Can You Sea Me Running?

For a brief introduction as to how this all started visit Weekends Collected for this related post, Rainy Days And Sundays.  You might even want to leave your own posts whilst there

It's four a.m. when the alarm goes off and I crawl out of bed.  My body goes through the motions of getting ready whilst my brain plays catchup, but by five a.m. I'm ready, after the usual visits from Captain Paranoia, to head off.

The sat-nav is switched on, with its heavy New Zealand accent forever telling me that there's a Bear left ahead: although for the life of me I never see the creature for myself.

I'm heading for the coast, for a meeting in one of our larger offices with a colleague and our clients.  If I were to go via train I would still have to leave this early, but wouldn't arrive until at least 11am - most likely missing the meeting.

After an hour and a half on the road, and just before I leave the motorway onto the smaller roads that will mark the rest of my journey, I realize that I am dangerously tired and stop at a soulless service station for a cup of bitter coffee served by an ever-so-slightly more bitter employee.

I sit in the car sipping the resultant brew and thinking about the Bruce Springsteen CD I've been listening too (Wrecking Ball - definitely a return to form, I decide) and briefly about the meeting ahead (like most sane people I try to spend as little of my free time thinking about work as possible) before finally switching Mr Sat-Nav back on.  The New Zealand accent is Herself's choice and is no more grating than any of the other options.  I've never really been tempted to change it, for example, to Mr T forever telling me to "turn left sucker" as I am under no illusions that such an option would cease to be funny after two junctions, leaving me forced to leave it switched on or admit that it really was a stupid waste of money.

The rest of the drive goes well and I arrive at the office in good time for the morning calls and meeting preparations.  It's a pretty enough site, set in a small town that could only be described as "pretty" if it were in comparison to a boil.  The grounds are big, with a huge lake built for natural coolant of the immense IT infrastructure stored inside.

At 10am when there's still no sign of the man I'm here to meet I venture downstairs to the other room we use and find that a) I've walked straight into the middle of a very important meeting and b) he's been there all the time.  We spend the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon discussing the tasks ahead and finally meeting with the client.

Finally the day draws to an end and I pack up my computer and head for the little treat that I have promised myself.

Five weeks ago, as evidenced in the related post linked above, I took up running.  To be honest: progress has not been good.  I had been trying to follow a regime that I have downloaded from the internet, but have had several set-backs, including some trouble with my knees.  The upshot of all of which is: I am nowhere near as fit as I had hoped to be by now and still barely able to do more than 20 minutes worth.

Still, with our office so close to the coastline I haven't been able to resist the temptation to recreate a scene from Chariots Of Fire and go for a run on the beach.

I change into my running kit (grey shorts, grey vest-top, super-dooper expensive running shoes) turn the vehicle away from the route home and drive the extra five miles or so that it will take and soon enough I can see the pier and find a place to park.

The first problem with my vision of empty sandy beaches is that for the first time since I was last down at this office three months ago: the sun has come out.  This means that the walkways are full of young people who really should put a T-shirt on (please - no one wants to see an exposed beer gut, it puts you right off your stick of seaside rock), who seem to have reverted to the childhood communication method of forever shouting at someone standing less than three feet away.  This means that whenever I start running I am unable to continue for more than thirty seconds without risk of knocking someone over.

The second problem is even more vexing: no beach.  The sea is almost entirely in to the storm wall and where it has condescended to leave an open spot it does so only to reveal not the golden sands I had hoped for, but pebbles.

And so, having been forced to turn in-land from the coast, I give up running after less than five minutes and settle for a leisurely walk back with my camera

In the harsh light of the sun, and using my mobile phone, it's hard to frame a picture properly -hence the above "Wall With Thumb"

However - I did uncover evidence of the imminent return of Jesus, as evidenced by the man walking on water below...(erm...ok, so he was jumping off the landing bay, but that's what it looks like, OK??)

And of course, I got to see a hovercraft taking off - so the trip wasn't a total loss.

Sleep Patterns

In my experience the two times in your life you cannot sleep are when you have to get up early and when you do not have to get up at all.

When you have to get up early you will inevitably lie awake into the wee hours, desperately aware that if you don't get some sleep soon then you won't get any sleep at all: disturbed by every creak of the wind from outside and constantly yelling silently inside your head to just RELAX AND SLEEP - PLEASE!!

When you don't have to get up at all you will, of course, sleep through the night soundlessly - and be wide awake at 5am with nowhere to go for hours but downstairs to sit fuming in front of the telly about how good a nice lie in would have been, if only your brain had allowed you to do so.

Could Try Harder

Sometimes I think that my old gym teacher, evil sadist that he was, knew more about me than I would care to admit when he wrote in my annual reports "Pixie could try harder at games"

Of course: in reality the reason I didn't put much effort into Rugby, Football, 5 mile runs etc was not laziness but self preservation: IE i didn't fancy getting my head kicked in as part of a futile attempt to score a goal, try, home run (insert applicable sporting reference here)

In fact the only few weeks of sport that I enjoyed in five years of senior school were the ones where they took all the neanderthals off onto another field and let them beat each other to death for a while instead of us: leaving the weak and feeble kids like myself to play something that actually approached football.  (BTW the reference to neanderthals is not a humorous remark about my increasingly long years - they really were evidence of the missing link: albiet slightly worsly dressed than cro-magnon man)

But nonetheless "could try harder" will doubtless end up being my epithet as whenever I hit a problem my first instinct is to throw my hands in the air, declare that i will never get it and promptly give up.

The problem is that school very much installed the idea that I was extremely stupid: something that i still have to fight against mixed with the fact that I am not naturally particularly bright.  And before anyone that knows me says "oi" I feel this is fair comment - new knowledge is not something that comes easily for me and often has to be fought for.  Whether this is me being thick or the teacher just not being able to present the information in a way i can understand it is for greater minds than mind to decide.  Suffice to say: i nearly drove my maths teacher mad when i came to re-do my maths GCSE some years ago.

The problem that I am currently having is with my saxophone.  I haven't touched the damn thing in nearly 3 weeks and have gone so far as to find excuses to do anything else but practice recently.

The problem is three-fold and none of them really counts as the main problem: they are all so fundamental with the art of playing the thing:

#1: Tuning
With a guitar you tune the thing with an electric tuner.  It then remains in tune.  If you put your fingers in the right place at the right time you will get the right note.  With a saxophone you can do all of the above and still get the wrong note if you do not apply the right reed pressure.

The problem is - that i just can't hear it well enough to know that it is sharp or flat.  My pitch just isn't good enough. Considering this is an essential aspect of playing the dratted thing...

#2: Improvisation
I just don't feel it.  Whenever I try I feel just like a pedestrian endlessly crossing and re-crossing the same zebra crossing with not enough imagination or creativity to go elsewhere -and since improvisation is mostly about feeling and i mostly feel like a berk when doing it - i mostly don't do it.

#3: Timing
I am aware that there are different dots, signals and wierd symbols that mean pausing for different amounts of time and holding notes for a different amount of time - but actually putting it into practice is another thing.  The worst thing, and here is the true confession chaps and chapesses: I just don't care enough to want to get it exactly as written.  I'm never gonna be good enough to play as part of the rhythmn section for the Memphis Horns and, truth be told, I'm not sure that I want to be.  As long as the song sounds good enough to fool Joe Public and to please me - well then: it's only me and the cats that will ever hear it.

This attitude is, of course, a major factor in my lack of significant progress and therefore, possibly, in my current state of disilusionment.

Finally of course there is a fourth:

#4: Progress
I must have played the 9-10 songs that I know well so often that their composers are ready to beat down my door and bludgeon me to death if I don't get them right next time - and yet no matter how many times i get a tricky part right I always manage to find Fresh And Exciting Ways To Make New Mistakes...

And hence, as with my writing, my enthusiasm seems to be out the back of the house having a quick cigarette and showing no signs of returning any time soon.

Still: should I ever get far enough to actually record my efforts I do at least have a working title for the resulting album...

Could Try Harder

Caffiene Malfunction

The woman approaching me is beaming and deliberately being friendly at me.  As she approaches I can tell that she has honed her Friendly skills to a sharp edge and is not afraid to use them.

She is pulling a small trolley behind her, so my first thought is that she is lost and trying to find the local bus or train station – something which the local authorities, in their infinite wisdom, seem to have decided needs to be an exercise in Zen Navigation, as opposed to actually findable.  My brain is still trying to cope with the business of remembering my PIN for the cash point (note that I deliberately refrained from calling it a PIN Number, because of course the N stands for Number anyway)

“Hello” she says, her smile turned all the way up to supernova levels now, “I’m from local radio.  We’re just trying to find opinions of local people on the new restrictions on speed in the centre, and the decision to remove traffic lights – would you care to comment?”

I look at her through a thick dense fog of sleep, wondering how long it will take my brain to finish having its shower, eat its bowl of cornflakes, hop on a bus and catch up with my body.

Over the next few minutes as I find the nearest branch of Expense-o-Coffee and my brain finally reboots from the night I find myself responding that the decision is the latest in a long line of contradictory plans that seem to be wilfully designed to confuse and annoy in the manner that only “Town Planning” can manage – spending hundreds of tax payers monies only to change their minds six months later.  I decide that any decision to remove traffic lights, regardless of a decrease of speed, is an invitation to murder for all of the drivers that would happily run you over just to shave off thirty seconds from their journey.

I also decide that the recent decision to close one of the subways and put a pedestrian crossing across the busiest roundabout in 20 miles is so certain to cause death within 2 weeks that you’d never get decent odds at Vegas on anything else.

But at that moment, as my poor old sleep-addled brain stares at her from beyond a veil of morning fog, all I can manage to reply is “erm…..dunno”

Things I Just Don't Get (list of 5s)

Yes here we are again - Mr Inspiration is still out on his extended vacation and shows no sign of returning, despite having left the TV on and the central heating running - so it's time to turn to the spurious List-O-Fives that we have all come to love so well

As usual you should probably not expect anything too serious to pop up here, nor for the list to actually equal five.  Four or six yes - five, never.

This time we are looking at the list of things that I just cannot see the point of.  This may well be the railings of a grumpy man against a new world that keeps on changing so I can only refer you to the words of Douglas Adams who said "anything invented before you are born is in the natural order of things, anything between birth and middle-age is a new and exciting gadget: anything much after that is Against God And Must Be Stopped"

So - without further ado - here we go:

#1: The Continuing Success Of Ricky Gervais
Some years ago Mr Gervais and his writing partner Stephen Merchant unleased "The Office" on an unsuspecting world.  A curious mix of mockumentary and sit-com it spoke to a world of employees stuck in dead end jobs about over-enthusiastic bosses and the dreadful drudgery of many of our jobs.  It was a combination of genius and dreadfully hard to watch at the same time.

But even then it was fairly clear to everyone watching that Ricky Gervais was a one trick pony.  He was, to be blunt, more than a little similar to his comedy creation David Brent.

So really - explain to me how it is that years later he is still trailing out the same schtick, relying on the embarrassment factor, pulling the same gurning faces - and yet hailed as the new comedy messiah?

#2: Lady GaGa
Not doing anything that David Bowie or Madonna hadn't already done 10 years previously she has produced some moderately catchy tunes and put in a good play for the Annual Mrs Mad-person Competition with her famous meat-dress, but really???  All this talk of her being some creative genius just because she stuck a phone on her head?

(And by the way Lady G - Bjork and Kate Bush have already got the prize sewn up for some time to come)

#3: 3-D Movies (and, by association, 3-D TV)
Forced upon the world mostly by film studios as a way to halt piracy and as a sneaky way of raising cinema admissions prices I have to ask - what really does it add to a movie?  If a film is poor then the addition of 3-D will just mean that it is now a poor movie in 3-D.

Also - there seems to be a plethora of films that are now incorporating extended scenes just so the audience, complete with silly glasses and a vague feeling of an impending headache, can go "oooh, look at the 3-D"  (no names mentioned, but James Cameron should read this entry and do the world a favour by going back to low-budget Sci-Fi flicks)

A special effect, no matter how amazing, can never compensate for a lack of story

#4: The Sudden Decision By Motorists Everywhere That Indicating Where You Are Going Is Optional
It's a tiny stick, located right by the big wheel that you have to turn in order to steer - it really doesn't take any effort to press it in one direction or the other, thus starting a little amber light flashing that could save your life, of the life of a pedestrian - so until such time as Halfords, or RadioShack, start selling crystal balls that will tell us which way you are going - just use the bloody thing

#5: The Olympic Commissions Stance On Small Companies Using The Five-Rings Emblem
Over the last few months the papers have been rife with reports of florists, or butchers, who have put displays in their shop windows in the form of the 5 olympic rings (made from chrysanthemums or sausages according to shop)

And on each occasion the Olympic Committee has threatened to sue said shop for copyright infringement.

This stance appalls me.  I can understand that some bloke manufacturing knock-off mugs, toasters and tea-towels and selling them on the sly could be a problem, but really?  These are just people getting into the spirit of the Olympics - so get a life people and chill out

#6: Deep Fried Mars Bars
No....just...no

Growing Up

NB: This post was directly inspired by Lydia's OPW here

Sometimes the important moments of your life can happen when you're not even there.

It's true.  I wasn't there when the decision that would alter my school career significantly was made.  It was just a small thing: a tiny act of rebellion in an otherwise undistinguished time.  Whilst I was away for a week on a Geography excursion (I know: how rock and roll am I?) my two friends decided that hanging around the playground for an hour waiting to be attacked wasn't so much fun and began sneaking out for long walks around the country roads that lay behind the school.

Strictly speaking this was against the rules, but for the final two to three years of my school days we would go for extended walks, sometimes having to run to get back to class in time.

I guess it was this, in line with an act of sleepiness, that eventually led to our combined decision to bunk off the final day of school.  None of us fancied the idea of being thrown in the school pond, or covered with eggs and flour (where most schools now have expensive balls that make parents lock their wallets firmly away in boxes marked "not until your wedding", we had our own traditions for rites of passage) and had no one particularly that we wanted to sign their names across our shirts - so it was pretty much a given that the final Friday of that week would see us anywhere on earth other than at school.

And then, on the Wednesday of that week, two things happened.

Firstly I did that thing that you sometimes do in the morning - where you're not fully concentrating, and you get dressed in a hurry - and I got into my weekend clothes instead of my uniform.  The fact that no one noticed until the second lesson of the day should tell you something about how much care and attention my teachers put into my education and well being.

Secondly, and before the Cordoroy Trousers Incident, we were all called into a final Assembly and told that the final day of school would not, as advertised, be Friday - but had been brought forward to Thursday...presumably in a misguided attempt to avoid the aforementioned dunking in the pond/egg and flour experiences.

And so at lunchtime that day myself and one of my two friends (I really should ask the other one where he was that day) decided just to go home.  His parents were both at work, so we just spent the afternoon playing Connect 4.

And that, aside from a few exams, was that.

The next day we had decided to go swimming at the local baths - skiving out of school for only the second time in my entire stay - but when we arrived we were in for a shock.

The whole pull was bursting at the seams with kids: all ducking out of their various lessons, intent on returning home in one piece, sans eggs and flour.  It was quite impossible to swim, so we caught the next bus home and watched in relative safety from the window as a series of eggy, floury kids made their way home.

And there again those walks changed my life - for without them i might not have said to my friend "Hey, lets meet up on Saturdays and go for walks in the morning".  Without that skive, and without that shared history of those walks (sometimes running into quick runs) we may have simply lost touch - faded out of each others lives in the same way we faded out of school

As it is many, many, many (and a few more manys to boot) we still go for those walks

Pomp And Circumstances

Believe it or not there's a rumour going around that once, some years ago, England won some football match or other.

For a nation so usually reserved you'd think that, when questioned, we would shamefacedly admit that yes, the controversial second goal was a bit of a fluke and then quietly never mention 1966 again - but it seems that this is one of the areas where we are curiously happy to keep banging on about our victories.

I've been thinking about this recently as the Ukelele group were asked to play a patriotic medley of songs at some fete or other (and no, it wasn't a fete worse than death - and possibly not even worse than Chiswick, which i hear is a very bad fete indeed) - I immediately made my excuses for the day on the grounds of Terminal Indifference (UK is a nice place to live, don't get me wrong and i can't think of anywhere else i'd rather live (well....) - but i can't find it in me to have any great surge of pride in the place - i mean, we did invent the fried mars bar after all)

But the thing is - that after exhaustive discussion - they mostly came up with a bunch of World War II songs.  Pack Up Your Troubles, Hang Out Your Washing On The Siegfried Line, Bless Them All, It's A Long Way To Tiparari (you can't just dump them at the recycling centre apparently, they have to go to a specific rari plant) and Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler (actually not a WWII song at all and specially written/recorded for classic sit-com Dad's Army)

OK so there was also Land Of Dope And Tory (erm...Hope And Glory), and all that Elgar stuff - but I, for one, found it a bit depressing that more than seventy years on we're still going on about how we kicked the arse of Naziism - and that's the best thing we can think of to say about ourselves.

Clearly we like to sing about our victories - so perhaps its about time to stop banging on about it and pick some other campaigns

Agincourt - how once, many years ago Henry V took the throne of France
Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Julius Cesar - a song about the brave resistance under the Roman rule
War of the Roses - how one bunch of people with silly haircuts beat another bunch of people with silly haircuts

And then there's our national anthem - well, it's a bit of a dirge isn't it?  Four verses of yodelling on about looking after the monarch and lets face it no one knows verse 2 or 3 and we quietly forget the one about "all rebellious Scots to crush"

So - what about a new anthem? Why not adapt some new songs for us to sing joyously as a nation that don't go on about how we won some war, how nice it is to wear a crown for a few years or any such stuff?

Well, frankly I can't imagine anything worse than allowing the likes of Gary Barlow, Lady GaGA or the composers of today to try and cobble together some new song - so the only option is to look to the past and, in the spirit of utter mischievousness I recommend the Yorkshire classic On Ilkley Moor Baht' at (translation: on Ilkley Moor Without A Hat)

We'd all have a great time singing along, no bugger from anywhere else would have a clue what we were on about and most important of all: it would make the medal ceremony at the Olympics more interesting

Wheear 'ast tha bin sin' ah saw thee, ah saw thee?
On Ilkla Mooar baht 'at
Wheear 'ast tha bin sin' ah saw thee, ah saw thee?
Wheear 'ast tha bin sin' ah saw thee?

On Ilkla Mooar baht 'at
On Ilkla Mooar baht 'at
On Ilkla Mooar baht 'at

Tha's been a cooartin' Mary Jane

Tha's bahn' to catch thy deeath o` cowd

Then us'll ha' to bury thee

Then t'worms'll come an` eyt thee up

Then t'ducks'll come an` eyt up t'worms

Then us'll go an` eyt up t'ducks

Then us'll all ha' etten thee

That's wheear we get us ooan back