Digital Radio

We've been toying with the idea of digital radio for a while. We listen to the radio quite a lot and it's been annoying us that we get bad reception in the new house.

But DAB radio's are expensive and we've questioned the value. Several of our friends have them though - a surprising number in fact! - and with moving out of London meaning we get less access to stations like XFM that we like, we decided to look into them a bit more closely.

I, with my techie hat on, was looking for features. We like the "live pause and rewind" on our Sky+ box, and I was hoping to get that functionality in the radio too - should be simple enough you would think. I also wanted to be able to plug an iPod into it - preferable through a line-in socket. Sally, with her aesthetics hat on (we're a good team) wouldn't let me get a cheap, plastic-looking one - preferring the slightly vintage look of the Pure and Robert's models.

We tested the water by getting a cheap (£35) Roberts clock radio. A lot of our listening is done in bed as we attempt to wake up, so this seemed like a good way to try it out. And...

I was astonished!

I thought we'd get poor reception, with it constantly breaking up. But, no. DAB, here in Swindon at least, is crystal clear. We get a good range of stations. The sound quality is excellent. And the radios are incredibly easy to use - I don't say that lightly by the way, but you literally plug it in and it works with barely a button press.

We were SO impressed that we almost immediately went to Amazon and spent a lot more money on a Pure Evoke 1S for the kitchen. Which is equally easy to use, crystal clear, well built, has most of the technical features I wanted (not live pause and rewind - surprisingly few models had this!), and looks the business.

I'd happily evangelise DAB radio to anyone. If you're thinking you have reason to switch - do it!

I still think the receivers aren't particularly good value but in this case I'm happy to pay the premium for being a fairly-early adopter. Perhaps prices will come down as take-up increases? Or maybe the signal is sufficiently poor on other places to limit its take up. I guess only time will tell.

Chicago - Film, Sountrack and Musical

As one of her Christmas presents (I won't say from whom but his name begins with R and he's a very good present buyer!) Sally got two top-price tickets to the musical Chicago!

Sally loves the film version of this, I quite like it myself, and we both wanted to see it "Live". So, yesterday, off we went to London (luckily she chose to go with me), for a fun day out.

As part of the present I'd bought the CD of the soundtrack too. The film and the CD are, as you would expect highly polished, well produced, with dazzling effects, stunning performances from all the artists, and plenty of razzmatazz and razzle-dazzle.

We love the music, which is lively and varied and really captures the mood of 1920's America.

Did the stage show live up to the promise of the film and soundtrack?

Well, yes! But they we're very different. The show was...well...I guess it was more of a show. It was less polished but it knew that and made up for it by being slightly tongue-in-cheek. The show girl scene portrayed in the movie as sleazy and sensational, came across in the show as slightly silly - more Blackpool Pier than Chicago!

The stage was less sophisticated than I was expecting. It was quite a basic set up but with the band on platforms behind a limited stage space. The musicians were very prominent and played a big part in the show. There was even some clever interaction between the cast, the band and the conductor, which worked very well. The music was brilliant and I thought the band were just as much stars as the cast were.

It was highly entertaining and, while not worthy of a standing ovation, very well performed by some very fit, strong and talented people who can dance, act, sing, climb, and do acrobatics - usually more than one at the same time.

All in all it was well worth going to see. The excellent soundtrack (bar the last few tracks which are modern songs "based on" the story) will be revived occasionally I'm sure, but, as is my experience with most musical soundtracks, won't be an often-heard CD. The film, however, will be watched again and again on dull evenings that need a bit of livening up.

The Blog

I've been considering the purpose of this Blog lately

It's really only "notes to self" and yet, I started it after being inspired by other people, who were writing interesting stuff...or at least stuff about what they were up to that was of interest to me. It's stuff that I'd like good friends to be able to see, but not stuff that I want the whole world to see.

Truth is that, though there's an element of pride in having a set of hopefully interesting/funny /useful notes that others can read, I'm slightly embarassed about it. Some people recently heard that I had a Blog and all questioned with surprise..."you have a blog???". In opening it up to the world, I open myself to the critical eye of the world.

I originally set up my Blog such that people had to be approved as readers. However, I recently "imported" my Blog into my Facebook "notes" application - which meant that people could easily be updated when I post something new, and I really value having RSS feeds of other people's Blogs as it makes it easier to stay up to date. Both of these required me to open up my Blogger RSS feed, which I can only do by opening up the whole Blog to the world.

I'm nervous about this.

I don't mind people that I know are nice and won't make silly comments reading and commenting but I don't think I want everyone to see. There's a security risk in there, and, though I'm careful about what I write and I make sure I set my Blog up so that search engines aren't informed about my posts, I don't want all of what I write searchable by Google and so on.

This, though, poses some challenges.

Firstly, I don't currently have a way to only allow RSS access to a select group. I've tried importing my notes into a Wordpress setup, but this doesn't seem to allow secure RSS feeds either (if such things exist).

There's also pride in knowing who's reading too. I don't want to think I'm big because the world can read my musings and hopefully be entertained by them. But having control of who can see means I'm retaining control and I become aware of how popular I am (or am not). That could work either way.

And I'm challenged about what I'm writing too. Why am I nervous about the world seeing it? Do I not believe it? Do I not think it's interesting/useful/funny? Am I not prepared to stand by what I've written and be identified with it?

So I'm a bit confused about what to do at the moment. I think I've turned public access off, but it may be on and off for a while, while I work out what to do.

If anyone IS reading (I know at least one person is), I'd appreciate your comments and thoughts.

52 songs

Oh dear, what have I done??

Our friend Simon had his 30th birthday on 2nd December and he had a really fun party in York that we attended. He's a musician and has lots of musical friends, so part of the party was there was a PA and some musical instruments set up and a thrown-together band that played some well known party songs.

This was MOST entertaining, particularly the random, unrehearsed singalong at the end of the evening.

It gave me the (crazy, stupid) idea of having a new years resolution to learn a popular song each week. I've been playing guitar for about 8 years now and don't know many pop songs by heart, this would be a good way to learn.

Anyway, I never really thought I'd do it. But Sally's gone and bought me some chord books of pop songs for Christmas, so I guess I have to.

I doubt I'll make one per week, but I'll start a new thread here and maybe use it to keep people posted on how I'm getting on (if at all). Maybe this is a good way to be accountable and have people suggest songs too. If you're one of my limited readership, feel free to post comments or email me suggestions/ideas.

Thoughts turn to what the first few songs might be. "Love me do" by the Beatles is a good choice as it REALLY is three chords and has simple words. Though Robbie Williams' "Angels" may also be a good start as I sort-of learnt it before. Or maybe a Christmas song...especially as I've been playing LOTS on Christmas Carol services at church of late.

An update sometime soon...I hope.

Dress Codes

Another comment that I made on another persons Blog that I wanted to copy here. It took me a while to write and contains a funny story from a business meeting, so I wanted to include it as a "note to self" of my own.

The other-Blog author, is actually a friend of Sally's, but he's an excellent writer and has been keeping a very entertaining Blog of his time as an Englishman in Brazil. His writing was one of the things that inspired me to take up my own note taking here, but the quality and entertainment value of his posts is far greater than mine.

Links:
- Maps and Legends: Dave Maclure's Blog
- The specific post I commented on

---
In response to "Things I love about Brazil #25: informal dress codes"

I'm still reading and still enjoying your writing. Hope you don't mind. I particularly like your random numbering of "things I miss...things I love..."!!

I was thinking about dress codes the other day. I was in a business meeting with a supplier. The guys from the supplier company were both wearing suits. But us as "supply-ees" were, at best, smart casual. (In amusing contrast, someone had bought along some Chuppa Chupps lollipops, so we were all sat there eating kids' candy...in suits...bizzare)

It reminded me that I hate wearing suits. I feel like a fraud in them. It's not who I am. But I am pretty clean-cut, and I find myself frowning at people who dress really scruffily. And yet, that's who they are. They'd feel like a fraud wearing what I wear. I don't wear suits, but I AM a clothing snob!

Brazil sounds like the kind of place where you can just be yourself. Whereas in England we're forced to dress certain ways at certain times. I wonder why that is and what it achieves?

Hmmm...

File Sharing

I've mentioned Iko, the excellent band that a friend of ours is in, before. The lead singer of the band recently posted an message on his MySpace Blog about filesharing. I spent some time writing a response and wanted to copy my thoughts here. The full thread can be found on MySpace here.

Ultimately, Kieran was starting a discussion about file sharing, whether or not it's beneficial to the music industry, or should it be banned in some way. He hadn't asked a specific question, just wanted to see what people's thoughts were.

---

Hi Kieran and other folks,

I consider myself pretty old-school, I like cover artwork and inlays, I like to have a physical item in my music collection. Not everyone is like me.

I don't do piracy. At least, I always pay for music that's in my collection because it has value. Not everyone is like me.

Hmm....piracy. It's not new. It's not just that we're all selfish now...we've always been selfish! Hands up all those that copied CD or tapes (remember them) before computers and the Internet were fast enough to make MP3's and file sharing a reality? All that's changed is that it's quicker and easier to copy and swap music and, with digital, you don't lose quality with each copy.

But the technology has improved in leaps and bounds - faster than the industry can cope with, it seems.

The Internet truly is a double-edged sword.On the one hand:
- it has made it easy for new bands to promote themselves.
- it removes barriers and makes people equal; Iko probably have as much power as Radiohead on the Internet.
- it has the potential to create an environment where only truly good music thrives because you can try stuff for free and if it's no good you'll leave it and move on to something else quickly (as Dean does).
- it has potential to remove the middle men (distributors and record shops) and have more of the cost of music going direct to the artist...or to even reduce the cost of music in the same way (most people I know that copy stuff do so because they think/know they're being ripped off by the distributors and shops).

So there's a lot of good things about using the internet for music.

On the other hand it has turned music into "just information" that can very easily be passed between people at no cost. In some cases this may be to the benefit of the artist; especially to a decent new act just starting out who wants to get their sound "out there". However, I suspect that in many cases it can be crippling as the monetary value is removed from the art.

I work with technology a LOT. It is a tool. It is a means to an end. You don't own a hammer for the sake of owning a hammer, you own it so you can hit things with it. And like any tool, it can be used, and it can be ab-used. I can use my hammer to hit people, for instance, which isn't very nice (I don't, by the way)

File sharing is a tool. I'm sure it has many legal, useful purposes and that's why it exists. Sadly it seems to be abused more and more. And, oddly, I find that people who are normally kind, sensible, good-moraled, law-abiding citizens, have no problem with using computers for piracy, and seem to think that it's stupid that they have to pay for stuff that they can freely copy around.

So what can we do?

Just banning/outlawing p2p file sharing is impractical and unlikely to help. People will just find other ways.

We can fight technology with technology. DRM (digital rights management) is another method of protecting the artists rights. Giving the purchaser the ability to use the file on a limited number of devices, or for a limited length of time. Sadly this is more complex than it seems. What if I replace my computer and can no longer use that file? That's unfair is it not? People will always crack the technology anyway, rendering it useless. And the technology industry will always want to make as much hard cash as possible, and so you end up with not one technology, but several, with each technology onwer hoping that theirs will become the big one! (e.g. VHS/Betamax, or the recent HD DVD wars). There are many reasons why this isn't a great solution.

Education is not likely to work either. There will always be people who just don't care.

OK - I'm out of ideas. This whole new internet world needs some real creative thinking to work out how artists can best make use of it. Perhaps that's why Kieran started this discussion? The world is not the one we used to know and we're still mapping out the Internet and forming the unspoken rules and morals that surround it.

Have I helped the discussion? Probably not, K didn't ask a direct question, so I've not sought to answer one - in fact, I've raised a few of my own.

What's encouraging is that there seem to be people who share the values that make the internet good. To all the commenters above - good on 'ya. Perhaps one way we can all help is to help is to spread the word about how artists deserve and need the cash. Perhaps we can be role models in that, speak up for the artists, challenge those we know who copy and file share.

After all, we're right that it's wrong.

Aren't we?

Shelf hanging - a lesson in trust!

Now here's a thing that's quite contrary. I'm not a very trusting person, while at the same time, I tend to believe what people tell me.

I think it's all down to experience.

If someone says, for example, that they've got tickets to go see the Spice Girls at Wembley stadium. As long as it's not said with a fairly strong tone of irony or sarcasm, I'll believe that!It's pretty believable.

If, however, my wife told me that she'd had a piece of toast with peanut butter and really enjoyed it, I probably wouldn't take her word for it, and would insist on checking the jar. If something seems unlikely to me, I will check it out. This sounds reasonable, but I often feel like I'm unnecessarily doubting people when such things happen.

And so, with my sense of mistrust on red-alert, I was confronted with shelf hanging. Our house has lots of bare walls, which with a few planks of wood, can easily be utilised as storage space.

A quick trip to B&Q to buy the aforementioned wall furniture, and a drill, and we were off! Sally claimed I went a bit "drill crazy" at first - she probably had a point. We have a lot of holes to make!

But, while confident with making holes, I had doubts about the fittings. Most of the shelves we hung were held up by little "keyhole" fixings. A small, thin plate of metal, with a keyhole-shaped hole in it, that hung over a single wall screw.

And the instructions tell me that two of these little things will hold 25 kilograms?! That's 25 litres of water? It's more than a third of my body weight? Over 3 times the weight of an official men's shotput shot? And the average weight of an antarctic cod? (I'm open to other suggestions as to what this is the equivalent of)

Yeah, right!

And so, with the shelves up, I nervously started loading them up. I have no experience of this kind of thing, but I know that recipe books are heavy. I was very tentative. I told Sally to keep the heavy ones on the worktop - no Nigel Slater or Nigella up there!! I tried to carefully distribute the load between the two supports. I went round inspecting them every day for about a week. I cautiously pulled them occasionally to check that they'd take a little more weight.

It was very much a test of faith!

Lots of DIY seems to be like this. Trying it out, sometimes failing, learning as you go, but having the confidence to have a go in the first place, and to try again if you fail. I'm very much having to overcome some of my doubts and trust what people tell me in order to get things done.

It turns out that shelves are pretty sturdy, and two little metal plates can take a fair bit of weight - I don't know that I've risked 25kg yet and I don't have any shot or antarctic cod to test it with, but we've got some heavy - and fragile - stuff, hanging on the walls of our kitchen now.

Not only that, but I'm now a fully competent, drill-crazy, shelf hanger!

A few USEFUL things that I learned along the way:

1. Those keyhole fittings should definitely be flush with the bracket - if you buy cheap shelves with badly pre-cut holes, make sure that you enlarge the holes rather than forcing the bracket in.
   
2. If you have a large wall space that you want to put a LONG shelf in (we've done this in our utility room), don't try to hang one super-long shelf with more than two supports. Correctly aligning more than two supports such that a shelf rests flush on top of them is very hard. Use two shorter shelves instead!
3. Screwing the shelf to the supports is easiest done if you pre-drill the holes. Put the shelf in place, mark up where the holes should be, hold it all still, drill the holes (with light pressure - shouldn't have to push hard to get through the wood), and then take it off the wall to screw together. (There's probably a "proper" way to do this, but I found this method much easier than screwing it together while the shelf was on the wall. In fact, the pressure required to screw the shelf to the support whilst on the wall seemed to exceed the 25kg and bend the keyhole bracket!!)

Bike Radar

Bit of a plug...the BikeRadar web site is really taking off and if full of useful info. I was just looking through it and I keep coming across more and more useful stuff. Like:

• A guide to chainsets
• A Q&A about chronic fatigue (which I MIGHT have been suffering from earlier in the year)
• Stuff about forks and bottom brackets
• A review of different sorts of winter gloves (lots of good reasons to have cycling-specific gloves - on my Christmas wish-list now!!!)
• Articles on riding technique including road positioning...
  
• and handling complex junctions and roundabouts (very much needed in Swindon!)
• A blog article on the joy of commuting by bike (with hints and tips)
• Why chocolate is great
• Why some cereals aren't so great
• Why ginger is REALLY great

The forums are full of useful help and advice too.

Sometimes the Internet is just SO useful - even if it does waste many hours of my time.

Cycle scheme = NEW BIKE!!!

This is VERY exciting. My work have set up a cycle-to-work scheme. This is a government initiative designed to encourage people to cycle to work. Which I do anyway, but it's still a real treat.

What happens is this. I go out bike shopping to buy myself some new wheels to ride to work on, and any associated safety equipment I need. My employer buys this stuff, and I rent it back from them for 12 months, making 12 monthly payments to cover the cost of the kit. BUT, because my employer buys the bike, they don't pay VAT, so I get 17.5% off. AND, I pay before tax and National Insurance are deducted, so I get about another 30% off! AND I get it all on a 12 month interest-free loan!

At the end of the 12 months I get to buy the bike for a nominal fee - usually 5% of its cost.

Doing the maths, this means I can buy a nice, say, £600 road bike and get about 49% off the cost!

This is exactly what I'm doing.

I looked at 3 bikes: the Giant SCR2 (I think it was SCR2) a something like £525, the KONA Zing (£999 reduced to £695) and the Felt Z90 (£600).

The Giant didn't really do much for me at all. You pretty much got what you paid for, and the shop that had it would only sell at RRP, not doing any discounted bikes on the cycle scheme that we're signed up to at work.

The KONA was a VERY pretty bike, well equipped and great value with the £300 knocked off, but it was a racing bike really. Low position and very hard ride. The higher spec was tempting but in the end the Felt beat it on comfort and suitablility for the kind of riding that I'm doing.

So I have a Felt Z90 on order. Aluminium frame, carbon forks, 27 gears, mostly Shimano equipped. It has a slightly more upright riding position and the extra chain ring (that's a 3rd big ring by the pedals), bar-top brake levers and softer ride made it a good buy, and very suitable for the training/touring kind of rides that I'm doing.

It takes a while to process the paperwork for the cycle scheme but hopefully I'll have it before Christmas!!! Yipeee!!!!

Bikish - the language of cycling

So, I'm getting pretty into this cycling lark, but there are a few things that still baffle me. Cycling, like many other hobbies, has a language of its own, and experienced participants use it freely without really thinking about poor beginner like me who don't know their cranksets from their cassettes and their bar ends from their bottom brackets.

I've been looking into new bikes and doing some maintenance so I've been struggling myself. The component manufacturers don't help by naming equipment in the same sort of way that car manufacturers give names to cars. How am I supposed to know the difference between Sora, Tiagra, Ultegra, 105, Dura Ace and so on, easily, without having to research it all the time? Surely there's an easier way?

And sometimes things are known by different names. I still haven't worked out if a crank is different from a crankset, or a chain different from a chainset. There's subtle differences between hubs and axles, and it's not clear whether I can replace just one, or just the other, or if I always need to replace both. There's seat stays and seat posts, which are very different. It's all very confusing!

Anyway, here's a useful article that has helped me a little.

http://www.bikeradar.com/gear/article/buyers-guide-to-road-chainsets-118

My original intention for this post was to list some cycling terminology that I've learned the meaning of and try to keep that up to date, but that's a bit of a waste of time as there are plenty of resources out there that have already done it. If you're reading this on the internet then look it up on Google, Wikipedia, or your information source of choice.

In the meantime, I'm continuing my learning.

Drenched...but the first time in a long time

I read an interesting statistic a while back that basically said that if you commute by bike in the UK, despite our highly changable weather, you'll only cycle in the rain 12 times a year, on average.

Hard to believe, but, today I cycled in proper rain for the first time in AGES. It's the first time I've tried out my day-glo waterproof in real rain and I first posted about that on October 3rd. OK, I did have a week off driving to work (why was that??? can't remember now), but it kinda helps prove the point.

Anyway, the waterproof proved to be very much so but I got very soggy bottoms and socks and shoes. Riding home in wet gear isn't fun. Must remember waterproof over-trousers and over-shoes next time.

I have a bit of a backlog of posts to write but not much time at the moment. Hopefully I'll get to catch up soon. Sally's not so well tonight so she's gone to bed early and I get a little time that I wouldn't normally have. Bless her.

£50 million and a wobbly wheel

50 million quid for improving cycle routes is up for grabs!

Two quick things. One is that there's this competition going on where four projects have the chance to win £50 million of lottery money in a public vote. One of the projects is being put forward by Sustrans (a sustainable transport organisation) to improve walking and cycling paths, including the National Cycle Network, across the country.

Of course, I have a vested interest in this, being a cyclist, but I also think that it's the only nationwide project, the others are all specific to one place. Yes, they're all great projects, but the best use of public money is surely to improve access to cycle routes?

Some cyclists are very much against this, assuming that, if there are designated cycle routes, then we'll be forced to use them (and they're not very good for serious mountain biking or road riding as they're mostly paths used for leisure rides and shared with pedestrians), but the National Cycle Network is a great way for a beginner cyclist to discover longer rides, and was very much part of my catching of the cycling bug!

So, if you don't know about it, or don't really care which project gets the money, I DO! So please vote for Sustrans. Details on the competition here and details of the Sustrans Project "Connect2" here.

My Wobbly Wheels

In other, more personal cycle-related news, my rear wheel is wobbling again. I thought I'd done a grand job of repairing the broken spokes, but it seems to still be uneven and, when I hit about 25 mph, it starts to shake me around a bit.

But what to do? I've had a good go at truing up but without expensive tools it'll never be perfect. Should I buy a new wheel? Hmm...

I can do it!

A new thread starts. Having bought a house I'm learning something else new - DIY! Sally bought me a book as a gift called "You Can Do It!" (It's a B&Q book and B&Q's advertising slogan used to be "You can do it when you B&Q it!"). This thread will be the ups and down, ins and outs, successes, failures, and lessons learned, of learning to do DIY.

Which starts here with the question "Why does no one teach us this stuff?". I remember painting and stuff as a kid but DIY should be handed down to us somehow. I've lived in rented houses since I was 18 and so all my DIY and decorating has been done for me. I haven't got a clue about filling, sanding, wallpapering, plumbing, electrics, lighting, interior design, building, plastering etc. There's so much to know! And so much can go wrong.

I hope my readers can learn something from my mistakes.

And, for those of you who know, I've already learned my u-bend lesson!!! Won't be doing that again.

Finding purpose

So, it's been a long year. It's been a hard year. I've been ill a lot. I've not achieved very much of what I thought I would. I enjoy physical activity and I've not managed to do much.

On the up side we have bought a house and very much settled in Swindon, into our jobs, and into our church.

I've now had a period of feeling well for a while. Things finally seem to be fixed. So I'm taking stock, looking around and thinking "Phew, OK, so that's over...what now?"

To help with that process I'm re-reading a book that's quite well known in Christian circles called "The Purpose Driven Life". It's written by famous American church leader who does lots of "purpose driven" stuff. It's a very American book - though I can't really explain why. But if you can see through the American Evangelical-isms it's a good book.

It's just what I need right now. It's taking a very beaten and battered soul inside of me, and taking it back to the basics of my faith. Why am I here? What on Earth am I doing? How do I find God in all of this? And what does he want me to be doing with my life.

Hopefully I'll be reporting back sometime...watch this space.

New camera

During our trip to the Lakes last year, to climb Helvellyn via Striding Edge with my sister and her man (oddly, I didn't write anything about this, but we did!), we managed to drown both our digital camera and a mobile phone. They were wrapped up safely in rucksacks but it was so wet that they filled with water anyway and they never came back to life.

So, after phoning the insurance people and a bit of research, we've bought a new digital camera. We've bought a Canon Ixus 70 because:

1. We've had a Canon before, they're well built (but not waterproof) and we know how to use them
2. It's pocket-sized but has a 3x optical zoom and all the features we need.
3. We'd hoped for a fully-manual mode but there are hard to find on compact cameras. You can manually adjust the ISO setting, but there's no aperture or time priority. But then no other camera we looked at had those either.
4. The flash on our old Canon SureShot A80 was horrible, but this one, in testing, seems to have been improved.
5. We chose the Ixus 70 over the Ixus 75 mostly because it has a smaller screen and therefore better battery life.

Overall we're happy with the purchase. It's small, takes good snaps, the battery lasts long enough (though I don't like having a rechargable - our old one just took standard AA batteries). It's all we expected really. I guess, to the untrained eye, digital cameras are much of a muchness and though the Ixus 70 is nothing extraordinary, it is a well-built and easy to use camera.

It has one feature that I particularly like though - it does time-lapse filming! You can only set it to take a picture every 1 second or two seconds, and it kills the battery pretty quickly, but I've had some fun playing around with it and it gives interesting results. It has prompted a bit of a fascination with life-at-high-speed.

I first started playing around with this after a day's working from home. Here's a bit of me at the laptop - it's quite boring but I had no other subject to try it out on:




For a laugh I tried moving really slowly to see what would happen when speeded back up again. This has a strange stop-motion animation effect and makes me laugh every time:



I wonder what sort of life-observation could be had with this. Look out for speeded-up naturewatch movies next spring!

A couple of gigs

We've had the good fortune of seeing a couple of gigs lately. We always enjoy live music, but finding bands/artists we like at venues we like on dates that we're free, and at prices we like is always difficult.

However - despite our picky-ness we made it to the following recently (nicely matching with some recent CD purschases!)

KT Tunstall at Colston Hall, Bristol

Now...one of the games we played when we lived in Shepherd's Bush was guessing who was playing at the Empire (a popular music venue just round the corner from where we lived) from the people who were queueing up/milling around. e.g. Jack Johnson gigs have lots of normally-dressed, but pretty stoned, surfer and indie types; The Beautiful South had lots of middle-aged, middle-of-the-road-looking people queueing outside.

For some reason, I was very self-concious at this KT gig. Though the crowd was a real mix, I felt slightly too young, slightly too normal, slightly too 90's indie. Yet, I think if I was playing the "who's on at the Colston Hall" game, I'd have picked me out as a MOR soft-rocker type along with everyone else. And I didn't like that. Part of me is embarrassed that I went.

BUT...I don't really care. The gig was GREAT! KT is a great entertainer, with lots of crowd-pleasing banter. She's confident and charming, but a bit kooky. She's incredibly cool, and very talented, but comes across as homely and clumsy. Her mum and dad were in the audience and she even forgot the words to one song called "Hopeless", which, ironically, is about being just that!

The band were awesome and KT certainly doesn't stand alone, with a bassist, guitarist, keyboards/random sounds guy, a brilliant percussionist (I'm not calling him a drummer because he played far more than just drums), and two backing singers, playing, between them all, a HUGE number of different instruments.

The songs were great, and we had fun, and enjoyed a class act.

Martyn Joseph at Marlborough Town Hall

I was almost certainly too young and too cool to attend this aging, accoustic folk-rockers latest tour, but we love him to bits and we've caught the last 2 tours (and previous gigs too), so I've already lost any credibility I might have had. :-)

We've seen MJ with accompaniment before - a single keyboard player at a gig at Bush Hall in London. But this time he had a little band of sorts. There was a very cool-looking and talented female bassist playing double bass and both fretted and fretless electric bass - not all at the same time of course. And a very un-cool-looking but equally talented wind-instrument guy, playing tenor sax, clarinet and...yes really...the recorder!

I won't say much about MJ. He was on good form and the new songs, which have grown on me more since my album review, sound great live. Though I prefer "Kindness" unaccompanied...it has a certain kind of emotion and tension when it's just the accoustic guitar...it's longing for more sound around it..."how I miss you/my angel and my reason how I miss you". (Though I'm just listening to it again and there's a hint of piano and electric guitar on the album version...so I'm wrong there. I do prefer the album version though).

What did amaze me at this gig was the teamwork, humility and restraint of the musicians. The wind-instrument guy hardly played at all. He only chipped in when it was needed. He didn't, pardon the pun, blow his own trumpet.

There's a great metaphor in here for how we should live our lives. Quietly working in the background, not demanding attention, playing along to the tune of our creator, but remembering always that it's His work. He's the lead, we follow, we play, and if we demand too much attention that will detract from His glory!

Music is a great gift and I left both gigs thankful for the talented people who write and play these songs to bring us pleasure.

No logo?

[Note - the original idea for this was to include pictures of the logos mentioned but I decided this was probably not legal and so removed them and just did my own "representations", in the hope that that's allowed. Look them up on an image search if you want the real thing!]

"Maaaarketing..." said an alien on Radio 4's "The Now Show" some time last year...he was amused by the fact that humans bottled water and sold it at extortionate cost to one another.

"Yes, this is amusing. Marketing - hahahaha".

Which pretty much sums up my understanding of the topic.

The issue of "corporate re-blanding" has been bothering me for a while. A certain company quite close to my heart has recently scrapped its well-known logo and put in its place the name of the company, written in a bold, sans serif font, in a variety of colours...which is exactly what a similar company had done a couple of years beforehand.

But why? Why scrap an image that's recognised around the world and replace it with the same thing that everyone else is doing?

Some examples.

Welcome Break - you've all stopped on the motorway services and experienced the wonders of their toilets. They used to have a nice old fashioned picture of a swan coming in to land above their name.

I never quite got the swan thing. Presumably swans like a gigantic fried breakfast halfway through their migration or something (do swans migrate?), but it was recognisable and kinda homely...welcoming. So what's with the new "logo", which basically looks like this...

WELCOMEBREAK

This one particularly irritates me because NOWTHEYWRITEEVERYTHINGINBOLD UPPERCASESANS-SERIFANDITSREALLYHARDTOREADANDITSOUNDSLIKETHEY'RE SHOUTINGATYOU. Not actually very welcoming at all.

Marks and Spencer: Wow - I realise that I've not seen the name in full for a while now. Yes, they're doing it on the high street too! The old, angular logo was just a name and a magic little ampersand, presented on two lines in a nice shade of green. But it was a well-recognised name.

However, M&S have actually changed a lot. They used to be seen as a stuffy old supermarket that only sold its own brand food to old people, but for many that view has changed. Their new logo is modern and reflects that change but I'm still left wondering if they could have come up with something more unique than their initials in a curvy black and greeny-yellow...this is not just any logo, it's a smooth, sophisticated, trips-off-your tongue logo...my cheap imitation is simply something like:

M&S

The Co-op. Possibly another story of a stuffy old shop modernising - the old logo's loopy, lowercase, blue letters laid out in a square formation, firmly reminding me of shopping with my granny. Like M&S I like what the Co-operative are doing but surely they're just jumping on a bandwagon with the new look...which isn't far off something like...

The co-operative

Even charities are at it...internation Christian development agency, Tearfund, had their name in two fonts - with and without serifs, two colours - deep green and clean white, two weights - normal and bold, with a nice dandelion head in an orange box next to it. But even charities modernise and we now have nothing more than...

tearfund

(I should point out that the "t" should be cross-shaped with no curly bottom. This is probably important, but I don't have a standard font that looks like that!)

It's a silly thing to have a rant about but what bugs me is that all the skill and creativity seems to have gone from marketing. Let's just take a company name, optionally abbreviate it in some way, pick a modern typeface, and choose a couple of colours. Anyone could do it? Couldn't they?
If I had the time I could write a computer program to randomly re-brand company names in this way. And people get paid a fortune to do it?

So...to any marketing people out there...what's stopping me?

Alien 1: Here, buy this
Alien 2: I already have this
Alien 1: "Marketing"
Alien 2: Okay then, I'll buy it
Alien 1: I have laughed so hard I have accidentally passed what passes for alien wee-wee
Alien 2: Put it in a bottle, you could sell it to the humans
Both: hahahahaha

Form vs Function

Why is it that things that perform a job well always look stupid? This seems to be especially true of sports wear.

Why is it that the best way to keep warm on my bike in winter is to wear skin-tight, fleecy-lined tights?

Why is bright yellow seemingly the best colour to wear if you want to be seen on the roads in the daytime?

When are they going to invent some head protection that looks compact and stylish (this probably does exist but is not in my price range).

Where can I get some overshoes that don't make my feet look like they belong to a large black alien.

And of course, wearing all these things together simply make a person look ridiculous.

I've been experiencing this strange law of nature recently as I've been acquiring and wearing more winter kit for my commute. And I'm sure it holds true for more than just cycling kit. I bet runners (Sarah?) have the same feelings about vests and shorts and so on - I bet the stuff that keeps you cool and comfortable in summer and warm and safe in winter looks really weird.

So as winter goes on and I wrap up more and more I expect more and more jibes about how silly I look. Well let it be said that I don't care! I may look daft, but I'm warm, dry, fast, fit, safe and comfortable. So there!!!

Broken, deflated and worn out

I've had some wheel problems of late and have learned a few things in the process.

Breaking...and fixing...spokes

First of all, during the house move, I decided, stupidly to transport our three bikes in horizontal formation - flat, on top of one another, in the back of the transit van.

Lesson 1: Transporting multiple bikes horizontally is not a good idea.

Why? Well mostly because I totally overloaded the weight on one of my wheels and broke four of the spokes.

Now, I've heard that wheel building, and spoke replacement are pretty difficult to get right and it's easy to end up with a very wobbly wheel. But, with a bit of effort and a lot of fiddling, I managed to do this myself.

Lesson 2: Don't be scared of people in bike shops. If you explain that you're trying to fix something yourself they're quite helpful.

Lesson 3: Replacing spokes isn't as hard as everyone makes it out to be.

Lesson 4: When replacing multiple spokes do some serious preparation working out the spoke pattern. This will save you much time later on!

My first flat

Pretty chuffed with my wheel work, I started the ride to work an back again. I've been playing with different routes at weekend with the aim of extending my rides to make them into longer training rides.

On the first extended ride home, I must sadly report that I got my first puncture. Yes, after just over a year and about 1300 miles, I finally got my first flat!

I had a pump with me, but my multi-tool, patches and spare tube were in my seat pack...at home.

Lesson 5: It doesn't matter if your ride is short and not straying too far from home. It's ALWAYS worth putting your seat-pack-full-of-tools on.

I swallowed my pride and phoned home for a lift. Sally was most gracious and drove out to pick me, and my poor wheels, up.

Lesson 6: My hybrid with fully-loaded paniers is pretty heavy and carrying it any distance is hard work. When calling for roadside assistance be sure to get the person to drive to where you are, not to a point several hundred metres away up a hill!

Replacing Tyres

As I repaired the flat, I realised that my tyres were starting to look pretty worn. So they've been replaced now too. I still feel like the back wheel is a bit lumpy. It looks straight and true and, if anything, the bulge/wobble that I used to have in my tyre is gone. So it should be better! But it just feels not-quite-right when I do any speed in a straight line.

In addition, the, erm, well, a the bit of the bike that holds attaches the handlebar to the frame, is loose. It's occasionally worked it way loose before but a good strong turn of an allen key has sorted it out. Sadly, this time, the hexagonal hole that you put the allen key into is wearing away and I can't get enough force onto it to get it tight without it slipping. It might be a bike shop job now.

So in general my poor old machine is suffering a bit. I try to look after it but I guess 1300 miles is quite a lot for a cheap little Raleigh. Poor thing.

A Month Off

Phew, I'm finally back in the land of the living. Where have I been? Here's my excuses for not writing for a month...

Moving House

Well, the house exchange and completion went through. We got the keys to our new house on October 5th. Sally was away for the weekend and I'd been banned from moving in until she got home, so I got on with the job of cleaning and tidying the old place. We moved in proper on the Monday.

The house is great but a little rough around the edges. Lots of bits of DIY/building that seem to have been finished in a hurry. But it's ours, it has three bedrooms, a huge garden and it's in a great location.

Of course, we've had to clean up and get out of the old rented house too. Phew.

No Broadband

Moving house means setting up a new phone line and having our Internet connection set up. This meant several weeks without Broadband. Quite a nice experience really. We get so much more "real" stuff done without Google and Facebook and Blogger. We didn't really miss it at all. Of course, now it's back we're back in the habit of making good use of our "always on" pipe to the universe.

A note about providers...we were with Zen Internet, who provide excellent service, but at a cost. Our up-to-8Mb connection was costing £17 per month with a 2GB usage limit. So after some debate and research we decided to KEEP Sky TV and take Sky Broadband and Sky Talk (phone calls) too. Much as I dislike having hundreds of TV channels that I never watch. This appealed because:

• Sky Talk costs nothing and gives free evening and weekend calls.
• Sky Broadband is £5 for up-to-8Mb with a 40GB usage limit.
• Sky + (Sky's hard-disk based TV recording system), now has no monthly subscription cost.

Sky+ turns out to be awesome! VERY high quality recorded TV that you set up from the on-screen TV guide. You just find the programme and tell it to record. It'll record a whole series of the same programme. And you can pause and rewind live TV too. I understand how the technology works, and I'm STILL very impressed. Good technology, well implemented, is hard to find these days.

Holiday

We decided, shortly after the house move, to take a week's holiday. My In-Law's were off to Spain for a few nights and asked if we wanted to house-sit. With a free weeks' holiday on the edge of Dartmoor being offered we couldn't really refuse and it turned out to be just what we needed. We've just got back from this week off and we're well relaxed and trying to summon up the mental effort required to get back to work tomorrow.

We also popped to London on Friday for a couple of friends of ours who were having an engagement party. We're VERY excited that they're getting married and the party was really great.

Returning to London is an odd experience. We drive in thinking that it's horrid, busy, noisy, etc, but after a couple of hours re-uniting with good friends we miss it. Of course, we've made good friends here in Swindon too, but we're really still getting to know people and it's not the same as connecting with people that you've known inside-out for many years. There are things about London as a city that we miss, but mostly it's the people.

Finally...

So, yes, after all that we're in the new house, broadband is back, and we're not on holiday any more. I probably have some catching up to do. I keep having "I must write about that" moments, but can't remember what any of them are now. If they're that important then they'll come back to me I'm sure.

Back in the saddle!

After the successes of mountain climbing at the weekend I'm back into cycling to work. And it feels great. Going slowly and steadily at the moment but hopefully we'll be out on training runs again soon.

Funny how this has become so important to me. I feel I have some of my identity back now I can cycle again. And with the new school term starting driving has been a nightmare - I'd much rather be speeding along on my bike than sat in traffic!

I have a new day-glo waterproof jacket too. This is great for visibility and is, in my opinion, a fairly sporty-looking thing (rather than the nerdy day-glo work jackets you can get). I found a down side today though when I went to put the recycling out before heading off to work. The next door neighbour thought I was the bin man!!! Still - gave Sally a laugh.

Music: A month's worth of new stuff

It's been a good month for music. Sally and I are booked in to see Martyn Joseph and KT Tunstall in the coming months, plus, there was a new Athlete album out that I splashed out on. Thoughts below:

Drastic Fantsatic - KT Tunstall

The catchiest of the new albums, very easy to get into. KT is a good songwriter, a very accomplished musican and singer, and she's intelligent too. We very much liked the first album and this one didn't disappoint as a follow up.

The songs are a variety of styles, there's folk, rock and roll, ballads, pop, even a hint of Latin American.

It's a great album, but I don't think it will quite have the lasting appeal of "Through the Telescope". Enjoying it for the moment though.

Vegas - Martyn Joseph

This is the album about which I'd like to say the most. I became a fan of MJ quite recently (probably after the Bush Hall gig...3 yeas ago?) and missed out on a lot of his older stuff. But he is one of my favourite musicians.

For those that don't know, he's a Welsh folk-rocker who writes about stuff that he really cares about and sings and plays with an enormous amount of passion.

This record is a bit different to some of his other stuff. MJ himself says something like "it might even make you smile". And that's true - there's a tribute to Elvis and some other nice moments, but he remains gritty, slightly angry, political, and, occasionally melancholy.

I must confess that after a few listens I'm feeling like the album doesn't have much new - it feels like a union of the last two ("Whoever it was that brought me here..." and "Deep Blue").

Song-wise examples:

• Vegas is a catchy tribute with an easy chorus, in much the same way as "This Being Woman";
• "Weight of the World" is a bit like "This Fragile World";
• "Nobody Loves You Anymore" is reminiscent of "Six Sixty Six" (though I'll avoid comparisons of George Bush and the Devil - that would be going too far);
• "The Fading of Light" seems to be an updated "Yet Still This Will Not Be";
• and "The things that we have carried here" is like "Whoever it was that brought me here..." in more than just the length of the song name.

But that shouldn't detract from the quality of this album. MJ's consistently good songwriting hasn't gone away. His percussive accoustic guitar playing makes sounds like a single instrument shouldn't. His intricate fingerstyle is beautiful as ever. And his vocals, though mostly lacking range of pitch, vary from the haunting whispers of "Kindness" to the angry growls of "Nobody Loves You Any More" .The little flourishes of percussion, harmonica, woodwind, strings, piano, even an electric guitar or two (!) add depth and interest without detracting from the key elements of MJ's voice and guitar.

I DO like this album. A lot. I will play it over and over. And the gig in November will be one of the highlights of my year. But I'd like to see him writing about something a bit different next time...perhaps a few elections, on both sides of the pond, will make for some more variety in the next album.

Beyond the Neighbourhood - Athlete

And the album I'll say the least about. Certainly the most difficult to get into!

Athlete's first album was a catchy, pop-rock record. The second, Wires, was more downbeat, but more mature. I still haven't quite got to grips with all of it but the music is excellent and it was worth spending time having it grow on me - there's some cracking songs on there. I suspect this third album is like the second. It's in the shadow of two much more easily accessible albums at the moment, but I will persevere.

Musically it sounds rich and intricate and I suspect there's some awesome songs on there - I've just not found them yet...or they've not found me.

Maybe more notes required in a few weeks.

Exchange!!!

So after a long and complicated couple of days, which I won't go into the details of here, we finally exchanged contracts on the house and will complete on Friday! Wow. We will own 5% of a house (and be borrowing the rest from the bank).

After weeks of not very much happening this is quite a sudden thing, but we're very excited.

Time to pack some boxes, book a van, phone BT, arrange broadband, move utilities, set up redirection, pack some more boxes, hand in notice on the rented house, and a thousand and one other things...none of which involve writing this blog!

Yay!

Conquering the Glyders

I have now climbed three mountains!

What a weekend. We've had this trip to Snowdonia planned for ages. My sister and her boyfriend invited us to climb Snowdon the hard way (via Crib Goch) months ago and this weekend, it finally came about.

Despite the forward planning, for Sally and I it was all a bit last minute. My "post-viral fatigue" had raised questions about whether or not we would go away, let alone climb a mountain, but we decided that we would at least get out of town and spend a few nights in the company of good friends in a beautiful place.

In the event, we DID attempt to climb Snowdon. We set out on Friday morning with the aim of following the Crib-Goch-scrambling party to the start of the difficult bit, and then following an easier track (the Pyg Track) from there on our own steam.

I quite quickly gave up and didn't make it far past the point at which we split up. My legs got really tired and I just didn't feel like I'd make it very far.



However, on Saturday I tried again - the party headed out to climb Glyder Fach and Glyder Fawr - the other side of the valley from Snowdon, and I went with them with the intention of going as far as I felt comfortable. With a bit of encouragement from the others I kept on going and did a whole 7 hours walk, climbing a total of 800m over a distance of about 10km. Not bad for an invalid - climbing something higher than Scafell.



It was a good scramble. We headed up into mist at first and the unclear footpath we were trying to follow lead to some difficult, if unexposed, scrambling. However, the mist cleared once we got to the second peak and we were rewarded with some awesome views of Snowdon and

I WAS shattered today though and the drive back was very hard work.

My health is an odd thing. It feels like Friday's aborted attempt at Snowdon kickstarted my body a bit - made it realise that, at some point, it would have to stop moping around and get on and do some physical work. I'm also not sure how much of what I'm going through is psychological and how much is really physical.

Anyway, health issues aside, I've had a cracking weekend. Snowdonia is beautiful, the hostel was comfortable and the food good, we had lots of fun, and there was a bit of me that looked up at Crib Goch and REALLY wanted to climb it.

There's something in us that wants to explore, to experience danger, to go to the difficult place. We'll definitely be back at some point!

Still not right!!!

It's been nearly a month now since I was up all night being sick...the "flu-like virus" has mostly gone away but, as anyone who's been watching my Facebook status will tell you, I still have the odd bad day. Tonight has been a particularly bad evening with me collapsing in bed and feeling like I'm right back at square one.

The doctor doesn't seem surprised and a little bit of web research (dangerous as you could probably self-diagnose pretty much anything) shows that "post viral fatigue" is not uncommon and can last a long time.

But it's very frustrating. I've been surprised at how much my life is defined by physical activity. I miss my cycling and I'm unable to do much that's strenuous at all. I tried cycling yesterday, about 4 miles worth at a very slow pace. Perhaps that what's killed me off this evening?

It's stressing me out a bit as we're buying the house...probably real soon now...and I won't be up to much packing and cleaning and shifting big boxes around. Plus, I don't know what the future holds - I guess I'll slowly recover but if there is something more long-term wrong with me, is taking on a mortgage such a good thing?

Only time will tell I guess. In the meantime we press on with our plans in faith that God will stop us if we're doing the wrong thing.

Naturewatch: Web Building!

Possibly not for the arachnophobic. Some action shots of the fat spider building a web. The sun was shining down and making the web glisten so I thought I'd try and catch it on, err, well not film exactly, but you know what I mean.

The reason I'm a bit fanatical about spiders is that...well...they're just amazing. They have these 8 legs and they build this super-strong web thing with stuff that they naturally produce to catch their food. The co-ordination required to spin a web is phenomenal, combined with their apparent ability to fly between high places to put up the initial outer structure of the web. Watching it happen is just incredible.

I am someone who believes in God and, though I don't believe the literal 7-day creation, I do believe that God created the natural world around us, and when I see something like a spider spinning a web I can only watch in awe at the detail and intricacy with which God made things.

Book: Prayer by Phillip Yancey

This book was recommended as a good read on prayer but didn't live up to expectations.

Before I wrote these notes on it I did some searching and it's hard to find a bad review of the book. And I have to say that, despite the slow start to it, the book did grow on me as I read it, and it did inspire me to pray more and differently. But it was with relief that I finished it. It was just REALLY hard going.

This is probably more a reflection on me than on the book. Let me explain...

Much as my writing is very long and waffly, I like my reading to be concise and to the point. I like stories and illustrations, but they should help make the point rather than clog up the book and make it slow going and repetitive. Plus, I read non-fiction books like this slowly and carefully, taking everything in, underlining what's important, so I don't need the same point to be made several times.

You can probably work out that I thought that this book was too heavy on anecdotes, too light on simple, to-the-point theology, and too repetitive. The book IS a meandering journey rather than a write up of the destination. It's a discussion rather than a sermon.

In a book like this it is sometimes important to reinforce a point but, particularly in the early chapters, I found Yancey going round in circles without making much real progress. After reading about a third of it I wondered what I was going to get from it other than lots of questions and fairly stock answers.

I found later chapters were a bit more practical and inspiring and Yancey's honesty and openness about his struggles with prayer really make the book. By the end I has the feeling that he has somehow gained some mastery of the topic and he had managed to share it with me. I just wish it hadn't taken him so many words to do it.

I didn't find many points to disagree on, though Yancey's theology is obviously very open. He's not afraid to tackle the difficult questions, and not afraid to leave you without a firm answer either.

I'd like to see an edited version distilling his findings into a much shorter work. But worth reading if you have the time.

Update on house buying

A while ago I mentioned that we'd had an offer accepted on a house! A quick update is due.

The process has been moving along quite well. We stalled a bit while we chose a mortgage but that's applied for, the legal stuff has all moved along as it should, the survey is now done, and it seems that nothing can now stand in the way of our purchase (famous last words...you read them here!).

My main feeling, other then excitement, is the completely overwhelming amount of information that's involved. We requested some extra reports and searches because the house:
- is near a flood plain (far enough from it to be safe though),
- is near the site of an old refuse site,
- has recently had an extension built.

So we have the following documentation:
- an environmental report,
- a water and drainage report,
- a survey and homebuyers report,
- the information pack from the seller,
- all the mortgage information,
- information on buildings and contents insurance.

In addition, today we've received a couple of quotes and information packs for life assurance and payment protection. And my brain has just overloaded. I can't take any more!!!

There's been some discussion recently about things called home information packs that the seller is supposed to put together. I believe these are becoming mandatory for 3-bedroom houses just this week (if only we'd waited!!). What a good idea this is! If our purchase had fallen through the searches we've done and paid for would have to be re-done and re-paid-for. With a Home Information Pack it's all done once and by the seller, which seems to make a whole world of sense to me.

We are excited, we are thankful for the hugely privileged position that we find ourselves in in being able to buy a house in the first place, we're particularly thankful for the house that we've found that meets our needs so well...but my brain really is quite full up now and I need a rest.

Getting used to being ill

I don't remember being ill much as a kid, teenager, or even in my early working years. But that all seems to have changed lately.

The last two weeks, since getting back from Greenbelt, have been one physical problem after another. Starting with what appeared to be food poisoning or a stomach bug of some sort, morphing into a "flu-like virus" which has kept me in bed for most of this week, and then, having finally recovered from that, I did my back in, to the extent that I could hardly move last night (and I almost certainly shouldn't be using a computer right now).

I've been sick, aching, tired, emotionally drained and now in a huge amount of pain, for nearly two weeks. Add this to the couple of weeks I had off earlier in the year for my stress/depression (I'll write a "whatever happened to post at some point"), and it's been a pretty bad year for me health-wise.

Yet, there are positives to take from all of this. When I first started having my flu-like symptoms I said to Sally "I'm not very good at being ill". By which I meant that, my response to being unwell isn't always very good. I feel like I give up quite easily, but in reality I think I push myself too hard when I'm ill. I'm NOT good at stopping and resting and doing nothing. I feel guilty about not being at work and so I throw myself back into it too quickly.

But I've been learning about these things. I started to recover last weekend and took up too much too quickly and the bug came back to get me as a result. So I had a whole week off, and even when I started to feel myself again I made use of the doctor's sick note and rested.

I've learned to leave alone things that need doing around the house (it's a bit of a tip at the moment but I don't care!!!). I've learned the pleasure of sitting still and reading a book. I've learned not to feel guilty about not being at work - the world continues to turn even when I'm sat in bed doing nothing.


I've prayed a lot, I've chilled out a lot. Sally's been fantastic, as have others who have rallied round to help me out. It's taken a long time but I do think it's nearly over and I'm looking forward to carrying on normally, but with a few lessons learned.

Naturewatch: Fat spider

I like spiders! Which is just as well as there's about a million in our garden. Probably mostly the grown up babies that I spotted back in the spring.

I just liked this one because it used to be quite a skinny spider but she (we think it's a she) has put her web in such a good place that she's had a few meals too many and got really fat!

A case of "Who ate all the flies?"

Book: The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde

I've been off sick the last few days, sleeping, resting, and taking my mind off my churning stomach by both reading and writing.

One result of which is that, after about 6 months of on-and-off reading, I've finally finished a book!

The Eyre Affair is a cleverly comic, extremely eccentric romp through time space and reality. I'm sure I missed out on a lot of gags by not being familiar with some of the literary classics on which it's quite heavily based (Bronte and Shakespear getting lots of mentions), but I still found it amusing and entertaining.

It's clever in the sense that the book mashes together reality and fiction. It's set in Swindon, but it's not quite the Swindon we know...or the United Kingdom that we know, for that matter. Names, places, events, often sound familiar, but have been taken into a slightly-alternative reality. This skipping between reality and fiction is also a topic of the book.

I'm not very good at reading, and it took so long that I'm sure I missed out on some meta-narratives, and was not able to appreciate the intricacies of the book. But it was still a very entertaining read.

Would I read it again? Or the next book in the series? Possibly, but I was troubled throughout by the fact that I wasn't quite getting it all because of my lack of literary knowledge, so I certainly won't go straight to the library. Recommend for the quirky, clever, and well-read reader.

Charity and Justice

I'd like to post a link to this article about Charity and Justice. Relevant Magazine doesn't always hit the mark (more below) but this article explains an important difference between what the author calls "charity" (giving to help people in need) and "justice" (trying to fix the things that make charity needed). It's worth reading, thinking about, and taking action on.

Having spoken at some length about "Christian" media in my Greenbelt post, I now mention Relevant Magazine again. Relevant is a very-American media company who are publishing a couple of magazines, some books and resources, and a website, mostly aimed at a Christian audience but, as with Greenbelt, you could get lots from it if you weren't following God in any kind of way.

Sometimes it misses the mark totally, but if you ignore the American-ness, the vast amounts of advertising (someone's got to pay to make these things happen), and some of the less useful articles, there's some useful, interesting, thought-provoking, and sometimes challenging stuff in there.

I hope this article was in one of those categories.

Greenbelt: Thoughts and Discoveries

Last weekend was my first outing to the festival known as "Greenbelt". In fact, it was my first real festival outing anywhere.

Greenbelt is a music and arts festival. But it needs a little bit more categorisation than that. I shall explain.

A note on sub-cultures

Now, I'm always careful about talking about "Christian" stuff in a way that makes it sound like there's a whole faith-based sub-culture around. But the truth is that there IS. There is music that you won't have come across if you're not a Christian. There are books and magazines targeted at those of the faith. There are websites and organisations and a whole host of other things. I think that, to some extent, this is OK and helpful. It's the same with cycling. It's probably the same with Kung Fu and plumbing and...well, every specialist activity probably has some sort of specialist media targeted at it.

What I think is important is that we don't get so wrapped up in the Christian sub-culture that we ignore everything else, or worse, label everything else as bad or evil in some way.

With that in mind I'll try to describe my impressions of Greenbelt.

Impressions of the festival

Before I went to Greenbelt I was under the impression that it was mostly attended by people who would call themselves Christians of one sort or another. Yet I was led to believe that it was not an overtly "Christian" festival. You'd fit in quite well if you weren't a church go-er at all.

To some extent those initial impressions turned out to be true. However, when I arrived, I found myself swinging the other way. There seems to be LOTS of stuff targeted specifically at Christians. As time went on I found myself swinging back to the middle ground. You can't miss the stuff that's overtly Christian, but I reckon you can safely attend and enjoy the festival without having any of this forced upon you.

I did enjoy the festival, though I struggled with the social dynamics of trying to get a group of people to meet up at certain times when they all had plans that changed by the hour. I think next time I'll go with the aim of being more independent and if other people want to arrange to meet me at certain times then that's fine.

The weather for the festival was fantastic. Sun and warmth and dryness for a few days with it clouding over for the last day. As an introduction to festival life it was a very good one. The company was excellent too and we got to meet up, catch up, and generally have fun with some of our best friends who had gathered from around the country.

Festival Discoveries

We probably didn't actually see or do as much as I thought we would. We were quite selective and, often, got turned out of full-up venues. Though we did discover, or re-discover, the following artists:

• Michael McDermott - American accoustic rock guy with an edgy voice and some great tunes and songs. Probably my highlight.
• Martyn Joseph - We're already big fans and he's a Greenbelt regular so of course he was there and of course we went to see him. He was mostly running a show where he interviewed other singer songwriters, but he did play a short set in the music shop tent. He seems to be having a bit of a mid-life crisis; he's started playing up-beat rock and roll (as opposed to his usual hard political folk). But I like this. He's releasing a new album called "Vegas" in September and the stuff he played from it sounded really good. Looking forward to a proper gig in November!
• John Bell - One of the leaders of the Iona community, gets a mention for being a REALLY good speaker. He did a great talk looking at how we can interpret stories from Genesis and apply them to our faith that we live today.
• Kathryn Williams - Referred to by one of my friends as one of the few "proper famous" people at Greenbelt. I love this ladies voice and songs and dry wit, but I thought the overall performance needed polishing. I think she was very nervous about performing a solo live show.
• Core Magazine - who look like an attempt at an english version of Relevant Magazine. Compare the straplines "God, Life, Progressive Culture" (for Relevant) and "Life, Spirit, Adventure" (for Core). I think this is a worthy venture and I wish them every success. Unfortunately they don't seem to have updated the website since April, so who knows what the status of it is.
  
• Iain Archer - who's one of those artists (like the Shins) who sounds a bit dull on CD but, as I've just found, does a great live show. Perhaps I'll look up some of his newer stuff.

Book: Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell

A friend of mine used to keep notes on books she had read and films she had seen. I hope to occasionally jot down what I think of books, films, maybe music here. Not reviews, but reminders to me of what the thing was about and what I thought of it.

I've just finished reading "Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith", kindly loaned to me by a friend.

It's a book about...well, I'm not sure what. It's a general overview of what the author - the "pastor" of a large, fairly liberal church in Michigan - thinks about Christianity I suppose.

It's a controversial book for some. I agreed with most of it but had problems with some things. I'll just give a very quick overview of the chapters (or "movements" as he calls them). Forgive any use of church jargon that you don't understand, it's hard to talk about these things in a brief way without using words that either mean nothing or are loaded with meaning.

The chapters have names, not numbers, and are as follows:

Jump is about the building blocks of faith. He touches on "creeds" (statements of faith) and explains how they are useful but need to be flexible (like springs, not bricks), and why it's OK to have questions and why joy is important.

Yoke is about different teachings, truth, and how it's important to interpret the Bible. By this he means both understanding what the writings would have meant to their original audience 2000 years ago, and in terms of re-applying what is said to our culture today. His biblical, historical and cultural knowledge shines through the whole book and is very interesting.

True. I suspect this is a controversial chapter and I found it difficult myself - especially his notion of finding truth around us. I agree that you can find elements of truth outside of what's written in the Bible but he seems to think that, if it seems OK to you then you can call it truth. I'm a bit more fundamental in that I think there is an ultimate truth to find, and that you can find things that are "good" outside of that truth, but not all the "good" things are "true", or indeed helpful. I do agree that we are too inflexible with our beliefs and application of truth and that this is bad, but I found Bell to be too soft with the general notion of truth itself.

Other bits of this chapter were good with stuff about how God is everywhere but we don't always recognise it, and about taking our faith with us into our whole lives...good stuff!

Tassels is about being real with ourselves and healing of the soul. There's some of Rob Bell's story of how he came to lead this huge church and then have a bit of a breakdown and what that all meant for him and how God helped him through it. He explains how we also need to go through a similar process sometimes. Pretty nitty-gritty stuff that's easy to read and hard to actually be real with, but full of great truth. Includes a great section about the sabbath!

Dust is about "discipleship"; that is, being called by and following in the teachings and life of Jesus. Again, lots of historical and cultural background make some very interesting reading but other then a good feeling about being chosen, I didn't feel it challenged me much.

New is about grace and the process of being "made new" which happens when we believe in Jesus. Essentially about how we get forgiven for "sin" (the wrong stuff we've done)
and how, if we believe in Jesus, this happens by what God has done and not by anything that we do. It's about being who we were meant to be and making the world more like it was meant to be. There's a call to action in there somewhere and a challenge to be people who "bring heaven to earth".

Good continues the theme talking about renewal and how heaven isn't somewhere that we will be going, but rather somewhere that the earth will one day be. It's coming here, rather than we're going there. Rob Bell's real frustration seems to come out here as he talks about what the "church" should be. This is what it's all about. Creeds, teachings, truth, healing of the soul, discipleship, grace, all leading to us - people that follow Jesus - being people who lead a life of serving God and serving others in order to bring the goodness of heaven to earth. Phew.

I enjoyed the book. It was a good and easy read. Rob Bell writes in a very conversational style and obviously is a very knowledgeable and wise man. I'd love to read more of his explaining of the Bible and the Jewish culture and traditions.

A few things I didn't like - aside from where I didn't necessarily agree with him.

I think he overuses metaphor. Bricks, tassels, velvet Elvises, superpastors, tour guides. It peters out after a while but at the start he really overdoes it, stretching the analogies further than the springs on his trampoline.

And I think he's not challenging enough. He makes some good points but, as I said before, a warm feeling is about all I got. Maybe it's the conversational tone? It made me want to think about things, not to actually change them.

The overall feeling I'm left with is that he should be writing a different book. Perhaps if he focussed more on the history and less on the philosophy I'd find him a better read? But then, if he did that he'd be writing a completely different book. And I think I quite liked the book. But I might need a second read to be sure. Martin, can I borrow it a bit longer???

You didn't cycle in today...?

The rain is back, and so I'm once again faced, upon entering my workplace, with the statement "Surely you didn't cycle in today!"

I do sometimes question my own sanity, and I ask myself how I would respond if someone asked me why I did it. I reckon I could get between 10 and 20 good reasons...so here goes:

1. It improves my strength.
2. It improves my fitness.
3. I'm likely to live longer.
4. It takes a car off the road (reduces congestion).
5. It's less polluting.
6. I breathe in less pollution.
   
7. It reduces the need for parking.
8. It's cheaper.
9. It's less stressful (I'd much rather cycle in the rain than sit in a traffic jam).
10. It wakes me up.
11. It burns calories (OK, so I take them in again by eating more!).
12. It makes me feel good.
13. It's fun (in a strange way).

13 without much thinking! There must be more...

Customer Service and Trust

Back in this post at the end of June I mentioned that "[our car's] engine has developed a nasty rattle which the garage want £200 just to take apart and diagnose (and then another £200 to put it back together)."

I wanted to reflect on the process we went through to get this fixed.

The garage mentioned was actually our local Peugeot dealer. A company that I've gone to in the past to get work done under warranty and to get servicing done in order to get the "Peugeot" stamp in the book. I also had no reason to think that any other garage was going to give me better service.

Having said that, the service was pretty bad. In the past they have:
- failed to diagnose a serious fault;
- charged me vast labour charges for trivial jobs that I could have done myself;
- consistently not called me when they said they would - I always have to chase them on the phone;
- generally not shown much interest in customer service at all.

I THINK that some of this is because they're just too busy, but it leads to a complete lack of trust in their ability to do a good job.

So, on the recommendation of several friends, I took my car to Cross Street Garage in Swindon. I explained the situation, that the Peugeot people wanted to strip down a cylinder just to diagnose my rattle - which, in my opinion didn't seem to be coming from the cylinders - and charge me upwards of £400 for doing it. They said they would take a look and give me a call later on.

And...true to their promise, they took a look. The guy on the phone was actually the guy that took a look, and he said the rattle was coming from the top of the engine and that it was probably a spark-plug or an injector loose. I gave him the go-ahead to do some further looking at it and he said he'd call me back.

And...he called me back. It WAS a loose spark plug. He's tightened it up and would charge me about £30 labour for doing it.

Now, that is what I expect from an "expert". This man not only saved me over £350 by taking a sensible approach to diagnosing the fault, but he's done exactly what he said he would. He may well have lost some money by not doing the bigger job, but he has my trust. And my trust will win him more work in the future.

Reflecting on this then; I work in the customer service industry - OK, I'm third line, which means that there are two layers of people our customers need to go through before they get to deal with me - but I have the chance to set, meet, and exceed, my customer's expectations. I'm incredibly busy, but doing these little jobs for people gets their trust, and makes them come back for more.

There are probably loads of stories out there like this and it's important to those of us that deal with customers that we're constantly challenged by them.

In the mean time - I think out car's due a service now. I wonder which garage I'll be taking it to?!

To Cholsey!!!

As I'm becoming an bit of an avid cyclist (can you tell?) I felt compelled to watch a bit of the Tour de France this year. Something was said during the TV commentary for the "prologue" (the time-trial around London to establish the leader before they properly set off) that sounded a bit weird. They said that the cyclists were doing a two-hour warm-up on a turbo trainer before doing the time trial to get their heart rate up to optimal levels.

This sounded weird because my heart rate shoots up pretty quickly when I start exercising so why it would take those guys 2 hours was a bit baffling. And wouldn't they be knackered after 2 hours?

Well, today I did my longest cycle ride to date, to the village of Cholsey near Didcot, clocking 34.4 miles in just under 2 hours - a more than half-decent average of 17.7mph over the whole 2 hours!). And what was weird was that I kinda got used to working hard and going fast. After about an hour, I felt great - not tired as I thought I would be, and was able to sustain some pretty high speeds (for me) on the flat. It was like, after warming up for some time some extra strength and energy kicked in.

Now, I'm a novice sportsman and I don't know what phenomenon caused this, but I certainly see how a long warm up period can really set you up for a longer ride.

I'm pretty chuffed today. I set out expecting to average about 15mph. My goal was to get there, not to get there quickly. So do do under 2 hours was great - even with a tail wind and with it being more downhill than up.

I might even be up to getting to Bath in a couple of weeks time?

For those that care, the route is here. Great weather, great scenery. Oh, and I chickened out and got the train home. Not ready for 70 milers just yet!

Cycling update

Not done much longer distance cycling recently - though some would say I've never ridden a "long" distance, my 30 milers are as good as it gets. My excuse: the weather's been awful this summer with LOTS of rain. But it's finally getting better, so it's time to get out and trying to build up the distances again.

Last night managed a measly-but-hilly 13.3 miles out to Wanborough (towards Uffington) and back in just over 45 mins, averaging about 17.3mph. I played squash before the ride and by the time I finished I was pretty knackered but felt good! My knees were OK, I felt pretty strong throughout, and my cycling shoes and clipless pedals made it a joy to do. There were times of riding on the flat at 24mph that just felt really good!

Oh, and I stopped for a while to rescue a little dog who was running around all over a main road too.

I'm encouraged about this short evening ride, but I do need to get the distances up. Let's hope for lots more good weather!

Buying a house

We've done it! We've had an offer accepted on a house!

Actually, it happened a lot more quickly than I thought it would. So quickly that I didn't get to write anything about the house-hunting process.

You build it up in your head as being this huge thing that's really hard and takes ages to do but no...despite the differences that Sally and I had about what we wanted from a house and a neighbourhood, the fourth place that we looked out got us both very excited. We put an offer in
on Saturday and it was duly accepted.

I had some hesitations. Does God want us to buy a house? How do the notions of borrowing and spending that much money fit in with my faith? Am I just following the crowd and the culture? Is this really something that we should be doing, or should we be stepping out in a different,
more counter-cultural direction?

I never asked those questions about renting. Perhaps I should have?

I did spend some time praying about the decision. I thought hard about a little story in the bible where a man goes to Jesus and, excitedly, says "I will follow you wherever you go". Brilliant, we might think. How good, we might think, to see someone making such a passionate statement of commitment to following Jesus' teaching!

But Jesus knows the man's true motives and replies by saying that "foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head".

What does this mean? Does it mean that if we want to follow Jesus we should never settle anywhere? How does that fit the theme of community that runs through the bible, of living, sharing, and serving God together? Is buying a house too much of a commitment to stay in one
place? Or should I be settling into a community and trying to make a difference there by sticking it out, making friends and serving others?

This story is followed by another about a man who wants to follow Jesus but has a few things he wants to do first. It's a story about priorities. We should be following Jesus first, whatever that may mean for us, and doing the other things alongside that.

As I prayed and asked God about the passage and about our move I felt God saying that the most important thing was to follow Jesus. Buying a house is fine, as long as it doesn't make you lose sight of what's really important. If the house, job, money, friends, car, holiday, wide-screen TV, or any worldly thing starts to get in the way of loving God and loving our neighbours, then we need to re-prioritise.

It's early days yet and there's plenty that can go wrong, but we hope that one day soon we will own our house. But doing so MUST be an activity that enables us to love and serve and follow our God, not one that distracts us from it.

Critters!!!

For a while now we've had cockroaches in our house! And I wanted to write up my experiences in case we ever get them again.

The Wikipedia article is pretty good and has been very helpful. My experiences are given below.

Finding them

It started ages ago when I found one in the bath. I then found another, and then we had little baby ones crawling around the bathroom floor at night. We eventually got rid of them from the bathroom but then we started finding them in the kitchen (downstairs) and the hallway of our house.

Finding them is not always easy as they only seem to come out at night. So, you don't necessarily know you've got them until too late. We eventually got rid of ours when we opened the back door late at night and found lots of them scurrying around on the patio. So if you think you have some living nearby, it's a good idea to go scouting with a torch late at night. Of course, if they're inside then they're very good at hiding and you'll just have to wait until they come out, or get caught somewhere with slippery walls that they can't escape.

Living with them

They're pretty harmless, and they don't like people or light so they're very scared of you and tend to run away. They're not aggressive or dnagerous at all, though they can be dirty and spread disease (apparently).

We've read that they like warmth and moisture (hence initially finding them in our bathroom). They also like food and we've read that recent research has shown that they leave trails of faeces around so that they can follow each other to the food.

We seemed to find that this was the case. We were cleaning the floor of our kitchen a lot but still getting them coming into the kitchen. So, we started cleaning the hallway and other downstairs areas too, that lead from outside doors to the kitchen, and this seemed to reduce their presence in the kitchen.

Dealing with them

As just mentioned, cleanliness helps. Roaches are omnivorous so will eat whatever's around. Keeping floors clean - not just around where you're finding them, but generally, and especially near entrances, seems to help.

Roaches are quite easy to catch, but hard to kill. I, personally, don't like killing big insects...I can do the small ones, but stomping on a 3cm-long, crusty cockroach feels too much like really killing something. Plus, we're told that they carry their eggs around so, if you do stomp on them, you often just release the eggs and end up with more of a problem than you started with (though this is probably an urban myth). Dropping them down drains in the road got rid of them but didn't kill them. The most effective non-crunchy method was drowning - catch them in a glass or tub, tip them into the loo and flush. Some of them float, but these can be sent down by placing some toilet paper on top of the roach to make sure it gets dragged down.

In terms of catching them...we did come across a thing called a "Vegas Roach Trap", which seemed like a good, organic way to catch the beasties. Sadly, despite use of the finest coffee grounds on several occasions, we never caught any this way. Though, this, and other similar methods, are cited in many places.

We ended up going to B&Q and buying some "Ant and Crawling Insect Killer". This is a bait spray. The cockroaches find it, eat it and it attacks their nervous system. This usually means that they go into spasm, flip onto their backs, and then can't get up again. It doesn't take effect immediately, and you won't get any joy spraying it AT a roach, but if you put it down they'll find it and eat it. You find them in the morning dead, or mostly dead, ready to be caught and flushed down the loo!

The ultimate plan is thus...

1. Eradicate them from inside the house: use bait spray (it could take weeks or months to get rid of them)
2. Stop them coming into the house: again, use bait spray - around doors and entrances to catch them as they come in from outside.
   
3. Take the fight to them outside:

• go out at night and find where they are
• spray the insecticide bait down outside
• go to sleep
• wake up, take your jar or tub outside, and collect up the half-dead critters
• flush them away!

We successfully removed them from our house, stopped them coming inside and then caught 14 in one day outside doing this and we've hardly seen any since!!!

Other interesting facts

Funny what you find when researching these things. Some people are very interested in roaches. Some even seem to keep them as pets!!! One man who knows far too much about them has a Cockroach FAQ which answers more questions than I could think of, from "What are cockroaches good for?" to "What would cockroach vision be like?"