Symmetry, Loss, Letting Go, Life of Pi, Inception and Deja Vu

I went to see the Life of Pi movie last night.  I went by myself which is just as well because it cost me £11.  This was partly because I didn't want to wait an extra half an hour to watch it in 2D.  This would have saved me £3.  I really wanted a coffee too, but that would have been another £3, so I decided to have the 3D instead of the hot milk.

Even the cheap seats at the cinema now cost around £8.  With prices as high as these, I might have to keep going to the cinema by myself.  There's a bit in Trading Places when the really mean Duke brothers give one of their staff a very small Christmas bonus, and he says 'Gee thanks, maybe I'll go to the cinema....by myself'.  Well, now it's not just poor domestic servants that have to go by themselves, the prices are almost reaching personal loan proportions.

In last night's case, going alone wasn't entirely to do with the cost.  Ruth thought the book was garbage, so she didn't want to see the garbage film that went with it.

It was either 10 or 11 years ago that I read the book, I'm not sure which, but one thing I do know is that I read it over Christmas Day and Boxing Day, so going to see the film on Boxing Day had a nice symmetry to it.  I'm a big fan of symmetry.  Earlier in the year I took great delight in going to see Total Recall aged 44, 22 years after going to see the original when I was myself 22.  For good measure I took my 22 year old stepson with me to see the remake.  Numerologists could have a field day with that one.  The only problem being that the remake seemed to have been hit by the recession and instead of going to Mars they had to tunnel to Australia instead.  I was blown away by the special effects of the Arnie original but the Farrell affair just made me want to go to sleep.

Anyway, the film of 'Life of Pi' was pretty good, in places it looked stunning, but overall I think I preferred the experience of reading the book.  In the film, I could have done without the boat, and the phosphorescence, and the special effects and all the jazzy stuff they can do with computers now, the most compelling parts were listening to the older Pi talking.  In fact, I would have probably enjoyed it more, if it was just him talking.

Looking at it from a selfish point of view, it's possible I just didn't actually need this film to be made.  For me the experience of reading the book was such a rich and imaginative experience, that I already had all of it, and more, in my head.

There were times when I found the film very moving, and mostly these parts were created by a man sitting in a room talking to another man and recollecting stories from the past.  There was a point near the end, when I nearly started crying, but I managed to suppress it, because I didn't want anyone else to hear.  I was already wearing stupid 3D glasses over my own, I couldn't cope with any more embarrassment..

The part that got to me was when the older Pi was talking about the point where he and Richard Parker went their separate ways, and he said something like this, which I am paraphrasing terribly.  'Life is all about letting go, but what hurts is when there is no pause, no time to share what we've been through together, no time to acknowledge the passing, before we part'.  He was talking about the tiger, but also about his family, who were lost in the shipwreck.  This is maybe why it's so important for people to be with their loved ones, as they die.  Just to be aware of the process of letting go.

One of the things I love about the film Inception is the part where Leo finally realises that he has to let his wife go, and move on.  He finally accepts that they had their time, but now he has to go.  He has to move forward, and be with his children in the future.

And thinking about the subject of loss reminded me of another of my favourite films.  Deja Vu.  In that Denzel says 'Everything you have you lose', and although it's never explicitly stated, it seems likely that the family he no longer has, were lost in a terrorist attack, which partly explains his determination to change the past.  He makes a comment along the lines of 'loved ones gone in an instant', and his suffering is very much like that of Pi in Life of Pi, whose family are lost very suddenly and without warning.  This must be the hardest loss of all to take.  As miserable as losing someone to an illness is, at least you get used to their absence in increments.  It doesn't just go from all to nothing.

When I read Life of Pi, one of the parts I enjoyed the most were the descriptions of animals, and their behaviours, and this had more resonance with me at the time than the human stuff.  But I think 10 years on, the parts that stuck with me from the film, were the human dramas.  The decision to sell the animals and move to Canada, which took the family away from their home and their country, and Pi away from his girlfriend, and then the loss of Pi's family in the shipwreck, and finally the bonding with, and then the loss of Richard Parker.

I usually find it quite annoying when people in the cinema start talking, just as the credits start to roll, about how the film of their favourite book, wasn't as good as they expected, and how they missed this bit out, or that part was too long, or about how Galadriel isn't as tall as I imagined etc..

But I think that almost happened to me yesterday.  Because I'd already seen the extended edition 10 years ago, in my own head.  And I loved it.

Job Interviews are easy now - They're like exams I've already revised for

When I was at school I used to do exams.  Proper exams.  3 hours in a room with just a pen and a few pieces of paper (although they had started to bring out answer booklets by the time I finished).

And I was quite swotty at school, so I used to properly revise for exams.  And if you properly revise, there comes a time before the exam, when you need to stop trying to remember stuff and trust in the fact that you've done enough.  I was never one of those people reading notes outside the exam room, or reading notes on the bus on the way to the exam.  I used to mostly give up the night before, sometimes earlier.

And it's quite a nice feeling, knowing that you've done all you can, and now it's just about you and the exam.  I always found it was a good idea to try and remember that feeling during the first 10 minutes of every exam, when I used to have a complete and utter panic attack, and be convinced I couldn't do any of it.  Usually if I was still in there after 11 minutes, I did okay.

Well, job interviews are a bit like exams.  Except the subject is me.  And I used to revise for interviews the same way I used to revise for exams.  I used to look through lots of notes I'd made about different jobs I'd done, and I reflected on things like when I'd faced a challenging situation, or when I'd done well, or when I'd exceeded expectations, and all that telling your life story / competency based crap that you have to go through to get a job.  I used to wonder what they'd ask me, and I used to get ready to answer whatever came at me.

But these days I don't bother so much.  And for two main reasons.

1) I've done this exam so many times now, I know the answers off by heart.  I was crap at O Level Chemistry, but if I'd taken that bloody exam as many times as I've been interviewed for jobs, I'd have been getting 100% by now.

2) Self-confidence.  I'm not a performing monkey (some people might not agree), I'm a person, with a life story, and an employment record, and a history, and it is what it is.  And some of it is crap.  My employment history, like my life, is full of blind alleys, and some things I wish I hadn't done, and some things that didn't work out.  And sometimes what I am, and what I've got is totally not what an employer is looking for.  And that's fine.  It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with me, it just means I don't match what they want.

That's not to say I've not done some work things really well over the years.  It's not to say I don't have skills and talents and abilities, and strengths at work.  But being myself, and letting them find that out early is a good thing, not just for them, but for me.  There's nothing worse than doing a really good interview, and then ending up in a job where you want to flick your own eyeballs out with a grapefruit spoon after 5 minutes, just so you can get out of there.

The thing I've learned from all the interviews I've done, past and present, good and bad, is this.  There's no point telling them that you're who you think they want you to be, unless you are in fact that person.  If you're not, they'll soon find out, and they'll probably be really annoyed that you wasted their time, because now they've got to do the whole thing all over again.

And so job interviews for me now are easy.  They're like exams that I've revised for.  I don't overprepare, I go in, I show them who I am, and then I leave.  If they ask me questions, I answer them, if I want to ask questions, I do.  If they ask me why I only worked in a call centre for 3 months, I tell them it's because the job was totally wrong for me, and I found that out by working in a call centre.

I maybe wouldn't elaborate and say I knew the job was wrong for me about an hour in, but it took another 3 months less one hour to get out of there.  And I maybe wouldn't mention that if I'd only figured that out about myself before I went for an interview for a job in a call centre, I never would have gone to the interview, and in doing so wasted the time of the people who interviewed me.

But whatever I tell them, they will know that it's me talking.  They won't be fooled into thinking they're talking to Orville when they are in fact talking to Keith Harris.  And it will then be up to them what they do with that information.  And after getting to know me, if they think I'm not right for the job, they might be right.  But if they think I am right for the job, then they also might be right.

Life's too short for pretending (well it's okay if you're an actor, or at primary school), but when you're a grown up, just be a grown up.  When you take exams, you can't pretend to have revised, you either have or you haven't and it shows through.  And the same goes for interviews.  If you don't show them who you are, they'll probably notice anyway.



Postscript to this blog entry.  The interview I went for this morning, I got the job.

The Five Year Engagement - A stupid title but a good film

My favourite author Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying that all his arguments with his wife boiled down to her being 'Not Enough People'.  All couples could do with some backup in the form of friends and extended families, but we're not all lucky enough to have it.  The ones that don't are likely to spend a lot longer kicking each other in the arse during the course of their relationship than the ones that do.

And like couples in real life, couples in films need backup too, especially ones that are in romantic comedies.  If ever a type of film needed a supporting cast, the romantic comedy is it.  And that's because it's pretty boring to spend an hour and a half watching someone else's relationship implode before being slowly put back together again.  It's nearly always the same.  First they fall in love, then they have a load of problems due to their total incompatibility, then they gradually find a way of living together without punching each other really hard in the face, blah blah blah, the end.  It's dull.  Films are supposed to be escapism.  If I wanted to watch two people arguing for an hour and a half about nothing in particular I could just set up a webcam in my own house.

So anyway, I'm writing this because last night Ruth and I watched the Five Year Engagement, which had Emily Blunt and some bloke in.  The title is stupid and misleading, because the whole film hinges on a couple's decision not to get married because they have to move to Michigan.  This makes no sense whatsoever.  People move around all the time these days.  Half the people I know don't live near where they grew up, and where their families are.  Some of them don't even live in the same country as where they grew up.

But that's the thing about weddings.  Usually you get time off work to go to them, especially when they're your own, and you can go home to get married, or your family can come to you.  There's about a billion internal flights a day in the US, I'd be amazed if it's impossible to fly from San Francisco to Michigan relatively easily.  So why didn't they just take a couple of weeks off, and get married anyway?  He gave up his job and moved to Michigan with her, and they were living together, so they were virtually married anyway.  And she was a student with 8 weeks off every summer, that would have been the perfect opportunity to fit a wedding in.  All her family were English anyway, so she would probably have wanted to get married in England anyway.  Where they lived in the US was irrelevant.

Leaving aside this stupid fact, the film was a lot of fun to watch.  And that was largely because of the supporting cast.  There were some sick and twisted psychology students, a Welsh professor played by Rhys Ifans who was involved in a particularly funny chase, there was a heated argument between Elmo and the Cookie Monster, a bit of mime, somebody getting shot with a crossbow, some blokes going hunting, growing beards, knitting woolly jumpers, and drinking out of a woolly mammoth's hollowed out foot.  In fact, many of the best bits of the film had nothing to do with the central relationship at all.

So for me, it was a bit like Four Weddings and a Funeral, in that it was the interaction of the wider cast of characters that made the movie.  Imagine if Four Weddings had only had the vacuous Andie Macdowell character prancing around fancying herself and Hugh Grant bumbling and stumbling over his words for 90 minutes.  It would have been death.

Similarly, I was once chained to a chair and made to watch 'Failure to Launch' with Matthew McConnohee (I can't spell it properly, I give up) and Sarah Jessica Parker.  What a terrible film!  I probably would have had more fun reading a paint chart for 90 minutes.  But it was worth watching this particular dung heap for an hour and a half purely because of Zooey Deschanel, who played Sarah Jessica Parker's quirky room-mate.  She saved the movie.

And I've found myself, that it's not just in the movies, but in real life, when it's a good idea to have a good group of friends in the picture.  Because even the biggest stars sometimes need a bit of help.

Skyfall - Even James Bond is being affected by the austerity measures

I went to see Skyfall yesterday.  The new James Bond film.  Wow, things aren't what they used to be.

The film was 2 hours 20 long, but it could have been over in the first 3 minutes.  James Bond fell off a train and went headfirst into a river at about a hundred miles an hour.  Do that in real life and you die.  Added to that he'd been shot, so he definitely shouldn't have made it.  It wasn't the only implausible bit of the storyline either.  He also had a punch up underwater in a frozen lake, which went on for about 10 minutes longer than the world underwater holding your breath record, added to which, as I know from watching Bear Grylls, if you fall into a frozen lake, you can't move after about the first 10 seconds because your body completely shuts down.  Apart from these glaring factual inaccuracies, I really enjoyed the film.

It started off like they usually do with lots of people getting punched in the head, and stuff getting wrecked and blown up, but then it all went a bit low tech and old-fashioned.  It was almost like they used up all the budget in the first half, and the last hour was seriously affected by austerity measures.    James Bond used to routinely get helicopters and underwater cars, all he got in this one was a gun and a radio, and he even had to go back to his own house in an old car towards the end and raid the cupboards for something to fight with.

Without giving the end of the film away, it was a lot like watching the 80s TV series the A-Team where BA Baracus has to disable a posse of heavily armed men with a wheelbarrow full of cabbages and a potato gun.  Judi Dench bless her was making bombs out of leftover curry paste and staples and even Daniel Craig was struggling to find something deadly to massacre the helicopters full of ninjas with that arrived on his doorstep.

One thing I really liked about the film was that there was quite a lot of talking in it, especially between James Bond and the bad guy, played by Javier Bardem.  I can't be doing with films when it's a non-stop Transformer-a-thon of special effects, where there's not even a gap long enough between explosions to check whether you've got tinnitus or not.  I especially liked the bad guy's entrance where he started talking at James Bond while he was still absolutely miles away, and I was even thinking he probably should have used a megaphone, or got closer before he started, but I'm sure he had some sort of microphone near him, what with it being a film and all.  I really liked Javier Bardem as the villain.  He managed to convey just the right air of menace and was just crazy enough, without going completely over the top.  He was a lot more like Dennis Hopper in Speed than Heath Ledger in Batman.

Another good thing about the film was that it was very old person friendly.  I've written before about poor old Roger Moore in Octopussy, running around at age 57 chinning circus performers whilst wearing big cloppy shoes and gorilla outfits, but this one was even kinder to old folk.  The last 20 minutes saw the positively ancient pairing of Judi Dench and Albert Finney, trying to run around but being barely able to move, yet still managing to dodge bullets and explosions.  At one point Albert Finney does a brilliant impersonation of a statue, when someone shoots a gun at him and he doesn't even move.  He just waits there while the bullet blows the doorframe he's standing in apart.  At his age, he wouldn't have seen it coming till about 10 minutes after he'd been shot.

As well as watching old people failing to run around on the screen, the audience at the screening we went to were ancient as well.  It was the middle of the afternoon on Orange Wednesday but it looked like a reunion of all the people who'd been at the original Dr No screening 50 years ago.  I haven't seen so many sticks and wheelchairs since I went past the motability store in Stockton the other day.  I was almost getting comfortable in my seat when the old lady with the two sticks who was trying to get to her seat behind me started rocking my seat backwards and forwards like I was on a see saw, just before she fell over and had to be helped up by some other crumblies.

After spending so much time lately working with people who look about 12, I felt like I'd accidentally stumbled on to the set of Last of the Summer Wine.

The old ladies in particular wouldn't have been disappointed, as Daniel Craig in particular looked chiselled and rugged throughout, so chiselled and rugged in fact, he looked almost pixalated.  He did gratuitously get his kit off a couple of times for the benefit of the grandmas in the audience, although it didn't do much for me.  And it wasn't the best Bond film I've seen for Bond girls either, the ones that were in it were either disappointing, or dead.

But as for storyline, and excitement, it was one of the best, and I'd definitely recommend it.  Even if there was no hollowed out volcano with hundreds of people in coloured jumpsuits and a megalomaniac with a massive laser and a plan to takeover the world in it, it was still a really good film.

And much as I still enjoy watching the old slapstick Roger Moore doing his one liners after he's thrown someone out of a window, I'm warming to Daniel Craig.  I wasn't a big fan of his after Casino Royale, and I've never seen Quantum of Solace, but I enjoyed him in this, and I feel like he's lightening up a bit now he's got into his stride.

Looking forward to the next one....

Is this a restaurant? For a minute there I thought I'd wandered into a toy shop

Tonight I had my second leaving do in the last 3 days.

Tonight's meal had twice the number of people in attendance but it was also twice as much money for half as much food, which is a big consideration when you're unemployed.  That Copper Beech place we went to on Wednesday, the dinners were huge, and even with drinks you still got change out of a tenner.  The mince and dumplings I had could have fed a village, and the parmos were so big you could have used them as liferafts in the event of a flood.

But for all the cheapness on Wednesday, the food was still excellent.  Also, I understood the menu.  I knew what every dish was.  Parmo, check.  Mince and Dumplings, check, Fish and Chips, check.  I had a pretty good idea in my head what each of those things might look like, and when they got delivered to the table, I had no trouble telling them apart.  And neither did the waiter.

The restaurant tonight was a lot posher than the Copper Beech, but it was one of those places where they build stuff out of your food.  Dan Footy's dessert looked like a scale model of the Black Pearl out of Pirates of the Caribbean, and as for me, I got served a stack of something that looked like a replica of the paperwork I used to batch.  It even had orange case separators made out of carrot.  The veg was advertised as being hot pot potato, but it looked more like potato that had been hit with a hammer, mixed with some carrot and then assembled into a square in one of those car crushers.

I didn't have chips, and I was glad I didn't, but some other people did and they were those big chips that you got about ten of and that you could have started a game of Jenga with.  If I'm going to order chips, I want them to look like chips, not building blocks.  I'm not a child, I haven't played with blocks and bricks and that type of shit since I was about 9.  I just don't get what the appeal of this kind of food is.

The choice of food on offer played havoc with poor old Deano.  He'll only eat traditional British meals, so he ordered sausage and mash which you would think would be a safe bet, but they'd even tried to cut the sausages in half and build something out of that.  And instead of good old Bisto on it, it had some sort of black sauce, and they couldn't just slip him a wadge of mash, they had to mix it with some green stuff so it ended up being the colour of mint chocolate chip ice cream.  For God's sake, just give us food we understand!

Not only could we not tell what the meals were, neither could the staff.  Nothing looked like you thought it would, and it took about 10 minutes of swapsies before we got the right dinners.

Also, the gap between the courses was really long, and I think at least some of this was probably because of all the time it took to assemble the stuff out the back.  I've put IKEA bookcases together in less time than it took to fetch our desserts.

It was £13.95 for two courses tonight, plus drinks, so £15 each near enough whereas on Wednesday I was almost embarrassed to walk away after only paying £8.40 for what I had.  Not only embarrassed, I could only just get out of there under my own steam.  I nearly had to put my stomach in a wheelbarrow to get it out to the car, it was so full.

Maybe there are some people out there who want to pay extra to have their dinners made to look like stuff you might find in a 3 year old's bedroom, but I'm not one of them.  Just give me a proper dinner, that looks like a dinner please, and not one that looks like a Lego house.

Thank you.  Rant over.  Now I'm off to make some toast.

Getting fired and laughing at stuff - 20 years on

The last time I worked in a big office was in the early 90s.  Gazza was bawling his eyes out and the internet hadn't been thought of.  It was all faxes and post then.  I think mobile phones were just getting off the ground, but only just off the ground because they were as heavy as a log.

Even though that was half my life ago, I still remember that time like it was yesterday.  I can't remember the work very well, but I remember the laughs.  I remember going out to the pub for lunch all the time, and I remember being off my bonce on whisky at the Christmas party because there was no other booze left, and I'm told while I was out of it I won a competition for moving an elastic band from my forehead to my neck without touching it, just by wiggling my face, but that part I don't remember.

I remember getting absolutely bollocked for bouncing hundreds of direct debits that I wasn't supposed to, and I remember having trouble getting to work because of the snow, and I remember being late in and having to take it out of our lunch breaks.  And I remember arguments about parking charges and I remember being in a very minor car crash with Alison Rhodes and I remember her falling on her arse in her wellies on the ice, and it was funny even though her bum really hurt.  And I remember Andrew Spink being annoyed that Leeds had sold Vinnie Jones, and I remember the two of them dressed up for Yorkshire Day (Alison and Andrew, not Andrew and Vinnie Jones).

And I remember Mandy Mason dressed as Andy Pandy and I remember her going on maternity leave to have her daughter who is now all grown up.  And I remember Anne Smith and her stories of horrible car crashes and the worst broken arm anyone had ever seen.

And I remember that the manager's office doorframe was coming away from the wall, because of all the times it got slammed behind one of us, when we'd got absolutely hammered for making a mistake, and I remember the long walks across the office we had to do when our badge card numbers got read out.  And I remember how they used to draw the blinds before they used to shout at you.  And I remember Liz Thompson always wore trainers and she was always chasing and tackling things in them, or so she said.

And I remember that they brought Total Quality Management or TQM in, and part of it was that there was supposed to be a no-blame culture, but I still remember getting the blame for a lot of stuff.

And I remember Angela Richardson used to hang around for hours out the back looking through boxes and I remember that we used to make each other giggle, just by saying the word 'smashed'.

But the thing I remember the most is the laughing.

Anyway, since then I haven't worked in a big office, with lots of people.  It's all been small offices with only a few.  Until the last 4 months.

I'm 20 years older now but it's been like going round again.  Working with a new bunch of young people, all in their twenties or younger.  They've all got smart phones now, and they're all on Twitter, and they like to Facetime each other, and music's all gone digital and now there's more different colours of drink to get hammered on.  And nobody uses faxes anymore.

But some things have stayed the same.  Sometimes you still get called into meetings to get bollocked, and sometimes you even get called into meetings to get fired.

But the thing I'll remember the most has been the laughter.  And if I can still remember the people I was laughing with in the early 90s now, I'm sure in twenty years time I'll remember the class of 2012 just as well.

I may forget what a PFF2 is, and I might forget that it goes 'cover letter, then financial' (although I doubt it) but I'm sure I won't forget the people.  I didn't forget the ones I went to Germany with in 1983, I didn't forget the ones I worked with in 1990, and I won't forget Gibbo and Rob and Vicky and Footy and Rookesy and Deano and Joss and Lucy and Sophie and Cozza and Kirstywho'snotaGeordie and Steve and Phil and Edd and Rebecca and all the rest.

Because whatever differences we may have had, whether we were older or younger, or came from different places, or had different backgrounds, or had different life experiences, we all had one thing in common.

We all knew how to laugh at stuff.

Lockerbie - It's not something to be famous for

I went to Lockerbie on Saturday.  For reasons I don't even understand.

I was staying in Moffat, 13 miles and a 35 minute bus ride away, and if I'm honest I probably wouldn't have thought of going to Lockerbie if it wasn't for the bombing and the resultant plane crash that happened there 24 years ago.

The journey there was pretty pleasant.  It was a nice sunny day, there were good views of the hills, it was all very Scottish, but as soon as I passed the 'Welcome to Lockerbie' sign I started to feel a bit strange.

And the strangeness continued when I got off the bus.  I don't think Lockerbie itself is strange. It's just like lots of other towns I've been to in Scotland.  There were industrial estates, an auction mart, people chatting in doorways, a man walking a dog, people waiting for buses.  And then there was me.  And I think it might have been me that had brought the strangeness.

The difference between all the other Scottish towns I've been to over the years, and Lockerbie might have been purely in my head.  It had the same kind of shops, the same kind of scenery, the same kind of people, all except for the fact that when I was looking at the town and the hills surrounding it I was wondering what it must have looked like when they were on fire, and the streets and gardens were full of dead bodies, and there was a massive crater in the middle of the town and bits of aeroplane everywhere.  And I thought to myself.  No town deserves that.

I didn't do my research properly either, I knew there were two memorials but I didn't write down beforehand where they were.  As a result I couldn't find either of them.  and I didn't want to ask anyone where they were.  It could have been a dead person's mother I was asking, or a dead person's son, and I didn't want to look like a disaster tourist, even though that's probably what I was.

I did go to the local church and there was a massive gravestone in the graveyard, much bigger than all the others, and I wondered if that might be the memorial, but there wasn't a path to it, and I didn't want to start walking over other graves to go and have a look, so I just stayed at a distance.  When I got home, I checked up and I wasn't even in the right place, so the one I saw was probably just belonged to somebody important whose family could afford a big gravestone, or one of the town's founding fathers or something.

I went to Tesco at one point, and there was a ghost in the entrance collecting money, and Dracula and some other people dressed as dead people were wandering around inside.  As it happened, they were Tesco employees dressing up for Halloween, but it seemed surreal to me to be wandering around somewhere so synonymous with death and tragedy, and to be seeing people dressed as ghosts.

But then again, if dressing up as ghosts is normal at this time of year, why should Lockerbie be any different?  Even though it's a place that's known for something so out of the ordinary, shouldn't it be allowed to do the same normal things as everyone else?

In the end, I only stayed a couple of hours in Lockerbie.  I had some fish and chips and I got the bus back to Moffat.  The feeling I kept having was that I was an intruder at the funeral of someone I didn't know, and it wasn't a feeling I liked.

The experience seemed even more incongruous to me, because I was spending the weekend in such a positive environment with loving friends and families, and to take time out from that to go see a place that's known worldwide because of something so terrible made me feel uneasy.

I don't really know what it means to pay your respects, I don't know if it's just empty words or not, but somehow by going to Lockerbie I'd felt like that's what I was doing.

For the short time I was there, I spent some time thinking about those terrible and tragic events, and how they must have affected, and still continue to affect the community where it happened.  I thought about the scars that must be there, even if they're well hidden,   Like the people of Dunblane and Hungerford, and others, it must seem at times like they're living under a terrible curse, and I certainly didn't envy them for living with that legacy.

But even though it felt strange to be there, and I didn't see any memorials and I didn't offer any condolences to anyone, and I didn't in any way acknowledge to anyone why I was there, by the time I got back on the bus I felt like I had at least made an attempt to understand.  Even if I came away thinking that what happened there can never really be understood.

One of the really inspiring things I read about Lockerbie before I went was about how the community had pulled together at the time of the tragedy.  For example, in the days following the disaster:

Volunteers from Lockerbie set up and manned canteens, which stayed open 24 hours, where relatives, soldiers, police officers, and social workers could find free sandwiches, hot meals, coffee, and someone to talk to. The people of the town washed, dried, and ironed every piece of clothing that was found once the police had determined they were of no forensic value, so that as many items as possible could be returned to the relatives. The BBC's Scottish correspondent, Andrew Cassell, reported on the 10th anniversary of the bombing that the townspeople had "opened their homes and hearts" to the relatives, bearing their own losses "stoically and with enormous dignity", and that the bonds forged then continue to this day

And when I got back off the bus in Moffat, I walked back up the road to the hostel where my friends were all gathered together, and I was welcomed back in, and we all had a meal together.

And the sadness I'd felt earlier in the day might have amplified the feeling, but as I sat there I felt grateful for my own community, and I was glad to be a part of it.

The future's not very bright, and it doesn't have any oranges in it

The government keeps telling me the retirement age is going up.  Last time I heard I was going to have to work till I'm 68.  By the time I get to 68 it'll probably be 80.

Well, I went to Scotland in May and I spent about half a day in the Co-op trying to buy an orange.  I've seen the future, and if it's going to be full of old folk working in shops it ain't that bright.

This poor old sod behind the till, he moved about as fast as the waxworks in Madame Tussaud's, and after giving him my money I thought there was a real danger of him expiring before the end of the transaction.  In times of soaring inflation, my money would have been going down in value while he had it in his hand.  Also, you'd have thought he'd have had some training with modern technology, but he seemed utterly baffled by the notion of having to use a scanner.  Eventually some young bloke had to step in and deal with me, otherwise I'd still have been there now.

If he's a sign of things to come when there aren't any pensions any more, I think we better get used to eating tinned fruit, because in the time it took him to sell me a fresh piece, it had already gone off.

Another thing about old folk, they're always having to go for scans.  I'm only 44 and even I've had to start going for scans and tests, and to be put in a lead box and have lasers fired at me.  One of the jobs I worked at, where the staff were all in their late 50s, every week there was someone having a camera sent where the sun doesn't shine, or having a brain scan, or some other sort of test.

Can you imagine trying to staff a place with only old dodderers?  What a nightmare the rota would be.  What the government doesn't seem to realise is you can't just keep working people till they keel over.  They need to be at home struggling in and out of Shackleton's high seat chairs, and spilling dinner down themselves for a few years before they pop off.  They shouldn't be trying to sell me fruit and veg.  What if I tried to buy 5 pound of potatoes off someone with osteoporosis?  I'd hand them over to be scanned and their arm would probably snap off with the weight.

At the moment I mostly work with young people, and their main problem with work seems to be getting up for work early enough after going out getting hammered the night before.  Sometimes they don't get in till 5 in the morning, and then they have to be at work for 8.30.

Well, old people are always up at the crack of dawn, maybe they could just do a job share with one of the youngsters, just do a couple of hours until the 20 somethings have had time to down 15 pints of water and a sausage sandwich and get themselves out of bed.

You never know, it just might work...

Goldfinger - the low budget remake

I've just had my bones scanned by possibly the most humourless woman on the planet.

I wasn't expecting cabaret or anything, but a bit of friendly banter would have been nice.

Considering I had to unfasten my trousers and have a laser shot at me (which is a slightly unnerving experience) a few words of introduction would have been nice.

It may have been the fact that I've been talking about action movies all afternoon but the above scenario did remind me a bit of the scene in Goldfinger where James Bond aka Sean Connery is about to be lasered in half, and he says to Goldfinger 'Do you expect me to talk?' and Goldfinger says 'No, I expect you to die, but I'm not hanging around to make sure it happens because I'm off to blow the shit out of Fort Knox, and even though it would be a good idea to make sure that any enemies I've got are six feet under before I start, especially if they've got a licence to kill my ass, I'm not going to bother to put the effort in and wait 5 minutes for your body to be cut in half, so I'm off. See ya!'.

I wasn't expecting this poor NHS woman to enter into some sort of action movie role-play with me, my expectations of hospitals aren't that high, but it would have been nice if she'd just passed the time of day  with me, and said something like 'I just need you to lie down on this bed for a bit while I fire a laser at you, it totally won't hurt and it will only take a few minutes and there's absolutely nothing to worry about'.  Just something like that.

I didn't want her to ask where I went for my holidays, or if I've got any pets, like she might have done if she was cutting my hair, but just something.  By the way, I have a theory about hairdressers, which is that they make conversation with you to help ease the awkwardness which arises from touching a complete stranger's head.

And if there's a small amount of unease which comes about from being touched on the head, imagine if you will the slightly larger portion of unease that is felt by being asked to unbutton your trousers, empty your pockets, lift up your shirt and wait for a laser to be fired at you.

Under the circumstances, establishing a bit of rapport with me first would have been nice.  I haven't felt so processed since I went to the all you can eat Chinese buffet at the Banana Leaf in Middlesbrough.  By the time I crawled out of there heaving under the weight of barbecued spare ribs and overpriced drinks I could barely fold myself into the car to drive home....I felt positively violated.

But that's another story...

If Looper's the future, I think I'm off to Dignitas

I went to see Looper last night.  It was set in the future but it was all dusty, and people were driving round in beaten up old cars, and shooting each other with blunderbusses.  This is not the future I want.

I want the future like in I Robot where I can get a big smooth shiny Audi that drives itself, and a personal slave robot who, until he goes mad and tries to kill me, does whatever I ask him to.

I don't want a future like in Waterworld either, where people are going round on boats collecting soil and living on rusty oil tankers.  I want tin foil everywhere, shiny stuff and frickin' lazers.

And that wasn't the only thing about Looper.  To make it almost impossible for him to act the main actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt had been given a prosthetic face to make him look more like Bruce Willis.  I haven't seen such an unconvincing mask since Vanilla Sky.  Even my favourite actress Emily Blunt couldn't save the film.

It was so bloody loud as well.  There was hardly a minute went by without some poor sod getting blown away.  Most of the victims were bound, gagged and hooded and just got gunned down as soon as they landed in the past.  At least there's normally a bit of running about before folk get shot, this was like watching somebody shoot fish in a barrel.

It was totally and utterly humourless as well.  It was like watching Terminator 2 or Back to the Future with all the humour taken out.  Bits of it did remind me of other films but I found that mostly depressing too because they were all films I'd rather be watching instead.

It's rare that I dislike a film before the opening credits have finished but I think I managed it with this one.  And not since Justin Timberlake in In Time have I seen such wooden acting.  They could have got a plank to play Bruce Willis, and by the end I was wishing I'd hit myself with one.  Films are meant to be escapism, but with this one I could actually feel my life slipping away minute by minute.

Ruth mostly slept through it, she said it was such a monotonous shoot-em-up-athon she thought she'd just skip the middle two hundred shootings and just wake up in time for the ride home.

The sad thing is, I generally love time travel films.  I like getting my brain scrambled by shit like the Grandfather paradox, but with this one, I couldn't even be bothered to do any thinking.  I remember going to see Timecop with Jean Claude Van Damme about 15 years ago, and that certainly wasn't the best film in the time travel genre, but it was like Citizen Kane compared to this tosh.

If I had a time machine myself, if I could cobble one together out of bits of old bike and half used tins of paint out of the garage, I could do a lot worse than go back to yesterday, and go see something else instead.....or failing that I could just stick my head in a bowl of custard for two hours.  It would probably be just as good.

If technology gets any smaller I won't be able to find it

I went to see my mum yesterday.  As usual she gave me lots of food and then we watched some gameshows.

We usually watch contemporary gameshows like the Cube or Deal or No Deal but yesterday we had a go at that Challenge TV, where the shows are from about 20 years ago.  The main attraction was back to back episodes of Brucie's Price is Right.  I never even realised that Brucie had done 'The Price is Right'.  I've only ever seen the ones with Leslie Crowther.

It shows how far technology has advanced in the last 20 years that almost all the amazing prizes on the Price is Right, gadgets like Home Computers, Camcorders, Stereos etc, all priced at £1000 or more, you can now pick up from a charity shop for about a fiver.  Stuff that obsolete you can't even take to Cash Converters, they'll just laugh in your face.  A PC with 16 megabytes of RAM, a camcorder the size of a suitcase, a stereo with a tapedeck, a VHS video recorder?  You'd have trouble these days trying to give that crap to the rag and bone man.  And the 4 separate devices that between them cost about 5 grand on the Price is Right and which would fill a whole room, could now all be replaced by an I-Phone.

Technology has come on so far since I was growing up in the 70s and 80s I can hardly believe it.

To think that when I came home from playing rugby against Benton Park when I was 15 I was astounded by our new VHS video recorder that we'd just got.  I was so amazed I watched Top of the Pops over and over again.  I didn't even like Stool Pigeon by Kid Creole and the Coconuts, but I thought it was incredible that I was in control of when it was on.  We even had a remote control on a wire that trailed along the floor.  It was state of the art.

I think that VHS recorder cost about £700.  It was as big as a house, and if you pressed the eject button it set off so much vibration all my mum's ornaments fell over.

In the Second World War they had to crack the Enigma Code with a computer the size of a stately home that had about a million valves each about as big as a small child.  Then in the sixties they managed to land on the moon with the aid of a room full of computers that had less processing power than a modern Pay as you Go sim card.  Now we're all watching Youtube in our breaks at work on phones the size of postage stamps.  If technology gets any smaller we'll need electron microscopes to even find the stuff.

When I was a child I was a human remote control.  If my mum wanted the channel changing I had to get up and bash one of the big 3 buttons on the big wooden telly to switch between the 3 available channels of crap.  It was the News on two sides and Harold Lloyd on the other (no, young people, you've never heard of him, look him up he was ace) The cathode ray tube on that telly probably weighed the same as an anvil, and it was encased in a giant wooden case.  It was never likely to get stolen, and even it somebody did steal it, it would probably have been worth more as firewood than as a telly.  But nobody ever would steal it, because you'd have needed a team of navvies just to lift the thing.  These days you could get your i-Phone 5 stolen off you by a motivated fly.  Recently Ruth lost her i-Pod in the car for about a month because it had fallen down a crack about a millimetre wide into where the spare tyre is kept.

Say what you want about old and obsolete technology.  It may have been total crap and it may have had to be delivered to your house by forklift truck after having the front window taken out, but at least you could find the stuff.  Stuff that bulky you could see from space.

All this modern stuff, it might do all kinds of stuff that we could only dream of in the 70s, but at least in the 70s we didn't need tweezers to retrieve our technology from between the cracks in the floorboards if we accidentally dropped it.  We didn't have to go through the bins in case we'd chucked our phones away then. No, that bloody massive beige phone we had in the 70s, it was quicker to run down the street and call for your mates than it was to try and dial a number on it.  And the first proper record player we had was actually built into a sideboard!

I could go on, but if you're old you'll remember it, and if you're young, you'll never believe it, so I think I'll stop there.

Ted Striker couldn't get over Macho Grande, well after 4 days I'm starting to get over Helvellyn

It doesn't have to be night time for me to have a dark night of the soul.  I can just as easily have one in the daytime, as was evidenced by climbing Helvellyn on Saturday.

Being up that mountain exposed every physical frailty, every mental vulnerability, every emotional weakness I've got.

Up on the top of that ledge with a drop on either side, and people trying to squeeze past me there was no hiding place.  From the physical demands of the situation, but also from myself.

I felt weak and scared and vulnerable, and I just wanted to run away.  But I couldn't run, so when I got to the top I had to limp away and that took me another 4 hours.  4 hours of limping.  Even a scary fairground ride that you get on by mistake usually only lasts about 5 minutes.  5 minutes of terror maybe, but still only 5 minutes.  Oblivion at Alton Towers is over in seconds.

Being up on the top of that mountain I had the same feeling as I had sitting in a rickshaw in Old Delhi In January, and it was the same one I had sitting in a Youth Hostel in Arnside with wet socks on in June.

It's that feeling that comes after you've stripped away every pretence and illusion about how great and powerful and important you are, it's that feeling that comes from knowing that whatever ego you've got is sitting there in the corner examining its bruises after getting a thorough pasting.

First I was afraid on Saturday, then I was thoroughly frustrated at my limitations, and then after that I was embarrassed.  I was embarrassed because I was not only having a devastating loss of form, but I was having it in front of Ruth and Helen and in front of lots of other people too.

I think I'd have found the whole experience easier if I thought any of the people up there had been half as scared as I was, but they all looked confident and like they were taking it in their stride, while I was clinging on for dear life, and wanting to get down.

Ruth and Helen seemed so elated.  And so did most of the people up there (and their dogs).  Everyone was having a mountain top experience, but in their case they were on top of a mountain, whereas in my case the mountain was on top of me.

And since I got back I've been regaled with tales from everyone and their dog about how they've climbed it with a child on their back, or with a dog in a rucksack, or how their child did it as a rite of passage when they were 7, and how great it all is.

And it may well be great, but for me aged 44 and with who I am and with what I've got, it wasn't great at the time.  At the time I was falling apart.

But now I'm coming back together again.  The fear and the frustration and the embarrassment is wearing off.  And before long I might realise that I've achieved something.  Just like in Delhi, and in Arnside.  Like that famous bloke said who then went on to kill himself.  The world breaks everyone, but some are strong in the broken places.

And even with every frailty, and every weakness, and every limitation I've got, there's still no-one I'd rather be than me.  Because without the broken places, and the places where the breaks have knitted back together again, I wouldn't be me at all.

Climbing Helvellyn - a very bad idea

It turns out that climbing Helvellyn is something of a challenge, and if you're going to take on a challenge it probably helps to know in advance that it is a challenge.  I just approached it like a fun day out.  That was my first mistake.  It also contains another challenge within it which is this thing called Striding Edge.  I'd heard of it because it's sometimes on the news that people have fallen off it and killed themselves.

Well, now I've climbed it myself.  And it's completely nuts.  And so not Health and Safety.  You can't climb a ladder these days without going on a course for a week and yet Striding Edge is full of Looney Tunes and their dogs crawling around on their hands and knees on a piece of rock about as narrow as my dining table with a thousand foot drop on either side. Where's their risk assessments? Even the mountain rescue guy we met wasn't very reassuring. Oh yeah people fall off it all the time he said. Cheers I said you've really put my mind at rest...I didn't really...

Doing things that are nuts is fine if the people you're doing it with also know it's nuts, but they don't.  They all look like they're having a perfectly reasonable time, whereas I felt at times absolutely terrified.  And there's more footfall up there than there is at Piccadilly Circus or the Metro Centre, but it's on the side of a cliff.  

Amongst the crowds were a group of posh people in pink tops raising money for charity who all sounded like they'd just bought a copy of '1001 places to go before you die' and they were only up to number 9.  I imagined they were trying to get Helvellyn in in the morning before doing the Eiffel Tower in the afternoon.  They reminded me of the group of tourists that Dean and I overheard in the Ajanta Hotel in Delhi, who were going to do Delhi in the morning and Bangalore in the afternoon, or something like that.  It'll take you all day to buy a bus ticket you idiots we wanted to say to them, but we didn't.  

There were times yesterday when I looked down at the drops on either side of me, and I knew that if I didn't keep moving there was a real chance of me just getting frozen there and unable to move, so I made myself keep going.  I haven't been that scared since the top of St Paul's Cathedral and that only went on for a very short while until I could get to the downward staircase.  Even then once I got back to ground level I sat around with legs like jelly for about half an hour before I could walk properly again.  This just seemed to go on for hours.  

I sometimes stuggle to empty boiling water out of a pan, or to bend down to pick up a tea towel off the floor, so clambering around on jaggedy rocks trying not to fall to my death made me feel pretty feeble.  Having Ruth point out that someone had got up there in a wheelchair with a couple of broom handles sticking out of it didn't really make me feel any better.  

And even when you get to the top, you've got to get back down again.  Swirrel Edge is only moderately bonkers in comparison but by that time my feet were absolutely mashed and all my joints from the waist down felt like they'd been hit with a hammer.  

It took us 8 hours to get up and down the mountain and by the time I'd finished I felt absolutely out of it.  The whole thing was 10 times harder than I expected it to be.  I've been out walking in the hills before, but this was not hill walking, this was proper mountain climbing, and it felt like it too.

The worst thing about climbing Helvellyn wasn't that it left me feeling physically feeble, it was that it revealed a worrying tendency to crumble mentally on these type of challenges.

And it's not a new phenomenon.

I don't know what the un-magic formula is, whether it's a certain combination of physical discomfort, hunger, dehydration, a faulty balance of sugars, poor preparation or what, but often on long drawn out and physically demanding events, I start to come apart in the head.  Sometimes I can't string a sentence together, often I can't remember my own name.  On a holiday in Scotland last year, a B&B owner asked me where I'd come from that day and I couldn't remember.  I've been left virtually comatose and unable to speak or function in Berwick on Tweed and in Killin and in lots of other places and at lots of other times and Ruth has had to go and get food and post it into me to bring me back from the brink.

It's happened on Audaxes, it's happened on Sportives, it happened on the Swaledale Marathon, it's happened often on cycling tours, it happened on this year's Coast to Coast to Coast.  It happened in India.  I just reach a point where I start to unravel in the head, and I lose the mental wherewithal to hold it together.  I wonder what I'm doing there, I want it to be over as soon as possible, and I have trouble hanging on in there till the actual finish.

Often I get myself into these things by tagging along with other people, and whether it's because these things weren't my own idea that I end up getting mentally cut off at the knees.  I just don't know.

So, no more challenges for a while.  I don't want to end up on top of a mountain anymore with my sandwiches and drink a four hour walk away, I don't want to sit digesting a lovely meal at 2.40 in the afternoon anytime soon knowing that I'm still a 57 mile bike ride away from home.  At no point in the near future do I want to cycle along an undulating hill at the side of a 15 mile long loch in the blazing sun, having to pour water on my own head to stop myself overheating, and then have to sit up all night drinking fizzy drinks to stop myself dehydrating.  Nor do I have any intention of spending any more restless nights in Youth Hostels drinking Powerade so that my legs will work again the following day to enable me to repeat a 108 mile cross country ride I've just completed in the pouring rain.  If that sounds negative then so be it, but I'm sick of half killing myself on a regular basis for reasons I don't even understand.

I've got a week's holiday coming up the week after next and for a change I want to go somewhere where I'm never more than 200 metres away from an ice cream shop, where I'm never 5 minutes away from a bacon sandwich.  Where if I feel like shit I can just pack in there and then and go for a sit down and I don't have to drag my weary body another 4 miles on foot or 40 miles on a bike before I can get something to eat or get myself into a hot bath.

Challenges are great for some people but they're not very good for me.  Because when I mentally fall off a cliff into a very dark place, I don't want to be in the middle of nowhere.  It's hard enough to deal with that kind of shit when there's a sofa nearby.

Die Hard 5 - Forget you, Melon Farmer

I've fallen out of love with cycling this year.  Too many days spent battling against the elements, either with soggy blocks of ice for feet, or a head that's nearly been melted by the sun.

There's only so many times you can cower in a shed, frozen to the bone, waiting for one of your co-riders to be rescued, before you start to wonder what it's all about.

So, that last thing I fancied doing yesterday was a 100 mile bike ride.  But I went anyway.  The date was in the diary, Stephen had arranged it, and when Stephen sets a goal, we don't argue, we just do it.

When I got up at 6, imagine my astonishment, when all I could see out the window was blue sky.  We must have got the wrong day, I thought, go back to bed.  But no, this was the right date.  Alrighty then, let's do this thing.

I was even on time to Stephen's house, so the ride could start as planned at 7.30 am (well almost, we spent a bit of time chatting first).  There I was joined by Stephen (obviously, it's his house), Mark and Ian.  We were wearing matching tops, and we were go for launch.

No coffee or bacon sandwiches or sitting around looking out the window at the hail this time.  No, instead perfect riding conditions.  This cannot be happening.  Let's get this nightmare started.

3 miles in at Hilton we were temporarily held up by some cars gathered round a deer that had been run over.  I felt bad for the deer, but I was glad my day was going better than his.

By the time we got to Northallerton at the 20 mile point, we were so far ahead of our schedule, we were in danger of being much too early for our scheduled lunch stop at Leckby House.  As Mark had been grumbling about not getting his morning coffee, we nipped into Costa at Tesco, where I ordered a giant coffee and some tiny gluten free bakewell tarts.  These were a bit of a panic buy, as they didn't have any chocolate, but I thought I really should have some overpriced food to go with the overpriced coffee.  I spent some time wondering why anyone ever pays these prices, but this didn't stop me from having a nice chat with the guys.  This was going well.

Refreshed by our stop and with the benefit of a shortcut behind the prison we were soon on Crosby road and heading our towards Knayton.  Then, about 5 miles from Northallerton, and still feeling pretty smug about the time, one of Mark's rear spokes decided to pop out and his wheel stopped being a wheel and started looking like a big Pringle.

You probably wouldn't believe that it took 4 grown men a whole hour from this point to get going again, but that was what happened.  We couldn't get the spoke out, although eventually a passing motorist helped us out with some wire cutters and we did, but we also spent a lot of time discussing various scenarios.

Ian wasn't planning to do the whole ride anyway, so in the end, it was decided that he would sacrifice himself, and let Mark take his bike, but only after a bit of saddle swapsies had gone on.  This left Ian gamely wandering off to Knayton with Mark's bike for company, to be picked up by his wife.  And the three of us were off again.  But now, the hour we'd wasted in Tesco, we could have done with getting it back again.

So we took at short cut and got to Leckby House at the 43 mile point around 1 pm.  But instead of arriving there at the halfway point, we now had more miles to make up in the second half.

The thing about Leckby House is this.  It's not the kind of place you can arrive at, run in one door, eat a sausage sandwich and run out the other door.  McDonalds it is not.  Imagine instead that you have arrived at a really posh dinner party, with home cooked Shepherd's Pie (made with fresh Wensleydatle Lamb), a top selection of wines and ice creams.  No, it sucks you in and before you know it, you're on your fourth plateful of Shepherd's Pie, and you feel so comfortable you just want to curl up in the garden with Teal and Widgeon the dogs and go to sleep for a few hours, and not even dream about getting on a bike again that day.

Which may explain why at twenty to 3 we were still sat around the dining table.  We were still 57 miles short of our target miles for the day, and I was just wondering if we were going to be getting a coffee course.  We'd been going for nearly 7 hours and it was going to be dark in another 5, and we were nowhere.

But, as Stephen pointed out, this was the C2C2C Reunion Century Ride, not the C2C2C Reunion Oh Dear I've filled up on Shepherd's Pie and Now I Want to go to sleep in the garden with the Dogs Ride. So a little reluctantly, off we went.  I didn't expect us to be back before dark.

Surprisingly though we made pretty good progress.  For once on leaving Leckby, we had a tailwind and what's more, it was actually properly sunny.  There were no tornados hovering overhead and I could still feel my feet.

We stopped to point at the hole in the road in Sharow which Mark had fallen down last time.  And it was big.  At the time we couldn't understand how he'd fallen off, but in the dry you could see it was almost big enough to lose a whole wheel in.

We seemed to get to the crossing of the A1 at Londonderry in no time, and Mark seemed to be settling into his new bike, and things were going pretty well.  Even though we didn't really need anything to eat, we thought it might be a good idea to call at the corner shop at Kirkby Fleetham to top up on energy drinks and maybe buy some emergency quiche, but when we got there at 4.30 the sign on the door said they closed at 1.  At least we hadn't only just missed them.

Then the door opened, and an elderly lady popped her head out, and asked us if we needed anything.  She then opened the shop specially for us, and sold us some Lucozade and I had a big slab of quiche.  It looked too good to store, so I ate it there and then.  Yummy.

I drank my Lucozade there and then but Stephen decided to load his into his water bottle.  A couple of miles down the road there was a loud bang and we all stopped to see what had happened.  It turned out Stephen's Lucozade had blown the top off his water bottle.  Mark, distracted by the noise, forgot to clip out and whilst emitting a strangled cry, started to fall very slowly over.  Falling over whilst clipped to a bike is never a fun experience, there's always far too much time to think before you hit the ground, but one of the things Mark thought about on the way down was 'Oh no, this isn't my bike!'.  As a result he gamely threw his body underneath the bike so the bike never actually seemed to hit the ground.  Only Mark.

He spent a bit of time just lying in the road, but there was nothing coming so it was fine, for a while at least.  It's not the most dignified position to be in for a man who has just passed his 50th birthday, bit Mark carried it off as well as anyone could.

And while I was looking at him lying there in the road, I thought about all the training we've done this year, all the miserable bike rides we've done, and on them all no-one has suffered more than Mark.  He's been abandoned in a shed looking like a Smurf, he's had crashes, he's had mechanicals, he got straight off a plane from America with jet lag and directly into Day 1 of our Coast to Coast.  And now here he is, lying down in the road, with somebody else's bike on top of him.

But Mark being Mark, he did what he's been doing all year.  He picked himself up and got back on the bike and carried on.  And so did I.  And so did Stephen.

And we got home sometime around half past 7.  And it was nearly dark.  And we'd been out for over 12 hours.

We'd had a few mishaps along the way, but at twenty to 8 last night I put my bike back in the garage, and I felt pretty good.  The 100 mile bike that I hadn't wanted to go on, I'd finished it.  And although a few things had gone wrong, there had been lots of really good stuff too.  And for once the weather was perfect.

As I was lying in bed last night, trying to get to sleep, I went back over the route in my head, and I thought about all the places we'd been, and I thought about the fact that we'd been to them all in one day, on a bike.

And after a year of riding my bike in weather so miserable you wouldn't send your dog out in it, I remembered why I like riding a bike.

It's because there's no better way to travel.

The road to Avalon - Bring the noise

I went on a works night out last night.  If I thought the days where I work were noisy, you should see the nights.

It's not the kind of evening I like really.  Loud music, booze, drinks getting spilled (I had to work hard to override my desire to wipe them up, not really my job last night).

It was a lot like going back in time.  It was pretty much like the nights out I used to go on in the 80s except without the fear of being refused entry for being underage.  Oh, and there seem to be more different colours of drinks now.  Some people were already drunk when I arrived.  The plan seemed to be to get more sober during the course of the evening.  I think it's a recession thing.  Getting pre-drunk. It's cheaper in the long run.

And with the benefit of modern technology, you don't have to rely on hazy half-remembered memories anymore.  Most evenings I went on when I was younger, you were lucky if you could remember them afterwards.  I once woke up in somebody's laundry room on a pile of ironing, I'm not sure how I got there.  Now everything is recorded instantly on digital cameras and iphones, so even if I had been drinking I would probably have been able to track my whereabouts quite easily.  This kind of thing must be useful if you go missing.  It probably helps the police no end in their enquiries.

At one point I went upstairs in Aspire, and there was a 50th birthday party going on.  Loads of people with grey hair.  I suddenly felt quite at home, and I thought I might be able to blag my way into their party, but in the end I decided against it.  I did think it seemed like an inappropriate choice of venue for a 50th, but then Joss told me you could book that room for free, so that's maybe why.  I think having the party upstairs was a bad idea for some of those old guys.  Some of them could hardly get up and down the stairs.  Walking sticks, crutches, arthritis etc.  The people I was with couldn't walk either, but at least their legs would be fully functional again by the morning.

During the course of the evening I kept putting moisurising gel into my eyes, to stop them from getting too sore, and it got me through the night still able to drive home.  I did get some funny looks in the mens' toilet though when I was applying it.  I think a couple of the guys in there thought I was taking drugs directly into my eyes.  They were drunk enough, I maybe should have tried to sell them some.  I should have told them it was the next big thing.

By the time we set off on the walk from Aspire to Avalon I decided it was time to bow out.  The proximity of the car park was too tempting, and there's only so many photos an old sober person can get into the back of, before you start to think maybe you should let the young people get on with it.

But it was a pretty good evening overall.  I tried a hat on, I had a strawberry cider and I got my picture taken about 100 times.  I just felt that if I'd stayed any longer I would have turned into that guy who used to dress up in the different sports kits, and run into the back of team photos, photos of teams that he wasn't in.  The one who got into the England cricket team, and the Manchester United team after they won the Champions League.

This was at least my team.  I wasn't just pretending.  But in the end, I think there's a point when old and sober goes one way and young and drunk goes the other, and I'd reached that point.

I like the people I work with.  They're pretty nice, either when they're sober or when they're drunk.  But if it was up to me, I'd prefer to spend time with them somewhere quieter.  Maybe with tea and biscuits instead of Jaeger bombs.  And I'd like to have some conversations with them where you don't have to shout.

Of apple trees and sheds

We used to have an apple tree in our garden, but last year I had it cut down.

One of our elderly neighbours had convinced himself that it was undermining his shed.

There were bigger and wider trees around, some of them in his own garden, but he'd decided it was our relatively small tree that was doing the damage.  I got a tree surgeon out to have a look and he doubted that our tree was the problem, but in the interests of inter-neighbour harmony I had it taken out.  In some ways I really liked the tree, particularly the blossom in Spring, but being a lazy sort, I never really made the most of the apples and the majority of them used to end up in the compost anyway.  Also, the tree was close to the house, and the branches were so overgrown it was hard to get round the outside of the house or mow the lawn with it there, so this all influenced me in having it taken out.

Another thing that influenced me was that a few years before, the elderly neighbour had put a cat scarer in his garden, and although he couldn't hear it, it emitted a high pitched whine that made it impossible to sit in peace in my own garden, and when I approached him about it, even though he couldn't hear it, he took my word for it and took it down.

I tried to take a similar approach to the apple tree situation.  It was causing him stress, and even though I couldn't see the problem, I decided to take away the cause of the stress.  I figured it was the right thing to do.

I found out yesterday that the old man died in March.  I bumped into his wife in the street, and she told me.  And it made me feel sad.  But I was kind of glad that I'd handled the apple tree thing sympathetically, because from a selfish point of view, it's always better to find out that people have died if you haven't had an unresolved conflict with them prior to it happening.

And it made me reflect on the nature of stress, and the way I handle things.  I see apple trees everywhere, and often. like my former neighbour, I get fixated on them, and I think they're undermining my shed.  And although sometimes they might be, more often than not, they're not.  And I can't always go to the owners of the apple trees and have them cut down, and even if I could, it wouldn't always be the right thing to do.  Also, it would be probably be easier just to stop thinking about the tree and the shed, and to focus on something else, because the world is bigger than trees and sheds and what goes on in my back garden.

And I could do well to remember that when I'm stressing about not having a lawnmower, or about the cooker having blown up, or the front wheel of the car having a dent in it, because these are all passing things, and in the end they are all small things too, and not worth making a drama out of.

I've been working with some young people lately, and when I get stressed their advice seems to be to forget about the drama of the situation, and just to be nicer to the people in the story.  I'm fond of telling them that they don't know what their talking about, because they're young, and also that it's much easier to give advice to people when you only have the facts and none of the emotions, but I think they just might have a point.

As Ferris Bueller used to say 'Life moves fast, if you don't stop to take a look around once in a while, you could miss it'.  Of course he said that when he was a teenager, and he's a middle aged man by now, but I wonder if he still thinks the same thing.  If I could ask him what he thinks now, he might say this.

'If you thought life moved fast when you were 17, you should see how fast it goes when you're 44!  So don't waste time arguing about apple trees, car wheels, cookers, lawnmowers and sheds.  Because in the end none of those things matter.  Oh, and one more thing.  Be nice to each other!'

Or something like that.....

Deja Vu - Not knowing what to do and thinking about stuff

I really like the film Deja Vu.  For many reasons, but for a couple of reasons in particular.

Action films are full of dunderheaded action men doing stuff.  Shooting stuff, driving fast, blowing shit up, but not taking a lot of time in between to think about things.

In Deja Vu, there's a bit where the FBI agents sit round in a room, and something they tried to do has gone wrong, and they wonder what to do, and they admit that they don't really know what to do next.  And normally in films you don't see that.  You don't see the heroes sitting around scratching their heads and not really having a clue.  And I really like that.

Also, Denzel Washington liked to catch the streetcar rather than drive his car, so he can do some thinking.  You don't see many action heroes taking a trip on a streetcar just to have a think.  Mostly it's just a blowing-driving-shooting-non-thinkathon out there.  They just know what to do and they do it.  They don't have to go on public transport to mull stuff over.

Another thing I like about Deja Vu is the scene where Denzel gets angry at the Feds who've been lying to him.  I like that ability to get angry in a controlled way that he shows, and it's also why I like Kevin Spacey and Samuel L Jackson in the Negotiator.  I like the way they almost lose it, but don't.

I also like the fact that in Deja Vu some of the main characters actually take a bash at explaining some sciency stuff.  They don't just slip in an aside that the neutrinos have mutated, like in 2012 and then never mention it again.

I also like Deja Vu because it's a redemption story.  It isn't fully explained, but I've chosen to infer that the Denzel character's family were killed in the Oklahoma city bombing, and that's why it becomes so important to him to try and save the woman in the story, because he was powerless to change something in the past, and now he's getting a second chance at redemption.  It's also what I liked so much about Another Earth.  Seeing someone full of regret grappling with a life-changing event, and trying to grab onto a chance at redemption.  Wouldn't we all want a chance of that at some point in our lives?  Some harsh words we could take back, or actions we wish we could undo.  Or decisions we wish we could un-make?

Deja vu isn't a 100% success story.  For example, I don't like the bit at the end, where he takes the murder victim that he's just managed to get un-murdered back to the ferry, just in time to get blown up by the mad bomber.  It seems to me, that if you're going to bend the fabric of space-time to save someone from being murdered, it would be best not to immediately take them on a road trip to where the murderer and a big bomb are at.  I'm only a simple man, but that would be my advice.  Similarly, if  you're going to spend an hour getting Sandra Bullock off an exploding bus, don't take her back to where the hostage money is getting dropped off, she might just get abducted again by the mad bomber.  What I'd like to see one of these days in an action movie, is an action hero rescuing someone from disaster and then buying her a bus ticket and sending her in the total opposite direction to where the bomb and the bomber are, just for her own safety.

I realise this might make a dull ending to a film, Sandra Bullock sitting on a greyhound bus and getting the hell out of harm's way, but it would certainly be the logical choice, and I think it would be nice once in a while to see an action hero make a rational decision, instead of just blundering around blowing shit up.

That's what I think anyway.


Post Script.  I wrote this on Sunday 19th August and later that day the director of the film Tony Scott committed suicide after jumping from a suspension bridge in Los Angeles.  I've just read on obituary and I hadn't realised how many other top films he'd made, including Top Gun, Man on Fire, Crimson Tide, Beverley Hills Cop 2 and many others.  Very sad news.

You can't swing a cat in Yorkshire these days without hitting an Olympic Gold Medallist

This weekend I took my mum to the Dales for her birthday.  On the way home we popped into a tea shop in Burnsall and on the next table was Alistair Brownlee, the Olympic Triathlon Champion.

On these occasions I don't have the good fortune to have bloody Richard Curtis writing my lines for me, like he does for bloody Hugh Grant in Notting Hill when meeting Julia Roberts, so I just have to make up my own stuff.  I started out pretty well by congratulating him, and shaking his hand, and probably should have left it at that, but the longer I sat there, the more I thought how cool it would be to get a photo with him, and as I was between him and Ruth I thought she could probably get a picture of me on the sly, and he'd be in the background, and so I wouldn't have to bother him, but of course, she has bloody principles, which happen to include not photographing Gold Medallists without their permission, so she asked him for permission, and it all turned out okay, and we ended up with a better photo, but I also ended up losing any pretence of cool.

I'd only noticed him in the first place because the cafe owner was loudly making a fuss of him, and trying to get him to cycle round the Dales with his Gold Medal in a bum bag so he could bring it in and show her, and his brother Jonathan the Bronze Medallist was also there, but he had his back to me, and I didn't notice him, and it isn't that a Bronze Medallist isn't worth the fuss, because he most certainly is, and he won the Bronze Medal after getting a 15 second penalty for getting on his bike a nanosecond early, so he deserves as much credit as Alistair, and afterwards I felt bad that I hadn't congratulated him too, but I genuinely couldn't recognise him from only the back of his head, and there was another guy there who was tall and blond and thin, and he might have been in the Olympics too, but I didn't recognise him at all.

And after I'd got my photo with Alistair, a whole bloody family of people started trying to muscle in and get a piece of him, and the cafe owner was nagging him even more about bringing his medal in, and as we drove off, my mum and Ruth and I had a long and at times heated conversation about how to handle meeting Olympic Gold Medallists in tea shops, and this is sort of what I think after having that conversation.

For two weeks I watched the Olympics, and I found a lot of it genuinely inspiring, but the most direct connection I had with it was either shouting at the telly, or knowing that an Olympic Gold Medal winning rower's parents had killed my domestic animals (they are vets, so it was all above board, and I'm not looking to turn them in).

And now here I was, eating a scone, and there on the next table, also eating a scone was an Olympic Gold Medallist, and in these days of bloody Twitter and Facebook and bloody internet forums and discussion groups about every bloody subject under the sun, I wanted to acknowledge directly to that person, that they had done something remarkable, and that I had seen it.  Because to wander off into the car park of eternity without at least saying congratulations, would be a missed opportunity.

Wanting to get my picture taken afterwards was totally gratuitous, and for my own benefit, so I can tell everyone I know that this event took place, but hey ho, nobody's perfect.

And it may well be a total pain in the arse to be knocking around your own neighbourhood trying to do whatever you did before the Olympics, and having people constantly interrupting your scone eating or soap powder buying to shake your hand and get a picture of you, and a lot of those people might be tactless idiots who don't have any regard for your privacy or personal space, but in the middle of all that  are people like me.  Me, who was genuinely inspired by what I saw, and who didn't want to miss the chance to have a bigger connection to London 2012 than you can get from shouting at the telly. or from sending bloody tweets, whatever the hell they are.

So, if I see Kat Copeland next week buying some tofu in my local Tesco, or if I see Mo Farah in a train station one day, or Jessica Ennis in a launderette, or if I should encounter Chris Hoy buying power tools in a Scottish branch of B&Q, I will most likely take the opportunity to say to each of them 'Well done in the Olympics, you were incredible, and while I was sat on the sofa eating Wispa bars, you were totally inspiring, and I'm sorry if I'm intruding into your personal space, but I just wanted to wish you well, and while I'm here, can I have a photo please?'

Unless that is, I bump into Richard Curtis in the meantime, and perhaps he could write me a script for such occasions.  Because not only did I not win the Olympic Gold Medal for cycling, running, shooting or canoeing, I didn't win it for knowing how to talk to Olympians in the street either.

When I die I hope I'm not wearing new shoes

I bought some new shoes last weekend.  Don't ask me why but I always like to get them worn in as soon as possible.  This is because I suffer from an irrational fear of dying without having got value for money out of a recent purchase.  If there's an official name for this phobia I don't know what it is.

I feel pretty much like this about everything I buy.  I don't imagine it would be my most pressing concern if I got hit by a bus, that I hadn't used my shoes much, but somehow I feel it matters.

The cousin of this feeling is the pride I feel in throwing things away that are completely worn out.  Last year I threw away one pair of cycling shorts and two pairs of cycling trousers and all three pair had completely worn through on the arse.  In fact, I had continued to wear them for a while with holes in the arses, but Ruth eventually told me I shouldn't go out like that anymore in case I got arrested.

I felt really good about having worn something all the way from brand new to completely destroyed and in general I really enjoy owning things that I use, and I don't like owning things I don't.

I like having pots and pans and plates and cups that are used over and over again, but I really don't like having that pair of trousers that I bought to work in a call centre but which I'm now too fat for, and I don't know why I'm keeping them because I doubt I'll ever be a 32 waist again, but I can't seem to give up hope.

Anyway, I wore the new shoes every day last week, and although they still look new, I know that if I get wiped out later this weekend, I'll at least have got a few pence worth of wear out of them, so my dying-without-having-worn-my-shoes-in phobia is affecting me less as the week goes on.

I'm also feeling a lot better now about my Green Eggs and Ham cycling jersey.  The first few times I wore it, it was buried under layers and layers of overcoats and woolly jumpers because of the terrible weather, so no-one had ever actually seen it, but the last few weeks I've actually used it as a top layer a few times, and so now the £45 price tag is weighing a lot less heavily on me.  By the way, the shoes only cost £30.

I wonder if this fear of dying without having worn stuff in will get worse as I get older.  I wonder if there's an age beyond which the buying of new things will be completely impossible, an age when even the purchasing of green bananas and tinned food with a good date on it will induce mild panic?

I guess there's only one way to find out.  I'm coming after you Future, and I've got my new shoes on!

The first time I met a Geordie I was kicking a hedgehog against his house

I live up north now, and over the years I've met lots of Geordies.  Some of them are quite nice.

The first time I met a Geordie though, it didn't go too well.  I was living in Leeds at the time, in a terraced house, and being keen on football, as I was, I used to like nothing better than to kick a football against a wall.  I could go on for hours.

If I didn't have a football, a tennis ball or anything else vaguely football shaped would do.  Now I didn't have a dog at the time, so I don't know why I ended up with it, but one day I had managed to acquire a squeaky dog toy in the shape of a hedgehog.  This acted in many ways very similar to a ball except with it being shaped like a hedgehog it didn't always roll very well.

One day I was kicking said hedgehog against the side of the end terraced house in our street, and this ferocious old bloke with a Geordie accent came out of his house, and told me to stop kicking that bloody ball against my house, I'm trying to watch TV.

It's not a ball, it's a hedgehog, I said.  I always like to get the facts straight, even when I'm being bollocked.

This only seemed to anger him further, and he came out with a string of expletives in Geordie, the gist of which seemed to be not to give him any more cheek or he'd be shoving the bloody hedgehog up my arse.

I sort of steered clear of him after that.

I've met loads of Geordies since and a lot of them are quite nice.

I expect he might have been too, if it hadn't been for the repeated 'bang, squeak, bang, squeak' against his house.  Ah well, never mind.

One night in Turin vs One night in Kiev

I watched England play Italy the other night.

It was the quarter final so as usual they got knocked out on penalties.

I had been quite satisfied earlier in the tournament with their effort and with their attempts to be the best team in the tournament at throwing themselves headlong in the way of the ball to stop it going near the net.  Kicking it in the general direction of a colleague they weren't too good at, but the full length blocking dive, they'd got that off to a tee.

But I was very disappointed in their efforts against Italy.  They were out on their feet from the start of the second half onwards, Rooney looking like he was running in concrete wellies and a lot of the others looking like they were running through treacle.  How come England are always so bloody tired these days?  These are young fit lads!

Anyway, I was pretty much over it before I'd even gone over and switched the telly off.  I don't know if it's just because I'm older, but I don't get upset when England lose anymore.  I just shrug and move on.  Losing to Italy this week or Germany in 2010 just doesn't hurt anymore, not like in 1986 and 1990.  In those days I felt depressed for days afterwards.  It's well documented that I always tend to blame Shilton for these defeats rather than Maradona or the Germans and that may be a bit unfair, because after the Italy game this week I watched a documentary called 'One night in Turin' about England's run to the semi final at the 1990 World Cup and in it Shilton did quite a few good saves, and he also won 125 more caps for England than I did, so on reflection I should probably give him a break.

There were some other things I noticed about the 1990 tournament in this documentary which I'd never noticed before.

That goal that Platt scored against Belgium in the 120th minute came after Gazza ran from his own half and got fouled just outside the Belgian penalty area.  In the 120th minute it was!  And Gazza was leaving people for dead, sprinting past them at speed, with the ball.  And there were other clips of him running with the ball late in games, and it was obvious that he was super-fit, and so were the players around him.  And somehow that made me feel doubly sad about England just folding up at half time the other night. 

Another thing I saw in the documentary from 1990 which I'd never seen before was this.  When Chris Waddle misses the deciding penalty the camera stays on him as he's walking away back to the centre circle and the Germany captain Lothar Matthaus follows him and tries to commiserate with him.  And I thought that was pretty admirable.  His team had just got through the World Cup Final and instead of going and jumping on a pile of Germans, he took the time to try and comfort one of the team he'd just beaten.  I also remember reading in Stuart Pearce's autobiography about how he had to give a urine sample after the match and he couldn't and he was waiting around for a while with a couple of the victorious German side, and instead of making a big deal of just having won, they were quiet and respectful and there was no gloating, and somehow all this gave me a new found respect for the Germans of 1990.

And it also brought back to me how I used to feel watching the England team in 1990, which was exactly half my life ago.  Watching Waddle and Beardsley and Barnes and Lineker and Butcher and Platt and Pearce and Parker and Walker and Wright and even Shilton but especially Gazza.  Running and running from the first minute to the 120th.  And not only running around like headless diving chickens, but running around with purpose and passing the ball to each other, and looking not only good enough to be in the semi final, but looking good enough to win the World Cup.

And I wondered what's gone wrong since then, and why I don't feel like that anymore.

Green Eggs and Ham 2 - This time it's personal

This weekend I have been mostly cycling from Coast to Coast. East to West on Saturday and West to East on Sunday. 108 miles each way. From Redcar to Arnside and back again.

Day One didn’t feel so much like a day of two halves, as a day of four quarters.

The first quarter (Redcar to Northallerton) I could feel myself doing that thing I was trying really hard not to do, which was going too fast, but even going too fast I was still mostly at the back.  Even if you’re trying not to catch them, seeing your co-riders just a little way in front does make you want to pedal faster.

Then quarter two (Northallerton to Wensley) I felt like I was going too slow.  Like a football match with too many fouls in, there were too many stoppages, and even though the A684 had been pretty unpleasant out of Northallerton, once we decided to take the back roads through Newton le Willows from Bedale to Leyburn I felt like I’d turned around and was heading back East.  I couldn’t get into any kind of rhythm, and still being at Wensley at 1.30 with the more difficult half of the day to come, made me worry about what time we’d get to Arnside.

I set off from Wensley by myself, as I really wanted to try and settle into some sort of comfortable pace without anyone else around, and this third quarter I enjoyed.  It was raining but only lightly and the Dales were beautiful and the mist over the hills and the sound of running water was quite relaxing.  Although it had been raining a lot of the day, it was quite warm so I wasn’t getting too chilly.

We stopped at the Moorcock Inn at Garsdale Head at the end of the third quarter and it was noticeably colder up there than it had been lower down.  I probably thought from there that the worst was over as I thought it was pretty much downhill to Sedbergh and Kirkby Lonsdale and then we were nearly there, but then the heavens opened.

Within a couple of minutes I was soaked from head to foot, and the two things happened that always happen to me in heavy rain.  My shoes filled up with water, and the bike computer stopped working.  When it conked out I’d done 82 miles so far.

There was so much rain water in my eyes, and they were stinging so much that I couldn’t see and I had to pull off the road, dry my face, put some warmer clothes on and wait 10 minutes for it to stop raining before I could continue.

By the time I rolled into Sedbergh, there was almost a search party forming to come and look for me.  Gary lent me some safety goggles to keep any more rain out of my sore eyes and as there was only about 25 miles to go I thought we were nearly there.  But we weren’t nearly there at all.

At Kirkby Lonsdale we stopped again to regroup and now there was only about 12 miles left, and it was 20 past 6 and I thought we’re even more nearly there now, but then the whole ride turned into a bizarre surrealistic nightmare of ups and downs and ups and downs.  We did a climb the size of the one I accidentally took us on out of Kendal two years ago, and I was neck and neck with Adam for ages, but I was cycling and he was walking and we were both averaging 3 miles an hour, and it was so not the Tour de France, and every so often he’d get back on and storm past me and I was shouting at him for overtaking me with no training, but then he’d get off and walk some more.  And this big hill wasn’t the only hill.  They seemed to be everywhere, and we must have been getting nearer to the coast but I couldn’t see it,, and this end of day one which I was waiting and hoping for, just wouldn’t seem to arrive.

And even when we got to Arnside, Arnside seemed to go on for miles before we got to the sea, and then we had to walk up a massive hill to the youth hostel.  We’d missed the chance of an evening meal in the hostel by being so late, and I was so wet and cold that I just wanted to go to bed, and it took me about 20 minutes of sitting on a chair staring into space before I could get my wet clothes off, and I had to put Ruth’s shoes on to go to the pub because mine were so wet, and they were two sizes too small, and this made me hobble, and by the time we got to the pub (The Albion), the chef had his hat and coat on and he was heading off down the road, and the landlady had to go and grab him and tell him to do some more cooking and so thankfully with seconds to spare, we got an evening meal, and I’m glad we did.

And the pub had some live music on, and although the songs all sounded the same, the nice welcome off the bar staff and the food and the music made me feel a whole lot better about Arnside, which had seemed in the rain and the dark when we arrived to be about as welcoming as the end of Full Metal Jacket.

I did entertain some fears on Saturday night that I might not be able to do Day Two.  My eyes were hurting, and I had a stiff neck and a headache, and a bit of walking around in someone else’s shoes didn’t help.  By the time we got back from the pub it was nearly 11 and I couldn’t believe we were setting off again at 9 am.

Before I went to bed I drank a bottle of energy drink and then I had another one at 3 am, and while I was drinking this second one I started to think more positively about Day Two.  This was my reasoning at 3 am.

Day One had been hard, but a lot of the hardness had come from not knowing how hard it was going to be.  The last 30 miles or so with the hills and the rain had really tested me, but Day Two I knew I’d be doing the 30 miles on unfamiliar roads first, not at the end and once we got to Dent I knew the route, and there wasn’t any unknown bits.  Also, all day on the first day my legs had felt strong, so I reasoned I could probably do the pedalling all right.  Also, Day Two we’d be getting closer to the finish and to home all the time, and also the weather forecast said it was going to be dry, and also we might have a tailwind.  And in the planning, I’d always regarded Day One as being the hardest day.  All these things I was thinking and so around 3 am I stopped thinking I couldn’t do it, and I started knowing that I could.

Unfortunately my mood was dampened somewhat when I went to get my clothes out of the drying room at 7.30 am.  Although my clothes were dry, my shoes were still like two massive hyper-absorbent sponges that seemed just as full of water as the day before.

As soon as I got back on the bike on Day Two, I felt good.  My legs didn’t feel like legs that had done 100 miles the day before, they felt like brand new legs, and as I rolled down to the hill to the pier I felt pretty positive, helped by the fact that it was almost sunny.

In the pub the night before, the route for Day Two had been altered to avoid all the ups and downs of the end of Day One, and although this meant riding on the A65 to Kirkby Lonsdale which wasn’t ideal, it was good enough.  There was a nice flat part out of Arnside along the sea front which mirrored the start of our C2C in 2010 from Walney only that time on the other side of the Estuary (or whatever it is) and feeling the wind behind me strengthened my feeling that today was going to be a lot easier than yesterday.

I forgot where the bridge was in Kirkby Lonsdale where I was supposed to meet up with everyone and so I spent about 10 minutes pointlessly riding round the town, and although this was a waste of time, it seemed like a nice town to be wasting my time in.

I stopped a man who was passing by and asked him the way to Dent, and he pointed me in the right direction for the bridge, and he seemed to think I was a bit nuts going to Dent because it’s hilly that way, and I didn’t bother to tell him I was only going to Dent on the way to Redcar, because he would probably have called me an ambulance and asked for me to be put into care in the community.

I did spend a bit of time after that moaning to Stephen and Graeme about things I hadn’t liked about Day One, but then if ever there was a cure for moaning it’s the road from Barbon to Dent.  I don’t know if that Dale has got a name, but it was beautiful.  Graeme described it as a hidden gem, and it was, and it was at that point that the frustrations of yesterday seemed to fade away, because roads like this are the reasons that any of us ride bikes  (sometimes I wonder if I even am a cyclist, but I think I probably am now, after this weekend).

We found our way to Dent and as we rode through Dentdale we were overtaken by quite a few road cyclists doing what turned out to be the White Rose Challenge (the long route), and we had a bit of fun with some of them on the big hill up to Newby Head casually chatting to them, and mentioning in passing that we were on our way to Redcar, and that that was where we’d set off from yesterday.

From the top of Newby Head we had that big descent into Hawes, although I must have misremembered it because some of it I actually had to pedal on this time, and I rode by myself on that lovely road from Hawes to Askrigg which I loved so much on our last Coast to Coast, and I loved it again.

Although I felt really strong, and I was confident of making it all the way, I was concerned that by the time we got to Askrigg for lunch it was nearly 2 and we’d only done 45 miles out of 108.  At this rate it was looking like a 9 o’clock finish.

But from there on, we picked up speed.  At Leyburn at nearly 3 pm we had another stop for food, and at this point I had the sobering thought that this was where we’d started the final day of our last Coast to Coast and so we effectively still had a full day’s ride to do starting at 3 pm.  But then the sun came out, and for the first time this weekend I took my raincoat off, and I had bare arms and a Green Eggs and Ham T-shirt on, and as my legs were still feeling strong I set off as fast as I could down the A684 first to Bedale and then to Northallerton, and I was riding with Graeme and Stephen and we were all wearing matching tops and we were laughing and feeling good.

And by 4 pm we were in Northallerton, and suddenly a 7 pm finish looked more likely.  But we were never going to get to Redcar by milling round a car park so I set off again, and buoyed by the reassurance of being almost on home soil and being able to see the Cleveland Hills, our hills, I rode some more, and finally after being a bit spread apart during the weekend, we all managed to ride together in a group, and I wondered if we’d been doing some of that Forming Storming and Norming that groups do and now we were Performing.

We stopped at Hutton Rudby and all had a drink together, and I accidentally had a drink of cider which seemed to affect me in approximately the same way that Kryptonite affects Superman as I felt a bit sluggish afterwards, but it was nice to sit round and half a laugh, with a dog barking on the roof.

And before long we were back in Redcar and there was a cheering crowd to meet us, and the Pollitts had brought champagne, and I drank some of it straight out of the bottle like they do at the end of the Grand Prix, and then someone told me that there were glasses, so I had a glass of champagne and a Snickers.

I doubt that  necking champagne straight out of the bottle and eating a Snickers at the same time is recommended in Debrett’s Guide to Etiquette, but I don’t imagine those ladies who walk round with books on their heads do many Coast to Coast bike rides either.  But we did.  Twice.

People who do challenges, when interviewed, often spout a load of crap about what they found out about themselves while doing the challenge.

Well, the only thing I found out on this trip was that all those bloody horrible rides I did to train for it, in the end paid off because they had put some stuff into my legs that made it possible for me to do the thing I'd trained for, and that's probably the point of training.  And it deserved to be called a challenge, because lots of it was challenging, and I'd like to say I remained relentlessly positive throughout, but I didn't, but it didn't matter whether I felt positive or not, because I kept pedalling anyway, until it was over, and then I stopped, and at the end I did something I've never done before, I kissed my bike, and I know it's stupid to kiss inanimate objects, but if you're going to do something difficult, it helps to have equipment that doesn't let you down, and it didn't, and I had that feeling as I was riding up to the Sea Front in Redcar like I had in the last 10 minutes of my last A Level exam, when I put my pen down and just watched the clock wind down the last few minutes, because by then I knew I’d done everything I could and there’s a satisfaction that comes at that point that’s a distant relation of the apprehension you feel at the start of something, when you know you’re probably capable of doing it, but you can’t quite be sure, because you haven’t started it yet, and so there’s no evidence.

Well, I not only started it, but I finished it too, so now I know I can do it.  People were there to see it, and there are photos too.  And in some of them I look like a lab technician who has just had an experiment go horribly wrong in his face, but there are photos all the same.

So, well done to me, and to everyone else who rode with me, and to everyone who supported us, either directly or indirectly.

Thanks to all the children for lending us their dads on Father’s Day, and to all the wives who willingly tolerate their husbands going off on these slightly nuts lycra clad adventures,  especially to Tracey for lending us Tim on his birthday.

Thanks to everyone who made donations to the charity, and finally thanks in advance to all those people who are going to have to spend sizeable chunks of their futures listening to us go on about how great we once were…when we cycled Coast to Coast in a day, and then just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, we did it again.



 for another perspective on the trip, see Graeme's ride report here

for those who enjoyed this, here is the story of our original coast to coast in 2010 which had less miles, but more accidents