"Not all who wander are lost"

Baskers

2010-11-14T23:18:00.005Z

Hounding The Baskerville by Primeval Mudd

(The above poster is embedded from http://brokenbottleboy.tumblr.com/post/1571206536/an-image-for-baskers-and-lovers-of-twitter for the song lyrics go to http://soundcloud.com/primevalmudd/hounding-the-baskerville)

To put it mildly I am rather upset about the article written about Sarah Baskerville by Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail in which he attacks Ms Baskerville, a civil servant in the Department Of Transport, essentially on the basis that she makes comments about government policies in her personal blog (her blog and twitter are marked as expressing her own personal opinions), tweets about her job and is fond of a drink. My mood reached a new depth the next day when one of the grown up papers, The Independent, reproduced a (barely) rewritten version of the same story.

If you have read my blog in the past then you will know that I had the good fortune to spend a couple of weekends in the company of Baskers earlier in the year and, as I chronicled at the time, we had a very pleasant time watching movies, sharing a a few drinks and chatting - mostly about computers. One thing which slightly surprised me at the time, however, was that on both occasions Sarah's travel bag contained quite a deal of work from her job and that she insisted on spending an appreciable part of her time working. Yes, that would be over her weekend, something which I eventually came to realise was not that uncommon for her. To see her criticised in this miserable way in the national press for occasionally pausing to take the twenty seconds or so it requires to send a tweet while in the office seems a frightful injustice.

I am not employed in the public sector myself - although I did work in adult education in former years - but when we first met I must admit that I was amazed to find out how 'into' her job Sarha was, how much she believed in and cared about what she was doing. So, abandoning the idea that I could get her to shut up about it for more than five minutes, I started paying attention to her blog and tweets and it painted a picture of the civil service for me which I had never really imagined; far from the portrayal of an inefficient bureaucracy which seems so popular in the media it was a world of generally deeply committed and hard-working people. Certainly not faceless or without their own opinions (nor adverse to going out for a drink) but very much people and ones that I rather found myself coming to admire in a quiet way; how far that was from my previous preconceptions.

After chatting for a few hours I soon had to admit to myself that Sarah was quite a bit smarter than me (arguably not hard) and was able to design and manage financial systems which I found it hard to grasp in even a conceptual way. So seeing her talent and hard work rubbished in this unconscionable manner by somebody who clearly does not even understand her role - and apparently finds her job title amusing - was something I found particularly distressing.

Since Mr Letts piece appeared yesterday there has been an outpouring of support for Sarah. the hash tag #welovebaskers stayed in the top five UK trends for most of Saturday morning and there have been numerous blogs rebutting his opinions. Also one song and a poster, embedded at the top of this page, have been produced in support of @baskers as she is known on twitter.

Soon after Quentin's article a post was made by Paul Clarke at Honestly Real. As @solobasssteve wrote on twitter:

"comparing Quentin Letts piece in the Mail w/ @paul_clarke's beautifully written rebuttal, you'd be forgiven for mixing up who's the 'journo'"

Further blog posts in support of Baskers soon sprang up soon and I list those I am aware of in no particular order other than to say that the first two struck me as particularly poignant.

http://ashinyworld.blogspot.com/2010/11/little-bird-tweeting.html

http://annkempster.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/for-my-friend-sarah/

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/11/14/who-breaks-a-twitterer-upon-a-wheel/

http://lattelabour.blogspot.com/2010/11/defenestrating-defenestrator.html

http://indiedisco.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/journalism-opportunism/

http://adrianshort.co.uk/2010/11/14/fisked-quentin-letts-on-sarah-baskerville/

Sarah completely changed my idea of what the Civil Service was like though her tweets, her blog and her infectious commitment to the public sector. By contrast Quentin Letts has done little or nothing to change my opinion of the Daily Mail.

The London Naked Bike Ride

2010-06-16T18:42:00.008+01:00

Well it's been a busy week so I had better lay it all before you and try to explain, or possibly excuse, myself in some way.

It has been great fun to be back in the South West as I have mentioned before, seeing some old friends and, more importantly, being able to spend time with Rosa. All those familiar places, in some ways it has been quite nostalgic to revisit them. Here, by way of example, is a picture of Stonehenge, quite close to where I grew up, which I snapped as I was driving past.

Stonehenge

I've also had a chance to get back into the swing of driving and parking in Bath. Nope I did not get 'parked in' in this picture – it was one of the tighter parallel parks which I've had to carry out.

Parking In Bath

My weekend jaunt up to town to do the London Naked Bike Ride not only actually happened but really went very well. I might do well at this point to explain that the ride is an international yearly demonstration, carried out in many cities on the same weekend, to protest against over dependence on oil - but which also aims to raise awareness of cyclists as road users; a theme close to my own heart since I have had a few near misses while cycling myself!

Baskers very sweetly put me up for the weekend and showed me where to get the best food and drink despite feeling somewhat under the weather herself. Disembarking from my train in Paddington I jumped onto the bike and cycled off to meet her in Trafalgar square, where the first game of the world cup was being broadcast onto a huge screen at the foot of Nelson's Column, after which we went on to spend a quite evening eating Thai food.

Saturday was the big day of course and it would not be truthful to say that I wasn't rather nervous when we arrived in Hyde Park, from whence the ride was due to depart, to meet Sarah's friend Allison. One of the things which amazed me was exactly how many people were there. Quite apart from something along the lines of the 1500 people who were actually riding there were a great many more tourists, photographers, well-wishers and people who were probably simply curious about what we were all up to.

It felt a little like being at a festival and, with ten minutes go to go before the ride started, I finally got my nerves under control, stripped off and headed towards the start line; an action which was only slightly impeded by a group of friendly Japanese tourists who wanted to have their pictures taken with me.

The View From My Bike Saddle

After the initial shock it was, surprisingly, not that much of an embarrassment once we were riding; partially because there were so many other people doing it too and partially because one really needs to concentrate when riding in London traffic. However I'll admit that it was kind of surreal to go past all those famous landmarks like that...

Almost all the reactions towards the ride which I saw seemed to be positive and I soon became quite used to the seemingly unending flashing of cameras, shouts of encouragement, good natured cat calls and smiles of the people we passed by. Here is a video shot by one of the other riders which gives a pretty good idea of what it was like, especially the part at the beginning cycling between the wall of photographers; presumably celebrities are used to this but it was a novel experience for me.

The Bike Ride Via The Magic Of Youtube

After having reached the end of the ride I headed off to meet Sarah and Allison and share a few post ride celebratory drinks to recover myself before we eventually repaired to Wagamamma's for some food and I have to admit feeling rather sad when the time came to actually finish breakfast and head off on the bike to get my train – a journey which was made far easier than it might have been due to the GPS in my phone; however did I manage without it?

My job hunting has not been very fruitful thus far. I've seriously been considering returning to the study of Psychology, Perhaps via a Master's degree with a view to working in the healthcare system. Unfortunately this, to put it mildly, is not a great time to be seeking work in the public sector and, of course, there seems to be quite a deal of competition. No matter I am going to just keep on going until something turns up.

The worst that can happen would be that I am unable to find gainful employment in Bath by the time the contract on my flat comes to an end. If that proves to be the case... Well, it will have been expensive! I guess can always cut my losses and take off on a cycle tour while applying do do an MSc via UCAS for September 2011. In the mean time there is still stuff going on though, I've finally received the results of the MRI scan on my shoulder – yes it is damaged – and am now waiting for a consultation with a surgeon which should be in about a month or so; I certainly hope that I can the operation over and done with as soon as possible.

On a more definite note regarding my future the Summer Solstice rapidly approaches and I'm going to try and make it to Avebury once again with my brother – but this time, I hope, for the party as well rather than just to see the sun coming up ;)

Peace, Stuart.

Perspective

2010-06-02T01:49:00.009+01:00

One of the better parts, possibly the best part, of keeping this blog is that it gives me a perspective of time passing which I might not otherwise have. Certainly it seemed that way last night while, over a beer, I looked back over my entries since I began posting on blogspot.

Two years ago I was here, in Bath, getting ready to get on the plane for the United States and one year ago I was finishing my Yachtmaster course. Goodness me... I had been feeling rather stuck over the last month, waiting to hear about job interviews, researching where I can take my career. In some ways it has felt as if nothing was happening in my life but, now that I look back, what a journey it has been to be sure.

It seems like a lot longer than twenty four months. In the first year I set myself up for challenges in a big way. There was both success, by way of getting my Yachtmaster certificate, and failure, in not managing to cycle the length of Great Divide in the United States. After which there were also nine months of stabilisation and reflection during while I lived in Lincolnshire and did not really take on any significant challenges.

During that first year I was often outside my comfort zone - sometimes quite miserable - but, at the same time, I think that I lived more because I was pushing and testing myself. Maybe being very insular during the next phase was equally important for me psychologically? As Chou En-lai reputedly said when asked if the French Revolution had been a good thing "It's too soon to say."

It certainly seems like now is a good time to look back, now when I'm actually at a crossroads and making choices which will determine what I'm going to be up to for the next chapter. If I was going to do either of those two years again which would I choose? The comfortable one or the uncomfortable one? There's no contest really; so I should not be shying away from pushing my limits and stepping out of the comfort zone.

There is one thing I am very pleased about having done though; writing this blog. What has it been for me? Introspection, a kind of public self analysis? A way to enjoy writing? A means of letting my friends keep up with what I'm up to, or has it been simply the process of chonicaling my neurosis so I can look back on them later? Sepia tinted anxieties pressed between the pages of a first edition from Mr Von Krafft-Ebing. Probably all of those but it also makes me ask the question 'What do I want to be writing here a year from now?' and I think that this can only be a good thing.

“Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Sailor...”

2010-05-27T17:38:00.003+01:00

“Rich man, poor man, begger man, thief!” You will, I hope, forgive my vacillating about just what I'm going to actually be *doing* during the next phase in my life so that I might live near to my daughter and, with an eye to the more distant future, organise some sort of pension plan before it is completely too late. I seem to have examined so many possible career paths at this point I find it hard to keep up with what I want to do today myself!

Allow me to spread my current process before you and see if you, dear reader, simply get up, delete this page from your favourites (there is a supposition there I know but I'm forever the optimist) and depart never to raise my page count again. Admittedly you would have excellent grounds for this simply on the basis of my calling you 'dear reader' but, as is all too frequently the case, I digress.

Honestly you might never know that I was once employed to provide guidance to people in a not too dissimilar a situation than that which I now find myself in but, as they say in action films, “This time it's personal.” My job hunting continues apace. Since I let go of the idea of doing a second undergraduate degree, or at least let go of doing an honours degree in science, I have started looking for full time work but my aversion to a 'Mac Job' is, perhaps, understandable. What I would wish to avoid, if possible, is ending up doing something which won't lead anywhere; or at least which won't add to my CV in an interesting way. At the same time, well.... The bills do need to be paid one way or the other.

I would find it hard to get back into teaching now that I've actually left the college. I have to admit that it was a good time in my life. After all how many people are paid to teach what they really love? Alas it feels as if my days of teaching and training in martial arts are behind me what with this damaged shoulder and, having become involved with pedagogy from the administration side, I would need to finally get around to actually doing my PGCE to get my foot back in the door in the world of education. Not impossible of course but what would I teach? Basic to intermediate information technology and perhaps some internal verifying of NVQ's? It has occurred to me that I would really enjoy being able to make comprehensible to others the maths which eluded me while I was at school but there is the minor problem that I would have to actually have to nail my maths first and, I must confess, basic calculus is still eludes me.

I'm also loathe to return to the world of paperwork. Or at rather to something which is carried out for the sake of paperwork; perhaps it is a necessary evil but I am not sure that it would suit me as an end game really and I'm not quite trained in computers enough to make real tech stuff the focus of my future. I can use a network – and I could mostly likely hack one if I took me a mind to (of course I would not) – but I'm not sure I could set one of the things up and maintain it without a bit of study and support first.

Although it may sound mercenary I have to admit that I really would like some reasonable remuneration for my time and effort. Understandable considering that the costs of retraining are quite frightful when one gets right down to it. At the same time I have to have a practical way of getting to where I want to be...

Ah, stuff it. I'm going to go write out yet another job application form. After that it's beer o'clock ;) Presumably somebody will eventually look at one of these things and say "Yes." or at least, "You had better come have an interview." It's fingers crossed and keep doing one a day until then!

Being Back In Bath

2010-05-19T11:19:00.005+01:00

Well a new post and after the activist ravings of my last entry the blog has returned to it's familiar and more usual conservative non purple colour scheme.

I've been back in Bath nigh on a month now and much of my focus has been geared towards rewriting my CV for job applications. Alas that the whole plan to return to the undergraduate days of my youth has proved too expensive but, seriously, it was going to cost way more than the yacht master training I did when all the costs were taken into account and doing that was a wild extravagance in itself. Never mind though. A foundation degree might still be on the cards in the future since it would only take two years (thus costing half what a science access followed by a full time hons degree would tot up to) and would lead more definitely into a specific career. I've left all of that too late for this academic year though so as so far as further training goes I'll be looking at September 2011.

In The Fine Cheese Company

In a similar vein now that I'm actually back I've been able to see some additional costs and, with a due sense of reluctance, I must accede to letting go of living in the nice flat as soon as possible. Woe and beshroomie but it is the sensible thing to do after all. Of course I'm here till the end of my contract in October whether or no so I may as well enjoy it until then; after that I'm likely to be heading off into the world of bedsits so if anybody wants to come visit then this summer is the time to do it!

The Flat During The Evening

By far the best part of being in Bath again, and the main reason for my relocation from Lincolnshire, has been that I'm seeing Rosa on a regular basis rather than as a special event. It is quite wonderful and I've dropped into a pattern of picking her up from school most afternoons which seems to suit everybody very nicely. Naturally I've also been going to visit Jason in Bristol but, while it is always wonderful to see him, it is invariably a bit of a tear jerker since his disabilities mean he doesn't have any idea who I am. Still he seems happy and that's the important thing.

Additional bonuses of returning to Somerset have included being back around Bath Aikido Society who seem to be training far more softly than they did in the sepia tinged cine memories of my youth and are more than happy to accommodate my injured shoulder by throwing me gently. Possibly one of the most potentially life changing things, however, is that I've got an appointment for a MIR scan of my shoulder at the beginning of next week. After that I'll likely be put on a waiting list to have the rotator cuff stitched back together.

Walking Along The Kennet And Avon Canal

You may have noticed that I've been tweeting, facebooking and even occasionally answering my phone slightly more frequently. This is because I took it upon myself to take out a phone contract rather than always being out of credit on my brick; as a result I have now become the anxious parent of an HTC smart phone. 'Anxious parent' seems like a fitting analogy here because although I have to admit it has pretty much transformed my life for the better I also have a slight sense of dread every time it is not actually right next to me in case it has got lost or something has happened to it. I'm always checking my pocket to see that it is still where I put it... Rather like Bilbo with the ring. I'm liable to turn into Golumn at this rate; although some might argue that that process began some years ago.

My trip to London at the beginning of June to participate in naked bike riding demonstrations, watch Japanese horror films and maybe even have a half of lager with Sarah is looming large; a prospect which fills me with senses of anxiety, anticipation and thirst respectively. Before that, however, I'm to jump in the jalopy tonight and head up to Lincolnshire for a few days to retrieve a bookcase, my folding bicycle, the best suit for interviews and hang out with Jo and Ray. So, although things are not going quite the way I had planned, on the whole it's all rather positive.

Peace, Stuart.

Politics & Governance

2010-05-11T23:17:00.007+01:00

“The hustings are over, the bunting is down, the mad hysteria is at an end. After the chaos of a general election, we can return to normal.” E. Blackadder III

My what an eventful week it has been to be sure; in the United Kingdom where we have just chosen (sort of) a new government I mean - I recognise that some of my readers from the far flung corners of the world/galaxy might not be aware of this. Even a staunch political apathetic like myself sat up and took notice by the end of it all and when I searched a paraphrase of my leading quote to get the correct text Google immediately returned a plethora of links to other bloggers writing about pretty much the same thing.

Playing on the laptop while watching the election results as they came in via the BBC I was surprised to find myself directed to youtube footage by several twitters of people being denied their chance to vote nearly an hour before it became a notable story on the television. Perhaps this media hoo-ha about the internet revolutionising the political process has been less hype than I had hitherto imagined? Probably so actually since, almost to my own surprise, you can see that I've turned my blog page purple in support of http://www.takebackparliament.com/

Continuing in similar vein, as I mentioned in my last post, I am to take part in my first political demonstration in London next month when I do the London Naked Bike Ride in order to protest our seemingly endless dependency on oil. In large part this has been motivated by my exasperation with public transport in the UK being only slightly less expensive than my carbon inefficient car and ten times less convenient. A fact which is likely to be well known to those odd souls who are repeat visitors to this blog. I feel like a veritable political activist...

Since I have taken it into my head to write about current affairs in this post I may as well continue by sharing this news snippit. Stories like this one get my back up enough to actually get up and do something - or, rather, to sit down and type something. In this case a few words of polite disapprobation sent to Crown Prosecution Service via their web site feedback form. If any of my U.K readers feel similarly moved then the link is here.

Peace, Stuart.

P.S I simply can't leave it without an embedded youtube to reward you for getting though all those unusually opinionated words (especially since I didn't put in any pictures) and, since I opened with Blackadder III, I may was well finish with it as well.

Moving, Reflecting And Immanent Naked Cycling

2010-05-05T21:05:00.007+01:00

It's been a pretty helter skelter few weeks. Physically, emotionally, organisationally... I feel somewhat shot by the whole thing to be honest but hey-ho it's surely part of a rich tapestry of life and one only gets one go at it.

Despite getting thoroughly fed up with my shoulder hurting I've decided to go the NHS route with the surgery. I had a bit of a flare up from moving sofa's and such around and decided to just get it done privately as soon as possible no matter what but it is less painful now and, perhaps, waiting is not such a big deal. Right now I'm hoping for an MIR scan in the not too distant future. The shoulder thing has been ongoing for so many years now that perhaps I can take a long term view of the situation.

Moving house has been surprisingly stressful. Perhaps I should have expected it, past Psychology Major after all, but still I was amazed to find myself sitting in a really nice place with no real worries - at least none which I am not equipped to overcome - feeling rather down. Perhaps part of that can be explained by the fact that no matter how many spreadsheets I designed to budget for returning to university the costs simply seem to keep spiralling up out of control; which is annoying because it has been keeping me awake at nights.

What if I invest a fortune in doing a second degree and it doesn't lead straight into a career? As much as it will shock those of you who have followed my dilettante/wasteral whitterings since I stopped being a teacher I am, now that my midlife crisis seems to be coming to an end, seriously getting my game on as so far as being career orientated. If that doesn't happen then, it has to be said, I'll have missed the boat and will be a little bit stuffed. Lets face it 36 is kind of old to be saying "Hey lets retrain and have a new career." Also how old will I be when I finish the degree and start applying for jobs? 40, 41? It's the sort of question over which I have been mulling.

Quite apart from being in my early forties In order to be in a better job position than I am now I would have to finish any course with a 2:1 or better. Can I really be certain of getting that? I am pretty sure that I can actually but certain enough to base my future on? Of course I do have all sorts of transferable skills from my past life to look good on the CV as well but, even so, I need to get a move on. So what to do?

Well a second degree is very much still on the cards, after all it would be smashing to go back to uni - but I have also started applying for jobs, working on my CV and practising all those funky employee aptitude tests which one is sometimes faced with while wearing the best suit (as opposed to being poured a glass of Chablis in a nice restaurant which is a much better use for the best suit IMNSHO). Realistically if I can get a job offer which looks as if it might go somewhere, i.e which offers the possibility of being paid while I train/progress rather than having to shell out for tuition and living expenses I would be foolish to turn it down at this stage of the game.

Having started off writing on what may have turned into somewhat of a downer I will finish on a happy note. The London Naked Bike Ride is rapidly approaching and this is going to be the first time I've taken part - although in previous years I've often thought that I would like to do so. Baskers is going to put me up for the weekend - and laugh and point probably - as I join a couple of other thousand people cycling naked across central London on the 12th of June to protest our society's seemingly endless and rather depressing dependency on motor cars and gasoline.

Last Year's Ride Via Youtube

At The Drop Of A Hat

2010-04-22T15:55:00.005+01:00

No, not Flanders and Swan, I thought that I might provide you with an update re: my last post. After a talk with somebody in finance at Bath Uni it seems that they are not currently charging ELQ students overseas fees but that this policy might be changed or overruled by government at the drop of a hat. As a result I'm probably good to go but no definitive answer. Ahhh... All this vagueness and uncertainty dependent on whether the Education Minister of the hour's hat falls off brings back memories of when I used to work in delivering adult education myself.

I have little else to report other than that I'm currently writing a job application for an evening job cleaning an office. I used to have a cleaning job just after I finished my last degree (the drop outs had taken all the good jobs) so how strange it will be to go back to it as I begin another. Anyway a few hours in the evening should be something I can keep up though term time. Once I have actually moved into the new place I need to start taking my CV around places for something until September.

Well with all this hat dropping perhaps we might revisit just one Flanders and Swan song via the magic of embedding youtube.

Peace, Stuart.

A Solution Waiting to Happen

2010-04-22T00:54:00.001+01:00

Drat and Bother, or words very much to that effect but with rather less gentility thrown in.

As those of you who have been regularly following my blog will have by now apprehended I've currently taken myself an antique disposition in having decided to return to university with a view to pursue a new career in the wonderful world of science.

Why? Well science is quite marvellous to my way of thinking. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett science is being able to give something an extra head (Biology), send in back in time (Physics) and then blow it up (Chemistry). Indeed I've lost count of the number of times I've wished that I could do one or all of the above to something or someone during this past week alone – and it was a good week. Above and beyond this you will simply have to blame my plans on Bill Bryson for writing a Short History Of Nearly Everything which was what started the rot when I read it a some years ago.

Wait a moment, I'm getting ahead of myself here... Lets go back to the solution which is waiting to happen till after we go back and see if that sorts things out (Hate mail from the campaign for clear English to be sent on the back of a twenty pound note please).

The problem (sorry, naturally I mean 'challenge' not 'problem') is that our beloved leader Mr G. Brown of Downing St. No.10 fame has made it come to pass that anybody who decides to return to Higher Education at a level equivalent or lower than that which they have already attained will not only not only be unable to take out a student loan (I knew that bit..) but will be liable to pay the same fees charged to those international students from outside the EU; Arab princes, the children of Russian Oligarchs etc because I'm quite sure these are the only people who could afford them. These fees are so enormous that one really requires scientific notation to write them because of all the zeros; '1.4 pounds raised to the power of...' etc.

Which is a bit of a coincidence when you come to think about it because a big zero is to where this sort of bill will surely bring my best laid mousy and, or, manly plans.

Now I had realised in advance of course that trying for a second degree would mean that, rather than wafting in with the shiny faced 20 year olds clutching their LEA grants, I would be dragging my decaying pre middle aged husk across the 'start' line almost certainly unable to get a student loan to cover any costs but I have to confess that this new intimation is rather a blow.

There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel; of course it might be a train, a mirage, or possibly a mirage of a train. As yet it's too early to say. Perhaps I should try being more specific.

Although most equivalent or lower qualification (EQL) students get the chop those who are studying in 'Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subject' areas might be exempt (dependent on the university as far as I can tell). I found a list of those subjects vulnerable and strategic enough to be saved by Bristol University on their web page. Essentially if you want to wear a big white shirt and write poetry you have to pay extra but if you want to wear a lab coat and sleep with your calculator then things are not necessarily a lost cause.

“Problems are merely the pregnant mothers of solutions; there that's given you all something to think about.” Guss Hedges.

Back From Scotland

2010-04-16T02:14:00.004+01:00

What an interesting couple of weeks it has been to be sure. Since arriving back in Bath I've been sorting out my flat and now have a tentative date to actually take up residence on the 26th of April. Of course there is a deal to do in preparation, not least of all a trip back up to Lincolnshire to pick up some more of my stuff and getting a few bits of furniture but that's all going to be fun and frolics, or at least I keep telling myself so; I must know every inch of that journey backwards by now – all five hours of it.

Scotland – as usual - was beyond beautiful; at least once outside the urban sprawl. Glasgow was made European City Of Culture some years ago and, by all accounts, the centre has some really quite lovely buildings. If you just get lost and keep driving around the outside for a few hours it's less of a tourist destination though. Despite having left England amidst dire weather warnings of snow and trapped motorists being forced to eat each other in order to survive in their snow bound vehicles the journey was made in perfectly clement weather and once finally in the western isles we were lucky enough to have a good deal more sun than rain while being early enough to miss the midges.

The Real Food Cafe at Tyndrum may be a chip shop but it is a damn fine one and I'm going to give it one of my recommendations. The coffee was great, no burnt milk or over extracted robusta beans to test one's patience after a long drive and I think the batter on the fish was pretty much the best I've ever had, very light and crispy – almost like a tempura. As a result I've been stopping there every time I head up to Fort William for years now; including the time I cycled there from England with Dad. Indeed I've never driven or cycled along a road which has given me more pleasure than the A82 between Tyndrum and Fort William; the scenery is incredible.

While actually in Knoydart I managed to get out of the house and go running and walking a fair old bit and I am hoping that this marks the end of the malaise towards physical exercise which seems to have gripped me for the last few months – yes cycling is exercise but it is hardly as effective as it might be when you take it as easy as I have been doing!

From Knoydart Looking Towards Skye

I finally sent off my completed university application for 2010/11 today. I am feeling quietly hopeful that I'll be accepted, after all I'm pretty much applying for a science access course and I already have a degree but then, on the other hand, having only got C for GCSE maths, chemistry and physics way back at the dawn of time (or the dawn of the 1990's which is almost the same thing) is somewhat of a mark against me. No matter, only time will tell after all. Many thanks to those of you kind enough to offer advice once I posted the first draught of my application letter, recommendations were received with grateful thanks and put to good use.

Of course now that I'm back down here and renting a flat while planning to be a full time student for a few years into the bargain I'm going to have to see what prospects the labour market holds for a former teacher looking for flexible and or temporary work while studying. Buying a job lot of something and selling it on ebay? Possibly... More likely a Mc'Job though. Shelf stacking in the evenings here I come.

Peace, Stuart.

A Busy Month

2010-03-25T13:57:00.007Z

I hardly know where to begin; since I wrote here last so much has happened. Let me try to retrace my steps somewhat. After departing Bath back in February I took the train up to town to spend a long weekend with Baskers – or @baskers as I think of her now that she has introduced me to the delights of twitter.

An aside of these twittering types. I am quite recalcitrant myself when it comes to updating this blog and, predictably, my twitter – which, as I look now, is 17 days out of date – but there seem to be many people who not only update their own for their friends on a regular basis but who follow, and are followed by, hundreds (thousands in some cases) of people. I don't think I've ever met a thousand people, or if I have I surely don't remember them all. Goodness knows how I would ever keep up with them if I did but I digress.

I arrived in London and, since I seem to have pretty much mastered the underground system successfully, met Baskers at Kings Cross before repairing to what was to the first of many excellent restaurants for Cuban food. I was very lucky to have the B as my guide to the metropolis since she made it her mission to take me to all her favourite places to eat and drink. Other delights included a pub where you could bring in a pizza takeaway from the shop next door and the Stoke Newington Rasa - which was surely the finest Indian restaurant to which I have ever been and made me feel as if I had never eaten Indian food before. It was so brilliant I'm going to give it one of my sporadic and unsolicited recommendations.

Rasa in Stoke Newington

(Whoever would have thought Baskers would take me to a pink restaurant?)

The rest of the weekend included cocktails far too numerous to mention and going to see the musical 'Wicked' (which I have wanted to see for ages and really enjoyed) as well as watching the classic science fiction spoof 'Flash Gordon' and a trip to Tate Modern which I enjoyed enormously. By the time Baskers poured me onto my departing train on Tuesday I was in need of a few days of water in order to recover from the excess – although the memory of the best bagel I had ever had will remain with me for some time to come :-)

During my travels I had, thus far, ended up taking the train rather than my bike ever since I rode into Leicester station with a hangover and the smell of somebody who'd slept by the roadside for a few nights in a row. That particular journey cost 60 pounds and my attempt to at least get my ticket in advance to go from King's Cross to Lincoln went wrong since I somehow managed to buy it for the same date as which I travelled up to London... So I ended up buying the stupid thing again on the day – another 60 pounds. Okay that was a dumb thing to do but even without such a mistake I would have spent over a hundred pounds getting about and as it was I spent 160. I am left wondering – as seems usual after having anything to do with trains not booked three months in advance – that if taking public transport is both more expensive and less convenient than using the car whatever incentive to I have to stop driving around in my gas guzzler?

A few days after getting back to Lincolnshire I departed in my beloved car. A machine which comes and goes according to my own timetable, goes all the way to my destination, costs about half as much to fill with petrol as a train ticket for the same distance not purchased a quarter year in advance and which is never filled with drunken football supporters.

Once I arrived Madeleine duly departed for her holiday and I began my week of looking after Rosa during school time. It went really rather well, although it took me a few days to get used to the 6:45 starts and we had a great time. At the weekend we headed off to see the new Alice in Wonderland movie in 3D which I thought to be very good and which Rosa simply adored.

Alice In Wonderland

Other than childcare I've also been concentrating on my plans to return to the roll of a student for a few years, indeed my UCAS personal statement is in the final stages; my chosen courses being to do a foundation year in Bath leading onto a Physics Bsc and a similar course in Bristol. Bath would be my first preference simply for topographical reasons of course.

This has been a fortnight of achievement and yesterday I handed over an initial fee on a new flat which is quite ideally located for me. A quiet location on the east side of Bath with what I would consider a quite achievable walk into Bath and located between Rosa's house and Rosa's school and also be very convenient for Bath University – assuming that I am successful in my UCAS application that is. It's really rather lovely other than that there is no window or natural light in the kitchen. I'll even get a second bedroom for an office or guests :-)

I'm going to be moving into a first floor flat here.

I may as well let my devoted readers (all three of you) have a look at how far my personal statement has come. I'm going to be sticking this in my UCAS application once I've finalised it so anybody wanting to make useful suggestions can go ahead... Remember the whole plan is to get a place for somebody who got a C in maths GCSE about a million years ago on a physics access course.

"I think it is fair to say that I was not academically inclined while at school. Certainly I can recall finding maths to be both challenging and interesting in almost equal measure however challenge eventually won out over enthusiasm and my energy tended towards arts and social sciences -an inclination which subsequently guided my choice of A levels. In the latter part of my time at college and while at university I became far more committed to my education developing both study and IT skills which enabled me to gain a 2.1 in Psychology.

While at university I was very active in both judo and aikido and gained half colours from the athletics union for my role as secretary for the judo club and winning a bronze medal in the North Wales closed in my weight category. I went on to get black belts in both Aikido and Judo in the next few years and taught Aikido for a number of years at Bath Aikido Society.

After leaving university I eventually became involved in the delivery and administration of adult education and worked in a self employed capacity delivering short term contracted work to a number of institutions including The Accredited Training Centre, City Of Bristol College and University Of The West Of England. Projects which I was involved with included the promotion and delivery of the wider Key Skills though sports and martial arts and liaising between City Of Bristol College and the employment service as part of the New Deal program.

After spending a few years at home with my children I returned to work part time with City of Bristol College in 2005 managing a team of tutors delivering engagement activities in the South of Bristol and working as an internal verifier on several NVQ programs. My role of program coordinator required me to liaise between the head of school and the tutors in my group, present and summarise information and bid for funding.

I departed City Of Bristol College at the end of 2008 in order to pursue a long held dream of learning to sail. I subsequently acquired a number of maritime qualifications. MCA/RYA Yachtmaster, MCA (STCW95) Basic Crew Training, MCA Approved Engineering Certificate, MCA Proficiency in Medical First Aid Aboard Ship, RYA Small Craft Radar, RYA Diesel Engine Maintenance, RYA Powerboat Level 2, AMERC Long Range Radio with Satellite Endorsement.

Since leaving university I came to feel that there was a gap in my education in the area of science and mathematics, one which I wished to address. I began revisiting the maths which I had learned, or failed to learn, at school via books and online learning as well as reading popular science titles. As I read further I found myself most fascinated by the descriptions of modern physics and my reading focused on titles such as the ABC of Relativity by Bertrand Russel and a Brief History of Time by Steven Hawking."

I'm still building up to a punchy ending – and working hard going though all the maths and science I forgot / never learned while at school; the plan is to have covered maths/physics GSCE and moved onto AS level by the time any interviews come around. Here's hoping that I'm not biting off more than I can chew... Of course if it all goes pear shaped I can do a year with the Open University and then apply again.

In only a few days I will be departing for Scotland with Madeline and Rosa - where there is little internet access, or at least will be where I am going to be so I may be quite for a while.

Decisions, decisions...

2010-02-26T19:43:00.003Z

It has been an interesting time in Bath so far, not least because it has been one of those times in which I find myself commiting to life choices although I really wasn't expecting to do so - at lest not quite yet.

I miss Rosa a great deal and want to be around her more as she is growing up. So what to do? I have had eighteen months of being all alternitive and having a midlife crisis but I think it is time to rejoin society for a while. Certainly until she is more grown up anyway.

Since living in Bath is expensive and, besides, I am fed up of living on a impossibly tight buget I need to start thinking in terms of future career. Now the last time I did that I went off on a six month training only to find that I really was not cut out for a life at sea. True but then that does not mean I should stop trying to find out what it is I want to do and then going for it.

Given that I don't feel very motivated about going back into the world of teaching I think I am going to spend a few years as a student once again. After I finished secondary school my education was all centred around arts and social sciences. My recreational reading tends to be focused around popular science these days so perhaps I should see this is as being an opportunity for me to ballance things out somewhat.

Riding Along

2010-02-26T19:41:00.001Z

Wednesday 24th Feb

Today's ride went on pretty well after the late breakfast, although it began with a detour for a closed road and continued unabated until I reached a town where I had promised myself a cup of tea and instead had a pint and some food. Well I'm on holiday after all ;) Of course a pint of lager is not the best way to encourage one to get though a great many miles, especially if you have been working up a sweat all day before hand. I have finished the day just beyond Melton Mobry where I have ended up camping on the verge at the side of the road.

There is a lot written about free camping and, since I have now managed the grand total of five wild camps, I may as well stick in my two cents worth as well. In England and Wales almost all wild camping is, theoretically illegal since all the land is owned and one needs permission to camp on it. In practise what happens is that a fair amount does in fact go on but one has to be somewhat selective about where one tries it.

What I have been doing is somewhat out of the ordinary in that my camps have not been in wilderness 'above the treeline' areas but, rather, in more well populated parts of the country. My personal criteria for choosing a site is that it should be either concealed or where nobody will care; ideally both. When I say 'nobody will care' I'm thinking of land which is not owned by anybody who is likely to make a fuss about me being here for the night. Almost always it has been land which is probably owned by the local council and which is not near any residential areas. The verge at the side of the road, the land around the edge of the flyovers where main roads cross each other etc. I find that I can get a better night's rest if I'm also out of sight of passers by but tonight is the second time which it has got dark while I've still been riding and I've ended up just putting up my tent by the side of the road. This particular ploy is best carried away from towns of course; being disturbed by drunks late at night is going to break my sleep.

Thursday 25th Feb.

A slight change of plan. Last night Madeleine asked me if I could get to Bath for Thursday ie today so that I could hang out with her and Rosa tonight so my focus today has been based around getting to a train station and heading to Bath as quickly as I could.

I will admit that it has been somewhat dispiriting going today. I woke with a hangover; yup from the single pint of lager I had yesterday afternoon. If one cycles all day and then into the evening it would seem that any alcohol at all is to be avoided. Probably I should be cognisant of this after all this time but I just couldn't resist the idea that I might be able to get away with it. My day, therefore, began by painfully riding along with a headache. Things brightened considerably with the first truck stop where I had a bacon, egg and sausage cob which was a true work of art. Despite being thus fortified I found that once I was back on the bike my head was still pounding away and it seemed much further than it aught to the nearest railway station.

Out Riding

2010-02-24T15:09:00.001Z

23/2/10

I have never yet departed on a cycle tour on time or with a an absence of last minute panic and so it was probably predictable that, rather than getting out of bed, changing into my laid out bike kit, getting on my prepared and ready to go bike and leaving the house cleaned immaculately for my return I instead spent the morning discovering that I had lost bits of kit, needed to go to the shops for things and noticing that bits had fallen off my bike. As a result I actually left the house after one in the afternoon rather than at nine in the morning as I had planned.

Never mind though, there is always next time.

The afternoon, once I finally got going, proved a little challenging. I started well but, probably feeling overconfident because I've done this trip before, I took a wrong turn. Now one of the things which I had remembered that morning - when it was too late to do anything about it - was that my compass has developed an air bubble large enough to pretty much stop it from working which meant that I was relying almost exclusively on road sings and my map reading. I ended up taking a detour, a detour which added something like 10 miles of cycling to the trip by the time I had got to the wrong place and then back gone back to where I was supposed to be, and a good deal of it with a headwind.

On a brighter note, however, the rain held off until I was actually putting the tent up so I managed to stay dry. Dry enough, in fact, to wear my cycling clothes in my sleeping bag in order to properly dry it out - no getting into cold wet kit first thing in the morning which is a big bonus. One the whole, however, I'll say that it has been a good day's ride. I did not get quite as far as I intended, although I actually rode slightly further but my mood is pretty good and I've acclimatised to being out in the cold rather than inside with the central heating without too much of a shock.

My campsite tonight is a patch of woodland next to a main road flyover in Sleaford. After a couple of hours unconsciousness post ride I'm now finding it hard to actually get off to sleep - excitement perhaps but I want to be up early and get off rather than risk having somebody demanding to know exactly what I think I'm doing putting my tent here.

24th Feb 2010

At 6:00 my alarm sounded and a quick look around assured me that it was, indeed, light and I should probably be off. Emerging from the tent however showed little more than a white expanse of fog though which the cars and trucks careered alarmingly on the distant main road. I decided to go back to bed and see if the visibility would get better. It did, although it remained very much a grey day and after a leisurely wait in my sleeping bag I found myself riding into the centre of Sleaford just after 9:30.

The fact that I was about two hours behind where I was the last time I did this trip filled me with resolution. I was determined not to get lost the way I did yesterday once more so I stopped in an out door pursuits shop and got a new compass.

While I was standing in the store I came to realise that my mood had started to crash somewhat. Okay, lets have a look at what I learned on my last trip. Eat properly and be here now. Don't get focused on getting to a destination. Okay, sounds like a recipe for breakfast. Which is how I now come to be writing this in a cafe not far from where I spent the night wolfing down chips, bacon and muffins with copious amounts of tea and coffee.

I think the attitude I'm going to take is that I'm just going to take things easily, work on my touring technique and make up any remaining distance to Bath with a train ride on Friday since that is when I actually have to be somewhere. It sounds like a much nicer way to go about things than slogging my guts out in order to meet an artificial deadline.

I wonder how different touring in the summer is going to be? It seems like such a long time since we had any consistently nice weather that I can hardly remember it.

One thing which I have to confess that I'm really missing is my mp3 player. I lost my old one which I used though out my sailing course on the way back from Hungry and have never got around to replacing it. I have to admit that my daughter's itouch is uber shiny and I love the interface. I've more or less worked out how to get it to work the way I want - although it takes a bit of hacking. The apple DRM software is frightfully annoying and since she came to stay last and I installed itunes I've found it a challenge to purge my system of automatically running a plethora of apple processes which I don't need.

Against that some of the walkmans can give 45 hours of battery life for playing music and nine hours of video - although on a tiny screen) and all at half the price of the itouch. Not remotely so shiny (and I love my shineys) but that really is a lot of battery life.

On the topic of shineys I really do have to give Rosa her laptop back now that I've got it working happily with xubuntu - which runs about a thousand times faster than windoze on a netbook. I have to confess, I've grown almost symbiotic with it over the last couple of months. I use it to listen to mp3's at night while I'm lying in bed waiting for morphious, I hook it up to external speakers and an amp during the day and use it as my stereo so my main laptop can be free to run other programs more quickly and, of course, I take it out and about with me as I am now. I think, therefore, I'm going to have to get one of my own to replace it.

A Visitor

2010-02-10T04:17:00.004Z

Now that I've caught up with the weekend before last I can finally start writing about last weekend, which was rather super in that my friend Baskers came to visit.

Herself and I

Baskers and I know each other from a role play game (in which she is a vampire and I am a human who is has become part angel) and had made plans to go to the Lincoln Odeon to see a vampire film called Daybreakers. The previous day I had checked that it was still showing but after being five mins late to pick her up from the station in Newark and then getting lost trying to find the cinema in Lincoln I discovered that the line up of films changes on a Friday and that our movie was no longer showing.

We Were Going To Go See This

Deciding to give it up as a bad job we repaired to a local bar and a chat about electronic toys; mostly her iphone which I enjoyed tinkering with no end before we decided to head home and have food there. After a quick stop in Morisons for provisions we headed off with me boastfully elaborating on my skill at making paella.

Shopping

It was, of course, a bitterly cold night (it has been a rotten cold winter by UK standards) and when I saw a hitch hiker I felt compelled to offer him a lift rather than imagine the poor chap dying of hypothermia by the side of the road. Our new passenger had, by an unfortunate error, missed the last bus from Lincoln and was heading to Grimsby; his plan being to get to hitch or walk to Louth from whence he could get a bus until 11:00 or so.

His knowledge of the distances involved seemed rather vague but it was all too obvious that he was going to end up walking all night and I determined to make a detour and take him up to Louth myself.

Baskers was, especially considering that our new passenger was accompanied by an unfortunate smell (at least until he left, whereupon it decided to remain in the car with us rather than follow him) very amenable about the whole business. Indeed she gave the general impression that, while this might not be normal behaviour on my part, then it was at least endearingly laudable and probably the sort of thing which my role play character would have done.

Once we finally got home we had a very enjoyable time drinking Rioja and eating paella – my cooking at least went to plan - although we then went on to drink rather more brandy than was good for us and had to cut the DVD, Ringu, short. The next day, once the hangover had abated, I finally managed to get to the end of the movie; although Baskers was, for the second time, unable to stay awake till the end.

We Actually Ended Up Watching This

(on the second try)

Sadly it was Sunday all too soon and I regretfully had to deposit her back at the station in order to get the train back to London.

The Second Day's Cycling

2010-02-08T04:35:00.003Z

Last Sunday proved to be a very pleasant day's cycling and ended in accommodation which contrasted sharply with my first night of relative austerity by the side of the road. Although it had been comfortable enough in my tent the idea of waking up and packing away my gear in the early dawn while it was two degrees colder again made me decide to change my original riding plans and depart Starbucks to a bed and breakfast on the far side of Metheringham.

Chris and Collette: My Wonderful Hosts On Saturday Night

By the time I had managed to find my way out of Lincoln on the correct road it had warmed up, the sun was out and I soon found myself removing a few layers of clothes even before reaching any hills.

This ride has certainly been a very different experience to the journey down to Bath which I did in December! That trip was all about pushing and doing as many miles as quickly as I could - after all it was bloody wet and cold - whereas this has been centred around not really getting in any miles of note at all but just pottering around on my bike and taking things easy. As a result I've not even approached the sort of mental agitation which I ended up in on the Fosse Way.

In terms of enjoyment I would say that this excursion really does win out over the last ride I went on. A large part of that has been due to the weather being a good deal nicer of course - a bit colder but not wet - but the change in focus has also been a major factor. Having said this I can see that I've still not got things quite right yet. I spent a lot more money on Saturday than I can do on a per day basis for long term cycle touring for a start; Starbucks, B&B, dinner, drinks etc, it all adds up rather quickly.

Being more on top of the communications side of things has also made this an easier trip simply because I did not feel so isolated. As a result poor old Baskers has had to put up with my particular brand of humour a good deal - for which I am grateful, few would after all.

Making Tea At The Side Of The Road

So, things I have learnt for future trips:

Don't focus on getting to a destination, focus on being here now.
If I'm ever going to do this for more than a few days at a time I absolutely have to learn to stop and chill rather than to habitually keep pushing on. Getting exhausted crashes my mood and makes problems harder to cope with.
Communication with other people makes things a lot easier than just silently slogging on alone! To this end having the laptop and cell phone with me is invaluable but chatting to people I meet is just as important.
The weather really does make quite a significant difference, although it is possible to push on through the cold and wet it's much easier to keep my mood high in clement conditions. If it looks like raining all day then perhaps just hole up in a campsite with a novel?
Bring a phone charger.
I've taken care to eat regularly even when I was not feeling much like it; as a result my mood has not crashed along with my glycogen levels.
Make instant ramen or other 'camping' type foods an occasional convenience thing rather than a staple. An army marches on it's stomach after all.
Snack on a bag of apples not on a bag of mars bars!
Find a place to camp well before you need to (and then make a cup of tea and wait till it starts getting dark before pitching if it is going to be a wild camp) . An "It will be dark in a hour I should start looking" approach ends up in stress.
Two wild camps then one night at a site, a hostel etc to recharge might be a good rhythm to aim for. The occasional treat, fish and chips, a meal out or a beer etc is not just a luxury it's an important way to keep my spirits up.

The above might be summarised by 'Keep up morale through communicating, not over doing it and eating properly.' but there's nothing like making a list to entertain oneself.

First Night In The New Tent

2010-01-30T10:25:00.008Z

And here I am writing my blog on tour from the cosy caffeine filled mayhem of a Lincoln Starbucks on a Saturday morning where I have purchased a mug of cappuccino so large it makes me feel somewhat diminutive myself.

Self Portrait In A Reflective Lincoln Window

My entrance into said coffee shop was convoluted, involving as it did me carrying some cycle panniers and then divesting myself of a few layers of outer clothing. Apparently strange men taking off their trousers and then blogging on a pink laptop is entirely unremarked in Lincoln and I did not attract a second glance.

That maybe because nobody wanted to accidentally make eye contact with the weirdo in case he took off another pair of trousers of course.

Last night was assuredly the coldest night I have ever spent in a tent. -3 degrees C according to the BBC web site when I checked it with my phone from deep inside my sleeping bag. Okay I will admit that many might think little of such a temperature; people do of course go camping in insanely cold weather but I digress. Besides my sleeping bag is only a three season job so I was wearing pretty much all the clothes I could in it as well. In fact it was due to remembering a suggestion in a bike touring book to try using one's wet weather gear inside the bag if it was very cold (and assuming that one's wet weather gear is dry of course) that I was not actually uncomfortably cold.

My Tent Covered With Frost In The Morning

Apparently tonight is likely to be -5 degrees C... Perhaps I will consider a bed and breakfast; certainly if a lot of my clothes are wet and sweaty by the time I have finished riding today it might be something to consider. Of course I might be up for another wild camp... I will see what my mood is like and if I find any nice looking hotels :-)

I am delighted to be able to report the new tent as being a great success. There was a bit of a wind last night; 17mph according to the BBC. In the past I've always found that this results in a din as the canvas flaps hither and thither but inside the Dragonfly it was entirely quiet and when I got up in the middle of the night I was amazed to find that it was somewhat blowy outside.

I got some rather fun pictures of the tent covered in frost this morning. Had I thought to bring a USB cable with me then I would post them now, alas you will have to wait for the next installment.

Peace, Stuart.

New Tent And Off Cycling

2010-01-27T23:28:00.005Z

So, January...

Well after my bike ride I had a quiet but very agreeable Christmas in Lincolnshire. Since then one of the more exciting things to happen was me splashing out on a new tent to replace my Hennessy Hammock.

Don't get me wrong my hammock is smashing but, at the end of a day's touring I feel the need to be able to go 'inside' and chillax for a little. With the hammock found that all I could really do was lie down and that's about it whereas with a tent I can repack my bags, move around, change into new clothes etc without going outside.

I had, since finishing the my yachtmaster course back in June, carried out some quite comprehensive research into tents; after all my future plans include a fair bit of camping. Those of you who have been paying close attention may remember that I gave Dad's old Vango the thumbs up for everything except weight in my last post - it being 4.2kg on the bathroom scales.

*Warning, tent geek-ness coming up...*

The combination of features which I have been searching for were a small two person (or large one person), free standing, outer pitch first, lightweight tent with a semi-geodesic or dome structure to give rigid stability. Trying to find all of these attributes in a single design proved a little bit of a headache. Had I not set my heart on an outer pitch first design for example I would have had a great deal of choice and would have probably gone for the Terra Nova Voyager but, for use in the UK climate, the benefits of being able to protect the inner tent from rain when setting out and packing up are quite overwhelming.

Mountain Equipment Dragonfly II

After regretfully discounting the Hilleberg Soulo as too expensive it eventually came down to choosing between the Mountain Equipment Dragonfly II and the Marmot Grid II and, after having read blogs, reviews and forum threads aplenty, was still undecided. The Marmot at around 2.7kg is heavier but apparently more robust and slightly larger, possibly making it more suitable for a long cycle tour where a little extra weight in exchange for a hardier tent might be a good option? On the other hand the Dragonfly at just over 2kg is light enough to take solo hiking as well. Against that obvious advantage I've occasionally read people saying that they had problems with the Dragonfly being somewhat on the delicate side whereas the Grid II is universally beloved by users.

In the end the decision was made when I saw a new Dragonfly on ebay (with a small hole in the ground sheet which might easily be repaired) and got it for a fraction of the retail price. As a result, I found myself in receipt of a shiny new tent by the morning mail.

Mountain Equipment Dragonfly II

(sleeping bag in front to give some scale perspective)

My first 'out of the box' impression was that this is a really quality piece of kit. The poles so are so incredibly light and fit together so closely that I spent five minutes just taking them apart and putting them back together. Having said this I'll admit that this is the first tent in this price bracket that I've ever had the opportunity to play with so I don't have much of a frame of reference. The second thing which struck me is that, as the first really lightweight tent I've ever come into contact with, it is relatively delicate when compared to the Vango. I used to have the sense that the old beast could take pretty much any abuse without concern but with the dragonfly I find myself naturally doing things a little more carefully.

Attachment of the Inner Tent to The Fly Sheet.

I say 'ever owned' but oddly enough every tent which I've ever used hitherto has been either begged or borrowed in some way - unless we are to include my Hennasy Hammock of course, which is not really a tent so we shan't.

I also made a note in my last blog about how poor old Brunhilda was in need of some TLC and since then I've renewed the break cables (inners and outers), changed the oil in the hub, regressed the headset bearings and fitted a front mudguard. She seems a bit perkier as a result and I'm considering changing her name from Brunhilda to Kuromi.

Brunhilda or Kuromi... A Tough Choice.

Anyway I'm taking the tent and the bike out this weekend for a spot more stealth camping around Lincolnshire (fingers crossed I don't get in caught...) I'll let you know how I get on :-)

A Small Cycle Tour

2010-01-09T20:38:00.010Z

And so Christmas has come and gone and I never did get around to writing my blog.

The mid portion of December was taken up primarily with a small cycle tour. I had been promising myself that I would take off on the bike for some time and, almost unexpectedly, found myself getting the camping gear together and leaving my cottage in Lincolnshire with a view to reaching Bath in three to four days.

Now if I have learned anything from this excursion which I might apply to future trips it is that, even for a relatively short tour, one really has to check the bike over and be up to date with the maintenance well before leaving. I must confess that my bike has been so trouble free since I got it that I've hardly had to lift a finger to be assured of ongoing reliability. Of course it would be the evening before departure when I realised that the front break was starting to stick in the 'on' position and that the whole assembly could really do with stripping, lubing and rebuilding, not to mention the break inner and outer cables replacing... As it was I got away with doing only stripping and cleaning one of the break cantilevers but I can see that the job needs to be done properly before I set out on anything beyond a day ride again.

The Weather Was Great When I Started

I left home on a very lovely day. A high pressure system had settled over the UK and I was hoping to get down south before the weather became too frightful. Of course living in England there was only one way that things could go and the evening saw me cycling south west away from Sleaford looking for somewhere to pitch my tent in the rain. I will draw a veil over where I camped that night admitting only that I probably should not really have been there. Of course nobody will ever know that I was there since I follow the school of 'no trace' camping; indeed I took a certain amount of rubbish away with me that I found when I arrived.

Village After Village And All With Their Little Shop

I had set my clock for 6:30 which was when I estimated it would start getting light and had had breakfast, packed up the bike and was on the road again by 8:00.

My goal for the second day was to get to the other side of Leicester and onto the fosse way. The old Roman road which would take me as far south as Cirencester. I did, indeed, push on that far but by that time it was getting dark and was raining. After some time pressing on looking for somewhere out of sight to camp I gave up and just pitched my tent on the largest grass verge beside the road which I could find. On the third night I camped besides the road once again but in a far more pleasant location which I chose when it was still more or less light. It was some time after dark then next day that I got to Rosa's place.

This is me on the last day having a break.

Getting cold or wet is manageable (within reason) but getting cold and wet together is potentially a show stopper. Throughout the trip knowing that, even though I might be soaked in sweat and unable to feel my chilled toes at the moment, I was able to create a warm dry space to sleep in made it possible to keep going with a relatively chipper attitude.

I'm going to make an observation about camping technique in the UK. Due to our famously changeable weather a tent which pitches outer first really is massively useful since which pitching and packing up in the rain the, relatively, dry inner tent can be managed separately of the soaking rain fly. I used a plastic rubble sack to keep them separate inside the tent bad while I was riding and it seemed to work reasonably well. It would be nice to have a lighter tent but the one I've got, although heavy, won't stop me going anywhere; it just means that I'll get there a bit slower. Also it's completely bomb proof :-)

My Camp Site On The Last Night

So what did I learn? I think that I got pretty much into the endurance race frame of mind which I did in the US when I was cycling; of course on this occasion my trip was only three and a half days out so it worked but I can see that, if I want to be able to go for longer, then I'll need to develop more of a 'being here now' attitude rather than being end gaining about getting where I am going. If I am going to do this over a longer period of time then I'll need to get into a rhythm of washing my kit in laundromats when I pass though towns and taking time to stop and cook proper food rather than just boiling up noodles and eating muesli.

Heading off to the Station At 6:30 AM In The Snow To Get the Train Home

Washing up Gloves and Cycling

2009-11-23T16:14:00.000Z

It's been some time since I wrote anything about my cycling so I think I'll put in a few lines. Given that we are now fully into the cold and wet phase of the year I've had ample opportunity to experiment with wet weather gear.

The areas which I have always found impossible to keep dry when riding in heavy rain are my hands. At the beginning of winter I had thought that my Gill sailing gloves would be up to the task but was dismayed to find that, after a heavy downpour, they were quite soaked. 'Well', I thought, 'time to splash out and get some serious gear.' I've always found the cycling kit made by Gore to be excellent and so duly shelled out the best part of forty pounds for some Gortex, fleece lined all singing all dancing winter cycling gloves when I was in Bath last month. As a result I found myself feeling pretty damn confident about my hands staying dry when I got caught out in a thunderstorm today. Not a bit of it. The left hand only got quite wet but the right one became sodden quite quickly. Damn and blast.

Now the problem with making gortex gloves completely watertight is that they have so many seams and, added to which, on a bike you are always pressing down on the handlebars so the gloves are, effectively, under pressure. It's no wonder that the water gets in but it a pain since wet hands swiftly become cold hands.

After some thought I've come up with a plan. My hands, at least when cycling, don't sweat profusely; certainly not enough to completely soak my gloves over the course of a few hours of rain anyhow so maybe what I need is a loose but completely water proof, ie non breathable, glove to go over the top of the gortex ones when the rain is really heavy? A mitten would work perfectly well but nobody seems to make rubber mittens (other than some obscure fetish producers that is) so, once I've finally got them dry I'll try covering my gortex ones with a heavy duty pair of washing up gloves and then try riding for a few hours to test it out. If the gloves are not soaked with sweat at the end and my hands don't look too unhealthy when they come out then I'll have a strategy for dealing with really serious rain when on tour. Using the largest ones I can find is a good plan since it will, hopefully, leave an air space between the gortex and the rubber so the condensation will at least have a chance to end up on the outside of the gortex.

Staying as dry as possible when camping is a good thing. Having to get out of a warm sleeping bag and put on cold wet riding clothes first thing in the morning is best avoided.

Peace, Stuart.

Budapest and Fixing Computers

2009-11-18T19:30:00.006Z

My gentle low key adventures have continued unabated over the last few weeks, although the onset of some typical English weather for the time of year has made me a little reticent about going out on my bike for the last few days. It's so wet, grey and chilly outside and the idea of a cup of tea and a biscuit by the fire seems so jolly when combined with a P.G Wodehouse novel that my bike has been 'resting' in the hallway most of this week.

The highlight since my last post was, surely, raising myself up and travelling to Budapest to meet up with my nephew Alexander who is currently studying in Hungry.

The Author In Budapest

As a way of getting about internationally I, somewhat inevitably, join with the huddled masses to use the cheap flight airlines: Easy Jet; Ryan Air etc. It does occur to me, however, that the days of thoughtless flying may well be numbered. As our oil supply dwindles the price of such an activity will inevitably increase; unless some alternative transport for the proletariat can be arranged. I wonder if people will be able to be able to fly so freely within even a couple of generations? Of course by then they will be more concerned with the effects of climate change from all those cheap flights we are taking now so will have more pressing concerns than where to go on holiday so perhaps I should not worry.

All of this makes me think that things are somewhat out of kilter, or at least interestingly bizarre. The cost of petrol for me to drive to Luton and back from the Midlands and leave the car parked for four days was still less than the cost of my return air flight. The more environmentally sensitive strategy of travelling to Luton via train or other public transport was something like twice the cost of using the car and would have been almost impossibly inconvenient. As a whole the economic environment is not, seemingly, encouraging me to save the planet by burning less carbon, but I digress.

Alexander

Despite a sense of unease about having increased the size of my carbon footprint I none the less jumped into the jalopy at 2:00 am and arrived at Luton airport at 5:00. As a result I sauntered out of arrivals in Budapest looking slightly sleep deprived just after 10 local time and was reunited with the nephew.

Alexander confidently led me from the airport to the adjacent train station. Soon, however, we encountered a crowd of people and a line of police officers. The nephew was unimpressed by the doings of these post soviet block officials and carried on regardless with myself in tow only to be confronted by a sturdily built police woman who shook her head and said something in Hungarian. The nephew, undeterred, pressed onwards at which point the police officer spread her arms and legs in the manner of a fairy atop a Christmas tree and stood directly in his path. A lesser man might have baulked at this display but Alexander is made of sterner stuff and, by now exasperated by the contrary nature of the constabulary, tried to walk around her. Eventually however our attempts to enter the cordoned off area and disturb the bomb squad in dismantling what was probably somebody's forgotten bag were foiled and we had to take a somewhat more circuitous route to the train platform.

After a couple of train journeys we eventually arrived at Marco Polo, our hostel, where we were to stay for the next three nights and, having deposited our things, decided to head out for a bite to eat and a walk around the city. A bite to eat soon became a bite to eat and a beer, and then the bite to eat and a beer became a bite to eat and a bottle of wine. As a result we decided to do our legs some good and walk in what approximated to a straight line across the Danube and up to the castle to get the evening view of the city and clear our heads.

One of the joys of the trip for me was being able to go to the opera where we saw an operatic version of 'The Brothers Karamazov' set to the music of Wagner and Rachmaninov among others. Only my second opera I'm sorry to say but I loved it none the less. Alexander, being very erudite on this topic, was able to quite bewilder me by deconstructing it afterwards. Watching the dancers had me thinking about how I really need to do more to get back in shape than just the bike riding. In the interests of cultural balance on the second evening we decided that we should go see a film and, after a walk which made me wish I had brought shoes which were more functional and less dressy, we arrived at a huge mall and watched 'Surrogates' featuring Bruce Willis in one of his more thoughtful films - still plenty of explosions though.

The Opera House

It has often impressed me how Alexander happily saunters around Europe and had, hitherto, attributed his ability to live abroad to his fluency in serveral languages. This maybe partially be true but Hungarian is not one of them and we spent the weekend continuously talking to people in English and, in Alexander's case, German. The nephew proposed a theory, after quite a lot of wine, that there is a tendency for the British in general (monolingual lot that they are) not to travel about Europe in the manner of some of our mainland cousins out of a fear of not being understood or, I suggested, worse, of being thought bad mannered after having forgotten most of the French one learned at school. This probably provides as much of a flavour of our conversation as you will sensibly wish to hear.

I want to eat here all the time!

I'm going to take a moment to recommend one of the restaurants we went to. I don't usualy do plugs here. In fact I've not given somewhere to eat/drink a thumbs up since the vino volo recomendation from when I was back in the US but I'd like to say how much I enjoyed eating at Bable. Where not only was I delighted by the size and extravagance of the wine glasses but I had a pigeon salad which must surely the best thing which I have eaten all year.

The Wine Glasses Were Wonderful

One thing I've made sure of when travelling by plane (ever since the time Madeleine and I almost did not go to Japan that is) is to allow far more time than I consider necessary to get to the airport and check in. It is a policy which has served me well on several occasions in the past and one which was to prove its worth once again on my journey back to Britain. Alexander accompanied me though the metro and then with typical solicitude ensured that I was sitting on the train which would take me to the airport before we waved our fair wells, promising to meet up over the Christmas holidays. Determined not to miss my stop I watched the train signs like a hawk, reaching for my bag with every new station until, arriving at the airport, I sprang into action and made my way down the aisle to the door where I found and pressed the 'open' button. This resulted in a pronounced lack of movement from the portal and, after a moment, I became agitated pressing the button repeatedly. By the time I was half way down the aisle heading for the door at the other end of the train we had started moving again and I watched the airport recede into the distance.

Thankfully it was a relatively simple matter to get off at the next stop, buy a new ticket and head back the way I had come. It was made slightly more complicated however since rather than being in Budapest where everybody seemed to speak some English I was now somewhat out in the styx and my attempts at Hungarian were met with polite surprise and incomprehension; admitedly I am met with a similar response when I try talking to people in England quite a lot of the time but that is probably not to do with a language barrier. Luckily I was able to rely on the printed word and, though a combination of showing people the destination written on my ticket, conductors writing down train times on the back of scraps of paper and the gentleman next to me in the line for buying tickets showing me how much I had to pay on his mobile phone I eventually made it to the airport still in reasonable time.

And now for the nerdy part.

As well as leaving the shires for foreign parts I've also made some progress on the domestic front by way of working on the netbook to which I alluded the post before last. The problems being the battery not charging, Windows XP being far too much of a cumbersome beast for such a low power bit of kit and the sound 'skipping' when it plays films and music. In the interests of scientific inquiry I decided to time how long my Acer was taking to load with Windows XP. Sad to say I got board after five minutes (no really) and gave up looking at my watch. Even by windows standards that is pretty shocking so there must be something wrong somewhere.

I have a suspicion that the sound problem is due to the processor not being able to cope with the load it is under since I've noticed a similar effect on my main laptop when I ask it do do anything sudden and intensive while using Media Player. Hopefully a lightweight OS will sort out the sound glitch as well.

Rosa's Netbook Needs A New BIOS and OS. I'm keeping the desktop though :-)

A search of google eventually brought me to a report that some of the Aspires would stop charging their battery but that this could be sorted by a BIOS upgrade. After a little time on the Acer support site I got the file I wanted and set it to update from inside windows. The computer obediently restarted and I sat back slightly unsettled - the first time I've done a BIOS update but they made it sound so easy... The computer switches itself off, and continues to do so when I try to start. Oh blast; have I ruined it? After a bit of checking I find that there is another BIOS for my particular version of the netbook *sighs*

After a suitable amount of searching forums and resigning myself to never getting the dratted thing working again. I decide to install the correct (I hope) BIOS from a flash drive during start up. Obvious perhaps but I did also have a go at turning it upside down and tapping the base - no really, somebody wrote that theirs would shut down because the fan was sticking and that fixed it...

Starting up off the USB is a failure until it occurs to me to have *only* the actual .fd file on the USB and none of the flash install files as well. I put the new BIOS file on a flash drive and start up with the function key and escape held down. *holds breath* I have no idea if it has worked... Certainly there are no messages saying 'Your Computer Has Been Fixed - Go Party' but will still shut itself down?

I try to occupy myself with other things while during the tortuously long start up of win-doze; all the time expecting it to turn itself off again. After a time I finally relax, looks like it's going to be okay, but has that fixed the battery charging problem? Windows says it is charging... Time do do some more waiting I guess. The battery claims that it is at 34% and I decide to give it a go and unplug the mains charger. Netbook happily sits there running off the battery. Yes! It's these moments of triumph which make being a nerd with geek aspirations worthwhile.

That's the first problem sorted, now for the new operating system... but that is another post.

An Afternoon of Nerdy Roleplay Nostalgia

2009-11-04T16:23:00.007Z

It so happened that today I planned to take by bike out but, even as I was putting on my cycle clips and hat, was distracted by youtube and the afternoon was spent in Dungeons and Dragons nostalgia. Admitedly my role playing all takes place online these days; mostly in NoR but my bookshelves are still crammed with well thumbed AD&D rule books. I enjoyed my surfing so much that I'm determined to share the highlights of it with you here.

Firstly a series of cartoon AD&D 4th edition interview spoofs which delighted me beyond measure.

The Beholder interview

The Red Dragon interview

The Mindflayer interview

Tiefling & the Gnome

Demogorgon and the Gnome

Lady of Pain

Of course the parents of America were famously alarmed by the possibly satanic influences of this evil game; a subject which has long been lampooned.

The Dungeons and the Dragons

Dungeons and Dragons: Satan's Game

Arguably if, like myself, you spent your formative years pretending to be a wizard and reading rule books you might find yourself a little tounge tied when it comes to speaking to the fairer sex... Luckily there are some women who understand us; unfortunately, however, they charge by the minuite. 1-900-NERD-GIRL Cruel but true; I went on to max out my credit card with these two.

And, now, something musical and penultimate. It's D&D!!!

And finally... I have recently (well most of my life actually) been accused of being a nerd and after blogging about swapping the hard disk on my laptop, and now Dungeons and Dragons, I can't really argue... In case, like me, you were starting to wonder where the word 'nerd' came from (and why Japanese school girl's uniform looks like a sailor suit) then you should watch School Girls & Nerds

Right, that's it till next time then. I'm off to sit by my fire and read the second edition of Monster Manual II. Best, Stuart.

Computers And Fire

2009-11-01T13:20:00.004Z

I related in a few previous posts how my various computers seem to have been going wrong and/or needed work carried out on them. Let me update you, if I may, on that situation prior to relating my other recent doings.

After Brenda and Richard departed for their native land I took a few days getting the old Toshiba Qosmio up and running. The initial installation of windows all went very well but since the original disk seems to have vanished I had to track down the drivers by hand. This should be easy because the Toshiba web site makes it very easy to find them – annoyingly enough the sound driver wouldn't install – the forums seem to suggest that this is not an uncommon problem but not one to which there seemed to be a common answer to. After tearing my hair out for a whole evening I tried specifying a generic intel driver which seems to work fine. By lunch time the next day I had also found an Nvida driver that would work (my motherboard was upgraded so the standard one did not want to play). Yes! I was back in business.

About 48 hours after this, however, the hard disk drive failed and I was left staring at the blue screen of death; subsequent attempts to start giving me an HDD failed error message. After checking in the BIOS as well to see if the thing really was knackered I threw a tantrum and made a cup of tea. After I had calmed down I went to my box of old bits, fished out a 2.5 inch drive, fetched a screwdriver, and went about swapping the new drive into the laptop. On discovering that it had been detected and would work I threw a small party before going about the process of reinstalling Windows XP and tracking down all the drivers for the second time in a week.

My New Fire

I'm still haven't got around to putting xbuntu on the netbook but it's on the list (the speed at which it runs windows is shockingly slow) and my desktop is still languishing while I wait for funds to replace the graphics card. On a less technologicaly minded n

ote I've been enjoying the fireplace working now that the evenings have been drawing in somewhat and have not yet burnt down the house.

Cosy :-)

Rosa came to spend half term with me but, sad to say, we were both ill that week. I mooched around with man flu (ie a cold) while Rosa had a temperature and sore head. As a result we spent most of the week watching movies and taking paracetamol. After I had returned the newly recovered child to her mother and went to spend the night with my own mother and brother before visiting Jason in his school the next day. It was wonderful to see him again, although I always end up feeling rather sad that he does not seem to recognise me.

After a cup of coffee and a bite to eat it was time to leap into the car and drive back up to Lincolnshire; I'm almost becoming nonchalant about doing that journey now – certainly I don't get lost or need to look at a map anymore. When I got in I fixed some food, grabbed a beer and logged into Second Life to spend a few hours in NoR and wind down.

Of course now that I'm home it's time to get back to the bicycle; I've missed going out on my rides over the last week.

Peace, Stuart.

The Chimney

2009-10-18T11:31:00.006+01:00

One of the little projects which the cottage has needed is the re-installation of the old stove; a consummation ever more devoutly to be wished as the year advances towards winter. Luckily the gaffer has a very old set of chimney sweep's brushes – yes I know, it's the sort of thing that every body has just lying around – and I set to with them a few days ago to try and clean the chimney; which had been left unused for about half a decade.

After working away for a quite considerable period of time I had managed to collect a significant number of sticks, which looked to be the remnants of a bird's nest, fill the room with soot dust and lose the brush head up the chimney. Luckily the brush was not too far up when it became detached and I was able to recover it by reinserting the threaded end of one of the poles and getting it to catch – a tricky process which involved me lying on my back and looking up the chimney while wearing goggles and a head torch. By the time I had got the brush back I was slightly the worse for wear...

Chimney Sweep Triumphant

The brushes seemed to have passed though the obstruction although the cloud of dust made it impossible to see so I put the stove together and lit a couple of twigs and a bit of newspaper in it. There was a little smoke but at least some of it seemed to be heading in the right direction; I reasoned that the draw was probably not yet working because the lack of heat had not yet established an up-draft (fire places can often be a little smoky till they get going) and so put on a bit more fuel to see if that would help.

The next thing that happened, other than my living room getting quite hard to breath in, was Jo coming to bang on the back door wanting to know why her kitchen was full of smoke... After putting the fire out and opening all the windows I decided to give it a rest until the morning and put the electric heater on. The gaffer came around the next day to have a look at what I had been up to before shaking his head and whistling though his teeth (the universal sign that it's going to cost a lot). Despite these ominous beginnings he only charged me a cup of coffee for extracting the rest of the bird's nest.

Pottering along on my bike

2009-10-14T20:30:00.001+01:00

Cycle rides continue. I'm currently living on the edge of Witham valley which, prior to Henry the VIII and the dissolution, had the highest concentration of monasteries in the country and which has provided me with a couple of destinations. So far I've cycled out to Tupholm abbey and Bardney Abbey and yet plan to go see Barlings. It has taken me a couple of rides to get used to being on the bike again. My longest ride so far has been to Lincoln and back; best guess was that it was about forty miles.

I've started to spend quite a few nights outside in the tent. It's good to get used to it before starting out on any multi day trips and I find I actually sleep better out there in some ways – certainly I tend to wake up earlier.

Decorating, Visitors, Role Play and Travel.

2009-10-06T13:25:00.003+01:00

It has, rather obviously, been a long time since I took it upon myself to make a post here. I would not go so far as to say that my house is *finished* but then I seem to have come to a natural pause in my work on it and I feel as if I have a very nice place to base myself while doing whatever I go onto next. The remaining projects are to get the blinds downstairs up and sorted and there are still a few snags to sort out in the bathroom; well, actually the bathroom needs finishing in terms of painting, skirting boards and other minor details but hey-ho it's an ongoing process.

Cycling has begun again, abet at a gentle pace, and, although it has not led me to tour thus far, I've been enjoying going out and riding around the local villages on day trips. I've also had a quiet renaissance in my Second Life role play where I've been hugely enjoying my new character inNoR and working on my dialogue writing skills. As much as I'm partial to the occasional episode of NCIS I'm still no nearer to wanting a TV and am happy to type away every night on my computer. Sadly my desktop blew a fuse the other day and looks very much as if it will either need a new graphics card or both... I've been enjoying tweaking the settings on anAcer Aspire One netbook in order to make it run SL faster but it really can't cope - at least not while running Windows XP at the same time. Future projects will include setting it up with a cut down version of Linux to see if that speeds things up noticeably; probably eitherXbuntu or Linipus Lite.

I have been very lucky to have my friends Rooby and Richard come over from the US to hang out with me while they were in the UK for a couple of weeks. We had a wonderful time and, after going up to York where we took in the York Dungeons and the National Railway Museum, I took great pleasure in showing them my old stomping grounds in the South West including Bath and Longleat House as well as heading across the Severn into Wales to see Chepstow Castle and Tintern Abby. After they both showed me such hospitality and kindness when I was in the US last year it has been a real pleasure to have an opportunity to try and return the favour.

I rather feel as if I'm out of the transitional phase of settling in here and that it's time to get on and do stuff again; It's been quite a full year as far as life changes go after all but I want to get on to the next chapter now. As an exciting thing to look forward to however I've decided to head off to Hungary for a few days to visit my Jet setting nephew Alexander who, since I decided to visit the US last year, has managed to live in South America, Austria and now Hungry. It would be a frightful thing to miss out on having him show me around Budapest while he is there and so I will be heading off for a long weekend mid November. Until then I'm just working on my cycling. I've also got Rosa coming to visit for half term so I'm obviously full of excitment about that :-)

Peace, Stuart.

Unfashionable Nails

2009-06-25T10:04:00.001+01:00

"a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all". Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness.” J.R.R.Tolkien

I've been working on my new place with some enthusiasm and, I'm happy to say, implementing some of my the new practical skills which I gained while sailing. However despite my recent maritime training I'm not entirely convinced that I'm quite ready for the building trade. Yesterday afternoon I was happily occupied removing skirting boards in what will eventually become the bathroom but found that the nails were tearing out great lumps of plaster as I removed them. Luckily I was able to call upon the experience of the gaffer who has half finished more building projects than I've had hot dinners. “Father, why are these nails tearing out all the plaster when I drag them out?”

“Ahh, you've got the old fashioned masonry nails there lad.” A remark which, naturally, caused me no small agitation.

“You can't expect me to work with unfashionable nails!” Apparently this was not the correct response for an aspiring builder/decorator but I'm an artist damn it and I can't be hope to do my best work with substandard materials. As a result I spent the evening in Second Life to restore my nerves.

Best Laid Schemes

2009-06-22T13:12:00.003+01:00

I had originally intended to spend the mid portion of the past week in a light round of walking, camping and intellectual betterment however things actually worked out quite differently. Arriving in Warminster I received a message saying that my daughter was ill with a temperature and my assistance would be greatly appreciated and so the next morning I was off back to Bath. I’m very pleased to say that Rosa was okay despite feeling a bit rough and I spent a very pleasant few days watching Scooby-Doo DVD’s and eating pizza with her until, by the time the weekend rolled around, she was recovered.

I had been expecting to see my father and stepmother on the Saturday morning and for us to spend the weekend in Bath but “The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men gang aft agle" as Burns put it and on the Friday evening one of the dogs escaped from kennels and they had to return to Lincolnshire in order to help recapture the beast; coming when called is something which happens to other dogs.

At 3:00 am on Sunday morning I woke up on Madeleine’s sofa to find my brother standing over me and, after some panicked reflection, realised that I was not having a dream but had agreed to head off to Avebury for the solstice sunrise with him. Not having been before we went holding misplaced belief that we would be able to find a parking space; how wrong one can be. Every space was taken and the roadsides for a mile or so from the village were marked with police bollards to prevent illicit parking. As a result we ended up parking about two miles away and walk back in.

It was a good feeling to be there for the sunrise with other people, perhaps because there was a sense of being part of something that has been going on for thousands of years but at the same time it was not really what I was after. Perhaps because it had so much of a sense of a drunken party that I had turned up late to (although as drunken parties go I couldn’t fault it) and I was looking for something else. The sunrise is sacred no matter what but I think I’m more likely to find what I’m searching for on my own rather than in a crowd. Thank heavens I didn’t try to do Stonehenge instead; the BBC reported there were about 37,000 people there this year!

Dad eventually arrived and, after visiting Jason in his school, we started the drive up to Lincolnshire; which leaves me here, Surrounded by packing boxes full of my stuff and in an annex that needs rebuilding/decorating. Looks like I’m going to be busy for a while :-)

Peace, Stuart.

Short Walk

2009-06-16T10:32:00.002+01:00

Did I declare my proposed trip from Bath to Warminster to be a short walk? Well perhaps if I had made it last the two days I had intended or, indeed, if I had gone by a less circuitous route. As it was I was on the road by 9:00 and decided to wonder into Bath along the canal path where I spent a plesent morning getting a coffee and buying a replacement part for Ray's trangia stove (the stove situation is in hand father so stop fretting). After this I was heading out of Bath again at about 12:00.

One has to love the South West countryside. Rolling hills and little woods and fields, much as I always imagined the Shire to be in TLOTR. I actually managed to get to Warminster just after darkness finally descended at about 10:30 that night. The walk itself was lovely and a high point included coming to the end of a lane to find myself unexpectedly the grounds of Farleigh Hungerford Castle. However by the time I got to Warminster I was dead beat. Best guess is that the trip was actually between 30 and 35 miles. For some reason my legs feel a little stiff... I think I'll take today easy in order to recover :p

At Home

2009-06-14T22:08:00.002+01:00

It has taken a little while for me to actually start to feel that I won't be in class on Monday morning but it is slowly starting to sink in that the course is over. As soon as I arrived at my mother's house on Friday night I was given a message to phone Mads. "Would I like to have my daughter this weekend?" Of course I was more than delighted to and my mother, brother and I spent a wonderful couple of days hanging out with her.

I returned Rosa to Bath while carrying a backpack filled with camping gear. I'm planning some further travels this summer so a relatively short walk from Bath back to Warminster with an overnight stop saves on the train fare and makes a gentle introduction to things for me. Of course I couldn't be in St Catherine's without calling by on Tom and Alice who subsequently plied me with tea and cakes. After so delightful a tea I was unable to resist the invitation to stay to supper and leave in the morning. (Thank you very much guys!)

As a result my first walk lasted about ten minutes and I'm a bit further from Warminster than when I started; no worries it's not the destination that's important it's the journey :-)

Peace, Stuart.

Finished.

2009-06-12T23:21:00.002+01:00

Wow, I'm done. I passed the SOLAS paper on the resit. After the shock of messing up on the time this morning I really focused on getting stuff down as quickly as possible but still had only just finished the last question when the examiner told us to stop. Very sadly I was the only one from our group who got though; I'm sure I can't imagine how I would cope trying to do the course in a second language and be trying to finish my ocean endorsement at the same time. Poor Phil and Pete are doing just that and have been looking increasingly exhausted as the week has gone on. Good luck on Sunday you guys!

I'm back in Warminster at last after lugging all my stuff around on the ferry and train and I can't quite get my head around the idea that I won't be heading back to college in a couple of days time. I feel completely shattered.

Peace, Stuart.

Still here!

2009-06-12T12:42:00.002+01:00

Bah humbug! I fluffed my SOLAS paper this morning. I forgot to keep and eye on the time and ended up with a question still to answer when we got told to put down our pens. A resit will cost £120 pounds *faints*. On the other hand I've got some credit with UKSA because I did not sit my Ocean exam so I'm using that to have another go at the paper I messed up. As a result I'm booked in for my resit today at 2:00 and will be out by half past. Of course I was planning to be away by now but hey-ho it's great that I get another crack at the whip without handing over any more cash.

Right... last min revision and then this really is the last exam, regardless of what mark I get. It's time for the final effort.

Stuart.

The Last Night At School

2009-06-11T22:35:00.006+01:00

It's the last night I'll be here at UKSA. Perhaps a little predictably I've spent most of it sitting in the Waterside reading, writing and chatting to people online. Tomorrow I've got the last exam, my GMDSS General Operator's Certificate. A half hour paper followed by a 90 min practical. The pass mark is 75% but I've been doing pretty well in the recent mock exams and practicals so, unless I make some frightful mistake on the day, I should be able to get though it okay. Lets just hope I can remember all those radio frequencies!

A New Look

Finishing the course is the end of a chapter and it kind of felt right to mark it with some sort of external change as well so I decided to ditch the beard. I've been told by lots of people that it makes me look about ten years younger which is nice, although it's taking me a while to get used to not having it to hide behind. It feels right though, perhaps because I'm starting to feel more my real age again rather than like a middle aged divorcee.

I feel very much like I've become a different person to who I was back in January which is, really, what I came here hoping to do; learning to sail was, arguably, something of a by product. Perhaps the thing which was retrospectively the important to me was that I did not let myself of the hook and walk away from the course when it got really tough and all I wanted to do was be somewhere else. Hey, nobody ever said that transformation was going to be easy. Thank you to everybody who supported and encouraged me over the last six months; you know who you are.

Peace, Stuart.

Yachtmaster

2009-06-09T12:16:00.002+01:00

Stuart has a rather confused and exhausted look and is holding a piece of paper. It is torn, has blood stains, tear stains, dried salt and even some teeth marks on it. However the script at the top reads 'Yachtmaster'. I passed.

I'm not completely sure how that happened to be honest. After the first day I really felt that I had done so many things wrong that I was pretty much certain that I would not even be getting my coastal skipper.

I took a good long time to sail up to a mooring outside Yarmouth but got there in the end. I was just starting to despair but then realised that I was pretty much ferry gliding over to it on the point of sail which I was on so just sat there. My MOB could have been better and I got a bit lost in the blind nav... Luckily I guess I can't have been doing as badly as I felt since, when I go my debrief, I was told that I had just made the grade for Yachtmaster.

I did well on my collision regulations and meteorology questions though and got told that my taking charge of the boat was good. I was particularly pleased about this last since I've generally been told that I come over as too polite and need to be more assertive when I'm in command.

I'm not going for the ocean endorsement at the weekend though (a portfolio and oral exam) I'm pretty happy about all the material but I don't feel ready in myself to have that ticket simply because I know I'm not ready for ocean sailing - just look at how hard I found the Albatross trip. Perhaps I'll go for it one day. For the moment I'd just be happy to go out and get some experience.

That leaves me with the final radio and satellite course to get though this week. The exam is on Friday morning. Goodness knows how that will go... In any case the GOC cert is so far above the requirements for the sort of sailing I'm planning to do that it's not a great problem if I don't get the bit of paper although it would be good to leave on a high note.

I'm still kind of reeling mentally from having got though the exam after having been so sure that I was going to flunk it. What a six months it's been... I'll have to write something reflective on the process but right now I'm concentrating on getting though the final exam.

Peace, Stuart.

A Day Off

2009-05-23T12:14:00.003+01:00

Well this is it, a Saturday off! Dangerously workshy perhaps but wonderful to be able to have some time to chill out. (Despite the huge pile of homework which I am carrying around with me in my rucksack).

Sadly I'm not with Rosa. She had a schedule which could not be disrupted at short notice so I'm sitting in the Waterside same as usual. The owner just saw me typing away in the same chair and same position I was in at about 01:30 this morning and did a double take, "I did let you out last night did I?" he asked. I have to admit that the free Internet is keeping me here a good deal when I can get out of college - and it's turning out to be expensive because I buy a lot of coffee here! I'm going to have to try out some mobile Internet solutions, all the more so since when I return to deepest darkest Lincolnshire the fasted broadband available is 0.5 MB p/s. I'll go for a mobile phone network initially and keep my eye on satellite deals - with luck one-way sat systems will come down in price eventually.

I ended Friday feeling quite deflated. We had a classroom session on celestial nav after finaly finishing the boat off and towards the end the head of yachting came in and provided some quite direct feedback on our collective performance during the trip. It was not very uplifting, we are pretty much the worst thing since unsliced bread.

Shortly after that I decided to clear out for the day and wondered over to Pete and started talking about how much I missed my daughter but he spotted exactly where I was heading with that within ten seconds and headed me off. "No, you have to finish this," he said, "It's not about getting a qualification for you but it is about finishing. You have to carry it though. I've seen you changing so much on the boat over the last few weeks. Don't give in now." It was just what I needed to hear actually, after all that I would change and grow in myself is the real reason I'm here. Thanks Pete. When I saw John, who had been third mate during the trip, this morning he said that he thought that our feedback had actually been rather harsh which also perked me up a little. Besides I've got four days of taking diesel engines apart starting tomorrow which will be really interesting and something that I've been really looking forward to.

Having said all that I am going to duck out of the motor conversion modual (powerboats are not really something I can imagine wanting to have anything to do with) and have a week off; it means I'll return for the exams refreshed and more likely to perform to the best of my ability.

Right, engines then. I had better try to get the fiber glass out of my boiler suit tonight. I'll aiming to put in some video which I took during the last trip on later, dolphins, me going up the mast to check the rigging, that sort of stuff.

Peace, Stuart.

Life On The Ocean Wave

2009-05-22T21:16:00.011+01:00

First things first. This looks as if it will be the most amazing film since ... well I don't know when. Pan's Labyrinth perhaps? Hints of Kill Bill and Blade as well though, http://bloodthelastvampire.co.uk . Lets hope it lives up to my expectations.

Wow, I'm back at long last; sitting in the Waterside with a quarter bottle of Moet as a celebration to having made it. What the hell happened? I feel as if my ocean passage were all somehow unreal now that I am finally home. Of course the boat needing to be stripped and cleaned was quite tangible and I have a pile of hand written pages chronicling my mood swings as testament to its authenticity.

I've typed up my journal from the journey but I seem to have written quite a lot... You will have just have to bare with me. In any case it's good to be back in the UK after the best part of two and a half thousand miles of sailing over the last three weeks.

Journal Entry Sunday 2^nd Of May (At UKSA the night before leaving).

I have realised how close I am getting to the end of the course and it has mad me reflect on where I am with all this (again that is – cue self indulgent wittering)

In some ways it all seems to be coming together. Astro navigation is a big complicated subject but I can start to see the big picture at last and I'm planning to get in lots of practice on the boat. With luck we will be able to really get into taking sights so that the process can become more or less automatic.

Sailing wise I must admit that I'm not feeling too hopeful about the exams; on the other hand perhaps I will surprise myself and do just fine. As with pretty much every exam I've done the closer it come to the more I feel as if I have really no idea how it will go. Sometimes I feel as if I should be okay but I can also imagine it going the wrong way quite easily as well. The pass rate for Yacht Master seems to be about 50% or so as far as i can tell from watching eh results board so who knows?

If I do fail I guess I can just book myself onto another RYA course next spring. Or perhaps I should just concentrate on enjoying my sailing for a while and forget about exams. Well all of that is quite dramatically speculative; I've not failed the exam yet and there is certainly not going to be any forgetting it in the near future.

I'm very glad that I got through my earlier emotional wobble. I'm feeling quite excited about going on Albatross now – gosh I really am neurotic; but at least I wear it on my sleeve. Besides if I were not mad and complicated would this be as much fun to read? Or perhaps I would have less interesting readers...?

Now, if you will excuse me, I've got to pack up my stuff; we are off to the air port in the morning and I want to double check that I don't forget anything important or accidentally leave my sailing knife in my carry on luggage or something equally disastrous.

Peace, Stuart.

Cascais, Portugul to Ponta Del Garda, Azores

I've brought my copy of Walden with me – admittedly that is not great change but when I came to decide what reading material I wanted to take with my on the Ocean trip I realised that my taste in reading has completely changed. When I was a teenager I would devour fantasy or horror novels with a vengeance and now I seem to find little attraction in them, but I digress.

(The next scribble in my journal has a note saying that it was important enough to get up in the middle of the night to write so I had better include it here.) I have been sucked in to the RYA model and its made me focus on getting to the end of the course so the dreadful exams will be over.

“Each day, as a scholar at his first class, I prepare a blank mind for the day to write upon.”

The Silent Flute

Let me take this trip in that spirit. I know nothing, I would like to learn to sail, lets learn.

2^nd of May

Well here we are on Albatross at long last. It's pretty much an identical copy of Whirlwind with some extras and the sense of de ja vu is compounded by the fact that Pete and I have taken our old bunks in the rear starboard cabin.

Last night we all went out for supper and a drink. It was fun and I have hopes that our previous fallings out are going to be brushed under the carpet; I guess that the test will come when people start to get tired and stressed out. After dinner most people went on for drinks at another bar in the center of town. I came back to the boat. It was nice to be in a new place and be in the process of getting in tune with the land and the climate but after looking around the town square with people spilling out of the bars and the loud music I felt quite as divorced from it as I do at home. I starting to build up a certain excitement about this trip.

Saturday the 3^rd of May 10:15

What and exhausting day! A very rewarding one however, although i was seriously flagging towards the end. I volunteered Roland and myself for victualing durty. That seemed a pretty easy option at first since we were able to go out and have coffee and food with the skipper and watch leaders and get down to some planning while everybody else was left doing the inventory and pre departure checks.

A few hours later however I was deep into it while doing what was surely the biggest shop of I've ever taken part in. 590 euros and we had only and hour to get all the things on our list. Lars actually left us to find the store ourselves since he had forgotten the money and Roland and I at least hand an interesting and rather picturesque ramble though the town looking for the supermarket. The food is to be delivered tomorrow – all 26 cases of it – but the more immediate necessities we carried back. I'm still getting use to the change in temperature and it was a bit of a killer.

Having got back I took the opportunity to volunteer to do the rig check again. I've done it twice thsu far but this was the first time I had been up one of the challenge boats and I was dispatched right the way to the top. I have to admit that I found this time going aloft by far the most challenging and I spent the majority of my time saying what I could remember of the Bene Gesserit litany against fear out loud. I was a good deal higher than on the other boats I've done it on and because of the rig being so much larger I had to swing out much further to check the outermost parts of the spreaders. Also I was up for a lot longer. The first time I did this on Outreach II I went up and came down again inside ten minutes. This time I was up for well over an hour and had a good deal of stuff to do. I am very glad I did it though. Got to keep pushing my comfort zone (if only because it makes getting back to it such a relief!) After I had got my feet back on the ground, or the deck rather, I was straight into helping out with dinner after which we had our safety briefs from the watch leaders.

This continued till just after 10:00 at which point we were rewarded with a mini bottle lf larger each. Some of the crew are determined to make as much as they may of our last night ashore and have gone out again but we are required to be sowered, breakfasted and on deck for 8:30 and I would prefer and earlier night. I think I was right to get up and write down my thought of last night. Being in the present movements and letting go of my ideas and preconceptions (including fear, the fear that i will not get home is, surprisingly, strong if I am honest, despite all my rational logic to the contrary) it's what I need to do. I had a pretty amazing time today even though it was hard and tiring. It's heartening.

4^th of May Monday

The day of departure; onece again I am on food detail with Roland. I hope that I am going to be able to remember how to work out my celestial navigation. The classroom in Cowes seems a world away now. We have to do two sun-run-suns and a compass check as a minimum. I'm hoping that I will get quite a lot more done than that though. The sun is so strong here (at least by my standards) that I am taking great care to avoid sun burn and and discovering that I need to drink a lot in order to stay hydrated. Luckily I have my Musto sou'wester, which may make me look more like a dork than usual but does a super job of keeping the sun off.

Fear. I'm aware of it quite a lot fo the time; a little pre flight anxiety I guess. I used to be a little nervous about crossing the English channel and now i am quite nonchalant about it so I expect that I will become similarly relaxed about ocean sailing given time. Here's hoping that there is not much rough weather anyhow.

Wednesday 6^th May 11:15

Seasickness is vile and the work of Satan besides. I spent the first 48 hours sailing feeling quite frightful and got pretty miserable at times. At least I've not felt as bad as some of the other crew. On our second night sailing I had to wait to use the heads because they were both being used by people throwing up in them – but they carry on none th eless. I'm sure that I wouled not cope as well if I felt as bad as they obviously do. At least if I am on deck or lying in my bunk I am pretty much okay.

Our watch system, since we have three watches, in three hours on, six hours off with the additional requirement that those coming on watch before meeal times also sort out the food. I think this may be the first tim esince I started this course back in January that I have had a chance to take as much sleep as I want; indeed it has been a chance to catch up on the last week in which I was writing my essay till late and then getting up early in order to do my astro homework before class started.

I've found myself getting quite depressed at times, perhaps I've been spiraling down from feeling ill, or thn again maybe I've been getting in touch with some of my emotions. I have, however, tried to use it as an opportunity for introspection and to allow me to go into those feelings. I've got a lot of holding around my solar plexus – fear and anxiety; for the most part about this trip. We have doen such a lot of 'what if' training that the idea of something horrible happening has been quite present for me. As much as I recognize that it is important for me to finish this I think that it is very much with a sigh of relief that I will get to the end of our journey. The other places where I'm holding a lot are my shoulders and heart. I have relaxed a good deal tension wise in the last 24 hours and found that my shoulders have released a little. My heart, well that will take time I guess. In any case it 's not may weeks now until I can see Rosa and Jason again.

One of my anxieties is that we will probably get some tough weather before we get back to the UK and I don't really feel comfortable with this boat yet although I guess that will change before we get back to the UK.

Wednesday 6^th of May

How variable my mood is. What did Leonard Cohen say? “I don't trust my inner feelings, inner feelings come and go.” I've been from a little down this morning to feeling pretty high when I was on deck because Peter gave me an orange. If this course is anything for me I hope that it is going to enable me to take on more things in the future. I've not taken my sights off cycling across America yet – I have just learned enough about myself to know that I'm not yet ready to cope with it yet, at least not alone anyway. My lesson for today is that my mood, however unalterable and complete it may seem at the time will change. Perhaps I think to much about how I feel. (if you follow my blog you know how I get into that in a big way) or rather , perhaps I attach too much importance to the way I feel. So much of my process has been focused on what I think that I have forgotten that feelings are far from being the ultimate reality. I'm not saying that I should try to be less aware of what I feel just that I might try to cultivate the awareness of my feelings only being relatively real.

Friday 8^th May 2009 10:15

Land-ho! We can see the Azores away in the distance. Probably just in time as well since I've been a complete klutz on deck most of the time. My first attempt at flaking the foresail I made of a bit of a hash of. Since I forgot that I would need to start at the clew and tried to do it from the middle of the food – what a mess! At least I'm getting better though. I also managed to contribute to wards messing up taking out a reef which cost us a mast runner and took about two hours to fix. We left Cascais in light winds and sun but it has since clouded over and the majority of trip here has been trey and cloudy with very light airs; the motor has been on most of the time.

I mentioned my anxiety about heavy weather to Pete. He shrugged. “Imagine just how many storms this boat has been though, it'll be fine.” He's right of course. None the less I'm hoping for a favorable forecast when we head up towards the Bay Of Biscay.

Saturday 9^th Of May 09

We arrived in the Aores not a moment too soon, a F8 gale following hard upon our heels. That night I went out with Peter and had a really good evening in a little bar. A couple of beers and some tapas. Late at night and still a pleasant family atmosphere. The Portuguese seem to do going out for a drink so much better than we in the UK.

Sunday 10^th of May 09

I'm feeling rather overwhelmed right now. I'm one of the watch leaders for the leg to Spain and we still have strong (F8) winds blowing outside the harbor right now and expect a very rough sea state as soon as we get out. Thank goodness this was not the situation when we first stared the trip. Hopefully I have got over my seasickness despite having had 48 hours along side – but then I've never been in a really rough sea for longer than a few hours in the past. Our skipper is not even remotely concerned about the weather which is encouraging; I just want to get home safe and see Rosa again at this point. What in the world am I doing here? Still it's too late to back out now and the only way home now is onwards. Time to step up and be counted.

Sunday 10^th Of may 19:30

Bah! My leaving harbor and putting the sails up was horrifically bad. I forgot to check that the main halyard had been attached to the head of the sail and while I was debating how to rectify things one of the crew took off the sail ties and the whole sail billowed out the entire situation went to rat shit.

I'm not planing to take the ocean exam; the idea of me getting Yachmaster seems ridiculous right at the moment and a piece of paper saying I am competent to skipper a yacht under 200 gross tones anywhere in the world would be a joke considering my skill level, even if I did get it somehow. If I should pass my Yachtmaster exam at this point I would feel very lucky. What in the world am I doing here? I could have had a three week holiday an returned to UKSA refreshed instead of doing this passage. Okay giving up is not good bu , as you may rememberer from my previous whitterings, I knew pretty much for certain that I did not what to do this particular trip.

Take a step back though; this is a real low point I am in but it is going to pass. I would not have had the experience of overcoming my aversion to heights and doing the mast check in Cascais if I had not come and some of the other people here are having a much tougher time than myself. The frightful weather has not yet materialised but is surely on its way. Writing down the above paragraph has made me feel better; it will all pass and I will get home and, I daresay, that I will have changed as a person if I can sail or not. It's too much to think of just now, just try to do good watches and fill in the log as I go along. Once again I have the feeling that I simply can't get a perspective on this course and nor will I be able to until after it is finished.

It's and odd thing though, when I've done stuff in the past in a committed way I've generally been quite good at what I've set my mind to; it's a bit of a shock to find myself very much towards the remedial end of the class – but perhaps it's not just me feeling like this and some of the others are in the same boat so to speak? Goodness knows! Roll on the end of the course, has it really only been five months? However now I think back I remember saying in the blog that what I wanted was to be more alive, to experience life more fully and that was part of why going into the office day after day seemed so unbearable. Well I've certainly got that and, even though I'm feeling a bit shit right now, I'm glad.

Monday 11^th of May 09

Last night was rotten. I spent about half an hour with waves breaking over me on the foredeck trying to tie a sail bag down. I remember looking out in to the roaring darkness and just wishing I could be in Mystery Science Theater 3000 in Second Life with Gordon (even watching Mr B Flat Natural) instead of being wet, cold and terrified. The main problem of course is that I'm just feeling frustrated at how kack handed I seem to be. This morning I made the decision to jump ship when we get to Vigo but I shan't. The thought of leaving my friends another man down when two of us are already sick is unconscionable. Our skipper Lars is amazing though; thank heavens we got a good one, very nice guy.

17:35

I've been feeling really very down today – I spent most of it in my bunk when I was not actually on watch *sighs* When I look back on what I wrote before I was so sure that I did not want to do this but I came anyhow. What in the world was that about? Fed up of walking away from stuff which is hard perhaps bu then does that mean I should push on when things are really not working? I'm not saying that it is good to wuss out but then there is a wisdom in knowing what is right and doing it as well. We are back o quite calm seas and some sunshine which is nice. The sound of the engine is maddening at times but it will get us home faster and I'm all about that! Bah! When will this blue funk lift? At least my clothes have dried off now.

Wednesday 13^th of May 09

Oh God, this must surely mark the low point of my trip thus far; I found myself in charge of a sail change which all went horribly wrong and almost ended up coming to blows with one of the other guys (who, I have to say, was being simply vile to me at the time) after which I went and told the skipper I was thinking of leaving when we reach Vigo. He asked why and I stared to explain how depressed I have been feeling and in an oblique way mentioned my marriage falling apart at which point I found myself crying, which was both unexpected and embarrassing because we were in quite a public location. Sometimes I miss them so much it's like a hole in my heart; do I feel like this because I'm having to feel what is really there instead of being able to distract myself from it? Of course I also hate being on this bloody boat. At the moment I really don't know if I'm going to be able to get back on when we get to Spain.

It's a good thing that I had the presence of mind to write down that I was feeling good yesterday night (I seem to have lost that page - Ed.) because when I go to watch at 10:00 this morning I was in high dudgeon and fully intending to leave UKSA the moment I stepped food ashore. I'm pretty close to my throwing it in limit as is apparent from my journal. Of course I can't right now because I”m in the middle of the Atlantic. I just need to talk myself into getting back on the boat in Spain and then I will have to finish the trip. After that I'm sure I'll feel more perky once I'm into the engineering modal. Dry land is the business, and besides standing under a tree is universally regarded as a cure for seasickness.

Thursday 14^th of May 09

Come on, yes you can. Once we are in Spain it's only a few days to go really and you won't have to cope with being watch leader any more. Oh by the way, severe storm warnings – buck up, it won't be as bad as you imagine.

I had a pretty good watch. Helped to take down the yankee and put it up again with no apparent problems and earlier today today we changed the sail under my (nominal) direction and it all went okay. I even took some sun sights and got in my compass check. I've really no idea if they are any good but celestial navigation seems like a nice quiet hobby to keep up after the course is finished. I think the trend here is that if I can get stuff more or less right on deck my mood lifts quite a lot so the best way to help myself out of this blue funk is to study and make sure I have all the procedures right in my head, of course the fact that when I feel down all I want to do is lie in my bunk and try to sleep doesn't help much. Like I quoted before - “The easy way seems hard the hard way seems easy” How would I cope without the Tao De Ching to cling to?

“There ain't no call to go talking of pushing and pulling. Boats are quite tricky enough for them as sit still and don't go looking further for the cause of trouble” - Gaffer Gamgee.

Friday 15^th of May 09

Oh heavens, I feel amazing. We got the boat to Bayona! To actually get here, after having been though so much (emotionaly that is, no Typhoons or important bits falling off the boat), it's an amazing high. What in the world will it feel like to get her back home to Cowes? I've been setting myself up for these endurance things over the last year (as the readers of my blog will recall) but this is the first time that I've got to the end – it's not the end of course, we still have to sail across the Bay Of Biscay, but right now, ashore with a beer and everybody seeming to be quite happy again. It's the most amazing feeling.

Right now I feel as if I'm up for, and will enjoy, the journey home – I guess I'm going to have to test that hypothesis.

16^th of May 09

Well we have been back at sea less than 24 hours and, already, we are back to being the 'Big Brother Boat' with people being upset with each other. Oh well, at least it's not on my watch so I can stay pretty much out of things. We have being having our first really big swell as we make our way North to Biscay. Apparently it will get rough tonight but will all be settled by tomorrow with a good forecast for the rest of the trip.

Note to self – Pasta Carbonara followed by unexpected vigorous winching serves to bring on sea sickness, avoid in future. Only four days to go oncer I wake up for my next watch! Mostly feeling pretty good today, despite rain and cold on deck, it's time for the final effort.

17^th of May 09 01:15

A good watch. The phosphorescence in the water was amazing and, despite rougher weather than we have had before, (not actually very rough but rough by my standards. Rough sea state with about 30 knots of wind) I found myself rather enjoying things. The reef and sail change went well but a bit of a hitch in the final tack when my line got caught under a sail on the foredeck sent people rushing forward with knives to cut sail ties. Once dawn comes we can cross the traffic separation scheme and set off across Biscay. Only four more days!

18^th Of May 09

Just unexpectedly rushed up on deck to help take down the Yankee when the wind picked up; bigish sea, rain, fun, fun, fun in the sun. It all went well and we even got to that we looked professional doing it so yay us! :-)

We are about half way across Biscay right now and I'm getting along okay. Last night saw a sun set which must surely count as one of the most sublime moments of the trip. I can hardly believe that we are nearly there – the day after tomorrow with luck! When I look back at how I was feeling last week; did something resolve for my psychologically to close that period of depression? I would like to think so certainly.

The sky is very overcast but I've got sun and moon sights that I need if I decide to try for my ocean endorsement. Pat self on the back here in that even when I felt that the last thing I would want would be to take the exam I still kept taking sights. Giving myself future choices is something I'm very into.

A somewhat dispiriting raising of the spinnaker; took ages and ended up with some cross words, I was not involved in that thank heavens. I'm really very fond of the first mate who puts in an incredible amount of effort but has developed habit of pointing out that after five months of the course we/I should be know/be able to do such and such a thing. It's always a bit of a sucker punch if only because I kind of agree with him – so much of this course has become about finishing and not just walking away from it all and letting myself off the hook again. To fail every last exam, no matter what. It's good to have an ambition.

I'm having one of those phases when I can't stand sailing, not exactly what I was planning when I started the course I will admit. However when I look at what I want from sailing (basically relaxation and fun) and what the course is intended to be (six months of hardcore training with an emphasis on working commercially afterwards) I guess that there is somewhat of a discrepancy. Am I going to end up putting myself off what could have been a nice chilled out hobby? I hope not, anyway, as I keep reminding myself, I don't think I'm going to be able to get much of a perspective on the course until it's over.

Perhaps one question I should ask myself is where would I be had I not done the course? Last year I referenced the novel Candid in that of all the terrible things which might happen the worst would be to stay here and do nothing. Were things really going wrong for me or was I just not coping with my feelings? Well I've certainly pushed my comfort zone and I hope I've grown as a person – it's what I wanted.

Tuesday 19^th May 09

I was roused from my bunk at 4:00 am this morning, not in itself unusual since we are doing watches but unexpected since I was not due on until 6:00. “The mainsail has torn, you are needed on deck.” Just the way to wake up. I joined the exodus of gortex clad bodies heading for the cockpit. After a suitable quantity of dramatics we managed to get the main tied to the beam and raised the staysail. I must admit that I'm getting fed up with being told that I or we as a group should be better after five months of training. After all this I had the delightful experience of taking the heads (sea toilet) apart since they were blocked. I was about an hour later to discover that it was because somebody had tried to flush a wet wipe and yes, this job is quite as repulsive as it sounds.

Tuesday 19^th of May 09 11:55

This whole getting there tomorrow thing is taking forever – at least it seems to be. On the plus side, however, it seems as if we we'll get back early enough that that we well, after the boat has been cleaned and stripped, have Saturday off.

I can go see my daughter. That is a thought almost too wonderful to think about right now – but of course I am thinking about it pretty much all the time.

The comforts of home which I so took for granted are starting to seem like the most incredible wonderland of luxury right about now. Internet, a bed that doesn't make my back ache, being able to get away on my own, going for a walk, having a glass of beer – the list goes on.

Everybody is quite as exhausted and anxious to get home as I am so I am trying to not let it get to me but when I keep getting told I should know such and such or be able to do something after five months of training it is really does hit home. I just want to get on with the course, fail the exams and get it finished.

I did threaten to attend to the question of how I'm different now than I would have been had I stayed in my previous situation. I was, after all, quite comfortable. My job had moments of driving me around the bedn of course but as jobs go it was a good one and provided me with an unsual degree of freedom. It was simply not me though. The thing which moved me the most to head off into the blue yonder was the idea of what I would be like after twenty years doing something which did not really fullfil me any longer. Of course I was also running way from the pain of my collapsed marriage. Had I stayed i would have got to see Rosa and Jason pretty much every week of course. Indeed I had hoped I would have rather more time off during this course in which i could do exactly that. R will be six on the day of my Yachmaster exam, what lousy timing; I could have bunked off pretty much any other day, even if it meant failing a module.

Wednesday 20^th May 09

Nearly back now, in fact if visibility were better we might even be able to see the coast of England. My morning watch was very quiet but I have to say that I'm feeling really under confident about my sailing , which after five months full time is really quite surprising. Apart from my own dull headedness I think a part of it stems from the emphasis on getting lots of miles for the log book so will will be able to sit the exams. I've spent hour upon hour crossing the channel but hardly any time by comparison practicing sailing maneuvers in close quarters. It's not helping that I'm being told every day that I should be better after five months. I'm pleased that we are almost home but my nerves are shot to hell and I don't feel capable of commanding a canoe right now, far less a sailing yacht.

Quick Update

2009-04-29T21:36:00.005+01:00

After my mini tantrum I returned to UKSA feeling much better and went on to have one of the best sea phases so far. Quite as good as the first one in fact (which was a huge relief as you might imagine). In line with our recent sailing the week was spent traversing the English channel, although on this occasion we visited St Peter's Port in the Channel Islands rather than France, and the last few days were spent doing skills and drills in the Solent.

I've really not had enough time to practise some of the skills I could be asked to demonstrate in the exam, somewhat inevitably our sailing has been rather focused on building up the required number of miles for Yachmaster. I feel that I could really do with spending a week on controlling the yacht under sail at close quarters for example... Indeed I've never left a mooring under sail yet - so I've got a big list of things to sort out during my yachtmaster prep (both days of it). I'm hoping I can get my remaining pilotage notes for the Solent done during my Day Skipper Motor week.

This week I've been working on an essay on what I want to do when I leave the academy - in my case it has become somewhat of an introspective analysis of why and how I want to sail and what I want to get out of it. While not writing I've been transfixed by the feeling that my brain is liquefying and in danger of dripping out of my nose; we are currently learning celestial navigation. Actually I've been looking forward to these classes and although I've been finding it a rather difficult to get my head around some of the mathematical concepts it's been incredibly interesting.

I'm off for the ocean passage on Albatross on Saturday, during which I will be expected to use my new ability with a sextant to the full and build up a portfolio of evidence for my ocean oral exam on the 14th of June. After we get back to England towards the end of May the course really is in it's last phase. A couple of modules, pre exam prep, exams and that's it. At the moment, though, I can't think much further than just getting to the end of the course - passing some of the exams would be amazing as well though!

As an aside unrelated to sailing here is a picture of Mike and I when I went to visit a few weeks ago - It seems only yesterday that we were sneaking drinks underage after school and now here we are with beards and a couple of kids each. Exam revision excepted, time flies.

Peace, Stuart.

Renewed Vigour

2009-04-19T13:30:00.002+01:00

Okay, end of tantrum. I've had a few days to myself to chill out and I'm feeling okay again. Lets get back to it.

Taking a step back and having a cup of tea

2009-04-17T09:46:00.002+01:00

Steve, the head of yachting, turned up with his conflict resolution hat on and had a good go at getting people talking. In the end Pete decided that this week he would be happiest doing his navigation and theory work and that Roland and John are going to practise stuff on the boat. On Monday we will have an instructor again so with luck we will be back to usual then.

I went to Steve that afternoon and pretty much said that I was leaving but would like to come back and do the remaining classroom stuff. He pointed out that I probably just needed a bit of time off so I've come up to Lincolnshire for a weekend and will be back at UKSA on Sunday night. I'm feeling a lot better now and will, no doubt, be feeling much easier with things when we set sail on Monday.

Fingers crossed, Stuart.

Interesting Times

2009-04-16T07:09:00.007+01:00

I have been silent a long time, as has been pointed out by several people (yes thank you Mr Hamond) here it is at long last...

It is rather hard to imagine that I left off my narrative back when we were doing firefighting; how time flies when one is having fun? Mmmm let me come back to that one in a moment.

My next sea phase was hard work in it's way; near the beginning I was vowing that if I ever got off the boat I would never set foot in a dingy again but sea sickness passes given time and there were some high moments as well. There has been a lot of emphasis on making up the miles for our log books so we can meet the RYA requirements however and, to be honest, it's not the most useful thing to do in terms of learning, especially since, for me at least, I need to practice my sailing skills not do lots of miles (besides which getting another qualification for the portfolio is low on the agenda - I just want to learn to sail and have fun damn it!)

Anyways... After that I had my birthday (thank you for the lovely cards and mustaches everybody) and we had a delightful fortnight of 'making and doing' including such fun stuff as splicing and whipping. The whipping was my favourite part (just because I got older doesn't mean I have to forgo childish innuendos). We also studied water systems, rigging and spent four days working with fiberglass. The last basically consisted of constructing boxes, driving a car over them to see how strong they were, knocking a few holes in them with a hammer and then repairing them. We also managed to acquire our Powerboat level 2 qualification after which I skived off our final weekend of self study and had the most wonderful time visiting Mike, Dianna and their kids. It was great fun to get away from school and forget about studying for a night.

Now we are into our week of Self Skippering - which is to say we get to take the boat out on our own with no instructor to oversee things. To be honest I had been rather apprehensive about this; not so much because I doubted our ability to cope but because there have been some tensions in our group and I had wondered if it might all turn into a real life version of reality TV. Well it did, quite dramatically actually. Yesterday two of us fell out so badly that we had to turn around and come home and my attempts to make everybody have a nice group hug and make up were to no avail.

There is another thing which is troubling me, however, while I was on Whirlwind I think it would an understatement to say that I did not enjoy myself; in fact I loathed every moment of it. Now those two weeks on Whirlwind are supposed to be the forerunner of three weeks on Albatross during which we cross Biscay... Shall we just say I am not looking forward to that?

What am I going to do then? If I would, quite frankly, rather slit my wrists than get on Albatross for three weeks and, once again if I am candid, I would rather not be doing this sea phase with everybody hating each other that is five weeks, the majority of the rest of the course... The motor sailing conversion week was always something which I was not bothered about simply because I just don't see the point of motor boats. There are three things which I really have been looking forward to though though: The engineering modual, the week of ocean theory (I like meteorolgy and I would love to learn how to use a sextant) and the final week of satellite systems.

Right at the moment I feel as if I'd like to take some time to go and chill for a while and then just do the moduals I want, but I don't feel as if this is the best day to make a decision like that. Oh well... I understand that the head of yaching would like to have a chat with us about yesterday at 9:00. Perhaps it will be very touchy feely and everybody will cry and make up? Possibly...

Fire Fighting

2009-03-05T20:22:00.000Z

"Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub"

Trumpton

One of the pieces of paper which my current course of study provides me with is STCW 95 which is a requirement for anybody who wishes to work on larger ships and consists of first aid, fire fighting, personal responsibility and sea survival. As a result I spent the latter part of last week learning about fire fighting. Exactly how all this will fit into my professed plan to eventually get a small yacht and go cruising round the Mediterranean remains to be seen but at least I will know which extinguisher to use should my Crepe Suzette go spectacularly wrong.

Everybody Lined Up To Have Their Pictures Taken In Front Of The Fire Engine...

Wednesday consisted of an initial day in the classroom learning about different types of fires (Crepe Suzette was not mentioned specifically). The second day's training was held at the local fire station and was, initially, spent taking turns to put out small blazes with the various appropriate extinguishers after which the instructors blew up an aerosol canister by leaving it in a fire before demonstrating the effects of pouring a small cup of water into a chip pan fire - the effect being a huge column of flame and everybody saying "Ooohh!" and "Ahhh!" from a suitable distance away. I can't help thinking that it would have been a good idea to take some marshmallows and toasting forks but, alas, I forgot to bring mine from home.

Using The Extinguishers

After lunch we were kitted out with breathing apparatus and learned to carry out the various required checks before putting it all on and going to see the building into which we would be going the next day - when it would actually be on fire. Wearing the breathing apparatus was super fun for the first ten minutes (during which I felt like I was playing splinter cell or something similar) after that, however, I found the equipment increasingly oppressive and it was with the greatest relief that I got out of the frightful stuff. We then proceeded to practise carrying the hoses in teams before actually getting to spray water around. The day ended with a theory exam on what we had learned thus far.

The third and final day was the practical assessment. We were divided up into five teams of four (the adroit will fathom the number of people on the course from this information) each team having the same exercise to perform: Enter the burning building wearing respirators, follow the left hand wall to the hose coiled at the top of the stairs, take the hose down the stairs and attack the fire under the direction of the instructor prior to making our way back to the entrance taking the hose with us.

When Can I Take This Off?

Sounds simple? Well possibly... I am a bear of little brain, however, and instructions bother me.

The training building was singular in as much as it had no windows and that all the doors and fittings were constructed from steel. The walls were completely black from the soot of countless training exercises and a large bonfire had been lit on the ground floor. What with the darkness (no windows remember) and thick white smoke restricting what we could see to about two feet away. Entering from a door on the first floor we advanced in our team along the left hand wall keeping a hand on the shoulder of the person in front. We eventually reached the hose and, displaying a misplaced sense of enthusiasm, carried on down the corridor eventually all ending in a very small room about the size of a school stationary cupboard. Once we had all managed to get inside and were in the process of bumping in to each other, turning around in circles and wondering what had gone wrong the instructor closed the door behind us and waited for a little. After half a minute he opened it and pointed out that we were all dead.

After a short debrief, in which our screw up was explained and we were enjoined to buck up our ideas, we backed up to where we were supposed to be and opened the door to the stairwell. I had been assigned the position of team member number three, an illustrious position since it meant that I would be standing on the half landing managing the hose around the corner both on the way up and on the way down the stairs - the stairs which were acting as a chimney for the fire below. It was here that the actual heat really became evident. I will go so far to say that, while the experience was probably character building, it was decidedly uncomfortable. Imagine wearing scuba gear and a large coat while doing weights in a sauna in which the only light comes from four battery powered torches and you have a fairly good idea of the situation.

After a suitable quantity of slap-stick tripping over the fire hose and bumping in to each other we eventually reached the lower level and took a gauge check of our air supply before advancing to the final (and even hotter) room adjacent to the actual fire. In many ways this afforded a little bit of a break because our teacher wanted to run over the method of spraying the water and, so, opened one of the doors to provide some light and cause the fire, with this added oxygen, to be less smokey.

After this we made our way back up to the second level (with me standing in the extra hot bit half way up the stairs again) without making any further errors and, coiling the hose at the top of the stairs in what I can best describe as a heap rather than the neat role it was intended to be, made our way back along the wall and out into sunlight and fresh air. As it happened it can't have been that bad on the whole since we all passed our assessment despite our initial inclination to hide in the cupboard rather than confront the fire.

After we had been deposited back at the academy I had the weekend off! Well, for self study that is, but see my last entry for my approach to that. I therefore leaped onto a train and headed off for Linconshire to visit Jo and Ray. It was lovely to have a change of scene and chill out with family for a little.

Oh and for those of you from distant shores who will have absolutely no idea what the opening quote alluded to I offer up this youtube vid from the long gone days of my youth by way of explanation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P5wcCuNZbY

Peace, Stuart.

P.S To Jo and Ray who I said I would remember in my blog, "Hi Jo and Ray." *waves*

First Aid And Self Study

2009-03-03T21:44:00.000Z

It has been, quite rightly in my view, pointed out (thank you Mr Hammond) that my last post was somewhat below the usual literary standards to which I aspire with my self indulgent wittering, especially in respect of the manner in which I glossed over the mental and emotional depths which pretty much all of us seemed to reach at various points while on Whirlwind.

A Sunset From The Stern Of Whirlwind

I offer up apologies to my readership; all five of you, or is it six I have now? Certainly it was not a misguided attempt on my own part to keep a stiff upper lip but rather the result of not having posted for so long and then being too tired to make a proper job of it by the time I finally disembarked. Certainly I will make an effort not to let things build up again in future; it is, after all, far easier to account for the last week than for the last month. In an effort to raise the bar once again I will be including some pictures.

An Afternoon Of 'Self Study'

I have been enjoying a day off - sorry, I mean a day of 'self study' - hence my sitting around writing my blog rather than researching an essay or engaging in something equally self improving. I went on to spend a very happy afternoon in my favourite cafe reading 'Lone Traveller: One Woman, Two Wheels and the World'. The summer will see me back on my bicycle again for a while I think.

Yesterday was first aid, and the most interesting first aid course which I have participated in into the bargain. The reason for this is simply that one cannot rely on speedy medical assistance while sailing offshore and as a result have to be prepared to deliver medical care for a longer period of time. I must admit that when asked what one should do in case of a medical emergency I piped up with the suggestion to call, or instruct somebody to call, an ambulance - it's what I've been taught in every other first aid course of course... The ambulance being airlifted onto the boat in the middle of the North Sea became a recurring theme for the rest of the day.

Me In First Aid Class

As a result of the potential lack of trained medical help we covered such topics as setting broken bones and setting up saline drips. Our teacher for the afternoon had a very wry sense of humour and it was only at the very last moment of demonstrating the latter procedure that he did not *actually* stick the sharp in my arm. It certainly kept us awake and paying attention - especially me.

If there is anything that I am finding a little difficult it is being part of what is very definitely an 'institution'. A large part of the work of the academy is with young people and that feeling of being at school seems to carry on over into the adult side of things a little. Perhaps this is partially facilitated by the very definite (and quite necessary) power structure on a boat - the skipper is in charge, end of story. Or then maybe it is because the academy itself is so large? Perhaps it is odd that I should have disliked school so much and then have chosen to come and train in the closest thing I might have found to it as an adult, but then I can't say I'm not getting the training which I wanted out of this and I am feeling very positive about things generally so no worries.

The rest of the week is firefighting - sounds like fun. I'll let you know how it goes.

Stuart.

Sea Phase The Second.

2009-02-28T19:22:00.000Z

"And I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair,
with a love so vast and so shattered it will reach you everywhere."

Leonard Cohen

I have found the latter part of February to be a pretty tough couple of weeks. As well as experiencing a personal drama which I shall not bring to my online discourse it has been a change from the very relaxed and chilled out style of sailing of the last sea phase, a matter of clocking up lots of miles and drilling our basic skills while keeping night watches.

Our skipper, Mark, has recently been captain of a round the world race so is very much on the next level of sailing ability and set us all very high standards. On the first day he made the assessment that our basic skills, especially around winches, were not up to scratch and that we were not up to the task of getting somebody back in the boat in the event of an MOB (man overboard). As a result we spent the majority of the first week of the phase training all day and then doing night watches.

The yacht we have been sailing is an Open 60 called 'Whirlwind'. At 65 feet long and made of steel she is far larger than anything I have sailed before. I was part of a crew of ten plus the the mate and skipper (both of who were called Mark, which was twice as easy to remember but also twice as confusing). Whirlwind is a nice boat I am happy to say but I prefer the smaller yachts myself. The forces going though the winches were scary even on Outreach but on Whirlwind it is best not to think about how many tons are at the end of the rope; just don't let your hand get pulled into a winch! Also tasks like flaking sails need to be coordinated between lots of people because of the amount of canvas being managed, it is just a lot of additional effort to communicate and synchronise things within a larger team and it can get quite frustrating if things are not going smoothly. Of course I have always felt more comfortable working on my own or with just a few other people so perhaps this is an aspect of myself I could do with delveloping.

During the first three or four days or so I did not get a shower (showers for 12 people are the preserve of marina's or mega yachts) and what with the fact that I had forgotten my new t-shirts and had only two clean one's to make the last the fortnight I was a little distressed as to the way I would be smelling by the end of our term afloat. I need not have worried though, when I came to put on my unwashed t-shirt after my first shower in Dartmouth I gave it a worried sniff only to find that the smell of diesel overwhelmed everything else; as, indeed, it overwhelms every smell on board.

I think that pretty much all of us have found it very hard, both mentally, physically and emotionally but also very rewarding in terms of the amount we have learned. There has been so much to keep up with that I often felt that I didn't know anything or was going backwards in my sailing and I think that that experience has been fairly universal. With everybody getting frustrated and tired there have been a few cross words but nothing too dramatic. Certainly I have found myself hitting personal lows in terms of energy and ability. I woke up one morning (at 4:00 am for one of the night watches) and thought.. "Oh God... I'm not still on that fucking boat am I?"

Personal triumphs, however, have included finding that I am up to the challenge of cooking all day for twelve people when it is my turn and, for that matter, keeping going for the twelve hour shift this requires (after which I slept for twelve hours to make up for it), finding that my navigation has started to get faster at last and getting a fuel pump working when it was my day as engineer.

Probably the most dramatic event was when we were coming into a mooring around midnight in the second week and Mark (not Mark the skipper) tried to jump onto the pontoon from the bow of the boat with his mooring line. The bow is a good meter and a half above the level of the water and we were still quite a way off and, as he jumped, he slipped slightly, landing on the edge of the pontoon with his ribs before disappearing into the darkness between the pontoon and the boat. There was a splash and the sound of his life jacket inflating, followed by the shouts of the people on the bow conjoined with some moans from Mark suggesting that he was in quite considerable pain.

Very fortunately I had been standing ready with a line of my own and realized that I could probably make it across from where I was. I landed on the pontoon with a bit of a crash but on both my feet before sprinting down to where he was floating in the water. There was a brief moment of discussion between us while I tried to ascertain if he had any broken bones etc before pulling him too roughly but, on seeing that the yacht (which weighs about 40 tons) was moving closer, dragged him out any old how. Once the poor chap was safely on the pontoon I took the lines and we all got the boat moored up and called an ambulance. However though luck and a strong constitution he was fine other than than for some bruising.

There have been some wonderful moments to keep me going though the tough bits. The stars are much clearer once you get a way off shore and the sunsets and sunrises are sea can be wonderfully beautiful.

Next week is to be first aid, two days of fire fighting and sea survival. Farts on board are called deck frogs - frightfully course people these sailing types.

Peace, Stuart.

14th Feb 09

2009-02-28T17:07:00.000Z

Sorry that this was posted so late; it was written two weeks ago but I never got a chance to actually get it online till now.

Where am I going with this?

The course is great, it was certainly a good choice coming to do it; I've held learning to sail as a dream since I was young and being able to fullfil that is wonderful. I still feel very uncertain about where I am leading up to however. In some ways it feels that I've been cut free from any direction and that now every fresh idea of what to do in the future that enters my head elicits a sudden "Yes!' I will do that!" which lasts for about three days. After a while it's kind of tiring...

I think about my daughter all the time, sometimes talking to her on the phone is unbelievably painful because she misses me frightfully as well and is always asking me to come home. I would in a moment if it were possible but, since it's not, I guess I need to work out what I actually want to do over the years to come. Could I have carried on as I was? No. Treading water with my life so I could see her every week for a few hours; or at least it felt like that was what I was doing. I hope that she will forgive me.

With Jason I only have to worry about missing him myself, since he doesn't seem to recognise me anyhow because of his disabilities, but with Rosa it is like my hand has been cut off and is still alive somewhere waiting for me.

I keep reminding myself to return to the perspective of being here now rather than dwelling on the past or the future but the fact is that I am so unsure of what I actually want the plans refuse to stay still and, as soon as I make one, I change my mind and start making another. Perhaps in the end I will become so exhausted by the process that my hungry ghost mind will give up and I shall find a bit of peace. I keep trying to make a plan, or at least a narrative, to fit around the uncertainty which returns me, rather neatly, to my original question of where I am going.

What? Maudlin you say? Well possibly...

My studies continue well. I passed the yachmaster theory exams and my licence for long range and medium range radio came though the post (it looks most frightfully grand, rather like and oversized UK passport) and the second week of Feb was spent mostly in virtual reality, learning how to use radar and working on our chart work. I also studied the rules for avoiding collisions at sea until I thought I would vomit.

I am going back to Bath to visit on Friday night and am desperately excited about seeing the kids again. Sunday we have class (weekends are considered a dangerous, work shy modern affection here) and on Sunday I will be heading out on a Challenge 60 yacht for a fortnight. I'm sure a few nautical shenanigans and I will be back to my 'Pontoons And Youth' style of blogging. Until then it's Leonard Cohen and whiskey till the tide changes.

Chef is a brilliant source of one liners. Our instructor of the second week was an ex royal navy sailor who knows the collisions at sea regulations chapter and verse by word (I am not kidding, it's frightfully impressive) posed the hypothetical question , as a hypothetical question that, were he to have a thousand pounds to spend on a yacht, would Chef invest in a GPS or a Radar and why? Chef considered deeply for a moment. "Neither.." he said, "I'd buy a new cooker for the galley. If I'm going to be lost I want to have something nice to eat."

Peace, Stuart.

The End Of Sea Phase The First

2009-02-07T12:34:00.000Z

In which I am hoisted aloft and we visit Poole. A coastal passage is made in fog, the steering system fails in the needles channel and our boom is separated once more from it's restraining sheet. The demise of the wanger and a moral tale of caution on the use of magic string. Finally I make a spirited attempt to sink the yacht.

I had planned a somewhat more reflective post after the whimsical dramaticism of my last offering. However, since our second week afloat provided a few further moments of excitement, and as I am rather enjoying the new style I will continue in kind despite the fact that my blog seems to currently aspire to being a young pretender to Typhoons and Youth by Joseph Conrad. Rather over cooking going on a Day Skipper Practical perhaps? Pontoons and a Cup Of Tea might be more fitting.

Also I notice that these posts are getting rather long - try not to get used to it, I'm sure I'll never keep it up.

Ever since helping to pull Chef up the mast to effect repairs on the radar reflector I had been ill at ease, knowing as I did that there was a good chance that it would also be required of me at some point. Okay, I must admit that I was actually quite agitated since I am generally rather adverse to heights. After a few days of this I decided that it was something that I needed to get over and, since I knew the mast needed silicon sprayed into the mainsail track, I asked Paul if I might do it. It was as a result that I found myself being fitted into the bowson's chair and wondering if I would become a UKSA legend by means of being 'the student who threw up when he went up the mast' forever after.

Rather to my delight, however, far from being sick I found that, once I was up, I quite enjoyed the view and was able to smile and wave at people with cameras on the deck below. I would not claim that I felt secure or comfortable in any measure but doing it was far better than being worried about it. I recently read a book about single handed sailing in which the topic of fear is discussed in the marvelous chapter 'Freud Was Not A Sailor'. It made me smile and think of my good friend Duffy who always enjoins me to feel the fear and do it anyway; crazy Bene Gesserit that she is.

"Fear is probably the single-handers' greatest hazard. It can lie in wait to ambush him at the times when he might least welcome it. But fear is only Nature's way of overcoming man's inherent intelligence. Nature is wily when she wants to be, and the way to deal with fear is to remember that it interferes with man's place in the scheme of things as a logical, crafty, scheming, claculating son of a bitch who won't let Nature take his mind over. Fear is a nuisance; it clogs up the brain, and it doesn't do a thing for the boat, not for the successful conclusion of the passage. It belongs with all the other vices that Nature seems to have thrust on us to prevent our reaching the infinity, which is our right and which we are going to reach anyway, unless we let fear foul up the winch-sheets. Concern is another thing altogether. That is facing up to the reality of a given situation."

Tristan Jones from 'One Hand For Yourself, One For The Ship'

The following day saw us setting out for Poole harbour, the largest natural harbour in Europe according to its tourist information centre and the first time we had sailed Outreach II, our Sweden 39, outside the Solent. Once one leaves the needles channel the waves take on a quite different character since they have had a significant fetch over which to gather size and momentum. I'm starting to get the idea of a seascape now; the waves really do form different patterns and have different characteristics depending on what the tide is doing and the effect of depth and wind. Sailing back the next day we had a fog and could see nothing other than waves and mist once more than a little way off shore. As a result when I took the helm I became completely confused for the first thirty seconds having nothing by which I might orientate myself in the usual way other than the compass and managed to turn the boat though about 90 degrees without meaning to. After a little while however I got the hang of steering a course on the basis of the angle of the boat to the direction of the waves while occasionally glancing at the compass to check that we were still on course.

I like helming the boat. Thus far it has been either exciting or relaxing but never boring, although I'm sure that will come given the number of miles we are supposed to cover in order to be eligible for Yachtmaster Ocean, the main qualification that this course is designed to give me. On the way back from Poole, however, the steering stopped working altogether. At the time we were all fully engaged in the pilotage since The Needles can be somewhat tricky and the fog had not let up much. There is a very strong tide here requiring that one go though at specific times when the water is slack. Also there are a couple of sand bars on which one most certainly does not wish to run aground. "Skip.. can you take the wheel a moment? It doesn't feel right..." Paul nods and takes the wheel from me for a moment and then mutters "I don't believe it..." under his breath and shakes his head. "Right get out the emergency tiller!" It was not actually very dramatic in the end but it did mean that we had to head straight into Yarmouth to try and fix it; but since we all got to have a go at steering Outreach with the emergency steering system it was a good learning experience.

I have a splendid picture on my mobile phone of John's face, covered in grease, looking out of the starboard lazarette while Paul reads from the steering system owner's manual. As soon as I have overcome the technical problems inherent in linking my cell phone to a computer without installing any additional software I will have to post it. John is rather good with mechanical things and, between him and Paul, the steering was repaired. Never the less we had to head back to UKSA the following day so that the professionals could have a proper look at it.

The following afternoon, once the steering had been given the all clear, we set out with the intention of crossing the Solent and sailing up the river Hamble despite the fact that it was, once again, a little rough.

"Turn to Port!" There is, occasionally, an unfortunate moment of confusion liable to occur in the best of us at moments of stress, especially while learning and the poor chap on helm turned to starbord. "PORT!!!" Paul shouted urgently; he sounds a little tense, it must be a hard job being skipper for students week after week, only the next day I made a good attempt at putting a hole in the side of the hull, but I digress.

An accidental gybe, once it begins, happens far to quickly to do anything about - other than to duck if one realises what is going to happen. The experience, however, seemed to take place in slow motion. The sail starts to flap and there is a moment of stillness and inevitability before the wind fills the other side of the sail and the entire structure crashes to the opposite side of the boat with overwhelming force. A force which, in our case, separated the mainsail from it's restraining lashing of magic blue string which had been used to replace the shackle when it broke the week before ("It's as strong as steel!") as if t'wer the washing line it resembled.

The difference between the this and the first time the mainsheet came free, however, is that we are currently in 32 knots of wind.

There is a certain familiarity which engenders confidence to the situation however. We have already gone forward to fix things in a blow stronger than this, as I chronicled in my previous post, and the main has broken loose before as well so nothing new there either. Paul takes the wheel and directs us hither and thither while turning 'Outreach' directly into the wind to bring the boom within grasping distance. He starts the engine and, after a brief pause, offers up an expletive which currently escapes me; there is no water coming out of the exhaust pipe. In the case of a boat's exhaust this means that the cooling system is not doing what it is supposed to and that it will overheat in no short order.

Retrospectively this is one of the biggest lesson's of that trip for me. Even in nasty conditions and with inexperienced crew to look after Paul still remembered to do his starting the engine checks which included looking to see that the exhaust was working properly. "I need this done quickly guys. We have to get the main stowed and the headsail out because we can't keep the engine on long!" We all scramble forward with sail ties.

It's an odd thing, at least it has seemed so to me, that changing the direction of the boat can alter the experience of being in the yacht so dramatically. There is a saying "Downwind the boat will break first, upwind you will." Now we are pointing bow into the waves instead of running before them and the yacht pitches around wildly whilst we struggle to tie up the sail and find some means of getting the boom under control so we can turn onto a kinder course. There is a crack, or perhaps a bang, and Chef yells "The wanger's broken!" He points at the metal rod attached to the underside of the boom. It's actually called a vang but I can't remember what it is called either and am, frankly, unconcerned with terminology at this point. However I think I will always, from now on, think of it as a wanger.

I tie a bowline around the end of the boom while John and Chef hold it steady and eventually manage to secure it to the rails. "Is there any water coming out of the exhaust now!?" I look out over the side and shout back to Paul "Yes!". It appears that we can use the engine to get into Hamble after all. Hamble is, I should mention, the location of the headquarters of the Royal Yachting Association so it would probably be a good idea to arrive looking especially smart and professional. Sadly our mainsail looks a shocking state as we come in - especially since I've used some of the reefing lines to help tie her onto the boat. It's not a situation that Paul is going to countenance for long though and, pretty much as soon as we are moored in the marina and certainly before the kettle has boiled, the whole mess has to be untied, properly flaked and made to look presentable.

Getting back the following day is quite lacking in drama (until the very end) although some of the waves are comparatively large, giving me a chance to get a feeling for how to bring the bow of the boat up into a large wave so that we do not take it on the beam which causes the boat to keel over. With a large breaking ocean wave doing that this could actually knock down the yacht but, of course, in the Solent that is somewhat of a remote possibility. Out in the channel it's viable though, you might like to skip ahead to the video link of Outreach II being knocked over, luckily that was not while we were sailing her!

Thought the duration of our trip Paul has been maintaining that sailing is all about making decisions. It can be very hard or impossible to compensate for a wrong decision with skill after the decision has been taken. My wrong decision was about how to approach the jetty after forgetting which way the tide was running. As I came up on my approach the stern of the boat started to be pushed over to starboard leaving us at a 45 degree angle to where I wanted to be and I realised that the side of the yacht was headed directly for the corner of the pontoon.

There is nothing to be done in this situation - all the decisions have already been made and, in case you are wandering, pushing the boat away from the danger with a foot is impossible since it weighs about 14 tons. The sense of impending dread as the proverbial unstoppable force approaches the immovable object is really quite horrible but is, probably, not as bad as the moment of impact.

Skip was very understanding however, of course by this time nothing we did could have been a surprise to him, and waved aside my apologies; apparently this is not by any means an unknown event when people are training (note to self - never purchase a boat used as a training vessel) and I spent the next ten minutes removing most of the marks from the hull with my tooth paste and a dish scourer. The log entry reads:

"A tricky park, involved hull polishing."

I thought I would look up a picture of a Sweden 39 and actually found some video footage on youtube of what seems to be the very vessel I was on, I should imagine it was posted by another UKSA student. Unless there are two identical yacht's called Outreach II sailing around the South of England... Unfortunately she gets a bit of a tough time at the end of the vid. It's all very exciting of course but I rather hope that nothing as dramatic happens to me!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk1o6MgfzrE

Stuart.

Sea Phase The First.

2009-01-25T22:28:00.000Z

In which an inventory is taken and our hero rows across a river at night. A great many fine meals are served and a force nine gale is weathered. The crew of 'Inspiration' are bid "Good morning" by a helicopter's winch man and, finally, a sunset is sailed into.

I'm lying face down spreadeagled on the foredeck with my chin pressed against the teak trying to tie a bowline so we can get the storm jib working again. Roland is lying on top of the sail to stop it blowing away while I try and force the line to make the knot I want; unfortunately the boat is pitching around wildly under me and, although I can tie a bowline with my eyes shut in my bedroom at home, all I can do just now is think of the instructional video describing how falling overboard means we will get hypothermia and die in fifteen to twenty minutes.

Hold on a moment, I'm getting ahead of myself in true Woodhousian manner and better back up a little.

I am currently about half way though my first two week sea phase. This pretty much follows the Royal Yachting Association Competent Crew and Day Skipper practical course syllabus; the aim being that we can be though comp crew and have an appreciable part of the Day Skip practical singed off by the time we finish.

Our first day and second morning were entirely taken up with an inventory of the yacht, checking everything was present, undamaged and in date as well as as carrying out any maintenance which we could reasonably attempt. This latter task included disassembling, cleaning, greasing and resembling a winch; a job by which I felt rather intimidated, given that my mechanical aptitude tends towards the marginal at best. However I became much more confident once I realised that it was not, actually, a dissimilar process to cleaning and reassembling the mechanisms of my bicycle, although on an appreciably more robust scale.

On the Tuesday, however, we were able to finally set off up the river under power and give everybody a go at carrying out some basic maneuvering of the yacht under power and the evening was spent on a pontoon near Holly Hill Inn, a bar obviously accustomed to yachties; they have their own jetty. The journey to which occasioning one of my favourite moments of the course so far.

We have been having some rotten weather for the last week, low pressure systems, cold fronts, gale warnings and all that jazz after the first very cold but comparatively still fortnight. Some of the evenings, however, have been lovely; very still and calm with clear skies. Rowing the dingy across the river to the pub and back was really fantastic; when the wind had died and the stars came out the water took on the appearance of black syrup or possibly oil with very long slow ripples from my paddle moving the reflection of the stars.

The next day saw us sail across the Solent to Portsmouth before taking up a berth in Haslar Marina in time to shelter from the high winds which were going to characterise things for the next few days. Despite the worsening weather our spirits were buoyed up by the fact that, Roland, one of the crew of which I am a part, is a professional chef. As a result we have been dining like kings every night rather than living on Pot Noodle and tins of stew like some of the other crews seem to. Sadly we lost one of our number who had to make a sudden departure to visit a sick family member - a very nice Dutch gentleman called Pete. I hope he will be rejoining us. Already a very experienced sailor he is looking to teach in the future and I've had the opportunity to learn a great deal about sailing from him.

During our first day out of Haslar one of the shackles securing the main sheet broke, occasioning some considerable excitement as the rope with attached shackle went whizzing over our heads as the boom swung free. As a result when it came time to venture back across the Solent the next day in what was forecast to be a force 8 gale we had no mainsail and would be using a storm jib in combination with the motor.

As it happened it was force nine; my first experience of an actual storm while on a yacht. I should explain, perhaps, that the Solent is a really quite sheltered stretch of sea between mainland England and the Isle of Wight so it was not hardly comparable to being on the ocean during bad weather; the waves being nothing like the size one might expect if they have any significant distance in order to grow.

Despite this the wind was pretty blowy being towards the upper 40's when we started and gusting up to 56 knots later on, also for the first part of the trip we had what is known as 'wind over tide', which is to say that that wind was going in the opposite direction to that of the tide resulting in a rougher sea. It was all very much within the capabilities of our skipper, Paul, to steer us though, however, despite the fact that we had to cope with a few unexpected things happening.

The first of these was that one of the bowlines on the storm jib came free. I think I might have tied that one... but I'm not sure. Anyway it meant that there was a brief period of excitement with the boat pitching around and the jib flapping around freely and I had to clip on and make my way forward along the deck to put a new knot in the sheet, which brings us back to where I started; lying on the foredeck with waves breaking over my head.

I will go so far as to say that I was a little anxious... Okay I was quite frightened if I'm honest but there was nothing for it but to make my way along the deck on my knees, occasionally whimpering, and reattach the sheet. After what seemed like ages I got back to the cockpit and we got the jib up and working again. The movement of the boat became more predictable and I was able to start thinking about things such as looking down as the waves hit so I got the bucket of salt water on the hood of my jacket rather than in the face.

Unfortunately every time we tacked I managed to get something called a riding turn, a horrid situation in which the sheet one is working with jams in the winch, which basically messed up every tack we did. After a while Paul realised that this was happening because I had routed the sheet for the storm jib over the running back stay on my return from the bow rather than under it. (gosh don't I know a lot of technical names for string now?).

After I set up the line properly there was a period of relative calm, the tacks working well now that the sheet was going onto the winch at the correct angle. Unfortunately, soon after that, the navigation system was accidentally turned off while checking our position on the GPS and nobody below was able to work out how to turn it on again. As a result all the useful information such as wind speed and depth of water vanished from the the cockpit display. After shouting instructions on how to get the system back online though the companion way for a few minutes Paul told me to take the wheel so he could go below.

Taking the helm in 50 plus knots of wind was actually just as cool as the still paddle across the river of a few nights previously, but a whole lot more scary... I was only in the hot seat for a few minutes however but it was still pretty amazing. After this things went really very well. Despite all getting cold, wet and tired there were no more unexpected misfortunes and I found that, thank goodness, I'm not going to be battling with sea sickness every time the waves get rough.

After a while we spotted that, off to our port side, our sister UKSA yacht 'Inspiration' had a helicopter flying over them and a winch man was being lowered. There was a certain amount of anxiety as to one of the other crew members had been hurt and needed an airlift however since we had not heard a Mayday alarm on the radio we made the assumption that they must have become involved in a training exercise. When we later met up it emerged that we had, indeed, been correct in our assumption. The helicopter had hovered over them, the crew of which holding out a cardboard notice of the VHF channel to listen to, and once contact had been established inquired as to the possibility of a training session.

Now the crew of inspiration are quite as new to yachting as ourselves, although they include a couple of very proficient dingy sailors. I later had a beer with Simon, whose job it had been to pull in the winch man's line and who, at the time, was having a very similar experience of hanging on for dear life as I was on our boat. Apparently the winch man was lowered precisely into the rear seat by his pilot and, looking entirely relaxed, settled back against the guard rail and said "Morning."

It's nice to know that there are people like this in the world, along with Father Christmas and James Bond perhaps.

At the end of the first week our skill level as a team seems to have come on quite a way from when we first stepped onto the boat and things, generally, seem a lot less confusing. Encouragingly all those hours in the classroom are starting to pay dividends, becoming less of an exercise in geometry and theory and more a body of information relating to practical situations;I still feel a long step away from being confident about taking charge of a yacht myself but I've got another twenty one weeks to go so there's no rush.

Now although coping with my first day of rough weather and the paddle across the lake under the stars were both very memorable my favourite part of the week was yesterday, sailing into Yarmouth on a relatively smooth sea with a fine wind while watching the sun setting into the water.

Peace, Stuart.

Nav 1 and ENG1

2009-01-13T23:04:00.000Z

Well we have got navigation one well and truly underway now and it’s going okay. In fact after then madness of fitting the radio certificate into three days it is positively relaxing in comparison. I’m very pleased that I’ve covered most of the day skipper theory material before, coastal theory builds on that so, rather than being dropped in at the deep end I’m having a comparatively chilled time of things.

Of course I’ve been learning a great deal. Our main focus has been working out ‘course to steer’ a topic that I’d not done before. It’s not dissimilar to adding vectors geometrically in essence but it requires a slightly involved process of looking up tidal speeds and directions and speed/distance tables to find out what the vectors are going to be in the first place.

The other parts of the syllabus which we have covered have been topics which I’ve done before at Bristol, although certainly things which I was very pleased to get the chance of practising again.

I’ve been on a little bit of a quest with getting my ENG1 medical certificate sorted out; basically that is the bit of paper which certifies me as fit to work on ships. Passing the certificate was not a problem, getting to the Doctor’s surgery and back now that I am a self inflicted pedestrian was the makings of a saga.

Half way though week two tomorrow and the weather has changed. It’s not sunny and cold anymore - it’s been a bit wet and cold. In spite of the fact that I can only show grey skys I'm working on getting pics from my camera onto the computers we use at the school so hopefuly my blog will be a bit more graphical again in the not too distant future.

Passed an exam and it's the weekend (with comics).

2009-01-10T10:21:00.000Z

I've noticed that it is an expensive business this yachting malarkey. I had intended to borrow some foul weather gear from the school but, arriving at the beginning of Jan, it seemed that every shop I walked past was a sailing shop with a New Year sale taking place so I'm now the owner of my own set of offshore foul weather gear as well as the boots and shoes I knew I would have to get anyhow.

My favourite American writer, Mr Thoreau, cautions against activities which requires one to get new clothes but, on the basis that I am planning to do this a lot, I'm maintaining that it is an investment rather than an extravagance. Pretty much anything can be justified like this until one can't pay the gas bill. I managed to scrape a pass in my LW/MW radio on Friday so that's the first of the new bits of paper for my CV folder. I actually found it a very interesting course but it was quite intensive. Apparently the first navigation module is fairly demanding as well so it doesn't look as if the pace will slacken much next week other than that there not being an exam to worry about before next weekend.

This weekend is being cheered by the fact that I joined the local library and discovered that it holds quite a collection of Graphic Novels. As a result I've got four of Hellblazer to read in addition to a Terry Pratchet novel. Lectures, homework and John Constantine comics - makes me feel as if I'm back in Bangor again.

Getting Started.

2009-01-07T12:42:00.000Z

I'm on day two of my course now, we're studying long range radio this week, and with the first of many exams on Friday.

This really does seem to be a fantastic training program so far; very intense though although our teacher for this modual is doing a very good job of making the material accessible. Nothing like, for example, university where I recall having four hours or so of lectures a day and the rest off for reading, essay writing and drinking. This is lectures all day and then work in the evening to get ready for the next class.

Of course I expected to be working pretty much flat out, indeed I would never have paid to come were that not the case.

The school is very much geared towards placing people in a job in the yachting industry and, as a result, there is quite an emphasis on time keeping and personal presentation from the outset - both of these qualities being essential for prospective crew. Being late for a lecture, or indeed anything, is anathema, I should think that giving in a piece of homework late probably means beheading.

Living accommodations are quite spartan but clean and, on the basis of the last couple of days, it looks like a great many of my evenings are going to be spent working late in the classrooms in order to make it though the various exams so I'm unlikely to be spending much time in my room other than to sleep anyhow.

The coffee is frightful (instant, God save us) and I miss being able to have a properly hot shower. The food is pretty good though and I'm looking forward to actually being able to get out on a yacht, the course I'm on is all theory for the first two weeks.

Peace, Stuart.

Moving house and getting ready for the new year.

2009-01-05T17:32:00.000Z

2/1/09

Well, with quite a bit of last minute help from my brother, I managed to get my kit moved out of the flat and into my mother and father's respective houses.

It was the first time I've been away from Mads, Rosa and Jason at Christmas and I went through a few days of feeling somewhat emotional however I certainly had enough to do to take my mind of things as I've been very busy moving into my new rooms here at my dad's. Jo and Ray have been incredibly supportive and accommodating

It's been super to come spend the holiday period with Jo and Ray up in Lincolshire and now I'm in the process of packing my bags to head off to school on Saturday morning.
A new year and a new direction. It's exciting for sure so fingers crossed that it all works out.

Alone once more. London and a weekend away.

2008-12-10T16:55:00.000Z

I had managed to save a day trip to the capital till near the end of Donna's visit and, after using a couple of sites to look for tickets, I managed to find some cheap fairs from Chippenham. Train travel is not quite as common in the US in general as it is for us in the UK, in large part because the population is so dispersed and the distances so large long distance transport has hinged around driving and flying.

Donna At The Train Station

Of course many of the major cities have tram/subway systems but Donna had managed to survive her entire life without setting foot on a train until we decided that cycling all the way home from Bristol was a bad idea back in October.

Tower Bridge From Inside The Tower Of London

Perhaps it is my imagination but the UK train system seems far more likely to run on time than in the days of my youth when the question was not if a train would be late but by how much it would be late. As a result we arrived in London on time and got the tube to Tower Bridge to see the Tower of London. The Tower was the last of our castles and although good still did not dislodge Chichester from its place at the top of Donna's castle league table.

The Houses Of Parliament

The tower is, however, both very large and replete with exhibitions so by three o'clock we had been there for nearly four hours and still had two audio tours to go. Forgoing the final history lessons we got the tube to Westminster and walked from the Houses of Parliament past the Cenotaph and up to Nelson's Column taking pictures as we went happily engaging in the full tourist experience.

At one point I made a concerted attempt to get myself run over by trying to cross a road just as the lights turned and the traffic set off. After a sit down in Trafalgar Square we wandered up to Soho and had some supper. After a full day of tourism we were quite exhausted even before we got on the homeward bound train from Paddington.

Looking Towards Big Ben And The Houses Of Parliament From Trafalgar Square

After London I drove Donna up to Linconshire for a farewell weekend of freeloading from my father and stepmother while also taking the opportunity to deliver another car load of my belongings. Joanna's cooking is better than mine so I always seem to put on a few pounds when I visit and the reduction in fuel prices has made the whole trip a little more affordable. I must say that the food was even better than the last time (thank you Jo and Ray) and now that I'm in post weekend mode I feel as if I am going to need a new wardrobe of larger trousers.

We visited Westbury White Horse on Tuesday and at 6:00 AM on Wednesday Donna departed for her native land. I am feeling rather emotional; I don't think I fully appreciated until now how much I had got used to sharing my day to day existence with another person and the flat feels very empty. I have to say what a special and lovely person she is. She became my sister in Second Life a few years ago (an odd phenomena Second Life family but I'll blog about it another time) and, perhaps in part because I've not got a biological sister, that relationship has been very special to me.

Westbury White Horse

I'm feeling shaken by her departure if I'm honest but I need to get into packing up the house so it is ready for Rosa coming over tomorrow and have a go at my navigation homework. I am aware of a definite inclination for sitting in front of the PC all day and continuing to write and maybe logging into Second Life. I think I really need to get on and get out though... I'll lever myself out to the swimming pool for the late session tonight.

Take care sis, we will see each other again soon. Lots of love.

Can't Get Enough Castles

2008-11-30T21:05:00.000Z

Donna must be getting fed up with castles by now. The previous day I had dragged the poor girl out for a long walk into Bath and back and I was faintly surprised that she seemed quite amenable to the prospect of trapsing around another Welsh ruin. I took her and Rosa out to Caerphilly for the day, a slightly longer drive than Chepstow from Bath but still worth while. I thought it was actually the more spectacular but Donna's preference on review was for Chepstow. Rosa was quite interested but lost interest by the time we got to the inner keep so we headed back.

Caerphilly Castle

There were simply loads of birds in the castle moat as we walked up from the car park following a short stretch of National Cycle Route number 4.

The Castle Gate

I managed to keep the costs down by making sandwiches and buying a thermos flask in advance. Since the remarkably warm winter weather seemed to have deserted us the hot chocolate was very welcome by the time we got back to the car.

The Birds Were Obviously Used To Being Fed

Days Out And A Castle

2008-11-25T02:42:00.000Z

Before we came back from Lincolnshire Donna, Ray, Jo and I went to see the grey seals at Donna Knook. It somehow seemed a quintessentially British day out. The weather was somewhat cold and windy and we sat on the sand dunes drinking tomato soup from Dad's thermos flask while eating sandwiches beneath the overcast sky. The seals were remarkably inured to both to the human audience a few meters away on one side and the RAF practising bombing runs on the other. Donna, who loves animals, was full of interesting information about the seals and Jo and Ray were able to provide a commentary on what the planes were up to. The barking of the seals and the doppler effect of the jet engines was gently soporific. All in all a very enjoyable way to spend the afternoon.

A Tower At Chepstow Castle

We returned to Bath and I finally made good on my promise to take Donna to see a proper castle. We had seen Nottingham Castle of course but, although it was very nice, it was not really the sort of ozymandian ruin I knew she had been picturing in her mind. As it happens Chepstow Castle is both close by and afforded an opportunity to go to Wales into the bargain.

Castle Interior

I had not actually been to see Chepstow before myself and was delighted to find it both quite spectacular and reasonably priced. We finished the day by heading down the road to have lunch by the ruins of Tintern Abbey, a trip down memory lane for me since Ray and I met up with Jo at Tintern two years ago when we cycled from Land's end to John-O-Groats.

Recovering From All The History

Time flies, at least retrospectively and I feel as if the decisions I made over the last few months are swiftly reaching their fulfillment. It is nearly December and then not long until Donna spreads her wings and returns to the colonies. I'm going to miss her dreadfully.

More Stairs!

I'm also aware that soon I will be back off on my travels; and this time in a more committed way than I did over the summer. After all I am handing over the keys to my flat and dumping most of my stuff on my father and step mother next month. Perhaps it is misleading to say I am off traveling, more accurately I'm going to spend Christmas with Jo and Ray before heading off to school for six months. It feels like going traveling though, perhaps because I'm ditching my job and the flat. Of course I enjoy my vagabonding aspirations so no complaints – at least not yet.

I finally got around to taking Donna's photo next to the living statue opposite Pret A Manger where we get drinks when we go into Bath.

Visiting.

2008-11-12T06:36:00.001Z

I just fixed the html which was stopping the blog working properly with Internet Explorer. An annoying glitch because it, apparently, meant that nobody could read my more serious posts and it just showed the random thoughts one, stupid internet.

This week I've taken Donna up to Linconshire to have a look at a different part of the country and to spend a week with my father and stepmother. Yesterday we took the chance to visit Nottingham and had a look at the castle before taking a tour of of the Galleries Of Justice; a sobering experience and one which reminded me that I am lucky to live in more enlightened times than those of my forebears.

We went out for lunch in a Thai restaurant and Donna thought that my interpretation of Pad Thai was better than the one served therein. I got the recipe I use from 'How To Cook II' by Delia Smith, so well done Delia.

It's super to see Jo and Ray again. Very sweetly they are going to allow me to use the cottage attached to their house as my base for the next year between my various training courses. I won't be moving there till June but I am going to have a place to leave my stuff while I'm in the process of changing my career so that is pretty awesome.

Still lots of plans going on right now but I'm trying not to get too carried away and lose the present moment.

Random thoughts...

2008-11-04T13:53:00.000Z

For some extraordinary reason (nascent dipsomania perhaps) I recall that when I returned from the US I became fixated for a few days on how – were I to find myself unable to legally buy alcohol – I might make the stuff in secret.

I attribute this anxiety to the fact that in the US (at least in some states) one is made to feel frightfully anxious about buying the stuff by the local customs. Indeed on more than one occasion I found myself unable to, or anxious about, getting a drink due to not having brought my identification along - despite my lengthening beard, arthritic right hand, grey hairs and obvious need for pre middle age crisis therapy. An experience which sent my already taxed mind hurtling back to the tortured years of adolescence when my most fervent desire after getting laid was to get drunk; a desire brought on by a combination of depression, not being able to get laid (or quite often even have girls talk to me) and – I am sorry to admit – being British.

I remember that quite a lot of my early teenage years were spent at my friend Ian's house imbibing home brewed wine with a quiet enthusiasm but never getting very far at making the stuff myself. My own mother was less understanding about concocting vats of wine in the bedroom closet – almost certainly resulting from the practical matter of my propensity to expose myself to alcohol poisoning at any opportunity rather than due to American styled temperance ideas.

Experience, it would seem, tends to be universal – or at least widespread. A search of google was enough to reassure me that I was not alone in my adolescent desire for clandestine fermentation; at http://www.bogsnorkelling.com/tiggers_home_brew.htm I found the following quote.

“My fermenting bucket was a dustbin liner inserted into Granny’s Birko Boiler, with a length of ‘twist-&-tie’ garden wire to seal the brew from the elements. I kept this contraption in my bedroom and went to sleep each night intoxicated by the sickly smell of fermenting alcohol, plagued by swarms of fruit flies, which had miraculously materialised through double glazing and a locked door... Instead of homebrew being the hidden horror, it can, if prepared by someone other than a desperate adolescent teenage girl with hormone problems, become an enticing beverage worthy of praise.”

Good heavens! Where was this girl when I was young? But then she probably would not have spoken to me anyway so it is a moot point.

Searching...

2008-11-01T00:27:00.000Z

One of the nicest things is that my dear friend Donna from America has come to spend some time with me. It's been pretty amazing to have a bit of company and I'm really enjoying showing her around my corner of the United Kingdom. She has chronicled what we have been getting up to quite comprehensively on her blog so I'll not try to repeat the whole thing here but we have visited some pretty neat places: Stonehenge, Cheddar Caves and Gorge and Wookey Hole being highlights

We have done a fair bit of cycling (I made the poor girl cycle to Bristol at one point) although in the last few weeks the cold/wet weather has kept us from the bikes. As a result I've taken to swimming at the university pool and am delighted to find that it has not, thus far, done anything to set off my tendonitis

When I was in America I experienced some pretty deep feelings of missing my kids and it prompted me to ditch the cycle tour and come back early. I think I can look back with some more perspective now and say that a great deal of what I was feeling grieving the life I used to have and had not yet let go of.

In some ways I can smile now about how I caved in mentally cycling in Washington. Let me take a simile if you will. In one of the former chapters of my life I was quite a committed marital artist (how do you think I got all the injuries I whine about after all?) and I recall a couple of occasions in which a person of my acquaintance would decide to enter a competition completely unprepared. In one instance it was an MMA match and in the other an amateur boxing bout. I was able to dissuade the person in the first instance but the second... ouch. Well that's pretty much how unprepared I was emotionally to deal with being on the other side of the world away from everything that I had been trying to hold onto even though it had gone

For whatever reason when I arrived back I found that I have really had to get to grips with the fact that the life I once had is gone and can't be brought back. It's been a painful process but I won't say that it has not been transformative and it's made me question what it is that I want to do with the rest of my life. The answer... Well I won't claim that I know what it is that I want; but I am quite certain that what I'm doing right now is not it. So I've decided to take a gap year in order to find out what it is. I never took a gap year between college and university and I think I'm going to appreciate it a lot more now than I would have back then.

I've always wanted to learn to sail so I'm going to start the new year with an intensive sailing course based on the Isle of White – I've been working on my day skipper theory this term at college and already have my competent crew certificate from earlier in the year. If things go according to plan, I should have my Yachtmaster June 09. I must admit I'm really excited about doing the course.

Of course deciding that I'm going to go off to find myself has meant that I've had to burn a few bridges and make some commitments. Giving in notice on my job and flat were scary moments not to mention coming up with the sailing course fees and it would be an understatement to say that the financial climate has not been inciting a feeling of security recently... (I have had ample time to reflect on the fact that having all my savings in equities is not necessarily the best way to promote an easy night's sleep but hey-ho I'm young enough to take the long view. I'm certainly planning to develop a progressively less risky pension plan as I get older though).
After the sailing course... Well I am not sure but I'm living with a spirit of optimistic inquiry as to what I'll be getting up to next. I do have a few tentative possibilities of course. I'll need to build up experience in the marine industry after qualifying if I'm going to work in that field so some volunteer work is going to be needed, probably by way of crew on delivery passages. I'm also holding the idea of a cycle tour and there is a course in boat building which I also like the look of. It would give me a very comprehensive skill set as a carpenter as well as the boat specific stuff so I should be pretty employable by the end of it all. Those who know me well will take all of this with a pinch of (sea) salt; my capacity to spend long evenings entertaining myself with future plans only to let myself off the hook at the last moment is well known.

One of the things that bothers me is... What if I am making another mistake? Now doing the US trip was not, by any means, a bad choice, in fact is was absolutely amazing but I did make some pretty big errors in assessing my own emotional state and what I was able to do. What can I say? I just have to go for it I guess, the alternative is to live in fear of doing anything in case it goes wrong and that's not a life I am willing to live.

Oh yes, I decided I quite liked the beard I had when I was in the US so it is back bigger and longer.

Being back home.

2008-08-07T08:33:00.000+01:00

I have been back for a week now and I've had some time to get a little bit of perspective on my American jaunt and to think about what to do now. I've spent most of it with rotten jet lag and feeling deflated that I am back; although I have been overjoyed to see the kids of course. I've also replaced my mother board, case and power supply after my computer decided to play dead.

New Motherboard Installation In Progress

I've learned a lot about myself which was, retrospectively, probably obvious to those who know me well; I can't, for example, go for a considerable period of time without seeing my children and still be happy. I've abandoned some things I thought I knew, most notably the idea that I am not that interested in or dependent on other people for my happiness and finally I remembered something which I had forgotten; the world is a pretty good place and I am actually rather a nice person when I am not being too self obsessed.

I began this holiday with such different (and grandiose) plans that I am almost afraid to make any further statements as to my intent – even to myself let alone on this blog – as I am quite sure that my plans will change as soon as I make them. However, I when I look back over the last month, I have to say that things turned out pretty well. Even the parts of my journey which I felt hard pressed by at the time were so much more memorable, or were so much more experience if you like, than my usual day to day existence. It does not matter that the events were not what I planned but had I made no plans at all I would certainly never have left my chair. There is, I believe, a place in the novel Candid by Voltaire in which the main character lists a string calamities which might befall him if he were to leave home (some of which are quite horrible) and then proclaims that the most dreadful thing of all would be to sit here and do nothing.

Home (the little one on the left)

For many years it was my ideal to go training seven times a week and occasionally visit casualty to be patched up. However, after sports injuries prevented me from destroying my body any further, I sank into somewhat of a malaise and, as my relationship floundered, and I feverently wished to go no further from my chair than Second Life might take me. It is somewhat of a tonic to discover that, like Candid, I am now quite keen to get out and do stuff once again.

Madeleine is planning to take Rosa away for quite a lot of August and I am foot loose and fancy free till the end of September should I choose to be so. Meanwhile my bicycle is fixing me with a look of reproach that I've done far less cycling than I intended and the thought occurs that this summer's adventures need not be over by any means. I think I'll take out my maps and see what I might see. Now if only it would stop raining for more than a few hours together... I can't help missing the delightful American weather which was hot and mostly dry.

Wine, Cheese, Martinis and Traveling by Plane

2008-08-01T01:23:00.000+01:00

This post has been delayed somewhat by jet lag. I am, currently, at home in the United Kingdom; and deeply enjoying spending some time with my daughter. Though now that my appetite has been whetted for travel I may be off on another jaunt quite soon - especially in light of the fact that she is going to go away for a few weeks with her mother. Had I realised that I might have arranged to stay longer in the US but hey-ho.

I have taken to writing 'United Kingdom' rather than 'UK' more often since some people I met in the US imagined that I was describing myself to be from the Ukraine when I said UK. If my readers are currently under any delusions on that count let me assure you that, although I would like very much to visit Eastern Europe, I am in fact from the land of cricket, vinegar on French fries and cream teas (the cream, incidentally, does not go in the tea).

Well, I arrived home after quite a journey. Duff, displaying once again the amazing willingness of my American friends to drive me considerable distances, dropped me off at JFK a couple of hours prior to my plane being due to leave. Check in was a little convoluted mostly because, on this occasion, the staff chose to see my bicycle as an extra bag and charge me accordingly in time, paperwork and money. After dispensing with these formalities I found my plane to be four hours delayed and that the staff of Lufthansa would be staging a strike from Midnight.

I remained entirely sanguine however since I had (or rather thought I had) an ace up my sleave. Getting though security was easy and I immediately started looking for Vino-Volo – which was where my troubles began and my mood began to deflate somewhat.

Perhaps I should explain.

When I made my second (and rather unexpected) three hour stopover in Philadelphia on the way back to NY from Pittsburg I found what is surely one of the best of American chains. It is called 'Vino-Volo' and I am delighted to endorse them as being the best thing since the realisation that sliced bread tends to be that frightful processed stuff which sticks to the back of your throat and I learned to use a bread knife with a certain amount of skill and dexterity. You can find their web site at http://www.vinovolo.com/

I discovered Vino-volo while in a slightly low mood. I had a long time to wait for my plane and eating a Philadelphia Cheese-steak in Philadelphia had not been the gastronomic treat I had hoped for (they are supposed to be the best if you have them in their home town but this one was let down by some fairly awful cheese). Perhaps the airport is not the best place to expect amazing food. For my European readers a Cheesesteak is not dissimilar to a hot dog with the 'dog' replaced by steak and cheese. A more comprehensive description is at at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheesesteak

I have been fairly consistent in my enthusiasm for all things American while I've been writing but, despite my best efforts, I'm unable to extend my goodwill to their ubiquitous domestic cheese – or at least the type that one encounters in an airport as a casual tourist. This is a pity because one thing which I have realised while being in the US is that they either import or make pretty much the best of everything - even if it is not always in the mainstream. Have a look at this if you don't' believe me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt_Fog Yes I know the UK will serve up some frightful cheese given a chance, indeed I buy it quite often when my budget dictates, but I'm afraid the culture of the 'processed cheese slice' seems more pervasive in the US (it can also be brought in spray on cans). Anyway there is a cheese making tradition in my family so I hope you will excuse me for ranting on the topic.

It was in this 'dark night of the cheese' as St John might have put it were he not distracted by more spiritual matters that I saw the wine bar Vino Volo.

Wines From California

There are a number of delightful things, to my mind at least, about Vino Volo. Firstly, for pretty much the price of a single glass of wine you are able to get a tray of three glasses of different wines with tasting notes. Can I just say, I was in heaven? Okay... I am a frightful epicurean when the mood takes me but it was diverting till my flight was ready to start boarding. Secondly, somebody has put a little care and design into the place – at least the one I was in. Lastly the food was super, not least of all the cheese which was quite delicious. One of the things I really liked about this bar was that I was able to choose a selection of wines from Pennsylvania – I assume that in the others one can also choose to try wine from the local state.

Wines From Pennsylvania

In my conversation with the young lady pouring the wine I learned that there was another bar of the same stable at JFK airport and it was this intimation which made me shrug off the news of delayed flights and airline strikes with such nonchalance when I arrived for my flight home from New York. Now the problem which I encountered was that Vino Volo at JFK is in terminal seven whereas I was waiting in terminal one.

Despite my initial disappointment I stiffened my sinews and after some searching found a place with a quite promising sign reading 'wine bar' just outside. Now in this instance the claim 'wine bar' was a little euphemistic since the they provided a choice of six wines in conjunction to food, cocktails and various beers – 'restaurant' would have been more accurate. Happily, while writing my journal and drinking the rather nondescript wine I made the acquaintance of a very lovely couple from Norway, O.G. and Greta, who had been stuck in Terminal One since breakfast time and were now waiting for the same plane I was.

It was actually a very nice way to pass the time partially because they were so nice and partially because I had found a captive audience for my thoughts about American cheese. Coincidentally they had also sampled the delights of Vino Volo while in Philadelphia airport. Upon the news that our plane was delayed for additional two hours something of a party atmosphere ensued and we made our way to the terminal one Martini bar.

Now, although it was super fun at the time, I have to confess that I rather over did it with the drink and woke up on my plane somewhere over Greenland with a bit of a headache. In fact, since I tend to limit my drinking to four or five glasses of wine at a time, I remained feeling rather the worse for wear until I was due to depart Frankfurt for Bristol. It was a good job that I had recovered by the time I got back to England (nine hours after I was originally scheduled to arrive) because I was then to set to work rigging up my bike and cycling the forty miles back to Bath. The weather was shockingly bad even for England and I was soaked to the skin within ten mins of starting to ride.

Never the less in spite of the rain I found myself in a very good mood, it was good to be riding again. In fact after getting so down while cycling in Washington I must admit that I had been a little anxious about returning to it but I was in good spirits all the way home – although by the time I arrived at Madeline's house I was quite tired; but Rosa was still awake and ecstatic to see me.

Drinking

2008-07-26T19:39:00.000+01:00

I'm back at Duffy's house getting ready for the flight home. I need to get my bike bolted back together and pack up all my kit. I'm excited about seeing Rosa and Jason again but I am also sad to be leaving my friends. I'll have to write a little more about my feelings on this topic when I have my thoughts together.

One of the more entertaining events of my time here has been the discussion of what to do if the tornado mentioned in my last post was actually to touch down near us. The general consensus was that the safe places were under door frames or in some other location in which one was protected by a structure, for example in a bath tub. The plan of action was that, were the worst to happen, we would first move the beer and ice from the fridge to the bath and then everybody would find a door frame. Tornadoes apart the way in which alcohol is treated here has been somewhat of an eye-opener for me. It seems to be considered as very much more of a controlled and dangerous substance than at home; or at least such is my impression from buying the stuff and talking to people.

It is not as if everything is more tightly controlled here - quite the reverse in fact. We have, for example, an inverse relationship with guns; at home they are very strictly legislated (too much so in my opinion but then I used to like pistols) and here shooting for food or recreation is considered quite normal. One story I was told included an encounter with a ten year old hunting with a long gun. Now the amazing thing, to me that is, was that the fact that a young boy was at large with a rifle was not the point of the story, indeed it was quite incidental and considered unremarkable.

As a general observation the Americans seem pretty much as ready to drink too much as the British (not the best part of our national character admittedly) but it is much more of an inconvenience to buy alcohol here - hence the willingness to save it from tornadoes perhaps. Of course I knew the drinking age was 21 in most states before I came but what I did not know is that the sale of spirits, and in some cases even wine, is generally confined to specially licenced shops; so no buying whiskey at the super market. Also I've come to understand, somewhat to my regret, that having to show my ID in order to buy a drink does not actually mean the shop assistant thinks that I look under 21 after all but rather that pretty much everybody has to show some.

I've been told that the whole drunken teenagers roaming the streets situation simply doesn't happen here. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that if I am completely honest; it can be, admittedly, rather a pain at home but then I'm not sure if it actually means that people get drunk less or behave less badly when they are. As an interesting question I wonder if the majority of young people in the United States get over the whole wanting to go out and get wasted phase of life later on than us? I must say that I would certainly not have liked to be unable to drink myself when I was younger since I very much appreciated being able to collapse in an arm chair in a quite corner of the **** and ****'s and have a quiet few pints after school once I could pass for 18. Of course those of you who have known me long enough will probably point out that my early drinking was occasionally somewhat excessive.

Now one one piece of legislation which completely amazed some of my American friends is that in the UK it is quite legal, for example, to be having a family meal and for the children to drink wine with the adults if they are over the age of five. For my, perhaps, disbelieving American friends I refer you to the children's section of the BBC web site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4390000/newsid_4391200/4391209.stm I am inclined to believe this is actually rather a good thing in that it encourages us to be more like the French and Spanish who, at least in my experience, are invariably far more sophisticated and moderate around alcohol than the British.

There is one further prohibition around drinking which is worth mentioning and it is one which actually makes me feel more than a little anxious. Apparently one can't drink in a strip bar here - a prospect which I have to say fills me with horror at a deep and primeval level. Not that I have actually been in a strip bar since I was 16 (and that required come creativity with my ID; but since it was in Hong-Kong rather than at home I will confess to it) but the idea of going to a strip show only seems like a good plan after, and then in conjunction with, a few drinks; the concept that people might do it stone cold sober is frankly somewhat alarming.

Pennsylvania, Wal-Mart and Tornadoes

2008-07-23T05:32:00.000+01:00

Well, things have moved on a pace and I am in Pennsylvania visiting my friend Donna and her family quite close to lake Erie (for my European readers Lake Erie is one of the great lakes in the North East of the United States - if that does not suggest anything to you then I suggest investing in an atlas).

My journey here was convoluted to say the least. I started badly by missing my initial flight and the middle of the journey was marred by my replacement plane having been struck by a lightening bolt and being deemed unfit to fly. The less said about the latter part of the trip the better as the majority of it was spent in a 3 hour 45 min lay over in Philadelphia (a city not very far from where I started) prior to my final flight being delayed for additional pre-flight checks.

After such a journey one might be excused for thinking that I was due some relaxation but no such luck was forthcoming. My lift from the airport to Donna's home was somewhat up in the air due to the failure of a truck transmission. I am aware that I have mentioned it previously but throughout my travels in the states I have been consistently amazed by the generosity of people in their willingness to offer comparative strangers a helping hand - or in this case a space in their car. On this particular occasion I was the beneficiary of the kindness of my old friend's younger sister's boyfriend's mother.

I met Donna for the first time, in real life that is, at the airport and then Bob about ten minutes later at his place of work. To my lasting delight meeting people who I have got to know very well over the internet has been pretty amazing thus far. It is somewhat akin to being reunited with a long lost friend.

Donna and I

On arrival I was pleasantly surprised to find that the ubiquitous trailers of the United States are, in fact, very large when one gets inside. I had previously imagined something akin to the British caravan experience (a topic not to be dwelt upon by the mentally balanced) when the subject of trailers had arisen. The one I am staying in is actually about twice the size of my annexe at home and has a sizable garden; incidentally for my American readers a 'garden' is a 'yard'.

I would, in fact, be quite prepared to get a 'double wide' myself when I arrive home, indeed I made a search via http://www.nestoria.com/ hoping to find something in my area and did, indeed, manage to find a trailer very close to Madeline and the children which seemed ideal. The only snag is that it costs a small fortune. I despair of the British housing market. In common with their ready access to gasoline the Americans are blessed with house prices which seem, at least in comparison to that of the United Kingdom, comparatively reasonable, or at least vaguely attainable for the average person.

Donna's younger sister Danielle has been very sweet in her willingness to taxi us hither and thither and one thing which this has brought me was my first actual experience of Wal-Mart. We do have Wal-Mart at home under the name of Asda but it is does not quite live up to the American experience. For the benefit of my untraveled European readers a US Wal-Mart in all it's capitalist glory is much like a Hyper Store at home but 25% larger and 25% cheaper. Ironically enough it is only due to another American influence that I did not actually go mad and buy a few TV's and a 'Bath In a Box' - well done Henry David Thoreau.

The main drama and excitement of my Pennsylvania trip thus far has been almost being almost in the path of what might almost have almost been almost a small tornado. I have captured the excitement on my video camera to be made available in the fullness of time on youtube so that all my avid (rabid?) readers can take a break from my over worked prose and watch some movies by way of light relief.

Almost Tornado

Since I am neither dead, carried off into the air by an almost tornado nor sober enough to continue writing I will sign off with a view to watching the comic talents of Victor Borge with Donna.

Peace, Stuart.

A few quiet days

2008-07-19T17:57:00.000+01:00

The last few days have been very quiet and pleasant; I've been able to spend some time with Duff which has been wonderful and I've been able to get to see Rosendale a little better. One of the topics which I have already mentioned in relation to the United States has been that of space; there is so much of it here. Rosendale, however, somehow manages to be entirely walkable, at least for the moderately active. Just large enough to have some businesses (most of which seem to to derive much of their trade from visitors) but not nearly big enough to encourage the likes of Wal Mart - I have a suspicion that they would not be tolerated anyway; it's just that sort of place.

A further difference between here and there that is worth remarking on. Mobile phone messages, or 'texting' is a pastime which I have hitherto regarded with polite incomprehension - I mean... Why? It is wildly expensive and, using a phone, rather hard to input the words in comparison to a keyboard. Rather like an awkward and very short email with a price tag. Here it seems not to exist. Well it does exist I suppose; my US phone can do it and I believe I have a text price as part of my call plan... It's just that I've not been sent one of the infernal things nor have I seen anybody receive one or even mention them during my stay thus far.

What people use here instead are instant messages via yahoo, google etc running on their cell phone. Now at home the luxury of having my handset internet enabled by T-Mobile would cost me no less than seven pounds and fifty pence a month (Cries of "Boo!" and "Shame!" from the galleries). Here I brought a pay as you go phone, also by T-Mobile, and, while playing with the phone functions, entered my yahoo details expecting to be told to upgrade my call plan, call my service provider or just get stuffed. Not a bit of it! I was logged onto yahoo in a moment and - this is the amazing part - it appears to be free. I leave it on all the time and my balance diminishes by no discernible amount.

I may never have acquired the British obsession with .txt but I have taken to IM's by phone much as a duck to water. My question now is "Will I be able to go back to not having it when I return?". Yes it is nice, but is it worth eighty four pounds extra a year?

Despite staying in such a delightful location I've found that my thoughts have focused ever more strongly on my children. In all honesty with especial regard to Rosa. I miss Jason of course but the fact is that he is so disabled that it is quite unlikely that he will register that I am not around to any dramatic extent whereas Rosa is likely to feel our separation as keenly as I do; which makes me somewhat anxious about our being apart.

I've become quite familiar with air travel over the past year; although it has been fun I wonder how long I'll be able to fly around with relative impunity? The days of cheap flights may well be numbered if the price of oil continues its seemingly inexorable rise in cost. Flight tickets seem to be the most extraordinary market with prices often seeming to bare little, if any, relationship to the actual distance which one travels. For instance at only three days notice I was able to find a ticket to fly from Portland to New York, which is to say across the entire continent, for less than the cost of a standard return on the train to London from Bath during rush hour. When i reached New York however I found that getting to Pittsburgh a comparatively short distance away the prices started out at 600 dollars. In the end I got a return flight to Erie for $300.

It is hard to admit that ones ex was right all the along but when Madeleine said that a month might be a better time for for me to go traveling she was quite correct. I've booked a flight home for the end of the July and should see Rosa only a few days after she returns from holiday in France.

As a final report my my sleep cycle is still somewhat messed up although not nearly as badly as it was a few days ago; I guess I'll be able to re-live the experience when I fly home in just over a week.

New shoes, jet lag and wooden houses

2008-07-15T07:41:00.000+01:00

The thing is about jet lag that, as one goes West, is is quite easy to recover from - at least for me. In fact I don't think I would even particularly wish to recover from it. The effects are simply that one wakes up very early in the morning, has a lie-in and then finds it is 5:00 am and one actually wants to be up and doing in a very productive way. For an indolent dilettante like myself lying in is no trouble (quite the reverse as a matter of fact) and to be actually coffee-ed up, feeling awake and ready to face the world before 6:00 in the morning is both novel and delightful.

Now compare the above to the vile and wretched effects produced by traveling eastwards. First one is afflicted by the most dreadful insomnia and, when sleep finally comes, it lasts until after lunch. This state of affairs is even worse than my usual routine; the one in which I stagger about the house sobbing for coffee and wondering what day it is half an hour after I should have made a start on things and two hours after which the average American worker has been to a meeting, sent twenty emails and set up a major contract.

I am sure that it is not accidental that the cry of the early settlers here was 'Go West!' and the resulting early mornings achieving things and feeling that one hardly even needs a second cup of coffee to be called human is at least partially responsible for a belief in Manifest Destiny.

From the above observations I'm sure that the casual reader will have guessed that I am suffering from the ill effects of having traveled eastwards and will understand how I have now come to writing my blog at after three in the morning.

Other than the privations of jet lag I have two items of note to report. Firstly, and more astheticaly, I am falling in love with wood framed houses. Rosendale is seemingly almost entirely comprised of timber buildings dating from the Victorian era and very lovely they are as well. It has become somewhat of a mystery to me that British buildings are generally constructed of stone or brick. Presumably wood frame would be cheaper to assemble and produce? If anybody has insight into why this is the case then please enlighten me.

Secondly, on a more mundane note, I have acquired new running shoes. Yes... after these many years the pair that Pete let me have because they were too small for him have gone to the great gym locker in the sky. In truth I must confess that my initial impulse to ditch them was because they had, even after a trip though the washing machine, ceased to be fit for decent society - at least society with a sense of smell.

I tried on a new pair and, thinking them quite lovely but a bit expensive, resolved to look around for other options so put the old pair back on again. My heavens! No wonder I was suffering from sore knees when I started running back in January; they were completely worn out. As soon as I stood up I could feel how acutely they were twisting my feet into pronation in comparison with the new ones. So I got the new shiny pair forthwith, even though I had meant to get something from last season and on sale, and I must confess that I am delighted and feel not even a little guilty for my excess. There's nothing like a really good narrative reason why one needed something to expunge post retail therapy guilt after all.

Reflections

2008-07-14T06:49:00.000+01:00

It is strange that, after all my plans, I have gone on to do something completely different than that which I expected; although as time passes I seem to be finding my feet with that. My expectations of this trip were, to say the least, centred very much around myself - well, yes, arguably they still are but in a different way to that in which I previously envisaged.

My original plan was to be alone; very much alone in fact and I was amazed to find that the reality of being by myself to such an extent was not what I wanted; indeed it was as if I never knew myself until that moment.

If I have learned anything from this trip thus far it is that my relationships with other people are far more fundamental to me than I had previously imagined. Yes, of course I am probably still quite a solitary person in the general run of events and certainly I knew that I would miss some of what I was leaving behind before I started; but what I'm trying to describe is not 'homesickness' or missing Jason and Rosa (although certainly I have had that experience) but rather that this process of removing myself from my general routine and my usual network of support has made me realise how much my fairly solitary existence is, in fact, given it's context and meaning by the relationships which surround it.

Of course I am happy to report that I am still having a pretty awesome time. However while I had projected that the greatest moments of joy would come from being alone in nature they have, in fact, come from connecting with other people.

Perhaps I am simply discovering that I am neurotically co-dependant? I rather suspect that I am not, at least not neurotically so. I glean from his poetry that Ryokan, while in his hermitage, found some of the greatest joy in the visits which framed his solitude. Certainly I think that I would read those poems now with a quite different appreciation so something is probably shifting for me.

At Duffy's

2008-07-12T13:50:00.000+01:00

Wow, I made it to Rosendale. Meeting Duff in real life was so strange but also very amazing. It's wonderful to be able to conect with people who I have only known from behind a key board in the past.

We were both pretty tired when we met up in JFK airport but we made it back to her place without misadventure. It is so neat to see the place after all this time, the video tours were lovely but it's just not the same.

It's seems quite different here to Portland so I'm really interested to see what things are like. Right now I'm kind of bushed though... sleep in hammock time.

Pottering Around Having Fun

2008-07-10T18:24:00.001+01:00

Well I got up and decided that the time had come to really make some decisions. So I have a ticket to NY where I can hook up with Duffy. Brenda and Richard have been the most amazing hosts; I never imagined that I would meet such kindness but there you go. I have sorted out a plane ticket to NY on Friday and have boxed up my bike for shipping so I'll be back on the road again soon.

I'm getting more used to being over here now. Even though I've been in the US a couple of times before I always forget how spread out things are. In Portland there seem to be at least twice as many parking spaces as people wanting to use them and they are free! I must admit I don't miss hunting half an hour for a park and discovering myself to be in the privileged position of paying five pounds to leave the car for a few hours. The down side of this spatial profligacy is that doing pretty much anything means one simply has to use a car. Goodness knows what the increasing oil prices will mean for people here in the long term.

One of the highlights of my trip so far has been getting 'carded' (for my European readers that means I had to show some ID to buy alcohol since I might not be 21 years old). Yes! I had a grin on my face all afternoon. It's nice to know I might pass for a young'n in the right light when looked at by an old lady with glasses. Arguably Gandalf the wizard might get asked for ID in that circumstance but I'll take my compliments where I can get them.

There has, occasionally, been a little confusion with language. Brenda very kindly took me to see Costco, a huge warehouse like store quite similar to what one might find in the UK but larger, with more choice and less expensive (pretty much everything here is larger, has more choice and is less expensive) and which also sells food; rather like Home Base or B&Q back home but with a food section.

Now in the manner of supermarkets there were a number of staff giving out free tastes at little stations and I happily exchanged pleasantries with one of the ladies doing this; although, to be honest, in exchange for nibbles I would most likely enthusiastically engage in small talk with Genghis Khan. The conversation was a little stilted since we both had quite different accents but things were very amiable and Brenda explained that I was from the United Kingdom and had never been in a Costco before. The lady, obviously perceiving me to be a foreigner, very kindly complimented me on my good English and enquired if I took lessons at home.

Now my response to this was somewhat hampered by the fact that I had no idea what she had asked me due to her accent and I felt that I really couldn't ask her to repeat herself again without being rude. I figured that I had a 50/50 chance of being correct whatever she had asked and said "No, not so much." or something similar. We parted genially and I went to find the suddenly missing Brenda (who I eventually located in the fruit section doubled over laughing) who explained things to me.

I'm getting over some of my culture shock I'm finding that I really like it here. The people are very open and friendly, certainly more so generally than in the UK - I guess I can see how we get our national reputation for being reserved now.

I've discovered a TV chef I really like, Alton Brown, who I have watched before on You Tube but never really got into before; I'm going to get some of his DVD's when I get back home. Which leads me on to my next revelation about America - the food is amazing. I think there is a tendency, at least in Europe, to think of American food as being very processed and not much to write home about - epitomised by such things as McDonald's. Well of course they have all that stuff as well but there are a whole range of regional delicacies which are delicious and which I've just never heard of. It helps that I'm staying with an incredible cook I guess but determined to add some US recipies to my kitchen repetroir by the end of the trip.

Oh yes one final thing which took me a while to get over - the houses are all made of wood. That story about the three little pigs is clearly lies, these don't seem to fall down at all.

Change of Heart

2008-07-09T15:56:00.000+01:00

Well things have certainly rather changed for me and I've rather gone though it emotionaly as well, but I guess that is all part of a learning process.

Other side of the world, on my own and missing my kids. Perhaps I should have anticipated just how much that would effect me? As it was once I got cycling I got very depressed and, despite having a go at beating it, my mood just didn't lift. Oh well... One door closes and another one opens as they say and there is no writing in stone to say I can't change my plans.

I'm going to spend some time visiting friends and see how things pan out. I'm with Brenda and Richard in Oregon right now and I'm going to get a flight to NY to see Duff in the near future.

The anoying thing is that I was doing all sorts of things I love... cycling, camping, traveling. I think that, were I with a friend and not missing the kids, I would be have been on top of the world. Oh well, I guess I have learned some important things about myself from the experience and self knowledge is traditionaly regarded as worth traveling for.

I'm kind of spinning emotionaly and organisationaly from my change of direction right now so I'll try and update when I know a little more clearly where things are going to take me.

False Start

2008-07-03T15:50:00.000+01:00

False start on the cycling this morning. Poor Richard got out of bed at 6:00AM with a view to beat the rush hour traffic and drive me to the nearest point on the cycle route only to be greeted by the spectacle of my early morning tantrum as the new SIM card failed to play with my cell phone.

He had a coffee and suggested that we should go back to t-mobile later in the day to get it up and running as having a working phone may well turn out to be critical in an emergency. I agreed and he went back to bed while I cursed the phone gremlins and thought I may as well have another coffee and blog so it would have actually happened (I have abandoned solipsism and come to understand that nothing is real until blogged, 'bloggism' perhaps?).

Never mind, it gives me another morning pottering around in luxury and, since it has been a full week since I was on my bike at all now, it might be best to kick off with a half day rather than a full one. Of course whatever I do I am going to have sore legs when I get going... I reorganised my rig with a view to making it a bit lighter last night (Duffy is going to get a suprise fedex parcel of a load of my kit :p) but it is still quite heavy. Perhaps I have packed too much provender? After all I am hardly in the back of beyond just yet... In all events I can always eat my rig light over the next few days.

Probably a mid afternoon start then. I am a bit anxious at the thought of really starting... but perhaps that is one of the teachings of this trip for me? Learning to be okay that things are unknown and quite fluid. Of course I am still in the 'about to take the first step of a thousand mile journey' phase of things - which seems to have been going on for quite a while now - so I guess it is natural that I am a somewhat apprehensive.

Brenda and Richard have very sweetly said that they will come rescue me if I have problems; it's great to know that somebody will be there to catch if you fall.

I should probably start cycling...

2008-07-02T13:35:00.000+01:00

When I reached Seattle I must admit that I was feeling rather overwhelmed. I think that it is fair to say that Frankfurt to Seattle is a long journey; so I was tired and had had plenty of time in which to worry about missing my kids, if my kids would miss me, if I would get lost, if I would have fun, if I would be eaten by bears and weasels etc. On top of that I got my first real look at US mountains out of the window of the aircraft - Eeeep! Those are bigger than in Google Earth... Have I bitten off more than I can chew? I picked up my bags without any undue problems and phoned Rooby to let her know where I was. Within five minutes she and Richard walked up and proceeded to look after me; which was, of course, the very thing I needed. Thanks guys <3>

They took me to see Seattle and get some food, showed me the Space Needle and such tourist things before, very sweetly, inviting me to come stay with them; an offer which I have been only too happy to accept. It's a super start to my trip, and a far gentler introduction to my stay in the US than I might have expected. They are the most kind and considerate hosts and, I think I have to admit, things are so nice here that it will take me a bit of mental effort to actually get my stuff together and set out for the unknown. I say unknown and mean it... I am currently a ways south from where I was planning to start so I am not sure quite what I will do and I have been toying with three options:

1. Get a train to Whitefish and then go north to the boarder and come back again. The disadvantage of that plan is that it will mean splashing out on a train ticket, sitting on a train for 12 hours and boxing the bike before riding back along the route which I have come. However that is the plan which virtually grantees that I have enough time to give myself the 'rode from one side of the US to the other' badge.

2. Start riding north at Astoria. The big advantage of that is that is that I have the Adventure Cycling Maps for that plan and I would love to see Astoria. On the flip side I probably won't have time to get down to the boarder of New Mexico unless I start doing big mile days once my legs get tougher.

3. Try going more directly to the start of the great divide route by riding via Spokane, which would initially follow the route of the Lewis and Clarke expedition. The problem with that is that I will have to go get more maps, do research and make it up as I go along; recipe for getting lost and not actually getting to the top of the divide route more quickly at all.

I am leaning towards heading up the coast from Astoria and then following my original route. I really have no idea if I will end up doing the whole US part of the great divide at this point but I should probably let go of that and just move with the flow of things. All thing considered I'd actually *rather* have the experience of more pacific coast now and less desert at the end of the trip. Also abandoning yet another mental projection will be good for me! All in all I am having the most wonderful time thus far.

P.S Wow finally convincing myself to let go of getting from one imaginary line on the ground to another is a lovely sense of freedom; I can feel my mind softening and letting go and… mmmmmmm yummy. I knew it would be good when I finally did it. Start from Astoria and head up the coast it is then.

Good but tired

2008-07-01T06:55:00.000+01:00

I am not dead everything great. Stay friend's house. Journey long, very tired must sleep. Write when wake up.

Stuart.

After a small nervous break down...

2008-06-30T05:27:00.000+01:00

Well after only a minor attempt at a nervous break down (break-through?) I got to Bristol airport and checked in my bike and bags. I had been fretting at some length about what would happen when I turned up with a bike - especialy since I chose to just take the peddles off and let most of the air out of the tires.

Nobody had a fit of hysterics and told me to go home when I arrived but rather they took not only my bags and my bike but did not even charge me for excess bagage. I will make a point of trying to fly with Lufthansa from now on.

The whole thing was only made possible by my brother Robin. Who not only agreed to drive me to the airport but put up with my hystrionics, weeping fits, losing every item of lugage I was going to take with me and deciding to repack everything just as he arrived to collect me and partially taking his car appart in order to fit in my bike.

Thanks Robin! *hugs*

2008-06-29T11:31:00.000+01:00

Well I had high hopes of leaving with military efficiency and a minimum of stress. Of course this has not come to fruition but I will 'adapt and overcome' and take it as being part of the adventure.

Yesterday I realised that I couldn't find the bank card which I was planning to use when I am away. This would, in usual circumstances, be cause for me to run amok turning my house upside down trying to work out where it has got to. As luck would have it about the same time I realised that the card had vanished I was in the grip of a headache, temperature and stomach ache.

What a time to get ill! I had visions of myself attempting a transatlantic flight sweating and vomiting and then being unable to get any money when I got there; rather of a low point to be honest. Now that I'm feeling more myself I have come up with some plans to rectify my cash situation even if I can't find that dratted card before I leave and I am feeling a hundred times better than I was earlier.

My original plan was to be sitting in a cleaned and tidy house with not a scrap of dirty laundry to be sorted and all my stuff packed and ready to go by now. Well I've got 12 hours to sort everything so still no need for major panic just yet – I'll save that till after tea time.

2008-06-25T01:00:00.000+01:00

I had a super ride into work yesterday. The weather was glorious and, on the way though the center of Bath I got a coffee and sandwich and experimented with using my bag bar as a cup holder on the way to somewhere to sit down and eat. I was rather expecting a dramatic and embarrassing mess ending with me tangling myself in the bike and crashing in front of a group of tourists and covering myself with hot coffee but it was actually quite successful and I got my caffeine hit without mishap.

By the time I got back from work at 8:00 PM however I was very hungry; far too hungry to cook in fact and I ate bag of peanuts, half a jar of cocktail cherries some cooking chocolate and a what was left of a jar of mixed seeds within about ten minutes.

The new bar wraps were a wash out, they actually made the bars harder and too wide for my hands to grip comfortably so I took them off after about five miles. Oh well, it seemed like a good idea when I put them on. Tonight I am going to finish making my camcorder mount for the handlebars, at least that is the plan but I am trying to video it at the same time and Windows Movie Maker refusing to work without hanging every five minutes.

2008-06-22T23:38:00.000+01:00

To be going someplace or just to be while going?

One thing which has been occupying my planning 'hungry-ghost' mind (I have to have something to distract me from the fact that I am not physically prepared after all) is whether I should actually hold 'Cycling across the USA' as a goal to achieve rather than just cycling each day as it comes.

I originally planned to traverse the continent from the Pacific to the Atlantic (complete with the traditional dipping of the bike wheels in the salt water at either end) but was sad at the thought that what I considered to be the highlight of the journey, that is to say the Rocky Mountains, would be over relatively soon. Once I let myself of the hook I had created of having to go from East to West I realised that I could happily spend pretty much all of my time in the mountains if I wanted to. What a joy and relief!

So what if I let go of the whole 'having a goal' and just cycle from day to day? When I get to Eureka I will have the choice to head North for ten miles to the boarder with Canada and then back again the way I came before heading south so that I can leave the possibility of having cycled across the country open.

Of course it does not actually matter one way or another but I might stop myself getting into the whole end gaining 'Will I make it?' head space I got into on my last tour if I *don't* cycle those 20 miles... Then even if I get as far as Mexico I will not have cycled the whole way. My idea, after all, is to be in the moment each day rather than trying to force events so that I can meet an imaginary goal.

Neurotic? Who, me? Possibly.... I think I will probably do the loop up to the Canadian boarder if I think I might have a shot at making it to Mexico at that point. Aaahh what the hey, I'll see how I feel when I get there. Anyway it is a good long way of cycling to Eureka from Seattle in the first place so I may as well rest my weary mind for the moment and enjoy the rather nice glass of wine which is actually happening at the moment.

Oh yes I finally got around to trying out some video, and very underwhelming it is as well. You can marvel at my new leather bar grips in the following movie! Directed by me, staring my hands and bike, narrated by myself and filmed my me all at the same time; with predictably mediocre results - especially the lighting of the second half. Having said that it is not bad for a first go so I am sure I'll be able to come up with something a bit better in the not too distant future.