If technology gets any smaller I won't be able to find it

I went to see my mum yesterday.  As usual she gave me lots of food and then we watched some gameshows.

We usually watch contemporary gameshows like the Cube or Deal or No Deal but yesterday we had a go at that Challenge TV, where the shows are from about 20 years ago.  The main attraction was back to back episodes of Brucie's Price is Right.  I never even realised that Brucie had done 'The Price is Right'.  I've only ever seen the ones with Leslie Crowther.

It shows how far technology has advanced in the last 20 years that almost all the amazing prizes on the Price is Right, gadgets like Home Computers, Camcorders, Stereos etc, all priced at £1000 or more, you can now pick up from a charity shop for about a fiver.  Stuff that obsolete you can't even take to Cash Converters, they'll just laugh in your face.  A PC with 16 megabytes of RAM, a camcorder the size of a suitcase, a stereo with a tapedeck, a VHS video recorder?  You'd have trouble these days trying to give that crap to the rag and bone man.  And the 4 separate devices that between them cost about 5 grand on the Price is Right and which would fill a whole room, could now all be replaced by an I-Phone.

Technology has come on so far since I was growing up in the 70s and 80s I can hardly believe it.

To think that when I came home from playing rugby against Benton Park when I was 15 I was astounded by our new VHS video recorder that we'd just got.  I was so amazed I watched Top of the Pops over and over again.  I didn't even like Stool Pigeon by Kid Creole and the Coconuts, but I thought it was incredible that I was in control of when it was on.  We even had a remote control on a wire that trailed along the floor.  It was state of the art.

I think that VHS recorder cost about £700.  It was as big as a house, and if you pressed the eject button it set off so much vibration all my mum's ornaments fell over.

In the Second World War they had to crack the Enigma Code with a computer the size of a stately home that had about a million valves each about as big as a small child.  Then in the sixties they managed to land on the moon with the aid of a room full of computers that had less processing power than a modern Pay as you Go sim card.  Now we're all watching Youtube in our breaks at work on phones the size of postage stamps.  If technology gets any smaller we'll need electron microscopes to even find the stuff.

When I was a child I was a human remote control.  If my mum wanted the channel changing I had to get up and bash one of the big 3 buttons on the big wooden telly to switch between the 3 available channels of crap.  It was the News on two sides and Harold Lloyd on the other (no, young people, you've never heard of him, look him up he was ace) The cathode ray tube on that telly probably weighed the same as an anvil, and it was encased in a giant wooden case.  It was never likely to get stolen, and even it somebody did steal it, it would probably have been worth more as firewood than as a telly.  But nobody ever would steal it, because you'd have needed a team of navvies just to lift the thing.  These days you could get your i-Phone 5 stolen off you by a motivated fly.  Recently Ruth lost her i-Pod in the car for about a month because it had fallen down a crack about a millimetre wide into where the spare tyre is kept.

Say what you want about old and obsolete technology.  It may have been total crap and it may have had to be delivered to your house by forklift truck after having the front window taken out, but at least you could find the stuff.  Stuff that bulky you could see from space.

All this modern stuff, it might do all kinds of stuff that we could only dream of in the 70s, but at least in the 70s we didn't need tweezers to retrieve our technology from between the cracks in the floorboards if we accidentally dropped it.  We didn't have to go through the bins in case we'd chucked our phones away then. No, that bloody massive beige phone we had in the 70s, it was quicker to run down the street and call for your mates than it was to try and dial a number on it.  And the first proper record player we had was actually built into a sideboard!

I could go on, but if you're old you'll remember it, and if you're young, you'll never believe it, so I think I'll stop there.

Ted Striker couldn't get over Macho Grande, well after 4 days I'm starting to get over Helvellyn

It doesn't have to be night time for me to have a dark night of the soul.  I can just as easily have one in the daytime, as was evidenced by climbing Helvellyn on Saturday.

Being up that mountain exposed every physical frailty, every mental vulnerability, every emotional weakness I've got.

Up on the top of that ledge with a drop on either side, and people trying to squeeze past me there was no hiding place.  From the physical demands of the situation, but also from myself.

I felt weak and scared and vulnerable, and I just wanted to run away.  But I couldn't run, so when I got to the top I had to limp away and that took me another 4 hours.  4 hours of limping.  Even a scary fairground ride that you get on by mistake usually only lasts about 5 minutes.  5 minutes of terror maybe, but still only 5 minutes.  Oblivion at Alton Towers is over in seconds.

Being up on the top of that mountain I had the same feeling as I had sitting in a rickshaw in Old Delhi In January, and it was the same one I had sitting in a Youth Hostel in Arnside with wet socks on in June.

It's that feeling that comes after you've stripped away every pretence and illusion about how great and powerful and important you are, it's that feeling that comes from knowing that whatever ego you've got is sitting there in the corner examining its bruises after getting a thorough pasting.

First I was afraid on Saturday, then I was thoroughly frustrated at my limitations, and then after that I was embarrassed.  I was embarrassed because I was not only having a devastating loss of form, but I was having it in front of Ruth and Helen and in front of lots of other people too.

I think I'd have found the whole experience easier if I thought any of the people up there had been half as scared as I was, but they all looked confident and like they were taking it in their stride, while I was clinging on for dear life, and wanting to get down.

Ruth and Helen seemed so elated.  And so did most of the people up there (and their dogs).  Everyone was having a mountain top experience, but in their case they were on top of a mountain, whereas in my case the mountain was on top of me.

And since I got back I've been regaled with tales from everyone and their dog about how they've climbed it with a child on their back, or with a dog in a rucksack, or how their child did it as a rite of passage when they were 7, and how great it all is.

And it may well be great, but for me aged 44 and with who I am and with what I've got, it wasn't great at the time.  At the time I was falling apart.

But now I'm coming back together again.  The fear and the frustration and the embarrassment is wearing off.  And before long I might realise that I've achieved something.  Just like in Delhi, and in Arnside.  Like that famous bloke said who then went on to kill himself.  The world breaks everyone, but some are strong in the broken places.

And even with every frailty, and every weakness, and every limitation I've got, there's still no-one I'd rather be than me.  Because without the broken places, and the places where the breaks have knitted back together again, I wouldn't be me at all.

Climbing Helvellyn by accident

I climbed Helvellyn yesterday, but I didn't do it on purpose.  I just wanted to spend some time with Ruth.  It seems every weekend she's either at work or away having adventures, and that 'Yippee It's Friday' feeling is often muted by the thought that she won't be around.

I didn't get in till midnight on Friday night.  I was out with the young people from work again.  They put me on the last train home before they went off to get their armbands (these are to get into nightclubs apparently, I don't know).

By this time Ruth was already camping in the Lakes with Helen, and Saturday morning they were going up Helvellyn.  In the name of spending some time with my wife, I decided to get up at 6 am on Saturday and drive across to join them.  I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

It turns out that climbing Helvellyn is something of a challenge, and if you're going to take on a challenge it probably helps to know in advance that it is a challenge.  I just approached it like a fun day out.  That was my first mistake.  It also contains another challenge within it which is this thing called Striding Edge.  I'd heard of it because it's sometimes on the news that people have fallen off it and killed themselves.

Well, now I've climbed it myself.  And it's completely nuts.  And so not Health and Safety.  You can't climb a ladder these days without going on a course for a week and yet Striding Edge is full of Looney Tunes and their dogs crawling around on their hands and knees on a piece of rock about as narrow as my dining table with a thousand foot drop on either side. Where's their risk assessments? Even the mountain rescue guy we met wasn't very reassuring. Oh yeah people fall off it all the time he said. Cheers I said you've really put my mind at rest...I didn't really...

Doing things that are nuts is fine if the people you're doing it with also know it's nuts, but they don't.  They all look like they're having a perfectly reasonable time, whereas I felt at times absolutely terrified.  And there's more footfall up there than there is at Piccadilly Circus or the Metro Centre, but it's on the side of a cliff.  

Amongst the crowds were a group of posh people in pink tops raising money for charity who all sounded like they'd just bought a copy of '1001 places to go before you die' and they were only up to number 9.  I imagined they were trying to get Helvellyn in in the morning before doing the Eiffel Tower in the afternoon.  They reminded me of the group of tourists that Dean and I overheard in the Ajanta Hotel in Delhi, who were going to do Delhi in the morning and Bangalore in the afternoon, or something like that.  It'll take you all day to buy a bus ticket you idiots we wanted to say to them, but we didn't.  

There were times yesterday when I looked down at the drops on either side of me, and I knew that if I didn't keep moving there was a real chance of me just getting frozen there and unable to move, so I made myself keep going.  I haven't been that scared since the top of St Paul's Cathedral and that only went on for a very short while until I could get to the downward staircase.  Even then once I got back to ground level I sat around with legs like jelly for about half an hour before I could walk properly again.  This just seemed to go on for hours.  

I sometimes stuggle to empty boiling water out of a pan, or to bend down to pick up a tea towel off the floor, so clambering around on jaggedy rocks trying not to fall to my death made me feel pretty feeble.  Having Ruth point out that someone had got up there in a wheelchair with a couple of broom handles sticking out of it didn't really make me feel any better.  

And even when you get to the top, you've got to get back down again.  Swirrel Edge is only moderately bonkers in comparison but by that time my feet were absolutely mashed and all my joints from the waist down felt like they'd been hit with a hammer.  

It took us 8 hours to get up and down the mountain and by the time I got back to Helen's car I felt absolutely out of it.  The whole thing was 10 times harder than I expected it to be.  I've been out walking in the hills before, but this was not hill walking, this was proper mountain climbing, and it felt like it too.

My body felt so knackered by the end, I just wanted to get home to my own bed, and so Ruth and Helen packed up the tents and Ruth drove me home, and this added to the feebleness I already felt because I felt like I'd put a crimp on their girly weekend.  And they were so joyous on the mountain, whereas I was not.  And I wasn't just disappointed in how I felt physically, I was also disappointed in myself for how fragile and vulnerable I felt mentally.  But a lot of this was probably just because I hadn't expected it to be so tough.  It helps with challenges it you're geared up for them.  I spent six months preparing for the Coast to Coast to Coast bike ride, whereas I spent 20 minutes having a coffee and a bacon sandwich before attempting Helvellyn.  Beyond that I hadn't really got myself prepared.  

I was really glad to wake up in my own bed this morning, but I still feel really achy.  

I think one day I'll be really glad I climbed Helvellyn, but I'm not there yet.  I went there with the best of intentions, ie to spend some quality time with Ruth, but I hadn't considered the part where I had to climb up a mountain and get back down again.  That part was hard.  

Die Hard 5 - Forget you, Melon Farmer

I've fallen out of love with cycling this year.  Too many days spent battling against the elements, either with soggy blocks of ice for feet, or a head that's nearly been melted by the sun.

There's only so many times you can cower in a shed, frozen to the bone, waiting for one of your co-riders to be rescued, before you start to wonder what it's all about.

So, that last thing I fancied doing yesterday was a 100 mile bike ride.  But I went anyway.  The date was in the diary, Stephen had arranged it, and when Stephen sets a goal, we don't argue, we just do it.

When I got up at 6, imagine my astonishment, when all I could see out the window was blue sky.  We must have got the wrong day, I thought, go back to bed.  But no, this was the right date.  Alrighty then, let's do this thing.

I was even on time to Stephen's house, so the ride could start as planned at 7.30 am (well almost, we spent a bit of time chatting first).  There I was joined by Stephen (obviously, it's his house), Mark and Ian.  We were wearing matching tops, and we were go for launch.

No coffee or bacon sandwiches or sitting around looking out the window at the hail this time.  No, instead perfect riding conditions.  This cannot be happening.  Let's get this nightmare started.

3 miles in at Hilton we were temporarily held up by some cars gathered round a deer that had been run over.  I felt bad for the deer, but I was glad my day was going better than his.

By the time we got to Northallerton at the 20 mile point, we were so far ahead of our schedule, we were in danger of being much too early for our scheduled lunch stop at Leckby House.  As Mark had been grumbling about not getting his morning coffee, we nipped into Costa at Tesco, where I ordered a giant coffee and some tiny gluten free bakewell tarts.  These were a bit of a panic buy, as they didn't have any chocolate, but I thought I really should have some overpriced food to go with the overpriced coffee.  I spent some time wondering why anyone ever pays these prices, but this didn't stop me from having a nice chat with the guys.  This was going well.

Refreshed by our stop and with the benefit of a shortcut behind the prison we were soon on Crosby road and heading our towards Knayton.  Then, about 5 miles from Northallerton, and still feeling pretty smug about the time, one of Mark's rear spokes decided to pop out and his wheel stopped being a wheel and started looking like a big Pringle.

You probably wouldn't believe that it took 4 grown men a whole hour from this point to get going again, but that was what happened.  We couldn't get the spoke out, although eventually a passing motorist helped us out with some wire cutters and we did, but we also spent a lot of time discussing various scenarios.

Ian wasn't planning to do the whole ride anyway, so in the end, it was decided that he would sacrifice himself, and let Mark take his bike, but only after a bit of saddle swapsies had gone on.  This left Ian gamely wandering off to Knayton with Mark's bike for company, to be picked up by his wife.  And the three of us were off again.  But now, the hour we'd wasted in Tesco, we could have done with getting it back again.

So we took at short cut and got to Leckby House at the 43 mile point around 1 pm.  But instead of arriving there at the halfway point, we now had more miles to make up in the second half.

The thing about Leckby House is this.  It's not the kind of place you can arrive at, run in one door, eat a sausage sandwich and run out the other door.  McDonalds it is not.  Imagine instead that you have arrived at a really posh dinner party, with home cooked Shepherd's Pie (made with fresh Wensleydatle Lamb), a top selection of wines and ice creams.  No, it sucks you in and before you know it, you're on your fourth plateful of Shepherd's Pie, and you feel so comfortable you just want to curl up in the garden with Teal and Widgeon the dogs and go to sleep for a few hours, and not even dream about getting on a bike again that day.

Which may explain why at twenty to 3 we were still sat around the dining table.  We were still 57 miles short of our target miles for the day, and I was just wondering if we were going to be getting a coffee course.  We'd been going for nearly 7 hours and it was going to be dark in another 5, and we were nowhere.

But, as Stephen pointed out, this was the C2C2C Reunion Century Ride, not the C2C2C Reunion Oh Dear I've filled up on Shepherd's Pie and Now I Want to go to sleep in the garden with the Dogs Ride. So a little reluctantly, off we went.  I didn't expect us to be back before dark.

Surprisingly though we made pretty good progress.  For once on leaving Leckby, we had a tailwind and what's more, it was actually properly sunny.  There were no tornados hovering overhead and I could still feel my feet.

We stopped to point at the hole in the road in Sharow which Mark had fallen down last time.  And it was big.  At the time we couldn't understand how he'd fallen off, but in the dry you could see it was almost big enough to lose a whole wheel in.

We seemed to get to the crossing of the A1 at Londonderry in no time, and Mark seemed to be settling into his new bike, and things were going pretty well.  Even though we didn't really need anything to eat, we thought it might be a good idea to call at the corner shop at Kirkby Fleetham to top up on energy drinks and maybe buy some emergency quiche, but when we got there at 4.30 the sign on the door said they closed at 1.  At least we hadn't only just missed them.

Then the door opened, and an elderly lady popped her head out, and asked us if we needed anything.  She then opened the shop specially for us, and sold us some Lucozade and I had a big slab of quiche.  It looked too good to store, so I ate it there and then.  Yummy.

I drank my Lucozade there and then but Stephen decided to load his into his water bottle.  A couple of miles down the road there was a loud bang and we all stopped to see what had happened.  It turned out Stephen's Lucozade had blown the top off his water bottle.  Mark, distracted by the noise, forgot to clip out and whilst emitting a strangled cry, started to fall very slowly over.  Falling over whilst clipped to a bike is never a fun experience, there's always far too much time to think before you hit the ground, but one of the things Mark thought about on the way down was 'Oh no, this isn't my bike!'.  As a result he gamely threw his body underneath the bike so the bike never actually seemed to hit the ground.  Only Mark.

He spent a bit of time just lying in the road, but there was nothing coming so it was fine, for a while at least.  It's not the most dignified position to be in for a man who has just passed his 50th birthday, bit Mark carried it off as well as anyone could.

And while I was looking at him lying there in the road, I thought about all the training we've done this year, all the miserable bike rides we've done, and on them all no-one has suffered more than Mark.  He's been abandoned in a shed looking like a Smurf, he's had crashes, he's had mechanicals, he got straight off a plane from America with jet lag and directly into Day 1 of our Coast to Coast.  And now here he is, lying down in the road, with somebody else's bike on top of him.

But Mark being Mark, he did what he's been doing all year.  He picked himself up and got back on the bike and carried on.  And so did I.  And so did Stephen.

And we got home sometime around half past 7.  And it was nearly dark.  And we'd been out for over 12 hours.

We'd had a few mishaps along the way, but at twenty to 8 last night I put my bike back in the garage, and I felt pretty good.  The 100 mile bike that I hadn't wanted to go on, I'd finished it.  And although a few things had gone wrong, there had been lots of really good stuff too.  And for once the weather was perfect.

As I was lying in bed last night, trying to get to sleep, I went back over the route in my head, and I thought about all the places we'd been, and I thought about the fact that we'd been to them all in one day, on a bike.

And after a year of riding my bike in weather so miserable you wouldn't send your dog out in it, I remembered why I like riding a bike.

It's because there's no better way to travel.

The road to Avalon - Bring the noise

I went on a works night out last night.  If I thought the days where I work were noisy, you should see the nights.

It's not the kind of evening I like really.  Loud music, booze, drinks getting spilled (I had to work hard to override my desire to wipe them up, not really my job last night).

It was a lot like going back in time.  It was pretty much like the nights out I used to go on in the 80s except without the fear of being refused entry for being underage.  Oh, and there seem to be more different colours of drinks now.  Some people were already drunk when I arrived.  The plan seemed to be to get more sober during the course of the evening.  I think it's a recession thing.  Getting pre-drunk. It's cheaper in the long run.

And with the benefit of modern technology, you don't have to rely on hazy half-remembered memories anymore.  Most evenings I went on when I was younger, you were lucky if you could remember them afterwards.  I once woke up in somebody's laundry room on a pile of ironing, I'm not sure how I got there.  Now everything is recorded instantly on digital cameras and iphones, so even if I had been drinking I would probably have been able to track my whereabouts quite easily.  This kind of thing must be useful if you go missing.  It probably helps the police no end in their enquiries.

At one point I went upstairs in Aspire, and there was a 50th birthday party going on.  Loads of people with grey hair.  I suddenly felt quite at home, and I thought I might be able to blag my way into their party, but in the end I decided against it.  I did think it seemed like an inappropriate choice of venue for a 50th, but then Joss told me you could book that room for free, so that's maybe why.  I think having the party upstairs was a bad idea for some of those old guys.  Some of them could hardly get up and down the stairs.  Walking sticks, crutches, arthritis etc.  The people I was with couldn't walk either, but at least their legs would be fully functional again by the morning.

During the course of the evening I kept putting moisurising gel into my eyes, to stop them from getting too sore, and it got me through the night still able to drive home.  I did get some funny looks in the mens' toilet though when I was applying it.  I think a couple of the guys in there thought I was taking drugs directly into my eyes.  They were drunk enough, I maybe should have tried to sell them some.  I should have told them it was the next big thing.

By the time we set off on the walk from Aspire to Avalon I decided it was time to bow out.  The proximity of the car park was too tempting, and there's only so many photos an old sober person can get into the back of, before you start to think maybe you should let the young people get on with it.

But it was a pretty good evening overall.  I tried a hat on, I had a strawberry cider and I got my picture taken about 100 times.  I just felt that if I'd stayed any longer I would have turned into that guy who used to dress up in the different sports kits, and run into the back of team photos, photos of teams that he wasn't in.  The one who got into the England cricket team, and the Manchester United team after they won the Champions League.

This was at least my team.  I wasn't just pretending.  But in the end, I think there's a point when old and sober goes one way and young and drunk goes the other, and I'd reached that point.

I like the people I work with.  They're pretty nice, either when they're sober or when they're drunk.  But if it was up to me, I'd prefer to spend time with them somewhere quieter.  Maybe with tea and biscuits instead of Jaeger bombs.  And I'd like to have some conversations with them where you don't have to shout.