Author: Richard

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The Problem With Creativity

This is not a post about work. I repeat: this is absolutely not a post about work. In my day job I do have books to sell about creativity and of course they are all brilliant and you should buy them them when I tell you to because then you would be brilliant and insightful too. And that was quite a long sentence. It got away from me a little and that’s what I want to talk about. I’ll come back to it.

I used to draw a lot when I was a child. An awful lot. My grandfather was an artist and my mother was an artist and there were always paper and pencils and crayons and paints in the house. Whenever I didn’t have a book in my hand, I had a sketchpad and a pencil. From quite an early age I had a very definite idea about the lines I wanted to see on the paper. They were precise and they flowed just so. I wasn’t really bothered about representing anything in particular but I did want the lines themselves to work on the page.

Later, when I took up music I could hear my own tunes in my head and they were interesting and complex. They had strange intervals between the notes and the key shifts made things fizz just a little. I sang and played a guitar and bass and much later took up saxophone too. I’ve even plinked a few keys on a piano from time to time to no good effect, sadly.

That’s the thing. Nothing has been to much effect. I have a surfeit of ambition over ability. I’ve always been like this. The line never worked out on paper in the way I saw it in my head. The curve just wasn’t ever quite elegant enough. The shapes turned out ill-proportioned and just wrong. My fingers wouldn’t do what they needed to do with the pencil. It was frustrating.

Nor could I ever sing the melodies which rang out so clearly in my imagination. They came out more like some old hymn tune. That much shouldn’t be a surprise given my upbringing but it’s always been a disappointment. In this case, it’s as if the muscle memory generated by years of singing Abide With Me completely overwhelmed the most interesting tunes which still want an outlet from the sweary confines of my head.

And at last we come to the point. I try to craft the things which appear on these pages as carefully as I can. I throw away much more than I publish. Sometimes that’s because it’s just another empty rant about politics. The bitterness and disappointment evident in the previous post is still very real for me. At other times, it’s been one more In’t Running Great! post and it is but saying so again and again isn’t necessarily interesting.  Sometimes, most of the time in fact, it’s just been a good idea poorly executed like one of the drawings from when I was ten or twelve or that tune which popped into my head in the shower last night but sounded wrong when I tried singing it later. The problem with creativity isn’t necessarily having the idea, it’s executing it to any great or lasting effect.

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We Hold These Truths To Be Self-evident

I have the best friends, I really do. They’re warm and loving and generous. They share and support and we’re a bit of a mutual admiration group which would be horrible were they not admirable people. I am constantly surprised at how much we have in common. We have few arguments about anything substantive and nothing which is worth remembering or remarking upon at all.

I make a point during elections not to ignore contrary opinions. I can’t bring myself to read the Murdoch press, the Mail or the Express but I do read the Telegraph during election campaigns. For some reason, it’s not as objectionable as the rest of the Tory press. It’s the paper I would read had I gone down the Trouser Leg of Time towards Torydom.

The EU Referendum result has shaken my confidence in my fellow citizens. I think there are so many positives to our membership of the EU that outweigh the negatives. The EU is big, cumbersome, too many decisions are taken by commissioners and the Council of Ministers and the Parliament has nowhere enough power. However, EU citizens have the right of free movement within its boundaries to live and work where they please. Pooled sovereignty means that European states have less need to argue over access to resources.

Then there is peace. It’s true that there has been armed conflict in Europe since the end of the Second World War – in Cyprus and in the former Yugoslavia at the very least. However, Britain, France and Germany have stopped knocking lumps out of one another and that isn’t nothing. We are still calling each other silly names but we always will because, well just because, to be honest.

These things all seem so obvious to me and obviously good. I can’t imagine a world in which free travel, shared resources, peaceful international relations, tarriff-free trade and all the rest would be perceived as not good enough but 17.4 million Britons decided that was exactly the case.

I think it’s a stupid decision. It’s small-minded, short-sighted, fearful and daft. However, it’s the decision the majority of those voting came to on the day and that’s democracy. I can’t respect it because I think it’s small-minded, short-sighted, et cetera, et cetera but I can accept it because it’s that’s how democracy works. Whether the leave campaign would accept it had it been the other way around is a matter for bitter conjecture but still, I’m not living in that reality. This one is bad enough.

The Government is quietly tearing itself to bits. The Opposition is loudly tearing itself to bits. The Union is on its last legs and there isn’t a credible voice speaking for it. In fact, there wasn’t a credible voice speaking for the EU during the referendum campaign. David Cameron’s opinion on Europe couldn’t carry enough weight within his own party so he had to appeal to the rest of the nation. The rest of the nation took one look and said “Nah, stuff him.” From being the Man Who Fucked A Dead Pig, he has become The Man Who Fucked The Country. All political careers end in failure, few end in quite this scale of disaster.

The rest of the Tory Remain campaign was passionless. Actually, that’s true of the Remain campaign in general. There was nobody putting forward a conviction case for our continued membership with a vigour equal to the arseholes on the other side. The lying arseholes. The screaming, duplicitous, devious, wantonly destructive arseholes.

Boris Johnson is a man who would lob bricks through windows for the joy of hearing glass break. Whatever charm he once held in his sub-Wodehousian public persona has gone. We’re left with the liar who lied not to save another’s feelings but to further his own objectives. £350m a week for the NHS, remember?

I hope Theresa May gives him the kicking he so richly deserves. I then hope that she loses the next general election to someone with more of a sense of society but that’s another battle.

I can’t talk about that cunt Farage without calling the cunt a cunt. Probably best I don’t mention the cunt at all.

Oops.

Still, he lied or benefited from lies and he’s always been an odious little toad of a man, the sort to drop his fag end into his pint pot at the end of the night and leave it for someone else to clean up after him. And don’t get me started on his fucking Nazi propaganda poster.

Nor was there much passion from the Labour benches unless you were Kate Hoey or Frank Field. There wasn’t much passion from Frank Field either but you get more passion from bladderwrack at low tide than you do from Frank Field ever. Nobody put the Left’s case for the EU with the same strength that Michael Fucking Gove put against it.

And the LibDems, my poor old Liberal Democratic Party, were invisible. I saw two LibDem In signs on Queen Edith’s Way in Cambridge last week which was more than I’ve seen of Tim Farron since Christmas.

The Stronger In campaign was a sorry, gutless affair, it truly was. There didn’t seem to be a true believer among them. Ask a Leave campaigner why they wanted to leave and you’d get an immediate, emphatic, response – wrong and misguided, of course, based on lies and half-truths – but full-throated. Nothing similar seemed to come from the Remain campaign.

So, here we are. The weekend after the debacle before and we’re picking up the pieces the best we can. At least that cunt Farage isn’t getting his feet under the negotiating table. Apparently, there isn’t a rush to leave the EU. Boris doesn’t seem too bothered about it now. He just wants to be Prime Minister. The thing is, we need a skilled and dedicated negotiator in charge who will secure the best possible exit terms. Boris is not that man, not even close. Neither is IDS or John Redwood (I fucking saw John Redwood on telly yesterday, that’s how awful things are!) or Michael Gove or that bloke who wants to break up the BBC when he isn’t visiting prostitutes. None of them are.

The Leave campaign has won and doesn’t really know what to do now. Even if it did know what to do, it couldn’t do it because there aren’t enough skilled staff in the civil service to carry out the hard work. We haven’t needed them because the EU did all that stuff like trade negotiations. Basically, we’re fucked. We’re lost up Shit Creek without a paddle, canoe, or adequate protective clothing and the buggers who have left us here can’t get us out without help. The only people capable of helping us are the very people they want to separate us from.

It’s all been so very, very unnecessary. And just to cheer you up, tomorrow is Monday.

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It’s Not Acceptable. It’s Just Not Acceptable

I read Sam Lewsey’s recent blog post with a mixture of sadness and and anger. I’m sorry to bring my own blog back with what is going to be a long fucking rant about what is wrong with my fellow man. Maybe the next one will be about cake and kittens.

Now that the weather is warmer and we’re seeing a little more skin than we’ve been used to of late, it seems that some of my fellow men have forgotten how to behave. They really need to join the Don’t Be A Cunt Club. It’s easy. There are only two rules. Rule 1: don’t be a cunt. Rule 2a: learn to read. Rule 2b: pay very close attention to Rule 1. If you wouldn’t say something to your mother or sister, you don’t say it to random women on the street.

I’ve been reminded of the existence of The Everyday Sexism Project which exists to catalogue and chronicle the experiences of women every living day. Reading the entries ought to make any thinking human being reconsider their behaviour. Women should feel empowered not to put up with this sort of shit all the time and men, well they really need to stop and think for a moment before they pass that comment or whistle or do whatever their penis is telling them to do.

It’s about power, of course. It’s always been about power and you need to feel that you have some power in order to challenge whatever source of oppression is around. When you do, whether you’re a man or a woman, you’re going to be told that you’re humourless, that you need to lighten up. Worse, if you’re a woman you could be told that you’re frigid. Yes, of course she must hate sex because she doesn’t like being propositioned in Tesco’s when she’s looking for some fish fingers and a bag of frozen peas. She’s in the freezer section because that’s where women go when they don’t want to have sex. Fuckwitted men who behave like this towards women have such a high opinion of themselves that they must believe that all women must want them all the time. Unbefuckinglieveable.

(Alternatively, the men must have the sneaking suspicion that their wives, girlfriends or – who knows, maybe sheep and dogs? – furiously finish themselves off manually after the men have cum three strokes in again, the women all the time cursing themselves for getting involved in the first place. The men must look down at that sad little piece of gristle lying in their hand as they take a piss in the middle of the night and wonder why it all goes wrong every time they open their sorry, sorry mouths. And nothing will ever make sense to them, ever, ever, ever.)

I must find the article again where I read that a lot of homophobia comes about because the sort of arsehole men I’m talking about here believe that gay men treat all men in the same way that those arsehole men treat women.

Some people, women as well as men, will blame the woman for acting or dressing provocatively. This is of course patent bullshit. Men have for hundreds of thousands of years looked for signs of sexual availability in women and acted when they think they’ve seen them. However, you’d think that in 2016 a woman would be able to go for a run on a sunny day and not get chased around like a mallard duck on a pondful of drakes. She might look a bit hot and sweaty but she didn’t get that way because she wants a booty call. Being human in the Twenty-first Century surely means being more than a collection of evolved behaviours. We must have learned to be more than just that.

Further, if a woman were to out with no knickers on and one tit hanging out of her top, she still wouldn’t be asking for it. You could question her tailoring but no more than that. There is a problem with the male gaze. We still haven’t evolved behaviourally much beyond the savannah times I mentioned above.

It comes down to this: she doesn’t want to have sex with you. You might think she looks hot but she just wants to do what she’s doing and not get the hassle. She’s not going to suddenly want to have sex with you because you say something to her. She really won’t want to have sex with you now because she’s already heard four other blokes say more or less the same thing to her in the last thirty minutes. She didn’t want to have sex with any of them either.

Dude, go off somewhere private and have sex with yourself. You obviously need to wank and nobody else wants to see you wank, no matter what that video you were watching on the internet last night might have suggested.

There is a rather excellent book called Take It as a Compliment. One of my clients publishes it so if you buy it from a bookshop, I might get a few pennies. Each time a man makes a woman feel less than she is, it’s not a compliment. Each time a woman has to brace herself to pass a building site (sorry for the cliche, but it’s one of the most male places I can think of) or psych herself up for a night out because of the comments and gropes and all the other shit  that go down every time she goes out the door, then we’re all diminished. We all lose out.

Life should be about exploration, sharing and joy. Experiences like Sam’s sucked a little joy out of the world and not just for her. That joy can never be recovered. Her friends can rally round her and we all have but we’ve all lost something because some arsehole saw a bit of leg and thought he’d like a piece of it.

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A Sense of Achievement

I didn’t want to do much today. I thought I’d go for a wee run after breakfast. The plan said 20 miles but the plan could fuck off. I might do 10, or 13 or maybe even 15 miles. I’d do 20 if I got really lost. I had some chores to do too, and packing for my trip to London this week.

I did none of those things.

I ate a box of chocolates. It’s an achievement of sorts, I suppose. It was a SMART goal. It was Specific: eat an entire box of chocolates today. It was Measurable: eat one box of chocolates. It was Attainable: four boxes of chocolates would have been a stretch at this point in my training cycle. It was Rewarding: I fucking love chocolate so consuming an entire box of it was really its own reward and therefore almost Zen. Finally it was within a given Time: I ate those chocolates today.  It was just not my SMART goal for today.

It wouldn’t have been a smart thing to do any day but I didn’t explode and I wasn’t sick but I didn’t go for my run. I have been to the Household Waste Site too. (This is Cambridge; we don’t have a tip, darlings.)

I’ve also made dinner. It was supposed to be lamb casserole but there was no diced lamb in Tesco nearby. I came back thinking I’d do beef stew instead but it turns out I bought minced lamb because I wasn’t paying enough attention so we’re having that with dumplings. We will if I first of all remember that I still have to make the dumplings; secondly, remember how to make dumplings; and finally, remember to put the dumplings into the mince.

(I had to check that I have actually started to cook dinner and not just imagined that I’ve put it in the oven. It’s being one of those days.)

Lack of sleep and painkiller hangovers are playing havoc with me. One day when the pain has faded and the anger has abated sufficiently for me to write about it without the result being just one huge FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK! then I’ll tell you all about my Adventures in Dentistry. It’s probably going to be a while before that happens.

I still need to pack, fill the car’s tank with diesel, sort out some papers for the morning, worry a bit, have a brief panic, unpack, sigh, repack, realise that I’ll need some of the stuff I’ve packed overnight, swear, sigh, unpack a bit, fish out the things I need, repack everything else, worry about forgetting the things I need overnight when I leave at oh fuck o’clock tomorrow morning and finally not get enough sleep tonight because I’m worried about getting up in time to get to Ealing tomorrow.

Sundays haven’t changed since I was 14 and had to do homework over the weekend for a Monday morning. I’m nearly 50 years old and I’m still fed up with doing my homework.

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Jingle Mile IV – A New Hope

Heat 1

1 Paul Aste (4:54)

2 Lee Pretlove (4:57)

3 Kevin O’Holleran (5:06)

4 Ben Jones (5:19)

5 Alex Wright (5:28)

6 Grant Chapman (5:30)

7 Ian Richardson (5:37)

8 Graeme Inglis (5:48)

9 Dan Kitchie (5:52)

10 James Adams (5:52)

11 Richard Staley (5:52)

12 Chris Poole (6:12)

Heat 2

1 Richard Fay (5:30)

2 Scott White (5:55)

3 Sam Lewsey (5:59)

4 Rob Moir (6:01)

5 Lizzie Bennett (6:03)

6 Jonathan Escalante-Phillips (6:03)

7 Chris Hurcomb (6:10)

8 Steve Bland (6:18)

9 Ben Chamberlain (6:28)

10 Dave Mail (6:29)

11 Kat Hymers (6:31)

12 Diane Potter (6:54)

Round 3

1 Kevin Stigwood (6:33)

2 Chris Walton (6:49)

3 Lee Radley (6:49)

4 Catherine Wright (6:51)

5 Graham Boswell (6:53)

6 Rachael Leah (6:58)

7 Noel Jones (6:59)

8 Graham Holmes (7:15)

Heat 4

1 Liz O’Donovan (7:20)

2 Jason Mundin (7:26)

3 Gill Mundin (7:31)

4 Hope Hutchison (7:36)

5 Julia DeCesare (7:40)

6 Lynn Christison (7:42)

7 Karen Richardson (8:28)

Round 5

1 Cheryl Boswell (8:53)

2 Glenn Richer (9:13)

3 Linda Crook (9:14)

4 Ros Bodi (9:19)

5 Paul Beastall (9:29)

6 Helen Johnson (9:30)

7 Sylvia Jones (9:34)

8 Michelle Finnegan (9:54)

9 Gemma Underwood (11:13)

The Mince Pie 4 x 100m Relay

1 Ben Jones, Debs White, Richard Fay, Lee Pretlove (59.0)

2 Noel Jones, James Adams, Graham Holmes, Chris Walton (64.9)

3 Scott White, Dan Kitchie, Richard Staley, Chris Hurcomb (68.3)

4 Julia DeCesare, Rachael Leah, Gill Mundin, Jason Mundin (69.2)

5 Jonathan Escalante-Phillips, Kevin O’Holleran, Lynn Christison, Kat Hymers (72.5)

6 Kevin Stigwood, Graham Boswell, Grant Chapman, Cheryl Boswell (74.8)

 

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A Webble Post

This is going to come as a shock to some of you but I do try to exercise some kind of quality control over what appears in this blog. It’s not all just stream of consciousness swearing and yearning for a better running experience. I’ve written something most Sunday evenings since the last post appeared and binned each of them because every one of them was drivel. The internet is full enough of shite as it is without me making it any worse.

It’s been weeks since I’ve written anything I’ve been happy with and it might be weeks again before anything else appears. I have inklings of another project but I don’t have enough time to do it justice. I’ve even bought a couple of new internet domains for the websites I’m going to have to build for them.

I have been thinking about things. I have been wondering why blogs are called blogs and not webbles. Maybe webble posts wouldn’t have caught on in quite the same way. Other people lack my whimsy after all. You could then have moved into other media with viddles instead of vlogs. Vlogs sound like something the baddies in a Douglas Adams novel would leave in an overflowing toilet bowl.

See, I’ve saved the quality ruminations for you tonight.

I remembered something about about an American state legislature in the Nineteenth Century which declared that pi was 4 and not 3.14159265359 etc and then I became distracted by pie. Homer Simpson lives. My butterfly mind flitted on.

What if we had coypus instead of cats? #Coypuday on Twitter would be hilarious. Grumpy Coypu. Think about it. They have huge orange front teeth. They’re a dentist’s screaming nightmare, the antidote to all those toothpaste ads I hate.

Would you run through mud more quickly in bare feet than in knobbly shoes? I hate cleaning my running shoes after a muddy run but feet are easy to wash and come up as good as new unless you’ve been running through Dovedale. I did the Dovedale Dash for the first time last weekend and I think the mud will still be there should I go to the race again next year.

I’m going to stop there because I’ve thrown away more tonight than I’ve published here and I’m not convinced that what I’ve published is really worth reading. I just wanted to justify having the webble  in the first place.

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Anger Management

Bit of a stream of consciousness rant coming up. Sorry ’bout that.

I shouldn’t be this angry, I really shouldn’t. I have no right to it, no real reason for feeling this way. It’s probably going to be something to do with low blood sugar and frustration but I’ve eaten and been to the shops and I’m still, still fucking furious.

I could blame the bastard crash on the A14 this morning. Two lorries collided closing the road westbound and pushing all the traffic through Fulbourn and along Cherry Hinton Road. It was closed all day. I thought it would be fine when I left to go to the track this evening but it really, really wasn’t. The A14 was still closed, traffic was still piling up through the western part of the city and had I known about it I would have driven or even run the four and a half miles to the track. It would have been quicker.

I don’t know whether anyone was hurt in the accident. I really hope not. I’d like to find the fuckers truckers involved myself and ask them what happened. In that parallel world where I’m a bad bastard, I’d beat their heads together until their ears bled. Whatever momentary lapse of concentration happened this morning resulted in accumulated days of lost time for everyone caught up in the aftermath. It was a pile of shite for everyone.

I’m being generous. It’s equally likely that one twat didn’t want to give ground to the other twat and the two twats twatted each other there and everyone else within a six mile radius. That A14 is a relentlessly joyless piece of tarmac. There are accidents and incidents (hints and allegations) causing delays nearly every day. I hate it and I have to travel along it whenever I’m going anywhere other than London or Essex.

I shouldn’t take all those incidents personally. That’s what concerns me. It’s irrational. So what that wasn’t able to get to the track on time for training tonight? I helped coach the track session of 3 sets of 4x400m and really enjoyed it. The athletes responded well and I was happy while it was going on. It’s always good when the athletes click into the session and give each rep everything. I find it inspirational.

I thought I’d go for a run after the session instead but I was getting hungry and I think that’s when my disappointment became anger. I headed out to Tesco after eating to pick up some extra bits and bobs. That’s when my iPhone decided it didn’t want to play the podcast I wanted and I completely lost my shit in the car. The fucking thing.

I could have gone out and done my own thing when I got to the track this evening. It would have been easy to do an easy couple of miles to warm up, then four miles at a decent 10k pace and then either cool down for a couple of miles or pile on the pain for a fast finish. Boom! That’s a good session if you can nail it. I had to see some people and missed them at the start of the session and really didn’t want to miss them at the end. That’s why I couldn’t leave until I’d seen the people I needed to see. I didn’t know when everyone would return.

Running is my refuge. It’s what I do to maintain my calm. I know that some of you would question whether I am ever really all that calm. Imagine what I would be like were I not running. I managed to keep that bloke at bay this evening by fucking off by myself and swearing at an iPhone and not at anyone near or dear to me. I vented and I still really don’t know why.

There were no breakthroughs here. It’s a fucking mystery.

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Colnagone

What you see in the photo above is a very nervous man on a very expensive bicycle. It’s me setting off on the Gog Magog Gran Fondo a couple of weeks ago on a Colnago V1-r. I borrowed one of Colnago’s demo bikes  for the day from Steve at Primo Cycles. I’d been planning to ride my own old Trek but I saw that demo rides were available and asked Steve to sort one out for me. I gave him less than a week but he came up trumps.

The V1-r is a genuine superbike. It says so in a supplement to the current edition of Cycling Plus on the bikes of the Tour de France so it must be true. It weighs about as much as a snotty tissue but it looks the absolute business. The one I had was matt back with red highlights. You can have it in white and black, black on black, black with yellow highlights or black with white.

Mine was a feast of Italy. It had Campagnolo gears, Super Record at the back and Record at the front but the brakes were Colnago’s own. The bike’s aero flavouring put the rear brake under the bottom bracket which was excellent for keeping it out of the wind but gave it other issues when it came to losing speed in the grotty, damp conditions.

The carbon wheels come from Vision. They’re Metron 40s (oooh, Metron!) I hadn’t ridden with carbon wheels before and it took a while to get used to the way the brakes worked. To be honest, they didn’t really work in the rain and then they worked really quite a lot indeed when the brake blocks had cleared the dampness from the braking surface. This gave me a few brown bib-short moments coming down to junctions at the bottom of some of the wet descents.

The way the Campag gear changers work didn’t help. I’m used to Shimano. The Ultegra levers and derailleurs on my Trek are as smooth as a baby’s backside. The best I can say for the gears on the Colnago is that they’re positive and reward positivity. I was positive I didn’t like them. Slowing using the scary no-brakes-then-lots-of-brakes, unclipping to get my foot down and changing down the ratios on my way to a junction was too much for my little brain to handle at times. It got better with familiarity and to be honest, I think the bike needed a thorough service. God knows how many other cack-handed riders had been using it recently. It felt just a little tired and the rear mech in particular had a rattle on the lower ratios.

I called it a day after one particularly hairy moment when I nearly stacked it coming down a hill to a T-junction with the only busy road on the entire route. The actual descent was joyful. The bike is rock-solid at speed. Pick your line and the bike follows it with no nervousness at all. It’s not the least twitchy. It’s basically built to go very, very quickly indeed. After my near-spill, I diverged from the 80 mile route and headed for Bicicletta in Saffron Walden to gather my thoughts, dry off a little and have a coffee.

It’s a very fine bicycle indeed, this. It’s almost impossibly comfortable. My Trek rides on 23mm tyres. The Colnago had 25mm ones and the little extra air volume combined with all the knowledge gained in designing carbon fibre bikes in the years since the Trek was built make a huge difference. Only the saddle let me down. In truth, it demasculated me. The handlebars have little flattened bits on top and provided a very comfortable place to rest my hand when I was on the hoods. That wasn’t often. It really wanted me on the drops and driving the pedals.

When I did get into a tuck and give it some, the bike responded. I could feel it slicing through the air, every turn of the pedal making a difference. It has a little Ferrari badge on the top tube along with the legend in collaborazione con Ferrari. It’s only been in the actual Ferrari wind tunnel. I don’t know how much of this is down to engineering and how much is feel-good marketing, but the bike did feel fast.

I didn’t want to give it back when I got to the finish. It was wonderful. The thing robbed me of feeling in my bits for about three days afterwards but I still wanted it in my life. I said as much to Steve who said to keep it for another few days. It wasn’t going straight back to Colnago. So that’s what I did.

And on Monday I worked all day and didn’t get out for a ride.

And on Tuesday I worked all day and didn’t get out for a ride.

Wednesday, I took the posh bike out and gave it some. I set a handful of PBs on Strava including going up and over Chapel Hill towards Barrington and coming home along the A603 from Orwell to Barton. I’m not the best climber in the world but the bike gave me the confidence to push down the hills and when I had a bit of a tailwind, the aero properties of the frame really shone through. It really doesn’t waste the watts. It’s available with disc brakes now and I’d have mine with Shimano instead of Campagnolo because that’s what I’m used to.

It’s gone now. There is a Colnago-shaped hole in my life into which I’m trying to push a Trek-shaped plug. It doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit at all. You’re probably expecting me to diss my own bike now but I’m not going to because it’s brilliant too. It’s older and a little heavier but I smashed a Strava segment on the Trek last week I didn’t get close to on the Colnago. It’s a sprint from St Andrew’s Church in Cherry Hinton to the roundabout at the bottom of Airport Way. It’s the final part of most of my rides, a good way to burn off the last little drops of energy. The Trek and I nailed it last Sunday. In truth, the V1-r is a much better bike than I am a rider, even with its weird levers and scary brakes.

It’s not about the bike after all.

With thanks to Steve at Primo Cycles and to Colnago for the generous loan of the bike. Steve has a V1-r frameset in stock and for sale at £3000. A V1-r with the Campagnolo gearset and Vision wheels like I had would cost about £6500. It’s worth every penny. 

In case you doubt me, here’s a photo of me at the end of the Gog Magog Gran Fondo. See what it does to a handsome man like me.

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Caddisfly

I don’t like glace cherries. I never have. Fresh cherries have an odd taste anyway. Preserving them with sugar syrup or embalming them or whatever they do with them to make them inviolable like that does nothing to improve them as far as I’m concerned. Glace cherries are the winnets of the preserved fruit world. There are tastier things dangling from round the arseholes of sheep.

Yesterday was my last day as event director at Wimpole Estate parkrun. I have had the privilege of being at the heart of a wonderful community. I’ve built that community round me like a caddisfly larva builds its protective shield. The silk is creative swearing and there are pebbles and bits of weed and they’re represented by the friends and dogs and dogs of friends and the sheep and cows and geese and ducks and gorgeous children and they’ve all kept me safe and sane when my world has been coming apart.

Now I’ve left it behind. In a way. It’s its own thing now. I’ll be part of it and I’ll let someone else feel the love the way I have. I am not good at accepting praise. It embarrasses me. I deflect it or dismiss it with a joke. It’s not important to me. What is important to me is a sense of mutual respect and I am grateful to have had the chance to set the tone of our community if I’ve even done that much. I prefer to think I’ve let others do the touchy-feely stuff while I’ve been just the right side of misanthropic for sanity.

Yesterday was still mildly surreal. I didn’t want any fuss but Chris was never going to let me get away easily. He stood up and was warm and effusive and I was mildly embarrassed at the attention. It’s never been about me, it’s always been about the runners and that special landscape we run through and about the community we’ve become. He gave me a National Trust goody bag which is why I wittered on about glace cherries. They’re in a cake, an otherwise remarkably lovely fruit cake which I started with a cup of tea this afternoon. They’re the only disappointment in a day full of delights and I can pick them out of the cake if I really have to.

I’m a lucky, lucky man. I have friends and health, a roof over my head, food in the larder, the love of an excellent woman, a cat on my lap whenever I want one and sometimes when I don’t. I don’t need an artificial shell.

Good luck to Colm Crowley. You have a remarkable thing to curate and I know it’s going to change and grow and develop and continue to be a place where friends can inspire and be awesome for one another.

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What Is Wrong With Us?

I’ve had a bugger of a cold this week. I wish my legs ran as well as my nose does. I’d be running five-minute miles and two-thirty marathons. I’d also be a lot more attractive. There is nothing quite as unsightly as a man who’s left his snot faucet wide open desperately looking for a fresh tissue.

(That’s probably not true. I thought of at least half a dozen more unpleasant sights while I was writing that sentence. Ask me about them some time when you’re feeling strong.)

I’ve gone through three big boxes of tissues and filled the wastebasket twice over with the detritus of my virus. It’s all soggy tissues and crushed and empty lozenge blister packs in there. It’s really quite unpleasant to look at and I can’t imagine it’s much more pleasant for anyone else to contemplate now I’ve mentioned it.

I felt really quite ill for the first half of the week. I’ve been very tired; off to bed well before ten at night and sleeping for nine or ten hours. The last time I felt as poorly as this was last April  in the week before the Manchester Marathon. At that time, I passed out at home on the sofa and couldn’t do much at all to prepare for my race. I missed that race, of course as I have so many others.

I passed out once before. I woke one night feeling really odd when Anne was away in Wales with some friends. I went to the loo, spent five minutes heaving and sweating, threw the contents of my stomach up into the pan and then blacked out. I came to some time later with Harry knocking on the door, asking me if I was all right. I wasn’t completely coherent. I desperately wanted to go to sleep there on the floor but something was telling me that I should get up, move around, get to bed, at the very least take off the sodden dressing gown which was very nearly not staying wrapped around me. Ewww…

Pus and snot and blood and shit and urine aren’t often fit topics for dinner table conversation. They’re not fit for the sensibilities of a lot of people and I’m sorry about that but I’m preparing an argument and I had to do it. So, while we can’t often talk about pus and snot and all the rest we can’t ever talk about mental illness.

I read Andy Baddeley’s blog post this week about his depression and performance anxiety. It resonated so strongly with me. The most important thing in his post is that he felt he could talk to his friends about his depression.

People who fight cancer are now seen as heroes, warriors against an implacable and nearly invincible foe. People fear cancer because it’s a nasty disease. Nearly everyone must know someone who has died of cancer. Fear means that people don’t want to talk about it but slowly, slowly, attitudes are changing. Prognoses for many cancers are improving as a result of research and better cancer care. People are living with cancer now and not just dying from it and that means that people are willing to talk about it more.

The same is not true of depression or other mental illnesses. I can guarantee you will never, ever read a tabloid headline about a schizophrenic hero overcoming the the odds to fight against their disease. Never. Not ever. Papers will publish pictures of mums with cancer but without hair being brave and awesome and being mums. Race For Life is a fantastic phenomenon which has given many women the running habit and it’s a fundraiser for a cancer charity. I can’t imagine that Run For All The Sad People would have the same impact and not just because I’m crap at naming mass-participation fundraising events. It’s not about the name, it’s about our attitudes to mental health and those who lack it.

We are even more afraid of mental illness than we are of cancer. Mentals are mental after all, aren’t they? They get locked up because they kill you, don’t they? Bollocks, complete bollocks. The trouble is that the popular conception of someone with mental illness is the axe-murderer. I think this is because we don’t talk about our own mental illness when we have them.

Mental illness is not rare nor is it always severe. Most people with depression for example have the psychiatric equivalent of a bad cold or a mild dose of flu. It’s not pleasant but it does pass. The cruellest thing about mental illness is the isolation that goes along with it. It’s seen as a weakness or a failing. Nobody sees flu or Ebola or heart disease as a character flaw. As Andy says in his blog, nobody wants to admit to failing so we keep our mental health issues quiet. We go into seclusion when what we need is the help, support and love of everyone around us. You can’t catch depression from a depressed person.

There is something wrong with our society. I hope that we’ll see more blog posts like Andy’s in future to dispel the nonsensical shite that clings to mental health issues. If more powerful people like Alastair Campbell talk about their mental health then we’ll see that it’s not about weakness or failing it’s just about being well or unwell.

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