So I Was Walking Down Northumberland Street...

...when suddenly four people dressed as birds, walking on stilts, walked past me.

No-one batted an eyelid.

I fucking love this city.

Whee! (Back on my bike)

Well, this week the overnight temperature finally rose above freezing on a regular basis, and I happily de-mothballed my bike and got pedalling. Albeit with a brief detour to the bike shop to get it fixed after I managed to bugger up the gears whilst trying to lubricate the gear cables.

I've finally done the sensible thing and bought a proper maintainance stand, like the one in the picture, to hold the rear wheel off the ground so I can maintain it. (To lube the gear cables, you need to "shift the gears until the chain is on the largest sprocket, and then stop the wheel from rotating. With the wheel stopped from moving, shift your shifter all the way in the opposite direction, as if you were going to shift to the smallest sprocket. The rear derailleur should now be stuck on the largest sprocket, which will give you enough slack to fully release the cable from the frame." Thanks to the internet for that.)

£17 in the Edinburgh bike shop sale, it will be worth it for the amount of time it will save me when trying to maintain the bike. It is easy to shift the gears "on land" when the wheel is held off the ground and can spin freely, and an absolute bugger to try doing it any other way.

More importantly, I'm back on my bike, no more spending £11 a week on a Megarider bus ticket for me. This is good. There are few sadder sights than a cyclist deprived of a bike, waddling about on two feet instead of gracefully swooping about on two wheels as Nature intended.

So I had my first ride in to work for 2010 on Monday. And I had to yell at two pedestrians on the footbridge over the Central Motorway on the way in. This footbridge is the bane of my life; people, especially students, WILL NOT realise that it is split in two for a reason, namely, so that bikes can go over it. I don't ride my damn bike on their half of the path, now, do I?

It would be nice to think that people are rational and, if they are going to wear hoods over their heads whilst listening to music on earphones, thus depriving themselves of peripheral vision and hearing, they would be extra careful to look around themselves when walking over a bridge with big blue "cycle path" signs and pictures of bikes helpfully painted on the footbridge, especially if they are going to step out onto the cycling half of the footbridge. Alas, no.

Looks like another fun year of cycling and irritability awaits.

Interesting Stuff From the Internet

I can't seem to manage to write anything original, and I don't wish to write anything unoriginal, so here is some Interesting Internet Stuff:

Bad British Buildings
The Great London Beer Flood
The gross things people do on planes

Enjoy!

"I don't get people..."

As my hero Charlie Brooker once said*.


Today I had one of those days. Mainly because it started with a union meeting. No disrespect to the union bods involved, but the subject matter was so depressing I came out of it and had to eat two fun-sized choccy bars just to achieve a state of mind where I didn't want to shriek and jump through the window.


I then tried to do work whilst my Estimable Colleague No. 1 was out of the office. Estimable Colleague No. 1 was having a busy day, so I answered his phone three times. Unfortunately, I had the same conversation with each of the people involved:


Me: "Hello, [Estimable Colleague No. 1]'s phone."

Speaker: "Is he there?"

Me [thinks in head, "Does he have a secretary? No. Do I sound like his secretary? No."]: "No, I'm afraid not."


By the third time, I was seriously close to replying, "No, if he was here he'd be answering his own bloody phone, wouldn't he?"


Next time I should just let his answerphone get it.


Oh well. I went for a walk at lunchtime and ate some free ice-cream (well, free frozen yoghurt) from the Ben and Jerry's stall at the Odeon Cinema. Free ice cream cures all.







Thank God for weekends.



*The quote in full:

"I don't get people. What's their appeal, precisely? They waddle around with their haircuts on, cluttering the pavement like gormless, farting skittles."

Stuff I Know About Baking

I haven't blogged on my two other hobbies, baking and cooking yet. In the absence of amusing or even interesting stuff to say about any other bits of my life (I went to see "The Road" recently; neither 'amusing' nor 'interesting' does it justice, "utterly brilliant and I needed a drink afterwards" gets close), I may as well blog about baking. Mainly because I just made a banana loaf for my Mum and Dad, and now I have to keep myself busy so I don't go down there and "test" a corner of it. It looks a bit like the photo on the left.

Stuff I Know About Baking

• The fundamentals of baking: make sure you've got enough time, make sure you've got the right ingredients, make sure you follow the recipe exactly.
• The time thing is crucial. Always read the recipe first and check how long it takes, then allow a little extra. If you haven't got time to make the recipe, make cookies instead, they only take twenty minutes. It's meant to be fun, so why stress yourself about it?
• Always wear an apron. Anything else is tempting fate.
• If it gets burnt on top, remember that a) that's why icing was invented, b) everything tastes better with melted chocolate spread on top of it.
• I sift flour. It distributes more evenly that way. Flour lumps = not good.
• To avoid a cake being baked in a loaf tin rising more in the middle than at the edges: take a metal spoon, and use it to push a dent into the middle of the cake, so that the edges are higher than the middle. The middle rises a little faster and voila, one nicely-shaped loaf cake.
• No-one will really care if the loaf cake isn't nicely-shaped, so long as it tastes good.
• If the cake didn't turn out the shape you wanted it to, trim it with a knife and ice it. If you have a bag of icing sugar and some water, you can make icing.
• I can't be bothered with fancy sugar decorations. I greatly admire people who can do that, they have their place (the sugar decorations, not the people), but for me it's all about the cake itself. Splitting a cake in half and sandwiching it with icing is as fancy as I get.
• Regardless of what food snobs may say, I bake with margarine, not butter. Have you ever tried creaming butter with a wooden spoon? It's like trying to beat cheese. No-one has ever said to me that what they've scoffed would have tasted better if I'd used butter.
• Having said that, you can substitute margarine for butter in cases where the cake is strongly flavoured with something else (i.e. sponge cake, chocolate cake, banana loaf), but if there are very few ingredients in the recipe (if it's basically chocolate, eggs and butter) and it calls for butter, you will be able to taste it if you don't use it.
• If you have to melt chocolate, then add it to eggs, let the chocolate cool first. Otherwise you get sweet scrambled eggs - yeuch.
• When you add the flour to the rest of the dough mixture, stir it very gently at first, unless you think having flour exploding all over the worksurface will make the day more interesting.
• If you have to use whipped eggs or whipped cream in a cake and you don't have an electric whisk or egg beater, then regardless of what the recipe says, put the cream / egg white into a bowl first, then beat it like mad with the whisk until your arm hurts and you can't do it any more. Then carry out the next step in the recipe. Beat the eggs / cream again. Next step in recipe. Beat eggs. Repeat this until the eggs / cream are nice and fluffy (hint: it will take longer than you think). Alternatively, buy an egg beater from Wilkinsons.
• If the recipe calls for alcohol to be added to the cake, add it first, THEN drink the remainder. Adding it to the baker first just causes more problems than it solves.

I Went To My Gay Ex-Lover's Funeral As His Son

Well, I didn't, obviously. But Mark Dowd did, and his almost-too-unbelievable-to-be-true tale is recounted here:

My Thoughts on Dr Who: Farewell to Tennant

I originally posted this on Television Without Pity, but it fits just as well here. Enjoy.

After watching this episode, my second thought (first thought = "Shit, I'm going to really, really miss David Tennant" - no disrespect meant to Matt Smith) was "If you put a much-loved Companion on the mantlepiece in Act One, she needs to do something important by Act Three". I suppose I was expecting something along the lines of either:

a) Donna's memories start coming back, and she chooses to be the DoctorDonna again to save the lives of others, knowing that she will die. I know that the deal is supposed to be that memories coming back = instant death, but it could have been worked around to give her at least a few minutes of DoctorDonna, perhaps even by having the Doctor sacrifice enough of his life energy to keep her alive that he needs to regenerate afterwards.

Or, b) Donna does something heroic without her memories coming back because she is in fact awesome with or without the Doctor, and we get a little extra layer of tragedy in that the Doctor sees his beloved Companion as she was with him from a distance, knowing that they can never again meet without her dying.

As it was... yeah, I get that Donna's got her Happy Ending. I suppose what bugs me a little about it is that I really wanted to see some signs of her recovering the strong self she had with the Doctor and actually doing something of her own volition, not being the recipient for the actions of others. Of course, for all we know her new hubby's amazing and inspires her and together they'll discover the cure for cancer, but alas we will never know this since we've seen barely five minutes of him on screen and will never see any more.

Did anyone else find this two-parter to be unusually male-dominated? With the possible exceptions of Lucy Saxon and Sassy Vinvocci Lady (I haven't managed to find out her name), both of whom played fairly minor roles, all the characters with really significant parts (the Doctor, the Master, Wilf, Rassilon, Joseph Naismith) were male. That's not intended as a criticism, as the scenes between Tennant / Cribbins and Tennant / Simm were great verging on phenomenal in places, it just feels odd in a series which has to date made a big point of having strong female characters.

Agree to the nth degree with all who have said that this had far more plot than was needed. It's easy to say this in hindsight, but if there was going to be this much plot, "Planet of the Dead" could have been sacrificed (wishful thinking) for another episode which could have dealt with getting some of the exposition out of the way. As it was, just the Master's plan alone could have carried the two episodes, plotwise.

I'm still thinking about this several days later, and... I don't know. I feel like I saw much of this already, and it was called "Journey's End". The Doctor's already said goodbye to his companions, and the extended farewells, for me, drained much of the momentum out of the ending.

Also, I feel like now, whenever I rewatch any episodes with Tennant's Doctor in, it's going to be overshadowed by the thought "Yeah, now you're all brave and happy and saving the universe in between snogging your Companions, but you'll die a lonely and slightly pointless death which you'll hate and be fighting right up to the end". (Pointless in the sense that the "lockable box" mechanism felt just a bit too contrived, not that saving Wilf was pointless.) The final shot of the Doctor's bereft face at the end of Journey's End was enough tragedy for that character, for me.

When I compare that to Nine's regeneration, who at least got to go out in the knowledge that the danger was over and his regeneration (or the actions leading to it) saved the life of his Companion, it just seems a bit too tragic.

Final question: how the hell can a planet "stir in the deeps"? It's a planet. It orbits. It doesn't have a mind of its own (unless I'm missing something from old-school Who) and it doesn't move except in response to the laws of physics. Hmm?

Ah well. Bring on Matt Smith for the girly hair and GERONIMO!

The Blog About Cycling

A natural topic for one of my posts, this:

The Guardian Blog About Cycling

Enjoy!

Dieting is Crap

Yup, I'm in a mood to state the obvious tonight. I am doing a two-week diet, which promises that it will lose you half a stone. I already knew that wasn't going to happen, but my New Year's resolution was to try to reach my target weight of 63kg (9st 9 lbs) this year, and I thought I'd give it a kickstart with the diet.

I'm trying to manage on 1200 calories a day. Except I'm not, because when you average in the odd drink (I'm officially off the drink and on the soda water, though I have consumed a couple of glasses of wine), pre-workout Jaffa Cake for energy (if they're good enough to fuel the Arsenal football team, they're good enough for me) and the small piece of blondie I ate last night, it's probably more like an average of 1400 calories a day.

My basal metabolitic rate is 1333 calories a day, according to the fancy body analysis machine in my gym. That's how many I need just to survive, not counting energy needed to walk around and go to the gym. Those with a grasp of maths can see how this works.

And it is working. I'm not going to lose half a stone; it's nearly impossible to lose that much that quickly when you are already within the "acceptable" weight range for your height, but I have lost some weight, which is great.

On the one hand, it's a useful exercise after the indulgence of Christmas. It's good to exercise willpower, to practise saying no to food you don't need, to learn to enjoy an evening out with your friends without getting sozzled.

On the other hand... Christ, it's boring. Boring, boring, boring. I am sick of bloody snacking on apples, I am sick of not drinking, and mostly I am sick of feeling hungry. Thank goodness this is over with on Saturday.

It's been worth it, but I am not doing this again!

Normally I Post This Stuff On The Other Blog

The other blog being the Lonkblig of infamous repute. However, this fits better here: the 10 worst cycling crashes ever. Do not read if squeamish.










Right now this damn blog's a misnomer anyway. I'm neither cycling nor diving, thanks to the weather, and it sucks. I've seen people out and about on bikes, but they're either a) on a mountain bike or b) accident statistics waiting to happen. I just keep my fingers crossed that the temperature gets above freezing regularly soon. I will cycle in wind and rain, but not ice and snow.

As for the diving? I'm starting to hallucinate the smell of wet neoprene, like a coffee addict doing detox hallucinating espresso.

It's as well I gave up on that whole "trying to be normal" thing a while back, now, isn't it?

Salt and Grit

Are two things this nation apparently doesn't have enough of.

Is it just me, or does anyone else find themselves wondering at the fact that often the people rushing to blame the government for failing to foresee the worst winter weather we've had in at least a decade and lay in sufficient supplies, are often the same people who themselves didn't buy any grit, salt or shovels, and are now complaining that they can't get out of their houses? What happened to self-reliance?

In other news, the giant icicles on top of my house are now melting. I've half-sad, half-relieved. They were very pretty, but at the same time they did add that certain element of danger to popping out to buy some milk at Tesco. I can see the front page of the Chronicle now: "Woman Buying Groceries Killed By Falling Ice". Not my chosen epitaph. (Then again, my chosen epitaph has already been taken: "Bugger this, I wanted a better world". Top marks to anyone who gets the reference.)

Giant Penises In The Snow

.... is not the name of Tracey Emin's latest work, funnily enough. It's what was spotted on the lawn in the centre of my office on the first day back last Monday.

Someone had carefully walked through the snow and drawn a giant penis in it.

How we laughed as we scurried to the windows to watch the security men trying to cross it out by walking over it. Leading to the effect of someone trying to scribble out graffiti on a toilet wall.

I don't know what was going through their heads when they were doing that, but rarely have I ever been so glad that I hold the job I hold.

Happy New Year.

In the Bleak Midwinter

...Frosty wind made moan.

Well, I have returned to my home after an enjoyable week and a bit away from Newcastle, whilst I visited my friends and family in my home town over the holidays.

I very nearly didn't make it there. I set off later than planned on Wednesday 23rd, and was making good time down the A1, when, shortly before Wetherby, I realised that my headlights were glinting off the road ahead of me, and the reason they were doing this was because the road was frozen. Not reassuring.

I slowed down to 50mph, which is when the blizzard hit. Light snow at first, getting progressively heavier, and about fifteen minutes into this, I realised that I couldn't see the lane markings, due to the snow, and was driving in the left-hand lane on the principle that if I went onto the rumble strips, at least I'd know I was straying out of the lane.

I don't panic whilst driving, not because I'm particularly cool-headed, but simply because panicking doesn't make driving any easier. I will admit that I was thinking "Hmm. This really isn't good. Really, really, not a good driving situation".

I slowed down to 30mph and followed the lights of the car in front of me, then the gritting lorry in front of me. As the sign for Wetherby services appeared, I wondered if I should try following the gritting lorry all the way home to Wakefield. Then it turned off towards Wetherby services, my brain calculated the factors involved here (nearly midnight, freezing, blizzard, unlit motorway, fewer and fewer cars on the roads, it would take another hour at the speed I was going to get there, God knew what the roads in Wakefield would be like after I turned off the motorway, and for all I knew there was a jack-knifed lorry around the corner), and made the fast decision to get off the road.

I drove very slowly round the snowiest roundabout I've seen in some years, and did something I've never done before; I pulled in at a roadside hotel and asked if they had any rooms going free for the night. (If they hadn't, Plan B was to kip in the chairs in reception.) Luckily, they did, and I took a double room, breakfast included, £50. As I headed off to retrieve my suitcase and laptop from the car, a small queue of weary travellers was forming behind me.

Later, I called my mum to tell her I would be seeing her and the rest of the family later that night.

I don't panic whilst driving. But my hands were shaking as I dialled the number.

Other than that, it was an excellent Christmas, and much enjoyed by all. (For those of you wondering, the conditions the following morning were snowy, as shown in the photo above, which is the view out of my hotel room window that morning, but much easier: I was home 40 minutes after I set off.) Happy New Year.