Writing a race report on the Oxford 10K without using the phrase "city of dreaming spires", or even less resistible, Frederick Raphael’s "city of perspiring dreams", is probably tougher than the race itself. But I’ll give it a go. This is the race, mentioned here, to which I’d challenged my athletic Moriarty, Mark. Getting out of bed at seven in the morning on a Sunday, isn’t much fun, particularly after a late night. We’d made our first ever trip to Camberley where we saw an amateur production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying . A sixties’ satire, but with plenty of truth in it. We enjoyed it. Am-drams is always a risk. We went to a … …
Author: andy
Any mind mappers out there? I’ve recently been reminded how much it helps to see things in pictures. Charting has long been an interest; probably since those distant lectures on systems analysis on my MSc course. The enthusiasm continued during a brief and largely miserable career as an intelligence analyst with the police, when I spent my days drawing sprawling, complex charts showing links between criminals and organised crime, and mapping out the hierarchy of their gangs. Mind mapping is similar, but rather more useful, showing ideas or other entities in a tree-like structure, emanating from a central point. I came across some interesting and sophisticated mind mapping software last week which I’ve been playing with. If you want, try … …
Spoken with a raw Belfast accent, “terrorism” and “tourism” sound like the same word. Handy, as the city seems to have swapped one for the other in recent years. And it’s possible to experience a spot of both simultaneously, as I found a couple of weekends ago. After watching (in my case, guiltily) a boisterous crowd of SportRelief runners bounding through the smartened-up city centre,we got into a taxi by City Hall, and asked to be taken to Divis Tower, on the Falls Road. The driver didn’t move at first; then he turned round and stared at us. “Where did ye say?” I checked my notebook, and repeated it. I asked: “Do you know the place?” “Do I know… …
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. It took me until halfway through the Copenhagen Marathon to adopt a hybrid of 99 Red Balloons and Mister Tambourine Man as the soundtrack to the day. By contrast, Zurich Marathon day was just a few seconds old when I found what I really didn’t know I was looking for. I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’, Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world… Alarm goes, eyes creak open. I’m lying there in the darkness for a few moments, semi-conscious, hearing a noise I didn’t want to be hearing; the unmistakable sound of water drumming against the slanted window. Just like the Almeria Half in … …
I recently bought an iPod Nano, and have been teasing myself with its possibilities. Started off with a few rather unsatisfying weeks, re-exploring the less hospitable, outer territories of my own MP3-ised CD collection. Since then I’ve been back on safer ground — the spoken word. It’s a wholly different experience. Being a lifelong BBC Radio 4 addict, this shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was. It’s the different context that’s startled me. There’s something surreal about hearing languid, disembodied voices while out running. I suppose this is what believing in god must be like. On the subject of which, I heard yet another cracking Mark Twain quotation yesterday, while listening to the podcast of Start The Week… …
Dusseldorf, by all accounts an elegant city nestling in an elbow of the Rhine, has been home for three days now, but I’ve not seen much of it. What I have seen plenty of is the interior of Mercedes taxis – invariably driven by heavy-set, grouchy Turks who abuse me when I question their choice of route. Trilinguality and tranquility are out the window when confronted by their dishonesty, and they revert instead to some threatening hybrid of German and Turkish. Perhaps I shouldn’t care – someone else is paying for it (ultimately, the customers of a certain British mobile phone company.) Not a good attitude to take, but I don’t need any additional stress. Yes, all I’ve seen so … …
Life goes on. It was around 10:30 this morning that I first heard about the bombs on the London Underground and the Russell Square bus. For a couple of hours, there was a sense of shock around the office – not helped by the lack of hard news. Rumours of further attacks and mounting body counts kept the internet humming for most of the morning, before my capacity for grotesque wonder was fully charged, and it became time to do something else. You can say “isn’t it terrible?” only so many times. So I carried on configuring my server – a job that took the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon. Running? I’ve had a good week … …
Interesting experience yesterday. Last week, I was up in Leeds for a couple of days, and took the opportunity of popping over to Huddersfield to rescue a five-years-garaged bike. I bought the machine (a mid-range Trek hybrid, for anyone interested) somewhere in the nineties. [Aside: Hmm. When I was younger, people used to remark on my ability to remember dates. It was a party trick. Someone would recall a meeting, a football match, a party, a fight, from years before, and I’d say, “Ah yes, March Seventh, Nineteen Eighty Two”. But now? Now I’m reduced to saying “Er, somewhere in the nineties…”] The bike never got much use, but then Huddersfield isn’t a great place for a novice cyclist. … …
Early yesterday, Cup Final morning, I can’t recall what it was now, but something led me to an internet page. I was probably obediently researching some arbitrary request from my wife. Contemporary dance. Modern Jazz. An exhibition of surrealist paintings or abstract sculpture. When it comes to art, she’s the Arsenal to my Corinthian Casuals. Whatever it was, I found myself beholding a page with a marginal mention that caught my eye: Donovan in Reading, it said. Donovan? Now there’s a name I’d not heard in a long time. I clicked on the link, and found myself at the website of The Hexagon, Reading’s slightly outmoded theatre and arts centre. Donovan? Crikey. There was his picture. Yep, that’s … …
How many people under 40 know what this is? Until this morning, I hadn’t realised how low in our esteem the humble bicycle bell had fallen. It seems to have been all but eliminated. Running down the canal for 12 miles, I was overtaken by a total of 34 bikes. I’ve no objection to them on the towpath. The average cyclist looks like a quivering sack of jelly abandoned on a garden wall, so it’s probably the only exercise these poor people get. Moreover, the path is part of the SUSTRANS network, so I expect to see the weekend cyclist, and believe in our harmonious coexistence. But some of them are complete tossers. Perhaps the excess weight that most of … …