the opposite side of the road. As raving middle class vegetarians, neither of these attractions were that exciting to us, but we were at least out for a drive, the kids were on good form, and we might have even managed the odd chuckle about the day behind us as we got stuck into those Early Learning Centre cassettes again.

Even when it started to rain we were in good moods. When it really started to bucket down and the sky literally went black, we found the funny side. As we went past the abbatoir on the right and the restaurant on the left, we smiled, and only slightly wobbled when we had to explain what the abbatoir was to #2.

Unfortunately, the mood swung in the wrong direction, when first the road surface started getting a bit bumpy, and then we realised there was nothing wrong with the surface but that we had a puncture. As we explained to our wide eyed travellers in the back, the wheels on the bus had stopped going round and round. And round and round and round.

I mentioned it was raining. It’s worth mentioning again, because it was the sort of rain that really did demand attention. Out I jumped, got immediately soaked to the skin, got out the spare wheel, got the jack in place, put the slightly poxy wheel brace on, and…nothing. I’m not the strongest man in the world but I reckon I can normally get a wheel nut off a wheel, for goodness sake, but not these ones. These ones, incidentally, had last been put on by the tyre company the month before with one of those incredibly impressive compressed air bolt tighteners.

So, we stood, by the side of the road, in the pouring rain, trying to flag down drivers who might have better wheel braces or more defined stamping heel techniques than me or Mrs E. And, to the credit of the Sunday evening drivers of St Gaudens, three of them stopped. They pulled out their wheel braces, which largely matched ours for poxiness, and they pulled and stamped in pretty much the same way that I’d been doing for the last half hour, but to no avail. And, with a series of Gallic shrugs, they hopped back into their warm dry cars and drove back to their warm dry homes.

Meanwhile, in the back seat of the car, things were moving from bemused to fractious. A quick inventory from Mrs E (who, remember, had just wanted to get out of this bloody house) revealed that we had one unopened packet of Cheese Wotsits and one clean nappy (good luck with that on Ready, Steady, Cook). We had no money, and no id. There was an emergency number for the agency we’d rented the house from, but that was back at the house as well.

Night was falling. The restaurant was closed. It was still absolutely hammering it down. And it was one of those moments when you realise that you’re in charge. There’s no one else who can step in and save you, and there are three helpless kids crying in the back of the car, who are completely reliant on you.

And then something really quite remarkable happened.

(To be continued)

Abbatoir Blues (part one)

~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment

I’m not absolutely sure why #4 wanted to know the french for slaughterhouse this morning, but he did.

“Maison de slaughter”, suggested #3, his recent GCSE French burning a trou in his poche.

“No”, said his mother, “I think we all know the word for slaughterhouse in French, don’t we? It’s abbatoir”.

And, as a family, in our limited french vocabulary, A will always be for abbatoir, and this blog is going to tell you why.

It is a story of sickness and accidents, of disaster and horror, of a slaughterhouse and a mysterious bar, and of the ghastly realisation of parental responsibilities, the like of which hope never to experience again. In short, it is the story of our summer holiday in the year 2000.

We’d decided that, as the three boys were, at 6, 4 and 2, that much more mature, that we ought to all jump in the car and head 700 miles south of where we lived. Honestly, that’s how our minds worked back then. We booked two fabulous looking places to stay, and come the exciting departure day, lined up three car seats in the back of the car, loaded up with travel sweets and Early Learning Centre cassettes of popular singalong classics, and headed for Dover.

Dover is quite a way from Norwich, and it didn’t take too long to find out that #3 hadn’t quite resolved his problems with car sickness. The first and second projections were skilfully fielded from the front passenger seat, with Mrs E at silly mid on, but, unusually, with her back to the wicket. We weren’t so lucky with the third one though, and the back of the car ended up being lined with a bilious film that stank beyond belief.

Fortunately, this seemed to get #3 into a slightly better place, and he felt able to nod along feebly to a couple of choruses of ‘The Wheels on the Bus’, but by the time we got to the ferry terminal, never the sweetest smelling place in its own right, we were all feeling a little bit sick ourselves.

Onto the ferry, and #3 is still feeling a bit dodgy, so Mrs E takes him to the first aid room, where he spends the rest of the crossing. We agreed the duties for the voyage. Mrs E to take charge of first aid. Me to look after the older two and deliver car maintenance, ie making the next 500 miles a tolerable experience.

Armed with the only tools I had at my disposal (half a packet of wet wipes), I made my way onto the lurching car deck, and did my very best to clean up. I did a reasonable job under the circs, but was very conscious that my work wouldn’t pass much of a sniff test, and the practicalities of driving all day with all the windows fully open wasn’t too attractive. So I made it my business to improvise. Thinking back, I really should have improvised by finding a cleaner on board, who, presumably would have cleaning up other people’s sick as a key part of their job description. However, unfortunately I ended up trying to improvise at the Stena Line gift shop.

Had I been in desperate need for some Stena branded playing cards, a scale model of the ferry that we were travelling on, or even an oversized toblerone, I would have been in luck. But cleaning materials and things to make your car smell like it hadn’t been used as a student’s toilet were in short supply.

“Cleaning materials are in short supply here”, I brightly suggested to the assistant.

“Je ne comprend pas” was the reply, a phrase I was to hear very frequently on this and future visits to France, so much so that it became our stock in trade response to almost all questions asked of us. Sometimes it becomes a competition to see who can get the first “ne comprend pas” into any conversation.

I had another look round the shop, a exercise that really didn’t take very long, and, just as I was about to give up, found the one thing that could have saved our holiday. There, on a back shelf, was a can of deodorant, by the not very well known cosmetics manufacturer Joe Bloggs. At a bargain 15 francs, it would have to do. The label on the can said ‘Jus de Femme’, which suggested that they’d had an intern for the day in the Joe Bloggs marketing department (can you ever see Boots marketing a male deodorant labelled ‘Female Juices’?) but at the time, I just thought that it was something that Mrs E might find amusing.

I retuned to the car and liberally sprayed ‘Jus de Femme’ around the back seats. It seemed to do the job, and I stuffed the can into my jacket pocket.

Little did I know that I’d come to rue the day that I’d bought a can of Jus de Femme…

(To be continued)

Highland Flings

~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment

And so, to the north, or more specifically the north-west bit of Scotland just above Glasgow, where cycling for a few days in July had seemed like a great idea in the planning a few months ago. Frankly, any opportunity to get away from mobile phones, spend a bit of time with Mrs E and get on a bicycle was always going to be appealing, and the offer from #1 and #2 to look after their brothers, the dog and the house had sealed the day. Although #2 has parenting skills honed from watching the early film career of Ray Winston, and #1 has discovered a social life of must-have engagements that have threatened any attendance in the house beyond mealtimes, but hey, it’ll all be part of their growing up experiences, right?

Anyhow, I met the lovely and frankly rather excitable Mrs E at Newcastle, where I’d been working, and she’d been travelling to on the train, on Friday, and we headed north to Edinburgh, then Glasgow, then Ardrossan. There’s something quite romantic about meeting someone on a train, although by the time we’d annoyed everyone in her carriage by waving furiously at each other through the window, then I’d managed to hold up the train by not getting my bike properly onto the guards van, then fallen over a couple of times by running in cycling shoes to her waiting arms…well, it wasn’t really ‘Strangers on a Train’ territory, but it was as good a feeling as I’d had all week.

And it got better. Onto the ferry at Ardrossan, and over to Arran, which the local tourist guides describe as ‘Scotland in miniature’, because the bottom bit is lowland, and the top bit is pretty mountainous. I think they’ve missed a real trick here – there’s not much population in Arran, and most of the villages that you go through only have a few houses (and, bizarrely, always a co-operative food store), but if they could theme them along the lines of ‘Scotland in miniature’ a bit more enthusiastically then they could clean up. So they could have a whole load of people with posh English accents living in the bottom right village, level with that on the west a fierce sectarian rivalry and a thriving underground arts culture, and up in the northwest, a thriving set of engineers, enjoying two weeks of sober offshore precision mechanics followed by two weeks enthusiastic drinking onshore.

Anyway, we stayed in Brodick, which is the sort of town that Uncle Quentin and Aunt Fanny might have nipped across to when they ran out of ginger pop on Kirrin Island. We’d booked a room in what turned out to be a really lovely house, run by a lovely woman who, by her own admission, was going through something of a Fawlty Towers phase. The card machine was broken, and the prospect of hot food was limited in that the kitchen ceiling had just fallen down. And could we please not run any hot water after 10pm, as the pump was very noisy and it might wake up the residents of room number 5. So we didn’t. In fact we returned from a splendid meal by 9pm, at which point Mrs E, without any apparent irony, announced her intentions to our hostess that she was planning to ‘draw a bath’. It was that sort of place.

Fuelled by the sort of breakfast that really needed to be ridden off, we set off to discover the delights of ‘Scotland in miniature’, which consisted of taking the only road out of Brodick, and keeping the sea on our left until we got to the top of the island. This looked like about 40 miles on the map, so I’d optimistically thought it would take us a relaxing 3 or so hours, with a few stops for coffee and beer. In reality, it took us most of the day; part of this was because we stopped to look at the view so much, but mainly it was because it was just ridiculously hard work. It wasn’t helped by the weather, that just hammered rain down at a moments notice, but the main problem was that it was proper tough cycling, with some really, really testing climbs. I imagine that when they started marketing ‘Nepal in miniature’ it will feel a bit like the southwest of Arran, but with more people wearing Gortex. And all completely, and utterly work it, probably the best cycling we’ve ever enjoyed, despite all of the above – good roads, fantastic views, no punctures, and hardly any traffic. We got buzzed a few times by the same three Honda Goldwing three-wheelers, who I suspect we’re ridden by Billy Connolly enthusiasts who thought it was a great way to explore, but Arran is such a small island that they ended up going round the same road three or four times before they found an exit. Here’s something I didn’t understand – if you’re going to shell out lots of money on a piece of kit like a Goldwing, and for all I know it might be for a very good reason, like you’ve never learnt to ride a proper bike, or you’ve got a thing about wearing a helmet, why on earth do you have the stereo on when you’re riding? The engines on those things are specifically designed to make loads of noise, so all you’re doing with your recording of ‘Bat out of Hell’ is annoying those of us further away from the engine. On reflection, annoying other people is about all you should ever do with a Meatloaf album, but you get my drift.

Anyway, around we go, to the top of the island, and get on a ferry from Lochranza to Claonaig, and hike up the mainland to Tarbert, which was handily situated just inside its own raincloud. Tarbert is a proper harbour town, although these days there are more yachts than fishing boats, which means that it boasts a few more art galleries than are strictly necessary, but again, we ate well, and perhaps more importantly, kept our heads down when Tarbert cranked up the Saturday night mayhem settings. The main pub in the town was managing to host, in one room, a fairly raucous 50th birthday party, the 3rd/4th place playoffs in the World Cup, and a covers band, cheerfully murdering ‘Eight Days A Week’.

“Shall we go in for a drink?”, I asked Mrs E, and, quite rightly, she pointed out that I was something of a tool for even suggesting such a thing.

Tarbert woke up with a bit of a sore head on the Sunday, but us heathen sassenachs leapt out of bed ready to take on the haul up to Oban, which we tried to do by using the Sustrans route. Sustrans is a great charity, and has done a lot to try to carve out cycle-able stretches of the British countryside, but I do wonder sometimes what the volunteers have been smoking. In the past we’ve navigated our way in the dark, across fields of sheep, reading by torchlight a map instruction that says ‘slightly off road’. The ‘pretty route’ across to Oban is described as a ‘roller coaster ride’ with ‘some challenging climbs’, which perhaps paints a rather too jolly picture of it. In reality, it’s bloody awful 15% climbs, followed by descents that had me grinding my teeth well into the next evening. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, there were highland cattle, mountain streams, stupidly incompetent sheep, heather and mountains, and just us to enjoy it. Although, probably worth specifying ‘enjoy’ a little here for the record…

Mrs E had announced her intentions to cycle around Scotland on a weekend break to her friends, to be met largely by confusion and disbelief. I think the general consensus was that she’d get wet, break down, get knackered and possibly get divorced by hauling a heavy bike up ridiculous hills in astonishingly bad weather. And if the weather held off, she’d get bitten. And all the time, she could have spent her time on a beach, or in a nice place with easy access to the indoors. But Mrs E is made of sterner stuff than that, and despite the fact that most of her friends’ predictions did come true, and despite making the trip on a bike that I’d rather optimistically built for her myself, largely out of spare parts, and which (sorry dear), only appeared to have four working gears by the end of the trip, and despite a number of injuries largely caused by said bike, she almost enjoyed herself. As The good book says…,’Greater love hath no man, than that which sees his loved one haul a thirty year old bike up a mountain in the pouring rain, weighted down by two stone of luggage, vigorously swearing about her sore bottom’.

Anyway, just as we ran out of puff we landed in Oban, which is home to all manner of coach tours and guest houses, in a fairly genteel style, and checked in to a hotel with the biggest windows imaginable, and what we assumed was a complimentary decanter of sherry, which was downed a bit less genteelly, although we did at least use glasses. Another beer, another cider, another seafood meal, another sleep and another breakfast later, and we were ready for day three, which was to take us from Oban to the side of Loch Lomond. This was down as about 65 miles, which wouldn’t normally be a challenge on normal terrain and in fine weather but unfortunately we weren’t going to get either of those. It absolutely tipped down from the moment we cycled out of Oban to 10 minutes after arriving at Loch Lomond, about 7 hours later. It was truly, truly horrible weather, and not helped by needing to spend most of our time on the A85, which was stupidly busy with lorries driving too fast and seeing us too late. We almost cashed our chips in on a hill out of Inveraray, when two lorries hauling the towers for wind turbines misjudged the hill and drove us into the ditch. When I die, I would quite like it to be in a bizarre green-energy related incident, and ideally on a bicycle, but fortunately it wasn’t my time. Just as well, as Latitude is next weekend. Anyway, less said about that journey, the better. Through the clouds you could see some landscapes that we’re probably splendid on a clear day, but given that most of our focus was on keeping in one piece through the rain, there wasn’t much opportunity to do any wistful gazing.

Loch Lomond was pretty good though, and we managed to salvage some dryish clothing and found a bar to anaesthetise the day away. All of which was pretty successful, as even Mrs E greeted her saddle the next morning with a cheery pat, knowing that we had less than 20 miles to knock off before Dumbarton, Edinburgh, Peterborough and home. When we retire from cycling (which I briefly thought might have been at around 1500 on Monday on a hill out of Inveraray), I’m going to have Mrs E’s saddle made into a barstool so that she can relive the memories, one of which I hope will include rubbing tiger balm onto the back of her neck by the side of the A85 in a monsoon.

“She’s a cruel mistress, that saddle”, said Mrs E

Ahh, but mistresses are supposed to give you the most fun.

These Testing Times…

~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment
Good evening and welcome from Emu Towers, where we are just completing week five of a five week exercise in patience and stress management.
Yes, it’s that time of year again, where we knuckle down to exams, and this year we’ve managed a three card trick with #1 having to get approval for year 2 at Uni, #2 worrying himself into a stupor over second year of A levels, and #3 dragging himself through the Gove-inspired wanderlust that is the GCSE programme.
And it’s with #3 that most of my time has been spent, testing both our patience pretty much to the limits. Several months ago, the cheery ‘goodmorningFelix’ was replaced with ‘getoffthatbloodyscreenanddosomerevisionFelix’, and, as of this Friday, thankfully, we’ll be able to get back to a more cordial relationship.
But, as a result, I find my knowledge of GCSE type subjects at something of an all time high. Which has made me scratch my head a little bit at the way we teach, and test, our kids in this country.
Part of this head scratching is because I’ve ended up relearning stuff that I haven’t needed to know since…well, since I was 16. And, although that seems quite a long time ago in Felix-years, it isn’t really, it’s just that there’s quite a lot changed about how we go about learning stuff
I’ve bored you before in this blog on the delights of growing up in the sticks in the 1970s, and I’ve never really thought until now about how the process of learning was so different. Our family had a particular challenge here which is worth a slight diversion; my Dad had, in an effort to improve himself, and those around him, subscribed to an encyclopaedia, built in weekly parts, and filed away in a bookcase, absolutely ideal for all those homework and revision tasks.
This might seem a bit odd now, but this was at a time when sets of encyclopaedias would cost hundreds of pounds and often came with their own hire purchase schemes. So to build up from A for Aardvark, on an affordable weekly basis, probably seemed like an excellent idea. Unfortunately, around L for Lima, my Dad either lost interest or failed to keep up his payments. Or possibly the build-your-own-encyclopaedia company went bust. Anyway, as a result, we had a full set of binders in our house, but they were only really useful if you were looking up something in the range A-L. Consequently, our homework could be a bit hit and miss – Ancient Greece was no problem at all, but the Roman Empire was something of a mystery.
 (btw I do still harbour a light fantasy that one day I’ll be asked to join a quiz team where my limited general knowledge is matched, weirdly, with two people with fabulous recall on subjects M-S and T-Z. We could go on to conquer the quiz world and then to all manner of general knowledge related scrapes and japes, the whole thing will get made into a screenplay, we make our fortune, but it all ends up really badly because we find we have literally nothing in common to talk about…)
But anyway, all of the above meant that the stuff we learnt, had to be taught, and pretty much memorised, at school, in order to go into exams. And that’s the bit that I can’t understand not changing, because, should one of my kids want to know about Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, or oxbow lakes, or who played on Jack White’s last album…well, they look it up on Google. And, about 99% of the time, because this whole internet information thing is nicely self governing, they get it right. So they don’t really need to know facts that much anymore, they just need to know how to find them.
And, given that they’ll be doing an even more advanced look up through even more brilliantly interlinked technology in the future, shouldn’t we be teaching them  how to interpret data and manage it? Instead, we still seem to be fixated on remembering the stuff that, in Felix’s case, he might not need again until he’s tutoring/barely tolerating my sixteen year old grandson. That, incidentally, is one of the most disturbing thoughts I’ve had for some time, for a number of reasons, but you get my gist.
I do understand that part of exams are around how bright our kids at learning stuff. So not everything has to have a direct practicality. But we all know that being bright has a bit more to it than memory tricks and techniques that you could easily drag off the net. And it would be really good if we could tie in the subjects to stuff that was really immediately useful. If you look at the syllabus for GCSE maths, for example, (and pay attention at the back, Gove), the fundamental problem to me is that it hasn’t moved on in twenty years. So, we’re still looking at techniques around calculus and trigonometry in favour of understanding how money works, or how to understand, interpret and present meaningful data, which, IMHO, are going to be much more useful as tools for the future.
Anyway, no more GCSE horrors until (an increasingly nervous)#4 steps up to the plate in 2018. So, if you need to know the hypotenuse length of your bizarrely shaped patio plan, or how long your bath will fill up if water flows in at 2 litres/min and out at 20% of that due to a bizarre leak normally only found in maths exams, ask now! It’s only a short matter of time before I forget again.

Everything but the (geek/obsessive) Girl

~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment

When I was ten, I thought my brother was God

He’d lie in bed and turn out the light with a fishing rod

I learned the names of all his football teams

And I still remembered them when I was nineteen

Well, to the best of my knowledge my brother never owned, and doesn’t own, a fishing rod. If he had or did then I’d see this as an excellent opportunity to disown him; I’ve always set a lot of store by the maxim of ‘Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but give him a fishing rod and he’ll turn into a solitary twit who enjoys sitting in tents staring aimlessly into the distance while his guy-ropes trip up unsuspecting runners from the towpath’. Although mentioning gormless staring does allow me to flag today’s ‘word of the day’, an occasional series where I’ll travel from bathroom-reading direct to blog-writing, to bring you a word that you’re challenged to use in everyday conversation. Today’s word is ‘gongoozler’, a person who enjoys aimlessly watching activity on the canals of the United Kingdom. According to Wikipedia, it may have arisen from words in the Lincolnshire dialect : gawn and gooze, both meaning to stare or gape, which makes more sense. I’ve never met anyone gape-free from that neck of the woods.

But I digress. It was the song lyrics that got me started. I really like these lines from Everything But The Girl’s wonderful ‘Oxford Street’ as they take me back to a pretty innocent time which I remember really fondly, and which, these days,  I constantly struggle to articulate to my kids.

My brother and sister and me grew up in the country, where there was, in the 1970’s, absolutely nothing to do. We’d go and play in the woods for hours, returning occasionally for meals, or go out on bikes or played football, and if it was wet, we stayed inside and…well I’m not really sure what we did, really. We will have read books, I’m sure, but I can’t believe we did that all day. And we didn’t have a television. I don’t remember that being a big problem at the time, but it seems hard for my kids to understand. Last time I counted, there were three TV’s and nine computers in our house, which came out at about three per person, which, realistically, feels a bit excessive.

‘How many screens can you look at at any one time?’, I challenged #3 quite recently.

‘More than the number of your bikes you can ride at once’, came the irritatingly measured reply.

Most of our parenting ritual these days involves extricating kids from staring at the blue light, switching machines off, retrieving them from rooms at bedtimes, and generally telling the boys to ‘get off the bloody screen’.  So it’s quite hard for them to imagine a time when all that wasn’t available, or as #3 helpfully pointed out the other day, ‘when Dad lived in black and white’.

But we seemed to muddle through.  My Dad finally broke the duck some time around 1975, by buying a 10” portable black and white TV, which the five of us would crowd around to watch the football, a film, or (slightly bizarrely), the snooker.

So, me and my brother typically had other forms of entertainment, and chief amongst a pretty short list was the Freewheel catalogue. If you were a cyclist in the 1970’s and you didn’t have ready access to a bike shop, then the Freewheel catalogue was your bible and your bike shop all rolled into one. Every year, a new copy would appear on the shelves in WH Smith, and the regular poring over the pages became a pretty big ritual for me and my brother.

Inside, to a cyclist, were all manner of delights, from specific and exotic components through to the impossibly unaffordable Campagnolo group sets, and, at the back, where the really wonderful page layouts were, the  frames and the full bikes.  Freewheel only sold two types of bike; Mercian, still renowned as fabulous bespoke frame-makers, and a now-defunct brand of cycles from a company called Revell.

When you’re fourteen, and you’re really quite keen on cycling, and you turn the pages of a magazine, and it falls open at a picture of a beautiful touring bike, and then you notice that, quite literally, It’s Got Your Name On It, well, it’s kind of hard to explain just how astonishingly excited you feel. There are a number of post-pubescent analogies that I could use at this point, but, if nothing else, the Emu’s mission statement is to keep things above the waist, so let’s just go for very very excited indeed.

So, one day, I figured, I would own my very own Revell touring bike. Unfortunately, by the time I got old enough and financially stable enough to do such a thing, Revell touring bikes were a thing of the past. And then a couple of years ago, I found one on eBay, bought it, and put it in my garage, in the knowledge that one day it would get restored to its former glory. And, with a respray courtesy of the wonderful people at Mastercote in Norwich, the application of replica decals from H Lloyd cycles and some rather tedious sourcing of lots of parts, it is finally back to something approaching that glory. And just looking at it makes me go all dewy eyed and wishing I’d kept those old catalogues:

Image

I forgot to mention that the frame is too small for me, but it’s just the right size for Mrs E, and should be just about right for our brief tour of the Highlands in July. And, as it happens, the final nut has just gone onto the bike today, just in time for Mrs E’s birthday tomorrow.

Unfortunately Mrs E has got wind of the timing of this and made it clear that the bike doesn’t count as a valid birthday present. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, she reasons, the rebuild has given me all the pleasure, often at times when I might have been slightly more use as co-shouter at children, or providing meals/neck-rubs/handyman services etc. Secondly, and she’s mentioned once or twice, she’s not altogether happy about relying on my mechanical skills to keep her travelling (and stopping) when she wants to. And thirdly, she doesn’t quite share my adolescent geek-ness where bikes are concerned. Last month, while travelling down to France, we were about eight hours into the journey, with her driving, and, with the kids asleep in the back, and she told me she was tired.

‘Just talk to me’, she said, ‘Tell me something interesting to keep me awake’.

So I told her about the importance of gear ratios and the relative merits of compact and triple gearings, the tensioning function of the rear jockey wheel mechanism, and how to minimise chain stretch.

Before I knew it, we’d pulled off the road into a layby.

I’m really sorry’, she said, and almost immediately went into a deep sleep.

I don’t think I’ve ever really bored my wife, or anyone else, into an absolute unconscious state before; I’m looking on the bright side in that if I need to get a bit of peace and quiet I can always resume the discussion, but I guess my point is that we’re not exactly as one in our passion for bicycles.

Finally, and this is not to say that she’s ungrateful in any way, but there are strict parameters around birthday presents, as opposed to the other gifts that liberally shower upon her during the year. These include a) no second-hand items and b) preferably nothing that has been made by a member of the family or c) purchased at a craft fair.

That’s fine. Her main present this year is a fishing rod.

Happy Birthday, dear x