And I can trace my history...

...to one of our submarines.

One of my all-time favourite films is Blazing Saddles. Watch out for the nod to it later on in this post.

I haven't previously been too concerned with my family history. My grandfather on my father's side was a worker in a castle in Kent, who lived in a tied cottage and worked his way up to become Head Gardener, so in a way that makes my new career a move which closes the circle. My father was taught piano by one of the maids at the castle, then taught himself the church organ, and rose to moderately lofty intellectual heights before dying early of cancer. I haven't risen so high, and am now not even as high as head gardener, but I can always hope.

The only strange thing I knew about my grandfather was that he was wounded in the leg by a bayonet during a charge in the first world war. The reason I say that was strange was that he was a conscientious objector, and served as a stretcher bearer. However, a bit of research showed that the stretcher bearers went over the top with their less-conscientious pals and ran forwards through the wire and bullets without even a gun to fire back with.

One of my brothers has been far more diligent in his research on the history behind my father's side of the line, and has found that we descend from one of the signatories to the death-warrant for Charles the First, so we can count regicide amongst our traits. This ancestor was also clever enough to die before Charles the Second could exact revenge on those who ordered the pruning of his father's head, so I'm going to add a sense of timely departure to the traits of the line too.

On my mother's side, things were less clear. There was a hint of Welsh ancestry somewhere in the past, so that added to the list "Short, dark and hairy, and always sings flat". I hope not, but then you can't choose your past, you either learn to live with it, or try to forget it.

My mother had discovered a possible long-lost cousin a few years ago. I remember vaguely hearing something about it and losing interest rapidly because of a pre-occupation with motorsport. But I got a chance to meet this other side of the line last weekend, when long-lost relative came to stay with mother for a few days and we all went out for a meal.

I sat there across the table from her, thinking that she didn't look Welsh at all, not realising just how much worse it was going to get. She and my mother had each been trying to research their past, and had each gone back through the records to find a certain-named person in Gainsborough in 1840 or thereabouts. Originally believing they were much closer than it actually transpired, they got in contact with each other and made a trip to Gainsborough to examine the church records. There, they discovered that they actually descended from two brothers, each having the same name as the other, but differing in ages by about five years. They were part of a family which fled Ireland after the great potato blight.

Oh no, not the Irish! (There's the nod).

I perked up at the Gainsborough connection and mentioned I had sojourned not far North of there for a few months. I named the village and long-lost relative confirmed that she knew it. We agreed that it wasn't the best of the fenland villages, but by no means the worst.

She had, it seems, bought a pub in Lincolnshire some years ago, intending to turn it into a restaurant. The man who had owned the pub also owned some nearby land which he had turned into a caravan park, to which he now retreated, leaving this lady with the pub, her plans, and a condition that he would not develop a clubhouse in the caravan park which might compete against the established business of the pub.

Her first two weeks went well enough, until a bank holiday weekend. Then, she found the pub overwhelmed by miners and steelworkers bringing their families from Sheffield and Rotherham for a weekend break in the caravan park. They played darts all day long, with their dogs on leashes tethered to chairs snapping and lunging at each other across the narrow spaces seperating the tables. Their children took over the function room and snapped and lunged at each other across the tables and seats, effing and blinding amidst the splutter of exploding bottles of pop. Their wives took over the public bar, laughing loudly in between occasional spats when small groups of them would snap and lunge at other small groups, effing and blinding almost as well as the children in the adjacent room. Through all of this trooped fishermen in muddy wellingtons coming in from the nearby gravel pits for half-pints of mild and the odd plate of fish and chips.

She took stock after the weekend debris was cleared away, and wondered about her dream of a restaurant with a named chef and suave patrons. The first signs began to go up; No Children, No Dogs, and No Fishermen. That caused a mild complaint, and was negotiated downwards to No Wellingtons, and it became easy to spot a certain type of person in the pub on account of their feet, clad only in socks.

She had got all of these measures in place for the next bank holiday weekend, anticipating a few explanations, but feeling confident that she would smooth it all over. The weekend came and went, and on the whole, or at least by most of the patronage, her new conditions had been accepted peacefully; but she found herself faced with having to put up one further sign, or take other measures. The sign would have read No Women.

Think back to the Celebrity Big Brother fiasco last year, when England and India nearly stopped talking to each other. Who was it caused all the trouble? Not Leo Sayer, not any of the males, bar perhaps one, and he was easily lead, or at the very least as forced to follow a certain allegiance. It does explain why so many Working Men's clubs forbade ladies. They just don't know how to argue mildly, or when to shut up and let it go.

As it was, she found a better way out of the problem. after a few discussions with the ex-owner, the clause forbidding him from opening a clubhouse nearby was withdrawn by mutual consent. She got her restaurant, they got their club with dartboards, children's room, and dog-lunging avenues. Perhaps that's an illustration of the luck of the Irish. As it was, I found myself admiring her for her sheer bloody-mindedness in taking over a successful pub and effectively wrecking it in order to do what she felt like doing instead.

Perhaps I should accept my Irish ancestry gracefully after all. If nothing else, they have produced three of my most admired literary men, James Joyce, J P Donleavy, and Flann O'Brien..

Taking the Belsen train

Two people now have said to me that their doctors once told them "There were no fat people in the Nazi camps." (Did they have the same doctor?) Although true, it can't really count as a model for systematic weight loss, because the basic principles involved are forced labour and restricting diet to sub-subsistence level, and we in the civilised countries just don't do that any more. But I still found myself thinking, what exactly was the point behind those doctors' comments? I have been pulling together some scattered ideas that I came across during the past fifteen months, for which the significance, which escaped me at the time, has just begun to emerge.

For instance, when I first began to cycle in the evenings for thirty minutes, I was talking about the problem of getting fit from an unfit starting point with my brother in law. He was a PE instructor in a prison for a while. He explained to me that there is an elevated heart rate, above the normal resting rate, and the body behaves differently according to which side of this elevated rate it is working at. Above the elevated rate, the body builds muscle, but below the rate, it burns fat, providing it is working faster than the resting rate. He did mention to me the way in which this elevated rate could be calculated for each individual, but since I had no way of measuring my heart rate whilst exercising I didn't bother to remember it.

Then, there was the intriguing article Busting the Great Myths of Fat Burning I found on the web, an excerpt from "Cross-training for Dummies". It addressed the question "which type of exercise was best for burning fat, light exercise, or hard exercise?" To answer this, it first of all described the two types of fuel that we can burn, carbohydrates, and fat. Carbohydrates convert very rapidly into energy, but can only be stored by the body in limited quantities and only in certain places, typically the muscles. They provide rapid energy for the muscles when we exert ourselves. Fat, by contrast, can be stored in much larger quantities everywhere, but takes longer to convert into fuel and does not provide for bursts of power. Carbohydrates are essential for hard exercise, while fat is more suitable for light work.

What did stick in my mind when I read this article was the statement that athletes can switch from burning carbohydrates to burning fat much earlier than unfit people, and can perform better when burning fat than unfit people. Some of that ability might be peculiar to the person (explaining why some people are born sprinters while others are born marathon runners), but some of it must come from rigorous training. The summary, I understood, was that carbohydrates were essential for rapid bursts of activity which couldn't be sustained for long, while fat allowed a steady but lower level of energy to be used for a considerably longer period. They were almost parallel to anerobic and aerobic behaviour, short burst activity using the oxygen already in the blood, and longer-term energy requiring a regular supply of oxygen to replenish the blood supply.

That then got me remembering a strange little book by Hunter S Thompson, called "The Curse of Lono", which he wrote when he took a trip to Hawaii to cover the marathon there for the magazine for which he was sports columnist. He described how some contenders would gorge on pasta close to the start of the race, to get as much quick energy inside them as they could, in order to get as far as possible before they started to slow down and settle into the grim slog that is the last half of every marathon. Some sports, such as marathons, triathlons, boxing, and Tour-de-France style cycle-racing, would seem to demand a control of stored resources such that the most successful athletes can switch from carbohydrates to fat for a while, then switch back to carbohydrates for a sudden burst of energy, then back to the fat, preserving that precious carbohydrate reserve.

As a side-note, the opponents of the Atkins diet often claim that the brain can only function on energy derived from carbohydrates, and that going on low-carb diets to force the body to only burn fat is starving the brain of fuel. They also claim that the body, whilst in this state of ketosis, will rob the muscles of all the stored glucose in order to keep the brain supplied with sufficient fuel, and consequently the Atkins diet causes significant damage if not carried out under strict supervision. (Such as in a Nazi concentration camp? "We have ways of making you fast", or, "For you, the waist is over.")

That rang another bell with me, because shortly after I posed the question Why does Peanut Butter rot your teeth?, I found the answer. The body needs calcium in order to properly digest the food you eat. If there is insufficient calcium in the diet, the body turns to its stored supply, and takes calcium from the bones and the teeth. That explained to me why, after a few weeks living on a subsistence diet of bread and peanut butter, I had problems with fillings coming loose and abscesses forming under the roots. The inmates of the camps began to show diseases not seen since the Middle-ages, when nutrition was poor for many of the underclasses.

But before we get back to Belsen and subsistence diets while doing forced labour, let's just pop back to that bit about light exercise versus hard exercise. The Dummies Guide concluded that, although light exercise burnt more fat than vigorous exercise, the amount of calories consumed was less than the amount burnt in vigorous exercise. Based on that, it recommended that people stick to the fashionable 30-minute workout rather than walk steadily for an hour, because it would be better for them overall. Most people, it assumed, didn't have the time to walk for long enough to burn off the fat.

Theoretically, you could lose weight by not eating, if you could keep the body functioning effectively enough for it to turn the stores of fat into fuel. In practice, as hunger strikers have shown, the body needs a certain daily intake of food and water in order to function. Drop below this level, and the body starts to shut down, no matter how much stored fat it has. You need a certain amount of food each day in order to be able to turn your stores of fat into energy. For example, fat is converted into fuel by the liver, and the liver requires a certain amount of water to do this. Water has to be drunk, which requires some muscular activity, the muscles performing this activity, plus those in the heart and lungs, function better on carbohydrates, and so (allegedly) does the brain.

Back to Belsen, where the inmates were made to work all day long and were fed on a meagre diet of bread and cabbage water and potato soup. Devotees of the Atkins diet might like to note that this was almost the opposite of a low-carb diet, it was practically all carbohydrates, no fat or protein worth mentioning. The first thing that sprang to my mind was that it was a cheap diet, the Germans were preserving their limited stocks of meat and fish and dairy produce for the troops and the civilians involved in vital work. The thought that has subsequently crept slowly into my mind is that someone high up in the group setting policy for the prison camps knew exactly what they were doing: they were feeding the prisoners just enough carbohydrates to allow the body to function on its own stored fat. Each prisoner came with their own supply for food for a few months, which the camps cunningly extracted by supplying them with cheap low-grade food that would not be suitable for the fighting men and skilled workforce.

The prisoners lost weight not so much because they were on a meagre diet, but because they were working at a slow pace for many hours each day, and their bodies switched into fat-burning mode because they had no choice. They dug, they mixed and poured concrete, they hauled rubble and earth away from a site or hauled it in to another; they did all the things that you would normally use machines to do, but the Germans had very limited supplies of fuel, on which the war machine had first call, and they had all these conquered people wandering around with stored body fat available if it was treated in the right way. As I said earlier, I think someone with good medical knowledge proposed the concept to the top authorities and got their pet project accepted.

So, coming back from Belsen yet again, what is the relevance to us, today, with our national obsession with obesity? Are we going to turn into a nation crying out to be mistreated for the good of our health? Or should we lock the overweight into forced-labour camps and make them pick up litter or mend potholes in the roads all day while living on a Gillian McKeith diet of pitta-bread, seaweed and couscous, on the premise that by being cruel to them we are actually saving them from themselves? Take for example, the ethical question of a chronically overweight man who is likely to die within a few months unless he can shed a significant amount of weight. As things stand at the moment, curtailing his liberty to eat what he chooses and forcing him to do manual work is against our principles, but letting him die is not. And it has happened, I posted about it a while ago What goes up...: In memory of a fat man, just after I tried a low-carb diet to get over a long spell with no significant loss of weight despite regular short spells of hard exercise.

Of course, exercise is already known to be the best way to control weight, much to the annoyance of the legions of spammers who would rather the only exercise you got was unscrewing the bottle tops of the weight-loss pills they would like you to buy. But the government seems to be determined to follow up the program of eating your way to a healthy state with one to get you up and out and around and about. Perhaps the poor attendances at the polling booths might not be due to apathy after all, a large proportion of the non-attending voters are either too unfit to get to the polling stations, or too fat to fit in the booths?

All the signs to me are that we've been sold yet another story. Hard on the heels of 'fat is bad for you' comes 'exercise is good for you'.

You've snorted derisively at that sentence, haven't you? What is this idiot waffling about? Fat is bad for you? Of course it is. Exercise is good for you? Of course it is.

Let us take this one step at a time. Fat is bad for you, and so you go looking for low-fat alternatives. Of course you do. Those often turn out to be tasty carbohydrate-rich foods. Eating too much nice-tasting carbohydrates can lead to the insulin positive-feedback loop, thus:

Eat carbohydrates, the body produces insulin, which causes the body to store the carbohydrates as fat. Insulin, in turn, stimulates the appetite. Ok, so eat some more of that nice-tasting good-for-you low-fat carbohydrate food, and go back to the start of this sentence and read it again.

And now, exercise is good for you, so go and do thirty minutes workout in the gym, dressing up in fashionable pastel shades, and really get that sweat running. Assuming that you really try, and the machines are not set up for pussy-wimps, in that thirty minutes the body is working fast, and the heart is up above that figure we mentioned earlier, building muscle. Burning carbohydrates. So, after your thirty minute had exercise, what happens? You've depleted your carbohydrate stores, you've built up a healthy appetite, and you can, (justifiably), eat well, because you know you've done the hard work, and your body is desperate for more carbohydrates. So you eat plenty of protein, and plenty of carbohydrates, and guess what? It's time to go back to that previous paragraph and read it again. (The one that begins "Eat carbohydrates..."). What little weight you lost in the exercise goes back on again as the body, quite naturally, tops up the depleted reserves.

I haven't, till now, mentioned the final bits of information and observation that helped me put these pieces together and come up with a more coherent idea of where I've been going wrong in the weight-loss program. (And some of you as well, I'm not the only fat bastard apart from Alexei Sayle in this world).

Firstly, earlier this year, I made sure that I got plenty of exercise when I started my new life away from the keyboard. I got up early and went out each morning for a twenty-minute jog through the woods. I got out the bike each evening and went out for a thirty-minute ride. I lost weight slowly, and I found that limiting the amount I ate became harder and harder. The harder I exercised, the hungrier I became.

When I resurrected Albert Ross and started going out for longer bike rides at a more sedate pace, the weight suddenly fell away. I lost six pounds in a single week. That wasn't the week of the infamous trips to Stourhead and the East Somerset Railway, it was the previous week, when I went out for longer rides, double the distances I had previously been riding, but at a slower pace. I also noticed, that week and subsequently, that when I returned from the bike rides, I was not immediately hungry. I was thirsty, and had to drink copious amounts of water, but I could often wait an hour before having something to eat.

I have put together a working hypothesis to explain why I didn't feel hunger until some time after a longish bike ride. Bear in mind that is all it is, an hypothesis, and I'm going to be the first one to amend it as soon as any other information comes to light that suggests another solution.

If the body is exercised at a slow but steady rate, such that it is sustainable for a long period without requiring high energy output, the body switches from burning carbohydrates to burning stored fat. This process takes a little time to get going, and similarly, takes a little time to shut down. While the body is in that state, it switches off the hunger mechanism, because it is consuming stored fat while conserving carbohydrate reserves, and does not need any extra food intake. All it requires is adequate water for the liver to do its job and convert the fat.

Keep the exercise up for too long, or suddenly change pace and increase the demands on the body, and body produces hunger signals to try and get the depleted carbohydrate reserves replenished, to keep the muscles and the brain working properly.

And the reason for this mechanism? Simply that, since there is a mechanism by which the body stores surplus carbohydrates as fat for future use, there has to be a second mechanism to make use of that stored fat. There is no point having the first system without also having the second one.

It is a very simplistic picture, but it does seem to fit the observed facts. It also has caused me some grief in my discussions with Little Petal, because she has often likened us two to the Hare and Tortoise, me dashing about enthusiastically, she plodding along with dull determination. She is now claiming that her slow pace is being vindicated by my discovery. I, rashly, responded to that with "If that's true, how come I weigh three stone less and have a waistline six inches less than you?"

That didn't go down very well at all.

Afterword: My fascination with Belsen.

I grew up reading accounts of survivors from the German and Japanese camps. I was amazed that so many people did last till the end of the war, and how ingenious and determined some of them were in finding ways to keep going despite the odds against them. I remember the account of one woman who concealed a broken rib because she knew that there would be no hospital treatment for her, no rest and recuperation; she worked, or she died, and she was determine to survive. For that reason, I chose to keep on working with my bruised ribs. I have used this method several times in my life, when confronted by a problem that initially looked to be too big for me to handle; to ask myself, if this was a life or death decision, how would a determined survivor in Belsen react ?

Decision time

I had a vivid dream last night. I was caught inside a terribly-overgrown bush, struggling to find a way to see through the tendrils and branches that were knotted together all around me. I felt for the weave of them, and worked out that pulling on one point could loosen the tangles somewhat, which freed up another point that had previously been a solid knot, and on an instinct I raised the mass above my head and swung it to one side, and I had room to move again. I grabbed handfuls of the tangle as it came loose and pulled at it, piling up the mess behind me as more of the weave came free, and I could move forwards into the space I was creating. I could see there was a clearing ahead of me through the thinning stems, and started forwards eagerly to see what was out there, but I woke up instead. I had a distinct feeling that I had achieved something, and lay there in the darkness for a while, wide-awake because the dream had been so vivid that I could still smell the strange pungent tang of the foliage and feel the raspy bark on the branches and the cool touch of the leaves.

It hadn't been a nightmare, there was no sense of dread or terror in it, and as I waited to go back to sleep, I realised that the uneasy feeling I had been suffering from all through the weekend had vanished. I no longer had any doubts about my future.

In the morning, I quickly looked through all the forms I still had to fill in, and knew that I was making the right decision. I emailed the agency who had contacted me about the IT work to thank them for their offer, but to let them know I had decided to continue with the work I was currently involved in. My future lies on the other side of a tangle of undergrowth, not on the other side of a jumble of code.

I feel much better now I know where I'm going. I still don't know where the rest of the world will be heading, but it has always managed to keep going, with or without me. I'm striking out again into the unknown, where I belong.

The summer now standing in platform One

is the delayed 2007. I think this is the first week where there has been no rain at all, and no winds that threatened to put me off the ladder or swirl the hedge clippings and uprooted weeds around to double the mess I had created.

I have just driven my youngest brother to the station on the start of his trip to India. We celebrated his birthday last night in an Indian restaurant near to where mother lives. It seems, looking back now, a strange choice of meal, unless it was a piece of subtle preparation for his stomach. I slipped back into my old habits, eating too much, drinking too deeply, quipping too quickly with another brother with whom I have had occasional spats. I shall be uprooting these habits soon, just like the weeds and brambles I have been pulling out. I don't need them anymore, they're in the wrong places in my head, overshadowing and occluding other parts of me that need a chance to see the light again.

I drove back from the station in his Discovery, feeling too large and bloated in the little country lanes, just as I felt too large and bloated behind the wheel with my belly still full of Bangladeshi cuisine. I don't like to feel large and ponderous, and although I can appreciate the higher seating position that allows you to occasionally see over the tops of the hedges into the fields beyond, I felt intimidated by the extra width of the car as I went down the little lanes that I would happily squeeze my own car through. Fortunately I met nothing coming the other way, and swapped cars to complete my journey home in something smaller and less significant.

The tractors were out in the lanes, scurrying between fields and farms as they try to catch up on the delayed harvest. Already there are rumours of poor crops. Our own potatoes on the platform succumbed to blight, and in a farmhouse garden that I have been working on, their crop also went yellow and withered, so I know it was not the potatoes I planted or the soil we used. The fact that it wasn't any failing on my part doesn't really make me feel any better, though.

The uneasy feeling I have sensed is building slowly, as I read of world money-markets sliding down on fears that the American sub-prime mortgage business is shaky. So, we're all doomed to suffer because a group of businesses who like to lend money to a group of people who have a history of being unable to pay their debts are suddenly worried that they might have risked a little too much? Just like we're all doomed to pay increased house insurance premiums because people who have chosen to live in houses in areas at risk of flooding have started claiming when the floods actually occurred. The laboratories that supposedly work to protect us from disease and pestilence suddenly crop up as the very sources of the troubles. How much more absurd can this world become?

I dodged around the tractors and reached the roundabout at the top of the hill, to see over a mile of cars tailed back. Fortunately they were going in the opposite direction to my way home, as they all plodded slowly along in each other's wake on their way to the coast. The filling-stations have been expecting them, and the fuel prices show this. We, in the countryside, pay 3 to 4 pence a litre more for our fuel than those who live in the cities 30 to 50 miles away. The fuel companies know they do not have to compete with each other for custom, and also have a captive customer-base. If you live in the countryside, you must have fuel to get around, there are few buses, and the trains are mostly for London-bound commuters or people like my brother, heading up to Heathrow for a jet to carry him halfway round the world. The queue of people for the ticket office had been longer than the booking hall could hold when we arrived at the station, and when the train pulled in they had to jump on board and get ready to pay on the train, without the discount deals available through the computer system in the tiny office manned by a single member of staff. There isn't provision in the station for increasing staff levels at busy times, because that would mean increased wage costs, something that is anathema to our modern world. Let the costs of living nd taxation burdens rise as they like, but do not on any account encourage people to take the obvious method of finding the extra money they themselves need to play their part in the process.

My feeling of unease is growing daily, as I look at the costs of driving around, the costs of running electrical appliances, the looming threat of a cold winter requiring lots more heating, and the hint that we, as customers, will have to pay for the upgrading of the old water systems around the country to cope with the new threats of annual flooding. It might be better to relocate half of Gloucestershire to Scotlsnd and turn the county into rice-paddies, surely?

"Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air..."

My sense of lurking menace is due to the wonderful weather after the unexpected appearance of Autumn after Spring, the sense that this is a misplaced summer that might be the last one we see for a while, as storm clouds gather below the horizon, and not just climactic ones; Russia is flying bombers to taunt US airforce bases in the Pacific, Canada is thinking about trying to compete with Russia for ownership of the Artic area, and the money-markets that thrive on the supply of fuel, food and finance are starting to shake with fear. Is there a depression on the way? Will John Dillinger rise again from the ashes of the last century to taunt the banks once more?

"Lie down on the floor and keep calm." What made public enemy number one decide to quote Heraclitus as he went about redistributing wealth?

I hope that my youngest brother has safe journeys there and back, and finds in his five weeks enough happiness to make up for the loss he suffered earlier this year. I, at least, have finally found some sort of peace in the overgrown and neglected gardens close by, and the hint of a new life.

New dreams for old.

In fields of food I pass my time

I've learnt some worrying things during my two-year battle to get my weight down to a sensible level. The first, and probably most important thing I've learnt is that there's no single universal way to lose weight. Lots of people claim there is, but they're trying to get money out of you.

The quest for the single answer has derailed a lot of promising ideas in the past, Albert Einstein, for example, decided that there had to be a grand unified theory and went off to find it. If there were to be such a theory, it sounds frighteningly like it would be God, and the thought of being able to program a computer to be God is not a nice thought.

Gods are another good example of man's folly in looking for one single answer. There are at least three major religions that each claim there is only one God, and he brooks no competition. I would find it much easier to believe there are many gods, because then the activities of the supporters look slightly less outrageous, they're simply bigging up their particular dieu-de-choice. I've decided that the sentence 'God made man in his image' makes more sense if it is reversed; 'Man made God in his image'

I didn't find any single weight-loss method that screamed out 'I'm the one, follow me until the ends of the earth and your sagging belly will waist away' (sic). All I really managed to do was work out the two major principles behind dieting; 'Don't eat more than you need', and 'burn away the fat'. Both are gloriously simple to remember, and could probably take a lifetime to understand and implement.

I'll come onto the 'burn away the fat' principle some time in the future, becausae I have found it to be the most interesting one, but this post is about something I've noticed very recently that is a bit worrying.

I have found that the simplest way for me to stop eating too much is to be physically active. It is a bit of a paradox; I expected, once I started riding the bike for an hour each evening, to come back in through the door in a ravenous state. I was puzzled to find the opposite was happening. I would be thirsty, and drink a litre of water, but it would be at least an hour after the bike ride before I felt that I really did need to have supper. By chance, the BBC News site published a short article claiming that the body produces endorphins during exercise that suppress hunger pangs.

I noticed the same thing during my recent spell clearing gardens. I could work all morning and not feel hungry at all, and when I did finally stop for lunch, I ate the small amount I had brought along, and didn't have any desire to go in search of more. And yet, back at home, sitting at this computer typing in the story of my travels, I am constantly wandering through to the kitchen for another nibble. The story of the journey is every bit as absorbing as is pulling brambles out of apple trees, but requires almost no physical effort.

What has worried me is recognising that this behaviour pattern is quite easily observable in another large segment of the population of this planet. Farm animals spend all day with their heads down in the grass, munching. It's about all they ever do in the fields, except rear up on their hind legs and play shag. Locked up in their fields all day, given the occasional trip to a different field, or to the market, eating is the only thing they can do as an expression of their free will and creativity.

Are we, sat at our desks all day long, a form of cattle?

From Fortran to Forking

My new career as a jobbing gardener has begun to gather pace. I've carefully cleared the overgrown bank of a small brook, savagely slashed back two hundred yards of weed-choked ditch, and will set off this afternoon to introduce the idea of control and restraint into the unruly geraniums in a lady's garden. The weather, of course, has tried to persuade me that I still really belong back in the software business. So too has an agency.

I had a phone call the other day, something about embedded C and Linux on the South coast. C beside the sea, I thought, and without really thinking, said I didn't mind if they put me forward, knowing that my work history is so varied and unusual most recruiters put the CV aside after the second page and move on to someone who's done nothing but C and SQL for the past twenty years. Something in my past must have looked promising, because I came home last night, still green with grass powder thrown back by the strimmer, to find a request for me to go for an interview. Well, if nothing else, it's an excuse for a trip down to somewhere I've only visited briefly in the past.

And my dilemma is this. Supposing I land this work? It might indeed be a smart idea to have an inside job through the winter months, but could I then get back into the great outdoors when the spring returns and the software is commissioned? I do like the feeling that builds up inside me after several hours of physical work, and I do like to look over the results of my efforts and actually see something. The trouble with software is that it's usually invisible, unless it goes wrong. I can't point to things and say to people "I worked on that, that's my handiwork."

I thought I'd made my choice, but something inside of me still wants to have one last software contract, it seems. But I shall have to make my mind up soon: do I throw the interview? Do I give it my all, and then if I am offered the role, stick out for an improbable rate? Or do I say, quite firmly, "No, I'm not that person any more."

Goodbye C, hello seeds?