Up against the wall, Redneck Mother

It's been going round in my head like a mental tic these past few days. I don't even know what started it off, but there it was, even with a tune, and I know it's a Country and Western song. That's alright, but what was I doing listening to it in the first place? I can remember the subsequent line "Mother who has raised her son so well", then a der-der-dah-dah... up to a line "Bustin' Hippies' asses and raisin' hell".

Note the other little ticks in there. Two of them are for a missing letter, well, it's C&W, they don't use the g-sounds, and the third is one of these tricky cases of the plural possessive, because there is one Hippy, two or more Hippies, and we are talking about the bustin' of the asses of the Hippies, so I believe a tick is called for. When the good doctor is in Dr. Zen will usually pronounce definitively on such cases, but he has been on a political jag of late.

Doctor, doctor,
give me your views,
I've got a
bad case of plural abuse

Nope, rotten puns just don't cut it beside the quirky viciousness of "Up against the wall, Redneck Mother"

So how did I come to know a country and western song so well that I could remember the tune as well as some of the words? It was easy enough to track down on YouTube and the other lyric sites. But that still didn't answer the question of how I had come to hear it in the first place and then obviously hear it enough times to park it somewhere inside my head. Could it have been one of the Paddy-gigs I used to drive my brother to? I doubt it. Was it the Tom Jennings band? Possibly. Or, far more sinister, did I have a huge chunk of repressed abuse lurking deep inside me, waiting to burst forth into the light and smother me with shame? Had I been a tame butt-boy for a group of Country-music loving perverted hill-billies somewhere in the green hicksville quarters of the American-tainted English countryside? I scratched my arse experimentally, then a little bit more forcefully. Nope, that sphincter was still virgin-taut, I was glad to find.

The more mundane daily tasks of making a living got in the way for a few hours, and I got a bit of peace inside my head, We both sold some things, Little Petal on ebay and me to a car-parts customer. So we went up to the town at the top of the hill, to the post-office first, and then to the banks. As we parked in the Tesco car-park that doubled as the town shopping car-park, I felt compelled to burst forth into "Up against the wall, Redneck Mother". Two women just getting into a small red car stopped and stared at me. An oops, then. But surely, they can't be C&W fans? Little Petal was doing her best to look like she was with someone else.

I hate the town nearest to us. They cut down some massive trees five years ago in order to build a new Tesco with a car-park, and the trees were pronounced to be suffering from a serious internal disease that would have meant they were likely to have fallen and caused serious damage to parked cars if left there. A large sample ring cut from one of these 'diseased' trees was displayed for a while outside a small cluster of shops for all to see the non-existent problem, but it really goes to show that a large supermarket chain can run rings around any town council when it comes to getting what it wants. We popped into the cafe close to where the ring used to be, but it was just closing. Even the banks stay open later than that in the afternoon. I suspect that the rise in internet shopping is hitting the high street shops hard, and coupled with the new Tesco many of the traders have their backs to the wall...

"Up against the wall, Redneck Mother"

Heads turned. Another Oops.

They closed the street through the town for a few weeks while they 'pedestrianised' it. That meant removing all the give-way markings at the top and bottom junctions and making three large areas of raised granite paving. The idea was to terrify the cars into slowing down and letting pedestrians wander happily across the road. Only it hasn't worked. As I wandered happily across the road last week I felt a crunch as something hit me in the back and legs, and found a mountain-bike rider had cannoned into me. "Where's your bell?" I asked him. His reply, as he dashed off, was "Next time use your eyes, dickhead". I did, I know what he looks like, and will remember.

Now that all the roadworks had finished, the left-hand side of the street was lined with parked cars, and the two-way traffic was having to mount the pavement to pass each other, forcing us pedestrians against the wall

"Up against the wall, Redneck Mother"

More heads turned, in the semi-stationary cars trying to force their way through the pedestrianised centre. They didn't look terrified or hesitant to me, they looked extremely annoyed. I dodged into a cafe doorway, deciding that we ought to have a coffee and put a bit of money back into the trader's purses, but they too were shutting up.

So we went round Tescos instead, for coffee, and for spicy sauces for my noodle concoctions, because I believe that having spicy food cranks up the metabolism a bit and helps you to shed some weight. At the checkout counter, I murmured "Up against the wall, Redneck Mother" sotto voce, and got a quick glare from both Little Petal and the checkout lady.

And so we finally got back out into the fresh but windy open air. The town is on the top of a hill, and after they cut the trees down there were too few natural windbreaks left. It won't be like that for ever, they're building new housing estates to the East, which will help break about a quarter of the vicious winds that otherwise roll unchecked over the bleak expanse of tarmac and parked cars.

"Up against the wall, Redneck mother", full-bellow, knowing that the wind would whip the words away before anybody else could hear them. Two women glared angrily at me from inside a small red car with the windows rolled down. It was them again, they were still there. Had they been sitting in their car for nearly 30 minutes waiting for me to return to check up on me? I smiled at them, and their faces changed to looks of disgust. I found out why when I squeezed into the passenger seat and smiled at myself in the vanity mirror. The liquorice stick I'd been chewing had left me with horrible brown-yellow stained teeth.

The skin of my yellow country teeth

Oh God, don't start that again. Although it is a much better song.

Insanity doesn't run in our family, but I'm getting worried that it might gallop.

Just in case you really want to know what the hell that song sounds like, here it is:



20090119 No it isn't, I hate the way the net can't stand still for five minutes. Call it bladder-weakness.

Here's an even more Yee-hargh version than the missing one:



And just in case they pull that one too, here's another:



The bad pun earlier was on a Robert Palmer song, and since YouToob won't allow his video to be embedded, and since I found 'House' quite watchable, here is the song with a different video subject



And the song prompted by the liquorice smile is



Warning, awful sound quality.

Further to my whining...

By late tea-time I had realised that the pains in my legs weren't going to go away quietly, and that it felt worse when I sat down. I found myself pacing up and down the platform dodging the bursts of rain. That's a definite benefit to losing weight, being able to slide between the raindrops.

What I then did might seem stupid, it certainly got a reaction from the Tynemaiden: I went out on the bike. I kept away from the hills that I've been working out on these past few weeks and just rode a simple loop, out to the cross-roads with the little millstream, along to the junction by the gates for the big house on the hill, past the Gothic two-story crumbling cricket pavilion that is now looking very sad and haunted, past the farm with the little terrier that sits in the middle of the road and barks at the cars, over the railway line, back along the switchback road into the village, under the railway line bridge by the village hall, nearly half a mile from the village, and then back home.

I didn't have a single twinge from my legs in all that time. I was out for about an hour. So I suppose it was just a cramp. The Tynemaiden looked at me suspiciously as I came into the kitchen, sweating and glowing.

"Ah divvun kna wor yers gorrin' yer hid fer breeayns, boot it's neigh gud fer eenythen' boot peerin at thim dorty pikchewers oon yer compeeyou'or, yer poorvoort. Yer'll dee yersel a neastee wrungun' soom da."

I only understand about a fifth of what she says, and mostly I'll either nod and say "quite", or shake my head and say "Haddaway yer shite", (whatever that means).

While I was riding, I kept looking around me, thinking how clear and bright everything looked, and yet how cloud-covered the sky was. There was a strange silvery colour to the sky, and I remembered a play I had listened to on the radio last year while I was driving home from Lincolnshire. It was based on a true set of circumstances; a very cold summer two hundred or more years ago, when the sun hardly shone, the crops were meagre, and yet artists like Turner found a fascinating quality in the light that probed the landscape beneath the wintry clouds in August, and a young Edgar Allen Poe became entranced with the sinister tone that simple things like glowering skies and hungry cawing birds can portray.

"It's around me now," I thought, as I glided through the glistening countryside, scanning the treetops for ravens. I got home expecting to be struck through with a bolt of pure inspiration which would lead to my first successful novel, plus film rights and radio dramatisations. Then I took off the anti-dazzle glasses I wear when cycling to stop the insects that fly with blinding accuracy straight into your face as you whizz between the hedgerows. The eldritch light went with them, and I realised it was yet another self-delusion.

But it was intriguing while it lasted.

More threes

I drove back from my brother's house where I had fed his cat, we stopped in the Costcutter stores for a few things, cat-food, him-food, her-food, (mostly lardy-cake), and I thought I'd take the scenic road home. It is a steeply-plunging road that runs between high earth banks amongst the trees and is barely wide enough for the car, but I love those sorts of lanes. It levelled out at the bottom where it joined another road that ran round the edge of the bowl in the hillside. Halfway along, I saw a woman walking her dog, and moved over to the right to give her room. The wheels found the edge of the tarmac and then dropped off into a deep rut with an alarming thud. I worked the car back out of the mud and checked the steering as we carried on home. It seemed fine.

I went into the dentist's the next lunchtime for my final fitting. I came back out with a crown, and minus a serious amount of money from my bank account, a lot more than I had anticipated. When I started the car and pulled away from the kerb I felt immediately that something was wrong. I nursed it slowly into the railway station and climbed out, to find a flat front right tyre. I tried pumping it up with the little battery-powered pump, but I could guess that it was a puncture and not just the pixies stealing the air in a mischievous mood. It began to rain as I opened the boot and hauled out the spare wheel and the jack.

In addition to the rain, I had oily hands to worry about, and as I squatted to loosen the wheel nuts, I felt a sudden pain in each of my upper legs, just above the knees. I changed the tyre in the rain. A lady who had passed me when I first inspected the sorry tyre came back from the station and asked me if I needed any help. "You could tell me how to clean my trousers," I joked. If I had known her better it might have been worth a quick "Iron my shirt, bitch" as well, but I don't tease on first dates.

I checked the tyre quickly, seeing several points that might be nails, and hoped it would just be a simple puncture, but as I rested it on the ground while I opened the boot, I heard the noise of air escaping into wetness, and found a hole in the inner sidewall. The tyre, which was only a few months old, could not be repaired. It had received too hard a blow when I dropped the car into the rut the previous night.

So, once again, bad luck came in threes; a shocking bill, pulled muscles, and a ruined tyre.

I'm still waiting for something good to happen to make up for it. It usually does, but I've waited until teatime and it still hasn't arrived. Have I upset someone up there?

Treat time

I'm a toy-boy, by definition, because Little Petal is older than me by more than a year. She's had a rather bad time the last two years with financial troubles and a lifestyle change, loss of her garden, car, and the death of my sister in law recently.

So I thought that, since neither of us had gone out for an evening in several months, we ought to have a treat.

She was born on the same day that her mother was born on, the day before the longest day of the year. Is that strange? I don't know of any other mothers and daughters sharing the same birthday like that.

I took the bike out to go and book a table in the Coppleridge, the same place we took mother to for lunch when we went to see the Duncliffe Bluebells, because, as we sat and had our lunch, I was looking at the table set in a little secluded alcove just behind me, wishing we had chosen it instead, thinking how nice it would be to sit there for an evening, nicely out of the way.

I came to the triangle of grass where the side road to Mere splits off from the road which goes under the railway line into the village, to find that someone had cut the grass there recently, but had very thoughtfully left the two poppies standing.









I booked the table I wanted.

The birthday morning came, lunch drifted by as we both got to grips with ebay having changed lots of categories and mucked up our listings, and the afternoon finished. I began getting dressed up. At the back of the wardrobe is a suit I have kept there for years now, because I was too large to be able to do up the waist fastening of the trousers. I decided that it was worth a try, because I had that very morning got out the leather punch and made yet another new hole in my belt. The trousers drew up without a struggle, and I clipped the fastening in place without even having to breathe in. When did I last have a 34 inch waist? 1991, I think, before I started having double lunches with statistician K (What goes up...: Overweight, and past my use-by date).

The taxi arrived early, unlike most taxis, and we got there for half eight. I had planned on having a drink. Or two. Or slightly more, as it happened. They had a Mexican special night, and we both glanced at the menu, saw Nachos with melted cheese followed by Fajitas, and said "That'll do". We discussed the wine problem, she doesn't like reds because they give her a headache, and I find whites a bit insipid. I was happy to buy her a bottle of white and get myself a bottle of red, but she said she didn't feel like drinking a whole bottle, so in the end we compromised with a bottle of Rose. it was obviously a good wine, because I ended up ordering a second one before we had even got round to thinking about the sweet.

I decided that I was going to tempt fate and test the strength of the trouser fastenings, and had an Italian chocolate mousse, together with a coffee, and ended up stumbling happily out of the inn and into the taxi, with a lighter wallet and a heavier stomach, but the trousers still fitting comfortably.

I wonder if I'll still be able to put on those trousers at the end of the week? At this rate, not only am I going to stay a toy-boy, but I'm going to be a Chippendale candidate.

Video Chase

I got into a YouTube tag game with P. Dub last night. Here's part of the trail:

Mention Kirsty MacColl and everyone remembes her duet with the Pogues, and of course "There's a guy works down the chip-shop". But I remember something else, from a compilation tape I bought in Sweden years ago, which started off with The Boomtown Rats' "Someone's Looking at You", and also had this:



That started a chain of Irish Folk/Country, which I felt compelled to break, and got back to girl singers with the very cunningly-titled "Rapture":



My oppo in the game was edging back to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Wandering around the edge of the Australian connection, I found that the Prodigy had done a mash of Kylie Minogue, "Slow my bitch up":



You've got to admire them.

I ended up with the last girl singer, who I only discovered last year, on the "Ear Farm" mp3 blog you'll find in my sidebar links. Pea hated her, but I just love the drawling style:



She reminds me of someone, amd I'm still waiting for the synapses to click through to a path. Anyone out there like to try jogging my memory?

The Wait

I pulled into Nazareth...

It's a bit like fishing: you do your preparation, arrive beside the water, choose a method you think will be appropriate, and wait. Sometimes you wait all day, and go home without having had a tremble on the line. Other times they're hurling themselves at you.

And so it seems to be with weight: you do the research, count the calories, eat the right foods, do the right exercises, and wait. Sometimes the weight creeps off. Sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it creeps back on again.

In the week preceding my long bicycle ride I had dropped twice the amount of weight I would normally have done; I started the week at 12 stone 9 pounds, and on the evening before I set out on the first attempt to reach the railway, I weighed 12 stone 5 pounds.

I was elated, puzzled, and even slightly apprehensive. There have been rumours of dieters having problems with their life insurance, because the companies view weight loss as potentially harmful, a prelude to a wasting disease. The advice from doctors is to lose no more than two pounds a week, and here I was, doubling that figure, and I hadn't even tried. I hadn't eaten less, I'd been drinking plenty of water to guard against dehydration, and I hadn't tried any clever tricks like cutting out carbohydrates.

I had cycled a bit more, of course, and decided that exercise was obviously my particular key. I responded better to hard work than to a restricted diet. (Note to self: this does not mean you can eat more.)

After my two days either pushing or riding, I saw a brief figure of 12 stone 4 pounds. Excellent, I thought, long sustained exercise could knock a pound a day off. If only I could ride all day, all week. And then the earlier worries returned, would such an increased rate of losing weight be good for me? I wondered whether to go and have a word with my Doctor.

As it happened, I didn't need to. The next day, my weight had increased to 12 stone 5 pounds. I decided that the low figure had been a dehydration blip, and that it had taken a day to restore my fluid balance.

And on the next day, I reached 12 stone 6 pounds, and remained there for the rest of the week. I started to shirk getting on the scales, terrified I would see the needle reach the 7 pound line, or even worse.

The nice thing about the web is that there's always advice for something like this. There's sometimes too much advice, often contradictory, but it seems that every other person who has tried to lose weight has experienced both the plateau, and the reversal.

Some of the confusion comes in the figures they quote. Thin people need less basic calories per day than fat people. OK, so as you lose weight, you perhaps need to also reduce your daily intake. But, they also say, the extra muscles you develop as part of the exercise required to become a thin person consume more basic energy, so you should continue to lose weight as a result of the increase in basic metabolic rate. I was confused. Did I need to eat less as I lost weight and gained muscle, or more?

I went through all the pages I could find on plateau during weight loss. The key points I picked out where that:
1) this often happens
2) it is nearly always due to hidden calories
3) worrying about it is the worst thing to do.

An interesting comment on one of the cycling pages I had skimmed through jogged my memory, and I went back for a second portion. Increased exercise often means extra food intake, to give the body fuel to maintain the muscle growth. I realised that I might have moved out of the phase where my cycling was primarily to burn up fat into the phase where I was actively building muscle.

For a few moments I decided the reversal I had seen meant that I had actually converted some of the fat into muscle, and due to some magic process, actually gained more muscle than I had lost fat. A quick squeeze just above the waistline convinced me that I was thinking bollocks again.

Another dimly-remembered page on the web was re-visited. It recommended increasing the amount of protein and decreasing the fat and carbohydrate component of the daily diet when exercising hard. It did also say that the protein intake should not exceed 25% of the total intake, to avoid drifting into the perils of the stormy Atkins controversy. Oh, don’t go near the Atkins sea, sailor boy, it'll slice your sails and rattle your rigging and make your timbers tremble.

What I did do was take another look at what I was eating, and noticed that my old favourites, bread and cheese, had crept back up. And, after looking at the bread, I began to realise what was going on. I make my own bread, in a bread-making machine. It produces small, compact loaves; well, dense, actually. I love the texture and the taste, it's so much nicer than the shop loaves. And I loved experimenting with different types of flour. I had been using Spelt for quite a while, but had then discovered malted flour, and the taste of it was just too good.

I was mixing equal measures of Canadian wholemeal flour with organic malted wholemeal flour, and had stopped using the spelt. Looking through the packets to see what differences there might be, I discovered that the spelt flour claimed to have a higher protein content than normal flours. So, by switching to malted flour, I had inadvertently both reduced my protein intake slightly, and, because of the taste, also been eating more bread than perhaps I should.

So now I have a decision to make. Do I mix spelt and malted flours, or do I forgo the taste, and therefore the temptation, and restrict myself to simple spelt and wholemeal?

Just like fishing. What bait should I use? Why is nothing happening? Am I in the right place? Am I doing the right thing?

No, was all he said

And how much longer will I have this wait?

Square-bashing

An army term for marching endlessly round and round a parade-ground. Generally applied to a tedious activity in which one is constrained to a limited set of activities, and in which the use of the mind is contra-indicated.


It was a 10p listing day on ebay yesterday. After half the morning spent in front of the laptop and the scales I had thirteen items entered into Turbo Lister, ready to go. Why is it such hard work? Why do I hate it so much? It should be easy enough. Identify your item, describe it, work out the weight and size and estimate a postage cost, and get a reasonable photo of it. And yet I had struggled, trying to force myself to carry on.

"Oi, you, pick those arms up! Press those arrow keys, left-right-left-right, up-down! On the command, choose category, now! Obtain the,( wait for it,) weight for it. Calculate postage, de-scribe, and, save. Right, let's do it again."

So there I was, thirteen items at 10p each, plus 3p for a gallery shot, so that was going to cost me thirteen times thirteen. I could have just clicked on start -> programs -> accessories -> calculator, but I was fed up with sitting in front of a keyboard and screen. It was slavery, and I became Spartacus and hit the button to send the laptop into standby mode.

I stood up and walked around outside, wondering how to work out what 13 times 13 was. I could remember twelve times twelve is 144, because I learnt the times-tables by rote, and somewhere in the back of my mind was a whisper that thirteen thirteens was 169, but how could I work that out without going through thirteen stages of mental addition? Was there an easy way to get to the answer if you knew the result of the square just before the one in question?

Here we go. Five fives are twenty five, and let's forget that we know that six sixes are thirty six. Twenty five plus a five is thirty, plus a six is - thirty six. OK, so let's forget that seven sevens are forty nine, and start from thirty six, add six to get forty two, and add seven to get - forty nine. Eight eights are therefore forty-nine plus a seven makes fifty six, plus an eight makes sixty four. See the pattern?

OK, back to the original question, and starting with twelve twelves make 144, add twelve to get 156, and add 13 to get 169. QED

Is there a point? I don't know, I just felt elated by the experience of working out yet another mental shortcut to cover for the maths I have forgotten. And not having to do algebra or delve into number theory to do it. And not having to ask Windows pretty-please to help you with the answer.

(Note for geeks, yes, I know there's a simple algebraic solution, but this is a blog, see? Algebra and quadratic equations belongs on the blackboard).

Never rush to tidy up

Little Petal just stopped at the step between the kitchen and the office and said to me "Have you seen this?"

I thought she was referring to the drips of water coming from the cold water pipe ten feet above. There is a leaking pressure-relief valve on the small heater under the sink, and the constant flow of water through the pipes is causing condensation to form on them and drip everywhere.

I got up and moved to the doorway, ready to tell her that if she didn't insist on turning the thermostat for the water up so high it wouldn't be venting quite so much pressure, but what she was pointing to was not the drip point, but close by. A green moth or butterfly had settled on a piece of cardboard left laying on the step after I had packed a customer's order.



Neither of us had ever seen anything like it before. We've emailed off a picture to a web-site that might be able to identify it, but while we wait for them to reply, I thought some of you might like to have a look and share your valuable opinions with us.





After taking a few shots I started to worry about one of us accidentally treading on it, or a cat coming in and having a pounce, so I gently lifted the cardboard up onto the worktop by the sink, and for a couple of seconds stared eye-to-eye with it. It decided it really should be on the move again and fluttered around the kitchen for a few seconds, before settling on the remnants of the old station sign.



Strangely, although this shot was taken from several feet away, I found it to be better than the other shots, most of which were taken at a distance of a few inches with a close-up lens fitted, (the Sopwith Camel found an adaptor ring to allow him to start using his old 35mm equipment with the modern digital camera lens.) So this photo was the one we finally decided to send to the butterfly site.

Oh, and by the way, I have finally managed to get the blogger's spellchecker working, so you'll be spared some of my quirky words from now on. I suppose this is going to put the pedants off who otherwise love to flit around from site to site picking up a misused apostrophe here and an abused tense there. Gomen Nasai.

The return of Albert Ross

I would not be thwarted. The weather forecast on Sunday at seven still said a fine sunny day with high wispy clouds, and so I set out just after eight, with the water bottles and couscous tin replenished. I admit I was keeping a nervous eye on the secondhand front wheel and tyre of unknown age, but after I had reached Mere half an hour later I relaxed slightly. I stopped at the over bridge where the A303 passes over the road to Frome. A few months ago a Dutch woman had been sat there for a few days, waiting out the bad weather as she tramped around England with a rucksack and sleeping bag. I read about it in the paper, and thought how similar a lifestyle I had had when I passed through her country.

I rode past the layby where I had photographed the flowers, on further past the scenes of the front-wheel lockup and subsequent bodge, finding the second layby now taken up by a large lorry. I had passed beyond the previous day's farthest point, and carried on up the steady rise to Stourhead, where there was a sign, 'CAUTION CYCLISTS'. Did they know I was coming? But it looked as though there was a cycle meeting that day. I hate riding with other cyclists, they always want to go faster than I find comfortable.

I turned off the busy B-road onto Stourton Lane and rode through Kilmington Common, through an avenue of Ash, Sycamore and Beech trees, reached the crossroads at Yarnfield Gate, and went whirring and whistling down the steep descent towards Witham Friary.

I stopped before I reached the village, to brew a cup of coffee and have couscous by a small stream. The ground by the bridge was too soft to support the bike on its centre-stand, so I parked it on the edge of an entrance to a farm. It was out of sight, but as the couscous was cooking in the plastic noodle wok the farmer turned up in his turbo diesel four-wheel drive vehicle, and we chatted amiably about the bike and the terrible roads and how country folk have a harder time than city folk because their fuel costs more.

As usual, I had to get the camera out. I was particularly fascinated by the plants growing on the bridge stones, a microcosm almost.









I set off just as a horseman rode by at a trot, and followed him up the little hill until he slowed to a walk and I was able to pass him, then rolling down into and through Witham Friary. I passed the road I was due to take and rode through the village and back again because I had a little video recorder mounted on the handlebars, with which I am hoping to make DVD's of the countryside for my mother and little petal's mother to watch, because they are now too old to walk for long distances, and even find sitting in trains and on buses for long periods painful.

I passed through Upton Noble after a long uphill climb, crossed over the Bruton to Frome road, and sped downhill towards Batcombe. I had forgotten how steep and how long the hills were, and decided then and there to return by a different route. I climbed through the steep slopes of Batcombe and rode along to a tiny junction in a hollow by a stone house with curving corners, not a right-angle in sight, and then set off on the final stage of the ride.

As I passed through the lane, saying to the video recorder that I would try to find a gateway so that I could show them the panoramic views, I saw a small badger trotting towards me. The gap between us closed to about twenty feet, and then it realised I was there and turned to scamper back the way it had came. I followed carefully, not wishing to get too close to it, because badgers have a fearsome reputation when cornered. They will bite and clamp down until they feel bones crack, which is why professional badger-hunters wear shin-pads made of bamboo, to try and fool the badger into letting go early. As we rounded the bend, I saw two figures and a big black dog walking towards me, and the badger scampered towards them. For a moment I thought I was mistaken, and it was actually a small dog running back to its owner, but then the black dog barked and lunged towards it, and the three of us met in the centre of the road, me shouting furiously at the dog to leave it. The dog backed off in confusion, and the badger darted through the hedge and crashed noisily along for a few seconds.

Further on, the women and their dog now out of sight, I met another badger, much larger, loping along the road, but this one dashed into the hedge before I could press the record button. I stopped at the gateway I had been looking for and took some sweeping shots to show the abrupt hills and valleys around me. Somerset has a ruggedness that Wiltshire lacks.

I rode down a hill and along a stretch of road that used to flood regularly in the winters, when I drove these roads each morning and evening on my way to and from Nailsea for a few months working on PDP11's and Microvaxes that were used to control oil and gas platforms. As I passed the farm where the ground began to rise again a dog leapt the low stone wall of the cottage gardens and started to chase me, snapping at my ankles. I swore at the top of my voice at it, because there was no sound of the animal's owner calling it back. I got away from it without getting nipped, but was already well up the steep slope before I had time to try and get a lower gear. The chain is still too taught under load to change smoothly, so I was forced to tread hard on the pedals and climb the slope as best I could. A cow leaning over the wire fence to chew the longer grass on the top of the bank stared at me for a few seconds, then withdrew abruptly into the field.

I reached the bridge over the line by the station at a quarter to twelve. Allowing for the stop for coffee, I had travelled twenty-one miles in three hours. I know cyclists are supposed to be able to average 12 mph, but I like to go at my own pace, and I was carrying twenty-four pounds of baggage, as well as myself, and this was my first serious ride for twenty years. I was elated, but a horribly sweaty camel, and felt the need to hang around the bridge for twenty minutes drying off and cleaning up a bit before rolling down the slope and into the station parking area.



It was a busy lunchtime outside the restaurant, a large party of two or three families at one cluster of picnic tables, several other groups of people, and up the steps that lead to the platform and ticket office I could see still more people. I was glad, because preserved lines like the East Somerset depend on visitors; after all, what is a railway without people? But I wasn't going to lug the bike and baggage up the steps, and felt I would rather sit and watch the scene from a distance. I wheeled the bike over to beneath a small conker tree and stretched out on the grass beside it, taking off my shoes and thick outer socks.

I had lunch, a bagel, some cheese, a piece of red onion, and a good handful of raw spinach leaves, and decided not to brew up coffee. It would be a bit unfair to the nearby restaurant, and I realised I didn't actually need a coffee, it was just an old habit. I did have a five pound note in my pocket, but that was for emergencies, and I kept it away from my greedy little fingers. I wheeled the bike over to the other side of the car-park to see if there was somewhere I could sit and just watch the platform scene, but there wasn't, and I decided that instead, I would video the train further along the line, where it passed under a majestic road bridge.

After a short ride up a mild hill, I was rolling down a wooded lane and round a bend, to find my bridge. I parked the bike against the wall and fiddled with the video camera mount on the handlebars until it could just see over the parapet without getting pointless shots of not quite such a blue sky, and waited for the train. I got my shots of it, filming it climbing up to the bridge on my Kodak, which has a video mode, and using the handlebar camera to view it thudding slowly on round the bend out of sight.









Once again, I debated whether to have coffee, and decided not to, because I was down to only a litre of water left, and I would need that for the journey home. I was going to wait for the next train, an hour away, so I ate the tinned sardines, and kept the apple for later. I filmed some of the hedgerow flowers and the surrounding scenery for the mothers, and snapped a few more interesting bits of wild plants for my collection. The train returned, I got my shots, and then packed everything away and set off back up the hill.

The sky looked ominously grey ahead, even when I pushed my sunglasses up for a better look, and I realised that it was going to rain. This hadn't been in the forecast I had checked that morning, but at least I did have a lightweight anorak and waterproof trousers. I also had an ex-army poncho that could, in extreme conditions, be thrown over the parked bike, allowing me to crouch underneath out of the worst of the weather. The first few drops began hitting me even as I told the film that it was going to rain and the camera was going to have to go back in the bag. I pulled on the waterproofs and set off again.

The rain fell harder, bouncing off the road surface so much that for a few moments I thought it might be hail. I stopped to check the map on the approach to Wanstrow, and once more when I reached the village and crossed the main road. I had decided to avoid riding along for a couple of miles in the spray of passing traffic by taking a track shown on the map that ran from the southern edge of the village, through fields, over the railway line, and rejoined the main road a hundred yards or so from the turning that lead to Upton Noble. I rode along the metalled surface, which then became rougher, with large chippings that thumped and clonked under the tyres so much that I began to fear a puncture. After a steep climb over the railway line bridge and a short slippery descent the surface deteriorated into rutted mud and I could no longer ride. I pushed the bike uphill for about half a mile, my feet now squelching with each step, until I reached the road again.

After Upton Noble I had a long downhill glide, and then a steady rise to pedal up, before the road between Maiden Bradley and Bruton came in view. Over in the distance, a long way up, was Alfred's Tower, looming through the clouds and rain high over the surrounding trees. I knew that, even though I was going East, away from it, I was still going to have to climb that high to reach the general level of the land around Kilmington. I rolled downhill for a mile to the valley floor and then began the long ascent. The rain hadn't stopped, but I was now soaked inside my waterproofs from condensing sweat, and there was nothing I could do about it.

I was halfway up the mile and a half climb when I knew I wasn't going to be able to ride all the way up. My shoes, socks and trouser legs were soaked and heavy, stealing some of the effort from my muscles, but worse, I was too tired to control the bike properly. Due to the different shape of the Pedersen, a rider can put a lot more pedal effort in without having to stand up, and in fact the strap joining saddle to fork tube actually prevents standing and pedalling, but that means more weight is on the back wheel than the front, and the extra effort I was putting into the pedals was lifting the front wheel off the ground, when I then flailed uselessly with the handlebars until the wheel met the tarmac once more. I reached a house opposite a track into the woods and turned in through the gate, to stand under the trees and recover slightly.

I had aches and pains, was wet, but not yet cold, and knew I could still make it home, but I needed a rest. The trees stopped most of the rain from hitting me directly, and I took the crash helmet off for a while. I still had the packet of soup in the bag, but very little water, and getting the stove going in this weather would be a major task. I ate the apple instead, glad now that I had not wolfed it down earlier on, a benefit of my learning to control my appetite over these past few months.

I pushed up the remainder of the hill and rode the few hundred yards of slight incline to the crossroads where earlier that day I had taken the Witham Friary road. Now I was able to start retracing my way, and after a short ride up the slope was able to get back onto the largest chainwheel and start travelling at a good speed. A group of cyclists on drop-handlebar machines came towards me and were gone, and I realised that it was no longer actually raining. I flipped the anorak hood off, and felt damp cool air rushing past my head.

It was only a few miles back to Mere, and it was all downhill, but I kept pedalling, until I came back into the houses and parked by the Spar shop, which I knew would be open even on a Sunday afternoon. I went inside with my five pound note and hovered by the hot food counter. There was a sign saying Bacon Patties, and I asked the lad what was left. He pointed to a small pasty and said 'This is chicken balti..." I didn't even bother to let him finish. "It's mine," I said, and got a couple of packets of salted peanuts, and a litre of water from the fridge.

I stood outside, tearing into the pasty, then eating the first pack of peanuts in a more civilised way, and drank half of the water. Some kids were kicking a small ball around, bouncing it high off the sloping roof of the memorial building. I kicked it back to them when it got away and rolled beneath a pair of cars passing in opposite directions, without getting squashed by either of the sets of tyres. The occupants of the cars looked fat and ungainly, only the kids in the street were slim and healthy-looking. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the shop window and realised what a desperado I must appear to be.

Some of the aches I had been feeling in my shoulders and arms had gone now, but I still rode carefully out of Mere. What I had done in the frantic four-mile dash was burn up reserves stored in the muscles, forcing the body to stop burning up the fat and instead go back on the sugars. I hadn't bought sweets or biscuits in the shop, because I learned a long time ago that they only give you a short boost of energy, and when the effect dies away, you can feel even more fatigued than before you ate them. I stopped by the stream halfway home to eat the second pack of peanuts, drink some more water, and take off the waterproofs. I realised, looking at the road, that it hadn't rained here, or if it had, it had only done so briefly. The forecast had been right after all, and I should have checked a forecast for my destination as well.

I got home at half-past five, having ridden up the long final hill, and was able to take off the wet clothes, light the fire to get hot water for a bath, and sit down to watch the Canadian Grand Prix.

I had ridden a total of 54 miles in six hours saddle time, a typical daily distance when I was on my travels. And just like those old days, Albert Ross had shown his true colours by conjuring up the weather. It's an old joke, you see; I called my bike Albert Ross, a pun on Albatros, a stormy bird, because I seemed to meet such awful weather when I rode around on it.

The sharp-eyed will have already noticed that in my side-bar links is an entry for Albert Ross; I am going to seperate future stories about the bike from this blog. Again, it's another play on words and meanings, because the Albatros was Germany's fighter plane that was the direct counterpart to the British Sopwith Camel and the SE5A. I started this blog fifteen months ago as the Sopwith Camel, outdated, slow and ungainly, lumbering by modern standards, but am changing fast. The Albert Ross side of me should have a seperate blog, because although it may become my future yet again, it is very largely my past.

Problems come in threes

I planned my weekend meticulously. I had been riding further and further on the bicycle each evening, but the rides were just local loops of a few miles. I started to feel the need to go somewhere, and so I decided to visit the East Somerset Railway at Cranmore. The 5-day forecast said Saturday would be cloudy and wet, but Sunday would be sunny. I planned for a Sunday visit. The round trip would be 42 miles. On Thursday the 5-day forecast had changed, Saturday would be the sunny day now, and Sunday would be cloudy and wet, so on Friday I worked on the bike throughout the day, until I could get all three front chainwheels selected. In the evening I sorted out food, tools, petrol for the stove, and charged up all the camera batteries.

At seven the next morning the sky looked suspiciously grey, and along the line I could see what I took to be mist, but hoped it was the signs of a hot day to come. I set out on my antiquated-looking bike, carrying baggage for the first time in years, 20 or so pounds of it in two panniers. I reached Mere and passed through it easily, and started the continual climb up the B-road towards Stourhead, after which I would branch off to a little side road out of the traffic.

I stopped in a layby because the wild flowers in the hedgerows caught my eye.



This is Elderflower



And this is it just emerging. Later in the year the same sprig will be a cluster of tiny dark berries, the elderberry from which wine is made.



Bindweed, or Convulvulus, is a real nuisance at home on the platform, but it has the beautiful white flowers which the bees love. I just wish I could find a use for it myself.



This, I believe, is how a blackberry starts out.



Even Stinging Nettles can put out something pleasant and enticing.



And under the shade of the trees the Foxgloves were out in full flower.



And heading back out of the undergrowth to the roadside, the bike sits there, sixty seconds from catastrophe, without a hint of what is about to go wrong.

I was going to brew up a cup of coffee, but decided I'd rather do that away from the rush of the traffic. I hopped on the bike and set off again up the steady slope towards the turning to Stourhead. The bike suddenly slowed and almost stopped. I stuck my left foot on the earthy bank beside the tarmac and twisted to look back at the rear wheel, expecting to find a bag or a strap tangled in the spokes, but it was clear. I looked at the front wheel, and noticed that the wires leading from the hub dynamo were twisted. With a sinking feeling I got off and stood the bike on the centre stand. The hub dynamo had spun round and tightened up into a solid block. The wheel was immovable. I unbolted the wheel and took it out of the forks, and realised after about five minutes that I was going to have to dismantle it completely to allow the wheel to turn, and I didn't want to do that right beside a three foot earth bank with traffic shooting past me only inches away.

Fifty yards up the road was another layby, on the opposite side. I picked up the front wheel and the toolbag and ran up the road, left them on the grassy edge, then went back and picked up the bike by the handlebars and wheeled it like a heavily-laden unicycle over the road and up into the layby. This wasn't quite the idyllic morning I had forseen, and as I fiddled with the locked-up wheel I could sense that there was something missing, something I really had to have in order to be able to solve this problem. I needed coffee.

I got the petrol stove out from the pannier, used the old Echinacea bottle dropper I had found the night before to fill the priming bowl with petrol, used my flint and steel to set light to it, and got the saucepan ready. I started to pour water from the old blue plastic drinking bottle that had been on the lesbian bike. It wasn't pouring very fast, so I squeezed the bottle slightly. It split, showering water over the stove, washing the burning fuel out of the priming bowl and putting it out. I poured what was left of the water into the saucepan, and relit the stove.

While I waited for the coffee to brew I had a closer look at the hub. As I crouched over it my glasses kept slipping off and falling to the ground. It didn't help that I was sweating heavily either, and that both lenses were covered with large droplets. I realised, after dismantling the magnet and stator, that something else had bent, the wheel was now turning, but wobbling from side to side. I drank my coffee, and considered my options. The bike could not be ridden; the wheel was lurching from side to side as it ground around, making horrible noises as the rubber of the tyre chaffed against the mudguard stays and pannier frames, but more importantly, whatever was bent was allowing the ball-bearings to pop free. I couldn't call home and ask little petal to come and collect me, because she was 50 miles away baby-sitting for her eldest daughter, who was away for a long weekend somewhere in Wales at a glen reputed to be haunted by fairies. I didn't have my wallet, so I had no credit card or AA card, although I suspect that they would have simply laughed if I had called them up and requested roadside assistance or recovery.

I realised that I was going to have to push the bike home, all 8 miles of it. I had thought momentarily of pushing it to Gillingham where there was a bike shop, but then realised that without money or credit cards I was going to have to go home anyway. So I packed up the stove, and started looking for my glasses. I found them by the back wheel, on the ground, where they had either fallen hard, or I had trodden on them, because the right lens was no longer in the frame, and they were these annoying types where the top of the frame is just a piece of ultra-thin wire under tension. It had snapped, and I had nothing with which to mend them.

It wasn't quite the disaster it might seem, because I am long-sighted. I only need glasses to see what is inside my arms' reach, such as the keyboard and screen on this computer, but it still counted as the third bad thing to happen, all within the space of half an hour.

I set off along the road, walking along with both hands pushing the handlebars, wincing at the awful noises coming from the front wheel.



Just before the road went under the A303 I stopped to photograph some blue flowers that caught my eye.

I turned off into an industrial estate at the entrance to Mere to see if my friend was open, hoping he might have a spare front wheel or feel inclined to put the bike in the back of his van and run me home, but his unit was closed. I carried on through Mere and out into the countryside, and when I judged I was about halfway home, stopped to cook an early brunch of couscous with an oxo cube and some chillie paste.



And of course some more coffee, this time without any further problems with water-bottles. The stove is twenty-one years old, and I admit to feeling some trepidation when I got it going again for the first time since I came back from my travels, but it hasn't exploded so far, and it always was a scary thing to use even when it was new.

About half an hour later, much closer to home, I stopped yet again for flowers. This is the advantage of not using a recovery service, you can treat the journey back as if it was all part of the outing, which in a way it was.





And so, at one o'clock, I reached home, hot and sweaty, and decided I needed a bath, never mind the fact that the water would only be lukewarm. On an impulse I stepped on the scales before getting in, and found I had lost three pounds in weight since the previous evening. I put that down to water loss, even though I had been drinking copiously.

As an afterword, I got dressed and drove over to the bike shop in Gillingham, and said I wanted a front wheel, nothing fancy, just a 27 inch rim. "We'll have to order that in for you," I was told, "that size has been obsolete for years."

I drove back to the dump, and looked through the small selection of mountain bikes, none of which had wheels that would be of any use to me, and then went down the the scrapyard near to the station, where I managed to find a front wheel that was only slightly rusty, but more importantly, turned freely without any hint of bearing problems. I was determined to ride up to Cranmore, and the five-day forecast had now changed again, Saturday was dull and cloudy, Sunday was once more the bright sunny day they had predicted earlier in the week, and Monday now promised thunderstorms.

This has not been as much of a bad day as I thought it might, I feel cheerful after having rescued myself from yet another sticky situation. It is the first serious piece of trouble I have ever experienced on a bicycle, because it actually stopped me from riding it, but I was still able to get home at a good walking pace, without having to carry anything on my shoulders, something I loathe. More satisfying to me was realising that I haven't lost that part of me that was so resourceful all those years ago. It is like opening the front door to find an old friend standing there you'd thought was dead.

And although I marked it down as a catastrophe, it could have been far worse. The wheel could have locked up when I was speeding down a hill, the petrol could have flared up and set light to the small bottle of priming fuel, I could actually have been unable to see without my glasses.

Oh God, stuck in Limbo again

Just about a year ago, (now), I set out on the road. Seeking my fame and fortune... OK, enough of the Credence Clearwater Revival nostalgia trip, and due to the all-invasive nature of Google it's not even worth asking you lot to remember the name of the song, anyone can copy and paste that line into a search engine and shout 'Lodi' before you've finished reading this paragraph. The correct title was something like 'Oh God, stuck in Lodi again', but I really can't be bothered to Google to confirm that. You can do it, if you wish.

So, let's start again. Just about a year ago, I got into work on a Monday morning, after a drive of 270 miles, plugged my PDA into the charger, plugged it into the mains, switched on, and watched it flash the LED's dismally for a few seconds before dying. I was distraught, my life revolved around that thing. I switched on the desktop computer, and thought I'd better email a particular friend and tell her that there was no point texting me until I had got a replacement. The computer started up, but couldn't connect to the internet. The firewall in Holland was down. Fortunately I had synchronised the PDA with that computer, so I could dig out a phone number and give her a quick call. It's the only time we've ever spoken. I find that a bit sad, the internet has changed our lives so much that texts and emails and online chats have replaced the human voice.

Still, I managed to call my mobile company and discovered that the monthly rental I paid included a handset insurance policy, which would almost cover the cost of a replacement, there was simply the matter of a £25 excess charge. I said "ring it on, just give me the new phone." The problem was, my particular PDA, the O2 XDA 2s, was now obsolete. I would have to choose a different model. This threw me straight away, because I had bought a fold-away keyboard and become used to it, but after looking through the alternative phones, I discovered the XDA Mini also had the infra-red port needed to interface with the keyboard, and looked a nice little gadget. So I chose it. Then came the real problem, getting it to me. The place where I was working was over 12 miles square, and had a multitude of front gates. My particular office only had an internal address, and the phone carrier would only deliver to a post-code. I gave them the post-code of the head office, three miles away, and they said they couldn't deliver to that, because it was only a PO Box code. "Alright," I said, "I can live without it for this week, send it to my home address, I'll collect it on Friday." There was a problem, I was told, because the carrier who bought me the phone had to pick up the old phone and take it away with him. I would have to take the useless handset home with me on Friday, and get the Tynemaiden to do the exchange the following week. I would be without my PDA for a whole fortnight.

I thought a bit, called the mobile company again, spoke to the third different person, and agreed a way forward. I could supply the address of the security gate nearest to me, including the postcode, and the person I was speaking to managed to persuade the carrier company to meet me at that gate the next day, and the deal was duly done.

I was happy enough with my new toy, although the screen wasn't quite so large as the earlier model, and it predictably enough used the mini-SD memory cards instead of the SD cards. I had plenty of SD's but no minis. But the Argos store over the way had one left in stock. I re-synched all the details that had been on the old PDA with the new toy, downloaded a driver for the stowaway keyboard, and life went back to normal.



Here it is, complete with keyboard. If you want to see what the old XDA 2s looked like, follow this path What goes up...: The limits of my Geekiness are almost miniscule

Last Saturday, I was sitting behind the stall at Frome's indoor collectors market, filling in time between customers (all two of them), by typing in the handwritten pages I had sent home from Scandinavia during my travels. I had done this on the previous Wednesday, and it had made up for the lack of sales, because I felt the time had not been wasted. After almost both sides of the tiny pencil writing on page 7 had been converted into an RTF file courtesy of Word Mobile, I stood up, stretched, and glanced down. The screen had gone grey, with a few smudgy darker lines across it. I picked it up, turned it off and on again, shook it, reset it, and realised with that awful sinking feeling you get when you come up against an insoluble problem, that it was broken.

Later that afternoon, back home, I worked out that everything was working except for the display. I could couple the XDA up to the laptop by the USB lead and see all the files, with the exception of the un-saved Word document. I could copy files between the two machines. But I could not get the display working, and since it is a touch-screen device, couldn't effectively use it. I called up O2 and asked for a replacement, since I was still paying the handset insurance. There was nobody in the insurance section to speak to me, so I was given instead a complimentary £10 voucher.

Today, Monday, I called the O2 insurance section, and managed to negotiate a replacement. The XDA Mini, like my earlier XDA 2s, is now obsolete. No matter, because if there was one thing I had been dissatisfied with, it had been the small screen, and the XDA Exec they said I could have was almost identical in size to my original, and much-missed, XDA 2s. And, it has an infra-red port so I could still use my stowaway keyboard. They arranged to deliver it to me for the next day, and I got the dead Mini and power supply ready to hand over in exchange.

So, what was life like for two days without a PDA? Strangely enough, I managed. In fact, I actually found a better way of having mobile computing facilities without having to cart around a car battery and mains inverter to run a laptop on.



I dug through my collection of old computers and came up with this.

Remember it? It was the Amstrad battery-powered NC100 computer. It was advertised with the slogan "If you can't use this dedicated word-processor within 5 minutes, we'll give you your money back." I bought mine very cheaply, it was one of those where Amstrad had given someone their money back, and I only paid £50 for it. It used 4 AA-sized batteries, and ran for days on a single set. I took it on the plane to Japan with me, typed up the daily reports on it and printed them out on the Kawasaki Nikko Hotel's printer before faxing them back to England. I took it on the five-week sea survey for an underwater phone cable route where I was a Customer's Representative, again typing up the daily reports on the ship's printer before faxing them back. I used it on trains when I travelled between Wiltshire and Lancashire doing some power-station work.

You see, it had two distinct advantages over the 'proper' laptop I also had, which ran Windows for Workgroups 3.11. The first advantage was, it started up instantly. There was no boot-up sequence, no waiting while all the windows opened and the icons arranged themselves. Switch on, and you were instantly at the place you had been when it last switched off. The second advantage was that it would run continuously for well over a day on 4 little batteries, where the laptop might manage 3 hours on a pack the size of four king-size chocolate bars.

I stopped using it about six years ago, when I stupidly plugged the wrong mains adaptor into it. After reading about a simple fix on the internet, I mended it myself, just so that I knew it was ready should I ever need it again. I started using it a year or so later, when I went to work at the strange company in Swindon. It was the machine I left out overnight inadvertently and upset the security guards. (See What goes up...: Back in the juggling game again).

So, on Saturday, I started it up soon after confirming the XDA Mini wasn't going to come back to life, and began typing in the pages I had seen swallowed by the dead XDA. I was determined that, if I was going to continue sitting hopefully behind ranks of cuddly toys and assorted pictures in a market hall, I was going to be able to continue typing in my handwritten notes. And, for all the convenience it offers, the XDA Mini had two serious defects; it drank power when using the infra-red port to talk to the stowaway keyboard, and it frequently locked up and needed resetting. Well, it's Windows, it has to crash, doesn't it?

After a while, I realised that the main drawback with the NC100 was the screen; not the size, the 8 line by 80 character display actually showed as much text as the XDA Mini, but the problem was the angle of the screen. I found myself having to lean forwards and peer into it when the sunlight was in a particular position. So I dragged out my other toy, something I bought on ebay last year, the big-brother to the NC100, called, imaginatively enough, the NC200.



Some of you might recognise it, because I gather the schools used them for quite a while, badged up under a different name. It has a display twice the size of the NC100, but more importantly, it can be angled to suit the user. I've spent a couple of hours sitting out in the sunlight on the platform, typing in my travels. And guess what? It's more convenient to use than I first thought it would be. It's the funny letters, you see? I was wandering around Scandinavia where every other place-name has an umlaut, or a ring, or a strike-through in the letter O, and getting those characters in Word is tedious. OK, you can have 'charmap' open on the laptop and copy and paste letters in, but that's a bit of a pain, and I still haven't found out how to do anything similar in Word Mobile. The Amstrad word processor, called Protext, has a beautifully simple method that only needs two key-presses.

It's made me realise how far we've come since the early days of computing. My book was first started on a Tandy 100, and then continued on a Sinclair QL. I used to run a word-processor called Wordstar on CP/M and then DOS machines, but as Windows gained power I had to get to grips with WordPerfect, then Word, as my customers had all standardised on these heavyweights. Now, I am getting to grips with using MediaWiki and PHWiki on my home machines and servers. It's a continual learning curve, as new versions of the operating system come out and force new versions of the programs which run on it to be released, and new developments on the web promise to end the rule of disk-based programs for ever. I think we might have come too far. I have enjoyed the sheer simplicity of tapping away on the NC200's rather clumsy keyboard, and the lack of worry about resets and lock-ups. A simple machine, but I only want it to do a simple task.

Back indoors is my laptop, on which I collate and organise the growing amount of notes and drafts that will one day have to be printed out, double-spaced, and sent to a publisher, (or several, probably), to hopefully then emerge in the bookshops. It runs Windows XP Multimedia edition, but drinks power, and is a pain to use in bright sunlight. What a waste of the day, to be sitting indoors in the shade, just so as to be able to see what you're typing.



I have made one minor modification to my laptop. Here it is.

I have ripped off the Capslock key, because I am so tired of accidentally hitting it when I meant to either tap shift or A, and seeing wHAT YOU TYPE ALL COME out like that before you realise your mistake. Why, for God's sake, do we need a capslock key? Who types everything in capitals anyway, except for newbies and trolls on usenet? And why, if you have to have such a key, must it be put right next to the second most frequently used letter of the English alphabet, and just above the shift key as well?

Oh, and as a final little gem, the Tynemaiden took a phone call for me while I was out on a cycle ride. It was from O2. They had been evacuated from their offices because of a fire in an adjacent chemical works, and my replacement phone may not be arriving tomorrow after all. Is that fate telling me to go back to the simple solutions? Small isn't always best, you know, and sometimes battery power, like staying power, is more important in the long run.