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

I like people more than places

I was applying for a job the other day, and the application form asked me the question ‘What inspires you?’.  And after I thought about it for a while, this is what I wrote.

People inspire me.

I’ve done quite a bit of travelling in my life, and although I like to go to new places and see new things, I’m usually interested not so much in where I’m going, as in who I’m going with.

When I was 15 I went to Neuschwannstein, the fairy tale castle from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but I can’t remember the first thing about it and I don’t have any pictures of it either.  What I do have pictures of are the people I went with (especially the girls), stood outside the castle, as I was generally more interested in them than I was in a building.

I also got to hang around Munich and the English Garden quite a bit on that trip, but I haven’t got any pictures of that either.  I do have some more pictures of girls though (I was 15, who wouldn‘t?, I tastefully decided not to photograph all the topless women I saw or the naked man who kept trying to get us to play badminton with him though, so I did operate with some semblance of decorum).

Similarly, when I went to India in January this year, although I went there partly to see the Taj Mahal (which included a 12 hour trip in a taxi there and back where someone tried to get me to pay money to look at a monkey and another man with a sword opened a car door for me at the services, and we had to fire our tour guide because we just wanted to enjoy it without words), I went there mainly to hang out with Dean (and briefly with Elsa), and while I was there I was more inspired by the people I met than the places I went to.

If I’d met Shah Jahan himself, and he’d told me all about his wife and what he loved about her, I probably would have understood the Taj Mahal more, but in the end for me, it was just a building, and not even an easy one to get to at that (and I had my polos confiscated by the Army).

On reflection that day I went to the Taj Mahal I probably should have stayed in the Hotel Ajanta all day.  I could have spent those 15 hours having a leisurely breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hotel, striving and failing to get the things I’d ordered but being brought other stuff instead, in that marvellously random way they used to feed me over there in Upsidedownland.

Sometimes I felt more like a friend or a member of the family than a paying customer at the Ajanta.  And not always in a good way. Sometimes I got the distinct impression that I was getting on their nerves asking them stuff all the time, and they wished I’d go away, and conversely I sometimes found their behaviour completely incomprehensible and sometimes I didn’t have a bloody clue what was going on.  Like I said, it was just like a family.

Also better than the Taj Mahal was the goofy waiter in the orange hoodie from the Hotel Godawari who brought me my Paneer Butter Massala, He was running around delivering dishes of food while a man was hammering a door frame and the restaurant seemed to be still being built around us.  It was so the opposite of corporate, and I really liked that about it.

I liked it more because it was such a contrast from the faux corporateness of the Big Bite in Meerut the day before, which was like Fawlty Towers, only with a much more rude man in charge.  I’m sure I’ll always remember the face of the waiter at the Big Bite who was so disinterested and surly, until we gave him a big tip that is (we were being ironic) and he suddenly turned into Mr Smiley Shakey Hands Man.

And I’ll certainly always remember the quizzical looks I saw on the faces of the local residents as Dean and I got ourselves funnelled by Google maps down the ever narrower back alleys of Delhi until we were virtually riding through people’s back gardens.

It was only when we got trapped with our fully laden bikes between a man pushing a cart full of bricks and an old lady in a chair that we realised we had our map set to walking directions rather than road directions.  Thankfully the old lady, politely and without any fuss, lifted her chair over her head to let us through, or we’d still be there now.

And that bloody rickshaw driver who tried to take us down the Spice Marrrket, and who told us ’You happy, I’m happy’ but then managed to disprove this by leaving everyone unhappy.  And the little leathery tuk tuk driver with the bad teeth who followed us round  for fucking hours near India Gate (it was like being tracked by Tommy Lee Jones US Marshall character in the Fugitive) until he got moved on by the Army.  And the other much nicer tuktuk driver who told us to catch the number 11 bus, and made sure we didn‘t forget the number by tapping us on both knees and saying one and one equals eleven (I thought it equalled two, but this is India)..

I do sometimes feel awed by buildings and other things made out of bricks and other construction materials, and although I was pretty knocked out by seeing the Berlin Wall in 1985 the reality of that divide came home to me much more powerfully two years later when I met a retired lady from Leipzig on a train who was going to meet her sister in the West.

She hadn’t seen her sister for 22 years because they were living on opposite sides of the wall when Germany was turned from one country into two.  The matter of fact way she told her story made the Wall more real to me than seeing watchtowers and guards and the Wall itself.

And I went to Venice once, but the thing I remember most isn’t the Bridge of Sighs or St Mark’s Square but running around with water pistols shooting at my friends and being shot at, and if ever there was a city suited to the use of water pistols, Venice is it.  And the lady who ran the ice cream parlour in Padua that was the first place I’d ever been that had 30 flavours of ice cream, and hanging out in the café over the road from the hotel with my friends, playing King of Boxer, where I kept getting knocked out by a little computer man called Brown Pants.  The people and the emotions I still remember, but the buildings I don’t.

The fact that people mean more to me than places is the very reason I can do a 100 mile bike ride and remember no scenery whatsoever but I can remember the cantankerous woman in the Ford Fiesta van who was driving round on a beautiful summer’s day in a car full of urinal cubes and toilet rolls, and who not only beeped at me, but stopped to make lots of negative comments about cyclists.

And I remember less about the views I saw on Saturday climbing Hartside than I do about the incredulous cyclist who was doing his best to smash up his carbon fibre bike at the café at the top by repeatedly dropping it on the floor.

And it’s probably why I like cycle touring with Ruth, rather than on my own, because it’s not what I’ve seen that counts, but who I saw it with.  Without someone to say ‘Do you remember that time that we….?’ to, I don’t think I’d want to go.

Yes, buildings are all very nice, and they’re quite useful for keeping the rain off, but in the end they’re just buildings.  And they don’t really inspire me.  But people do….

Anyway, that’s what I wrote, so that’s probably another employer I won’t hear back from……

Hell is other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre, I wonder if he'd just been on a train

One thing I hate about trains is that sometimes they let nutters on.  And usually they let them book tickets to sit next to us.

Last year on the way to Glasgow in May the train operating company managed to only sell 3 first class tickets to Glasgow on the day we were travelling.  Two to Ruth and me, and one to a really loud polo crunching woman who they thoughtfully seated right next to us.  Oh, and the really loud humming she did along to her Ipod, it was nearly enough for me to stick a plastic fork up her nose.

When we were travelling back from Gretna at the end of the same trip, we managed to get sat next to a table full of daft arse lads on a stag do, boasting about their sexual exploits and knocking back about 20 beers each during the course of the one hour journey from Carlisle to Newcastle.  That's not the kind of thing you can sleep next to if you try.  Even earphones don't drown them out.

So I thought I'd seen it all, until we got on the train from Oban to Glasgow on Saturday.  I know they recently made a series about Del Boy and Rodney, the pre Only Fools and Horses years.  Well, I think I managed to get the train with a young Rab C Nesbitt and his wife on Saturday.

Ruth and I were sat in a double seat with about 4 panniers and we had plenty of room, but this guy and his wife decided they needed four chairs and a table each.  That was stunning enough, but they decided to choose two tables about half a train apart, and then shout down the train at each other in virtually unintelligible Glaswegian.

When the train stopped at Crianlarich this Einstein got off the train and ordered some bacon sandwiches, but they came with all the wrong fillings in (no tomatoes or onions), which didn't come as a huge surprise to me, as I needed a translator to understand what he was going on about, so no doubt the caterers had the same problems.

He seemed to be either so stupid or out of his skull on drugs that if he'd stuck his head out of the train window, and it had been hit by another passing train, I'm not sure he would have felt it.

And then he managed to spill coffee everywhere, and he emptied the whole train toilet of toilet paper to wipe it up, and even then it took him about an hour.  He was a walking disaster.

The really worrying thing was that at one point he seemed to be communicating on a mobile phone to a very young child and giving operating instructions over said device on how to use a toaster.  My God, I thought, if he's giving out safety information, someone's really in trouble.

But he saved the best till last.  As Ruth and I had 7 bike bags, 2 bikes and a tent between us, we thought it might be sensible to let the other passengers off the train before we tried to get all our stuff off, but the train coming to a standstill seemed to remove even the small amount of inertia he had, and after barging into me, he just stood in the aisle, like he was auditioning for Madame Tussauds.  Ruth stood behind him for ages, waiting patiently for her presence to register, but in the end I just pushed past him.  Otherwise, we could still be there now.

One of the really nice things about travelling is the nice people you meet, who give you tips and advice on cool places to go, and things to do, but then on the other hand, you sometimes strike it unlucky and have to share your personal space with people who make you want to jump straight out the train window.  That's probably why the windows don't open, and you have to hit them with a safety hammer to get out.

It's all a far cry from the British Rail adverts of old in which people's feet are melting into big comfortable slippers as they are whisked in a state of nirvana past the wonderful British countryside.

I don't suppose they would sell as many tickets, if they showed a picture of a tired cyclist and his bike being crushed against the windows of the bike compartment by a load of drunken lads and lasses on their way to get hammered in York on a Saturday lunchtime.

Ah well, better luck next time!

Come back Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - all is forgiven

I've been reading a book about Introversion this week.  In it, it says one of the reasons introverts need peace and quiet is because they are more sensitive to sensory input than extroverts and they need less of it to become overwhelmed.

In that case, I need to stop going to see movies like Avengers Assemble (worst film title ever) and Mission Impossible 4.  Both of them are just noise, shit getting blown up and people getting chinned from start to finish. I know that Hollywood's a bit short of money these days, I think they must have decided, rather than make 6 super hero films for 6 times the price, they'd just film them all at the same time in New York.  The plot was so non-existently bonkers I may have actually been watching 6 films at once, I wasn't sure.

Right from the minute Scarlett Johansen started kicking people's heads off in the first few minutes of the Avengers I was bored.  In fact, Ruth turned to me after 15 minutes and asked me if I was as bored as she was.  It was a good job I had the foresight to paint eyeballs on the outside of my 3d glasses, or I may have looked asleep.

It was the same last night.  Tom Cruise decides, instead of walking out the prison door which has been opened for him, to go back and chin about a hundred blokes before leaving.  It was just like watching a videogame.  I fell asleep after that, and when I woke up a girl got kicked out of a window and then Tom was running at absolute top speed through a sandstorm.  Then I went to bed.

Part of the reason I've found Mission Impossibles 2 to 4 so disappointing is because I really enjoyed Mission Impossible 1.  And what did that have, that none of the others have had?  More talking, that's what.

All the best bits of Mission Impossible 1 are people talking to each other.  In offices, in restaurants, on trains.  Just talking.  There are one or two action sequences, but they are quite short and involve things like one man dangling on a string for about 10 minutes, or a bit of running about on top of a train.

All the real action is in the dialogue.  And while I'm sitting there fighting to stay awake watching these supposed blockbusters, watching endless people getting punched, it makes me yearn for the days when films had a storyline that was advanced by actors talking to one another rather than by endless carnage.

Another problem I had with the Avengers movie was the sight of New Yorkers running for their lives, while buildings are being blown up around them.  In the innocent days before 9/11 I used to enjoy seeing Godzilla eating the Chrysler building or seeing a tidal wave sweep through Manhattan.  Having seen too much footage of real New Yorkers running away from things in terror, I find I can't enjoy it in the same cartoony way anymore.  Filmakers seemed to go easy on New York for quite a while after 9/11, but now blowing up central New York seems to be acceptable again.  I wonder what real New Yorkers make of it.

I might give Mission Impossible 4 another go later.  It can't be as bad as I thought it was last night.  But if it is, I'm going to watch Mission Impossible 1 again.  I'm going to enjoy once more the sights and sounds of people talking to each other on trains, and in offices, and over the telephone.  And I'm going to enjoy afresh the sights and sounds of stuff not getting blown up.  Because on the whole, I think, in films, as in life, things are better that way.  

Islay - the politest place I've ever been, and possibly the most beautiful

You know that thing about peer pressure, where you unintentionally conform to those around you?  Well, spending a few days on the island of Islay has made me want to be a better person.  Certainly more polite, courteous and patient with other people.

While I was there, all the islanders I met (except one) were incredibly polite and obliging and so were all the other tourists I met, which included some other British tourists as well as some Danes, a Swede, some Germans and a man from Braziil.  Everyone was unfailingly polite and courteous.  In a shop where we were buying twenty things and we tried to let a man buying only a frozen pizza go before us, he wouldn't hear of it.  He was happy to wait his turn.  And almost every motorist we encountered on the roads gave us a friendly wave.  Sometimes this was because we'd considerately made way for them on a single track road, but quite often it was just to say hello.

As well as being the politest place I've ever been, it might well be the most beautiful.  I'm not a fan of beaches but the beaches on the Atlantic Coast at Machir Bay and Saligo Bay are the most beautiful I've ever seen.  Ruth used to live on the Atlantic Coast in Portugal and she said it looks and feels the same.  We also visited possibly the remotest Art Studio and cafe I've ever seen at Sanaigmore, and the beach there was also immaculate.  Each time we were virtually the only people there.  We saw a family of three at Machir Bay but otherwise no-one.

During our holiday on Arran last year, we had a couple of days where we couldn't even leave our holiday flat because the weather was so hostile, and I sat reading up on Islay then.  The extra push I needed to get us there this week was that I wanted to go and shake the hand of Lorna, the local youth hostel manager.  I, along with Dean, met Lorna in Rishikesh while she was picking up rubbish in the streets, a quixotic endeavour if ever there was one, according to Dean.  She was the first Westerner we'd seen for days, and after we met the rafting and bungee jumping stress heads at Bhandari Swiss Cottages, she was possibly the only sane one we met while we were there.  She wouldn't shake my hand in Rishikesh because her hands were covered in street garbage, so I said I'd have to go to Islay to see her in her summer job to get my handshake.

If you do go to Islay cycling, don't try to cycle too far in a day.  Getting any speed up on a bike there is hopeless.  There's something on almost every corner worth looking at, and photographing.  The first morning we left the Youth Hostel, it took us an hour to do a mile.  We spent some time watching hares boxing, we messed about getting photos with some alpacas, and we generally spent more time off the bike than on it.  We'd taken about a hundred pictures before we'd done the 7 miles to Portnahaven.

As soon as we arrived in the bay at Portnahaven Ruth became transfixed by the seals.  There were around 20 or 30 lolling in the bay.  They were pretty relaxed on the whole but they did keep getting chased off the rocks by the local sheepdog Len.  It seemed to us that he was barking 'Get off my rocks!' and once they'd fled, they were replying from the safety of the water 'Come over here and say that'.

While Ruth was taking videos of the seals I assembled the Trangia to make some coffee, but I remembered I hadn't packed any food.  After about 5 minutes of careful looking around I noticed that people kept coming down the hill with carrier bags after being in a small red and white building, so I went to have a look.  It turned out to be the local Post Office.  Very small, and sort of hidden in a dip, so we hadn't seen it from the road down.

Unfortunately, my mood was somewhat compromised by my encounter with the local postmaster, who tried his utmost to get me to vote for him in the following week's elections.  Assuring him that I wasn't a registered voter in Scotland proved to be useless in the face of his tenacity.  If I could have got a word in, I might have said 'Look mate, I'm on holiday, there's seals in the bay, my wife's down there with the kettle on, it's sunny, and all I want is a Mars bar, please let me go', but I didn't manage it.  In a moment of panic I also bought some jerky beef.  He didn't have any sandwiches (only on a Monday) and only one pie and I thought that the jerky beef might possibly have some meat in, but no.  If you added water and waited about half an hour, it started to resemble beef, but in the end I threw it away.  I thought about offering it to Len, the local sheepdog, but if he died, I didn't want to get the blame.

For three days we cycled round Islay after that, and the weather was perfect.  A cool breeze while we rode, and a warm sun when we stopped.  It was magical.  Empty road after empty road.  The odd car would pass by with dog walkers in going to the beach, or whisky drinkers heading for Islay's many distilleries, but on the whole it was just the two of us.

We got home yesterday, and I looked at the 500 or so photos I'd taken on Islay.  At first glances they seemed disappointing, because they don't begin to convey the magic and the beauty of being there.  But having looked at them again, they're good enough.  Because they give you a hint of what's there, and a hint should be enough to get you there.

And if you do go, don't forget to pop into the Youth Hostel and say hi to Lorna.  If you need somewhere friendly to stay with beautiful views all around, that could be just the place for you.  

Getting electrocuted on the Isle of Arran and other misadventures

I mostly have trouble thinking up my own stuff to do.

When I was in India Dean and I went north to Rishikesh on the advice of an Indian waiter (known as PS), instead of going south to Agra as we'd planned (and I'm glad that we did), and I've been trying to cycle round the Isle of Arran for three years (not constantly of course) on the advice of Carol Burr from North Tees Medical Illustration, who I met once when I was delivering some leaflets.  .

Last year Ruth and I cycled round the southern half of Arran and across the String Road and the Ross Road, but we never made it all the way round the whole island in a day, a fact which annoys me every time I see the Isle of Arran on the weather forecast.

So I went back to have another go last week.  We planned to combine 2 days on Arran with a trip to Islay.  I had wanted to go to Islay anyway, but an extra reason was that I needed to go and shake the hand of Lorna, the local youth hostel manager.  Another by product of being sent to Rishikesh by PS the waiter was that I met Lorna picking up rubbish in the streets.  She wouldn't shake my hand in Rishikesh because her hands were covered in street garbage, so I said I'd have to go to Islay to see her in her summer job to get my handshake.  But that's another story...

We arrived in Arran late on Monday, and cycled over to the Youth Hostel at Lochranza from Brodick.  15 miles.  Pretty flat except for one big hill, or it may be a mountain.  I'm never sure what the definition is.  It was high though.  Ruth slept pretty badly on Monday night, and we struggled to get going on Tuesday.  In fact, the youth hostel door was virtually being locked behind us at 10 am as we left.

I knew we'd have to start with a headwind, and finish with a tailwind, but I still expected to average 10 miles an hour for the 56 mile trip.  In the event it took us over two hours to do the first 13 miles.

Then trouble.  I knew there would be.  Last year Ruth wanted to visit Machrie Stone Circle, but we didn't, so I knew we'd never get past it without the subject coming up again.  We asked an American couple who'd just come from there and who were running for the bus how far it was, and they said '20 minutes, but worth it'.  They were on the bus before I could ask if it was 20 minutes each way.  At this point it was already 20 past 12.  After a brief semi-altercation, we decided to go, and in the event it was more like 30 minutes each way, and then we took an extra half an hour brewing up a coffee on the Trangia, and eating some Crinkly cake which Ruth had been given at Rutland.  I think it's safe to say I didn't enjoy the stone circle as much as I might, as I was worrying about the time.

Just as we were arriving back at the bikes, around 1.40, we got caught in a hailstorm.  It was that sharp stabby hail that hits you like freezing cold needles, and it wasn't long before my hands and legs were blue.  My hands had been cold anyway.  Convinced I'd left them on the bike, I hadn't worn my gloves to and from the stone circle, but it turned out Ruth had been carrying them all along.  When I did get them back off her, in the time it take to put them on, they were soaked.  Trying to force blue hands into sopping wet gloves is no-one's idea of fun, and, already stressed about the time, I set off cycling again in a foul mood.

After about another 3 miles, we stopped at the local shop in Blackwaterfoot, and we bought some lunch and a cup a soup and the sun came out, and I didn't cheer up, and I said a few dumb things, and Ruth was already hatching a plan to head home, change the locks and call a solicitor.

After I made another brainless comment heading out of Blackwaterfoot, I knew I was probably in for an imminent verbal lashing, so I thought I'd at least ride out of the town, so no-one would hear.  I didn't ride far enough, as it happened.   Some decorators were painting the outside of a house on the outskirts of the village  and they overheard the whole exchange.  I'm sure if they were surveyed they would agree I came off worst.

Ruth basically told me to snap out of the mood I was in, or I was in danger of getting killed.  I made some vague protests about being hours behind my schedule, and I also said that I felt she wasn't really up for the whole round the island in a day thing, but mostly I wanted to get away from her stare and the decorators, so I rode off a bit further up the road.  To be honest, I had no bloody idea what to do next, whether to carry on, or give up, and I rode on about another 300 yards, stopped and leaned my bike up against a fence, and had a look back down the road.

I was really hoping Ruth was following, because as much as I wanted to ride round the Isle of Arran, I didn't want to ride another 40 miles by myself, with nothing to look forward to but getting a pasting at the Youth Hostel at the end of the day.

Thankfully Ruth had decided to go the same way as me, at least for now.  Just as she came round the corner, I decided to have a fiddle with my left pedal that had been making a funny noise all morning, and it was at that precise moment that I got electrocuted.  For some reason, I thought it must be static, but then Ruth pointed out that I had been leaning the bike against an electric fence.

Here is the moment faithfully recreated on a later trip

My hand was really hurting, and as I hopped around clutching it for a bit, Ruth didn't offer any sympathy whatsoever.    For ages she could barely stand, or speak, and I thought she might fall over with the bike on top of her.  When she could form full words again between the giggling, she said, not only was it fully deserved, and a punishment from God, but also possibly the best thing she'd ever seen, and also the highlight of our marriage so far.  Considering we've been married for nearly 13 years, I thought that seemed a little harsh, but the good thing was, it relieved the tension, and the mixture of the laughter and the sun and the hopping around a bit, made me forget all about times and schedules and plans and planning.  All I could think was 'Ow!'.  .

It took quite a while for Ruth to be stable enough to ride a bike, but once she stopped convulsing, we set off again.  The weather had improved, and as we rounded the south of the island, we got lovely views of Pladda and Ailsa Craig.  We stopped around 4 pm at at bench in a small clearing, to eat the lunch we'd bought at Blackwaterfoot, and the sandwiches were actually pretty good.  We'd still only done about 26 miles out of the 56, but I was starting to relax.

We stopped again for ice cream at the Kilmory cheese shop around 4.30, and the lady behind the counter obviously thought I was a nutter, partly because Ruth had set me up by sending me in to ask for pineapple ice cream, but also because I told her we still had to cycle the other 28 miles back to Lochranza the same day.  She didn't seem reassured when I told her we had lights.

We picked up speed through Whiting Bay (where I stopped to buy some tinned curry and rice pudding while Ruth kept pedalling), Lamlash and Brodick and then my crank started to fall off.  I kept reattaching it, with the 8mm Allen key I keep for just such eventualities, but I must not have tightened it enough each time, because it kept coming loose.  Although I'd caught her up after buying the rice pudding, Ruth had gone on ahead, to try and get back to Lochranza before dark, and it was then that I realised she had the lights.

I needn't have worried.  As I rode up the hill or the mountain between Sannox and Lochranza, there was a beautiful sunset lighting my way, and I could see deer silhouetted against the horizon, as they were running across the road at the brow of the hill.  I got back 8 pm, just before dark.  We ate tinned curry and rice pudding with fruit, in the company of lots of thin and fit young people eating much healthier meals, and it started to sink in, that this idea that I'd had for 3 years, of riding round the Isle of Arran in a day, an idea fostered during a casual conversation I'd had while delivering some boxes of leaflets, well, I'd finally done it.

As it finally got dark outside the youth hostel and as I was still digesting my rice pudding I reflected on how the day had gone.  On the whole, I was glad I'd achieved my goal, however arbitrary and unimportant it was, but the main achievement was I was still married, alive and on holiday.  Some or all of them could have not been the case after the way the day started.  And now that one was out the way, we could head off to Islay tomorrow, knowing that it won't upset me anymore, looking at the Isle of Arran on the weather forecast.