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A pair of embarrassing running shorts (part 2)

~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

Well, gentle reader, sadly it’s tights weather yet again. For running, you understand. I’ve long since moved away from the old school style of running that insists on wearing shorts at all costs, and, if it gets really cold, just tells you to run a bit faster. I run a bit up in Newcastle, where I believe tights are considered a bit, well southern, and I’m sure some of the people that I bump into running round Town Moor  at -2C in a hailstorm think that wearing a shirt is a bit of an unnecessary luxury as well. But I’m afraid these days, not freezing my nuts off of an evening has become something of a priority.

The other deviation that I’ve made away from old school running has been a sad reliance on needing company on my runs. By company, I mean needing to be plugged in to music or a podcast or a radio, and I justify this based on the fact that I’ve been running pretty much every day now for about twenty years, and so I’ve kind of got bored with the wonders of nature and the beauty of foot mechanics and being alone with my thoughts. Friends of mine who are proper runners are very sniffy about this, and warble on about junk miles not really being worth anything, and that I’ll only ever run slowly if I don’t fully focus on the run itself, but, sometimes I’m past caring, and I just need to hear the latest from Dan Carlin, or No Such Thing As A Fish, or This American Life, and the whole experience turns into a bit more fun. And these days, I have the added joy of an iPhone that I can strap to my arm, which also allows me to, as they say, stay connected.

So, off I go last week, out of the office in Newcastle, and away for a brisk run across Town Moor, with 3x two miles hard to tick off on the training plan, and all is well with the world. And the ‘well with the world’ status lasted well into the changing room, where I realise that I’d left that clever little armstrap for my phone several hundred miles away. As I saw it, I had three options – leave the phone in the changing room and have a good run but with no entertainment; carry the phone in my hand and Not Look Like A Proper Runner; or tuck the phone into my tights. Naturally, and helped by the fact that these were compression tights, which I suspect may have featured in an early draft of 50 Shades of Grey, I squeezed the phone into the waistband and set off.

An easy mile one, and I’m moving at a nice pace, with my eyes on the first 2 mile effort on the moor. History Extra podcast is my choice of entertainment, this one featuring things you didn’t know about Hitler’s cocaine habit (really). Get to the moor, and all is well, except for the fact that I have to knock out a 2 mile effort in the dark. But knock it out I do, get my statutory 2 minutes rest, then go for effort #2. This time, things do not go quite so well. For some reason, my phone starts slipping. At first, it’s just a bit irritating, but after mile one of the two miles it starts working its way, well, downwards. Possibly lubricated by sweat, which is pretty unpleasant, and heading downward at a steady rate, which is even more unpleasant. About a half a mile to go, and I find myself effectively sitting on my phone while running. In order to halt further progress, I naturally alter my running style to what I like to call ‘1950’s PE teacher’ – head back, back straight, high knees, and all the time trying to complete the effort.

Statutory two minute rest while I try to decide what to do. Sadly, it never entered my head to carry the bloody thing, instead, I went for the extra tightness option of tucking my phone into my pants, with added security from the compression tights. You may well be ahead of me here. I got another mile and a half around the final effort before disaster struck. The phone didn’t travel so far south this time, but unfortunately it did adopt a more, ahem, central position. So I’m running along in the dark, trying to keep a 6:30 pace up, with a running style owing a bit too much to John Wayne after a long day in the saddle, just having heard that he had a bad case of rickets, but needing to get to the Last Chance Saloon before closing time. Anyway, just about managed the last half mile and I’m about 50 yards from the end when History Extra (now focussing specifically on the amphetamines in use by the Fuhrer during the siege of Stalingrad), is disrupted by an incoming call. Given that it might be important, or my wife (teehee), I elect to press the little button and gasp ‘hang on’ while I get to the stopping point. It’s my wife.

“I can’t hear you very well” she says “I don’t think the reception’s very good at your end”

If only she knew…

More fun in tights to follow on this Sunday’s long run. But first, a word about fashion. When setting off for a winter run, it’s more than likely you’ll wear tights (black), gloves (black) hat (black), and, if you’re not careful, your favourite long sleeved top (black). Black clothing is of course, very practical and, I understand from too many copies of Grazia, very slimming. But unfortunately you end up looking, at best, like the Milk Tray man. Or, potentially, Andy McNab, and neither of these things count as A Good Look. Unusually, I looked in the mirror before I left the house, and saw a complete idiot looking back, and so went for my second favourite  shirt, a charming, and quite frankly, gleaming, long sleeved white number.

Off I trotted,  thinking that I looked slightly less twit-like, and maybe bordering on the mildly athletic. On reflection, this might have been a bit optimistic, given that I’d carbo-loaded the previous night with two pints of Wherry, one of Amstel, and a double whisky.

A couple of miles into the run, and I found myself a) running off road and b) running very slowly. Got to a stile across a very muddy field, and thought I’d better pick the pace up a bit.  Did I mention it was very muddy? It was very, very muddy indeed, and as I tried to speed up, I was rather held back by my right foot getting completely stuck.

Or not. In fact, it was my right shoe that was stuck, and my right foot was released into thin air, leaving the shoe sinking into the mud. As I had a reasonable amount of momentum built up, I didn’t have a lot of time to think, but I tried to effect a Jonathan Edwards-type hop with my left foot, which, given the circumstances, was reasonably successful. Unfortunately one successful hop was not quite enough for any sort of recovery, and the momentum of the hop quickly turned into a trip, and the trip turned into a full-on face plant. I got up very slowly, and for some reason I don’t really understand, because my right foot was completely coated in mud, I hopped, on my left foot, back to my shoe. And, again, for reasons I can’t really explain, picked up my shoe, walked back to the stile, took off my right sock and, standing one legged tried to knock the mud off by banging it, Basil Fawlty style, against the gate.

Now, muddy foot encased in muddy sock inside a muddy shoe, I tried to prepare myself for the next part of the run. I had no idea what I looked like, but if my previously white shirt was anything to go by, my face would have looked like Brutus in the Green Mile, just after the moon pie episode:

And that’s when the dog walker came into view.

“That was really funny” he said, “I really enjoyed seeing that”.

I spent the next 15 miles trying to think of what I should have said back to him. I’m not sure whether I managed anything better than what I actually replied:

“Grrrr”

 

 

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’.

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)

~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

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)

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

 

Jocky Wilson . . . What an athlete!*

~ kevinrevell ~ 2 Comments

Some of the best conversations I have these days seem to be when I’m in a taxi. Not the ‘you’ll never guess who I just had in the back of my cab, guv’ conversations, but the ones you get when you’ve got 15 minutes to kill, which I reckon is about all it takes these days to put the world to rights, eke out your frustrations with the government, or share your excitement about small dogs. Or, as was the case last week, discuss the wonders of the professional darts circuit.

So, I’m in this taxi at some ungodly hour and we’re talking about this and that, and out of nowhere, the driver says:
‘I was in Wigan all last week’
Well, that’s not a line I’m going to leave hanging around like a dropped handkerchief, so I asked what he was doing there. And it transpired that he’d not only been battling against 360 other hopefuls to get a licence to play professional darts, but he’d come 21st, with only 20 qualifying. Which must have been pretty gutting.
‘That must’ve been pretty gutting’, I said, always keeping one step behind the narrative.
And gutting is about what it was, by all accounts, as there’s money to be made on the circuit, but you need a licence to take part, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it.

And I don’t have a massive interest in darts, but naturally enough I started to ask about the culture around the sport, and, predictably enough, the drinking. Time was when Jocky Wilson, Eric Bristow et al would be lining up the lagers on the TV, but that doesn’t seem to happen these days. So, I asked, had darts cleaned up its act?
Far from it, I learnt, it’s just that the drinking goes on in the dressing room, and, by all accounts, quite enthusiastically.  Surely it must affect your accuracy of throwing, I suggested, but apparently it’s a balance between being completely off your tree and not allowing to your hand to shake, which is the thing that must be avoided at all costs.

All of which makes me quite enthusiastic to catch a bit more darts action, if I can be reasonably sure that the people throwing quite sharp implements might be doing so while reasonably trollied.

Fast forward to a reasonably unpleasant run last weekend, only really lightened by the wonderful Danny Baker podcast, in which the equally wonderful javelin superstar Fatima Whitbread was interviewed. Like many other people about my age, shape and size, I find myself nicely in tune with Mr Baker, and he asked the question that I would definitely ask FW, in the unlikely event that I found myself in a lift with her:

‘Are you any good at darts?’

And, it transpires, she is, and had appeared as a special guest on ‘Bullseye’ where she scored a triple twenty in the final. And it took three people to remove the dart from the board afterwards, boom boom.

Anyway, this kind of got me to thinking that the stars are aligning fairly beautifully if we could but take a few brave steps towards a new kind of sport. Here’s my thinking:

1. Lets face it, the common interest in track and field these days is largely track, and possibly a bit of jumping now and again
2. Which leaves a marketing challenge for the throwers
3. Darts seems to have something of an unfair monopoly on the idea of playing sport while three sheets to the wind
4. The Commonwealth games are heading this year to Glasgow, a city where you’d hope would enjoy a nice regular overlap of sporting endeavour and serious drinking.

You’re probably one step ahead of me here already, but what if we introduced javelin, shot, discus and hammer events which combined throwing expertise with light alcoholic poisoning? I’d be more than happy to stump up the entrance fee to see whether accuracy was improved with half a dozen vodkas down the hatch….and I’d probably not mind particularly if it wasn’t.

For added entertainment we could simply replace the volunteer judges with an ever rotating string of national pariahs. The heats could feature Lib-dem politicians who abstained in the student grant vote, the semi finals could have a selection of News International journalists, and for the grand final, what better set of judges/targets than your favourite misogynistic TV and radio personalities from the late 1970s?  And if they proved a bit nippy on their feet, we could have all the throws at once, or introduce blindfolds, or both.

Well, it’s just an idea, and it might need a bit of shaping on the marketing front, but I’m offering it to all bidders here and now, and I can’t help feeling that now that it’s out in the open, that without it our athletics viewing this summer will be disappointingly tedious and sober.

*Just one of the quotable quotes from the fabulous Sid Waddell. Others include:

“He may practice 12 hours a day, but he’s not shy of the burger van!”

“Darts players are probably a lot fitter than most footballers in overall body strength.”

“Steve Beaton – The Adonis of darts, what poise, what elegance – a true roman gladiator with plenty of hair wax.”

“The atmosphere is so tense, if Elvis walked in ,with a portion of chips….. you could hear the vinegar sizzle on them”

“Cliff Lazarenko’s jumping up and down like a gorilla saying “give me back my banana!”

“Bristow reasons . . . Bristow quickens … Aaah, Bristow.”

“It’s just like taking a sausage from a boy in a wheelchair.”

“That was like throwing three pickled onions into a thimble!”

“He’s about as predictable as a wasp on speed”

“It’s like trying to pin down a kangaroo on a trampoline”

“That’s the greatest comeback since Lazarus.”

“Under that heart of stone beat muscles of pure flint.”

“There hasn’t been this much excitement since the Romans fed the Christians to the Lions.”

“John Lowe is striding out like Alexander the Great conquering the Persians”

“Keith Deller’s not just an underdog, he’s an underpuppy!”

“When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer….Bristow’s only 27.”

“If we’d had Phil Taylor at Hastings against the Normans, they’d have gone home.”

“He’s like D’Artagnan at the scissor factory.”

“I can only sum that up in one word – world-class darts”

“They’re showing Shakespeare’s Othello over on BBC1 but if you want real drama tonight, get down here to Jollies, Stoke-on-Trent”

“Tell Mrs Dellar not to bother putting the chips on, because Keith won’t be home for his tea tonight”

“That’s quality with a capital K.”

“If you had to throw a knife at your wife in a circus, you’d want to throw it like that.”

“Circus Tavern packed — even a garter snake smothered in Vaseline couldn’t slide in here.”

and of course:

“There’s only one word for that – magic darts!”

I’ll be your dog

~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment

Well, following the Emu’s previous blog on The Big Decision On Becoming Dog-Owners, we’ve finally agreed the way forward. As a result, we made the all important call to the breeder a couple of weeks ago, and had a discussion that I suspect we’d find more familiar had we ever tried to wedge one of our kids into Eton. It appears that when you decide to buy a dog from a respectable  breeder, the interview kind of goes in the opposite direction to the one you’d expect, and it’s really up to you to pass the interview on whether you’re really qualified to own a dog. I’m not sure that we had the equivalent of this qualification when we first contemplated bringing kids into our world, but that may say something about the society we live in. Anyway, we passed the audition about whether we’d be fit to take on a puppy, and, given that there was a national waiting list and two large litters, we were duly allocated ‘bitch number 7’ and given a 90 minute viewing appointment in February, at which we will be paired with the ‘right’ puppy.

At which point, there was a suitable amount of what Hank Williams might have called ‘a’whooping and a’hollering’. I don’t think I’d realised just how much everyone else in the family actually wanted this puppy, and the sight of four people jumping up and down like they were on individual trampolines will stay with me for some time. And might be referred back to when the dog needs walking at six in the morning when it’s teeing it down with rain.

And that’s when the real challenge of naming the dog started coming in. At our allotted time in February, we’ve received instructions that we need to provide a small snap collar that is marked with the puppy’s name. This means that we not only need to have sorted a name by then that won’t sound ridiculous to the breeder, but also will a) mean something and b) be acceptable as something that can be called out in public and at the vet’s. For example, where we live, if we name a dog Elsie or Ruby and call it in the park, there’s a fair chance that we’ll be mobbed by ten year old girls in floral dresses and T-bar sandals.

And the meaning thing is a big deal as well. My absolute favourite ever name that we’ve come up with (thanks to our chums N&N) is Brilleaux, after the wonderful, wonderful Lee Brilleaux, who I mentioned here earlier and who really deserves some sort of recognition in the Emu home. I carefully worked out a hustings and lobbying plan for this name, and canvassed all members of the family to get them to vote in the right direction, but was eventually worn down by the counter-lobby (which I suspect may have been led by my wife, who has been heard in the past to say that ‘All Doctor Feelgood songs sound the same’). The counter-lobby finally won, with a text from #1, stating firmly that Brilleaux was ‘only suitable for a ‘boy dog”.

We also have a slight problem with other ‘meaning’ names, and my not-so-subtle attempts at calling a dog after my heroes have met similar obstacles. And as a result, Tegla (Loroupe), Grete (Weitz), (Alf) Tupper and Tuppy (Glossop) have been received with a certain amount of sniffiness by the committee.

Fortunately, I work in an industry that prides itself on knowing one end of a data based decision from another. And, if there’s one thing that I’ve learnt from a career in careful  observation of management actions, setting strategic direction and addressing important opportunities for process improvements (and so on), it’s that by turning very important data into attractive red, amber and green colours, you can make the whole exercise of making decisions far easier. So, taking our shortlist of potential names, and taking all feedback into consideration, we arrived at the following table (pls note #2 might not have been taking the exercise entirely seriously):

number 7

Oh, I forgot to also mention that I’ve also learnt from  observing management actions, setting strategic direction and addressing important opportunities for process improvements (and so on), that this is also an excellent way to hide behind the reality of actually having to do anything. And because it’s unlikely that our breeder is actually going to allow us to call our new member of the family ‘Bitch Number 7’, and because the really valid name (Brilleaux) has been outlawed, we’ll do whatever any responsible business leader will do, and make a decision by completely ignoring the management information and going with our gut instinct.

Which is what we’ve done.

 

 

Train, train, sixteen coaches long….

~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment
Our tale this week begins at 0450 this morning, my designated waking time for Tuesdays, as the day starts in a warm and comfortable bed in Norwich, and gets me to a desk in Newcastle a few hours later, full of the sort of vim and vigour that you might expect of a fellow with a heavily interrupted sleep pattern.
 
And our journey takes us, initially, from Norwich to Peterborough, courtesy of the comedy train line that calls itself Greater Anglia. It is a little known fact (by which I mean that it’s a complete fabrication), that Abraham Mazlo first had his bright ideas on hierarchy of needs while travelling on the 0550 from Norwich to Newcastle. Idly sketching to pass the time, he drew a triangle, and put at the base of it all the things that were missing from his journey –  lighting, heating, tea, power sockets, wifi, 3G, working toilets, something to look out of the window at, and so on, and before he knew it he had the bottom of his picture filled in. 
 
Sort these things out, figured Abe, and we’ll be able to talk about things like the human condition and purposefulness of thought, without too much worry at all.  
 
Anyway, accompanying me on this journey this morning was my eldest son’s bicycle, which he’d kindly asked me to take up to him in Newcastle that morning. So I’d pedalled it furiously down to the station at 0530, cutting quite a dash in a bizarre combination of cycling and work clothing, and popped it onto the train and locked it into position before you could say ‘first come first served’. Which is, verbatim, the Greater Anglia process for carrying bicycles on trains.  
 
All was good, and I settled down for the light combination of early morning emails and occasional naps that the journey allows, and awoke a few minutes before we pulled into the station at Peterborough.   And that’s when the problems started. Did I mention that I’d locked the bike to the train? Yes, but I hadn’t mentioned that I’d done it with a lock I’d liberated from the garage late the night before. Funny, I thought, as I put it in my bag, that one of the kids would just put a perfectly good (albeit cheap) lock in a drawer and not use it. Unfortunately, now was the time I found out that it was not a perfectly good lock. Although I knew the combination, it jammed. It was still jammed when the train doors opened. It was still jammed when one of my fellow travellers kept the door open to stop the train leaving, and it was still jammed when a member of the Peterborough station staff, almost apoplectic with rage, told all parties that the train must, must, must, leave on time. And the door was shut. Ten seconds later the bike was unlocked, and I found myself en route to Liverpool Lime street.   
 
And it is at this point, dear reader*, that when I expected my day to be heading for something of a decline, that things started getting better. 
 
This is what happened:  
 
I asked the conductor of the train for some help. She helped me. She told me to get off at the next stop (Grantham) and get a train to Newark. She printed from her ticket machine a revised journey from Grantham to Newark to Newcastle. I asked her if I’d be charged, and she said probably not, but wrote on the back of the ticket a message for future conductors. I have the ticket in front of me now, and I’m afraid I can’t actually read any of the words, which is a drawback. I have this problem generally with people with bad writing – my wife’s writing is appalling and I do have to second guess any cards she sends me – I tend to read them as ‘you’re the only thing that matters to me and I would like you to shower kisses on my upturned and eager face’ but for all I know, they may actually say ‘please see below for details of my solicitor, I’m having the house and you can keep that ridiculous car’. Similarly, this ticket may well say ‘this man is clearly deranged and doesn’t deserve to be in charge of a bicycle lock, never mind a bicycle’, but I like to think that it’s more like ‘please give safe and unpunished passage to this bloke who’s had a bit of bad luck and the world will be a better place’.  
 
Then I get off in Grantham. (Never thought I’d write those words down…) at which point the train waits for a good 5 minutes as it has got in early, thanks to its speedy departure from Peterborough. A man in a uniform calls across the tracks, and asks me if I’ve got a reservation for my bike. What I say is ‘no, I’ve missed my connection’. What I think is ‘gawp help us, what I really need now is a bloody jobsworth getting in my face’. He asks me to bring my bike across the footbridge, and I lug it over, expecting the worst. The worst doesn’t happen, he just explains that I need to pop into the ticket office and get bike reservations. This is very easy to do, I come out and he tells me that he’ll phone all my stations and make sure that the guard’s van is opened. That’s why they need reservations, on this train line, as otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get your bike on and off the train.  
 
And a man turns up next to me for the Newark train, and he unlocks the guard’s van, lets me get my bike on, and I hop into my carriage, which, this not being a Greater Anglia train is heated, lit, with a power supply, and before I get my coat off there’s a nice bloke asking me if I’d like a cup of tea. Which I do.    
 
And the conductor comes by and I steel myself for another difficult discussion about penalty fares, I start explaining myself, and she says ‘oh, that’s alright sir, you’re the one with the bike. Don’t worry, we’ll look after you’.  I’m not expecting to hear that level of reassurance and comfort again until I finally make it into a care home. Actually, I need to rethink that – given that my children are likely to have a pretty key part in the choice of where I spend my soup dribbling years, and given that I’ve tried to impress on them that every part of their leisure time should be spent in spartan pursuit of healthy improvement or quality of reading (advice that they’ve largely ignored), it’s pretty likely that they’ll get their own back by choosing something less comfortable as a fitting retaliation. So perhaps I’ll never hear that soft assurance again, which would be a shame.  
 
I bowl into Newcastle only 45 minutes after my original target, which was pretty good going. #1 was there to meet me.  
“Have you got a lock?”, I ask him 
“Yes, I bought a cheap one yesterday”, he said, showing me a TK Maxx bag.  
His turn next then.    
 
 
 
 
*evening dear. Don’t forget to put the bins out.