Moffat - Host City for the World Eating Championships 2012

Last time I went to Moffat I took my wife and a bike.  This time I was travelling light.  I even managed to lose my job the day before I went, so I you could say it was extra light.

If you're going to lose your job, what you really need is a holiday at 1950s prices, and the church 'Hostel Takeover' to Moffat is the ultimate recession proof holiday.

I managed to get my own room (with two plugs in it) for just over £8 a night, and then for the ridiculously cheap price of £5.50 I managed to get two evening meals of incredible quality courtesy of Sarah, the second of which left me physically unable to bend for approximately 12 hours.  Even if you're me, and even when you know crumble is coming, if seconds and then thirds of mince and dumplings with veg are available, there really is no way of saying no.  The night before it was lamb curry followed by about 19 kinds of chocolate.  It might have been the most calorie dense 48 hours of my life.  My stomach couldn't feel any heavier if I'd been eating dark matter (to be fair, that might have been one of the flavours of the chocolate we had).

I hadn't seen Ruth for 3 days until about 5 minutes ago and when she got in from work tonight she looked at me as if to say 'You look the same only wider' (or was that just my imagination?).  That's how much I ate.

In the absence of Ruth in Moffat, my choice of daytrips was perhaps a bit questionable.  I went on a day trip to Lockerbie on Saturday and then I went on a 'strenuous' walk with Graeme on Sunday.

Whether Sunday's walk was in fact 'strenuous' is debateable but we managed to make it so by walking about 3 times as far as necessary and being totally unable to find the spa we were looking for.  It didn't help that we didn't know even what a spa was, and even if we'd been able to find it, we apparently would have needed a torch to see it, so I'm not sure our chances were that good anyway.  Graeme didn't want to give up quite as easily as me, and this led to him clambering around on some rock face for about half an hour while I stood eating ham sandwiches and getting cold.  I wasn't as well equipped in the waterproofs department as Graeme and when we got back he kindly told me I looked like a tramp and he made me sit on a plastic sheet in the car to get back to the hostel.  As with all trips I go on with Graeme, I was just happy to get back alive.

As usual on these hostel trips, the highlight for me was the shared meals.  Not just because eating is one of my main hobbies, but also because it's really nice to hang out with old friends and also to get to know some new faces too.  I think I got to know who all the adults were, but I had some trouble telling all the children apart, especially all the small blonde ones.  The one small blonde one I did get to know was Henri, and I wish I'd had a dictaphone with me to record his musings for posterity.  I've seen less funny acts on Saturday night at the Apollo, he should probably get his own show.  One of my favourites was his prayer that all the dinosaurs should stay alive (I take it he hasn't seen Jurassic Park).  His geography needs a bit of work though as he seems to think that England is the smallest country in the world, and yet is still bigger than a planet.  I'm happy to give him the benefit of the doubt though, because I did confuse him utterly by trying to explain the intricacies of custard to him, when he simply wanted a yes or no answer.

I generally don't like card games or any other game where rules need explaining to me, but I managed to be taught two card games by two children aged 8 and 11.  They were called Poo and Speed (the card games, not the children).  I almost got the hang of both, and I almost understood the rules.

Even allowing for the incredible cheapness of the trip, and the ridiculously good value of the food, the best bit is still the chance to hang out with such lovely people for 3 days.  Seeing all the children running around and screaming so happily, and seeing all the adults neither running around or screaming but happily peeling vegetables and speaking kindly to one another, it makes me want to go and do likewise (well, except for the peeling vegetables part).

As an added bonus, I also got to recite my entire life story on the way up and down in the car.  One of the advantages of being in a car with people for 2 and a half hours each way is that they're a captive audience.

And as if all that wasn't good enough, Ruth came in from work and she's bought me a Wii Fit for Christmas, but she couldn't wait to give it to me, so she's given it to me already.  It's got one of those boards with it that you can sway around on to lose weight.  I think I need to get that up and running as soon as possible, before I have to go out and buy the next size up trousers.

But before I do that, I'm just off to eat some more chocolate....

Lockerbie - It's not something to be famous for

I went to Lockerbie on Saturday.  For reasons I don't even understand.

I was staying in Moffat, 13 miles and a 35 minute bus ride away, and if I'm honest I probably wouldn't have thought of going to Lockerbie if it wasn't for the bombing and the resultant plane crash that happened there 24 years ago.

The journey there was pretty pleasant.  It was a nice sunny day, there were good views of the hills, it was all very Scottish, but as soon as I passed the 'Welcome to Lockerbie' sign I started to feel a bit strange.

And the strangeness continued when I got off the bus.  I don't think Lockerbie itself is strange. It's just like lots of other towns I've been to in Scotland.  There were industrial estates, an auction mart, people chatting in doorways, a man walking a dog, people waiting for buses.  And then there was me.  And I think it might have been me that had brought the strangeness.

The difference between all the other Scottish towns I've been to over the years, and Lockerbie might have been purely in my head.  It had the same kind of shops, the same kind of scenery, the same kind of people, all except for the fact that when I was looking at the town and the hills surrounding it I was wondering what it must have looked like when they were on fire, and the streets and gardens were full of dead bodies, and there was a massive crater in the middle of the town and bits of aeroplane everywhere.  And I thought to myself.  No town deserves that.

I didn't do my research properly either, I knew there were two memorials but I didn't write down beforehand where they were.  As a result I couldn't find either of them.  and I didn't want to ask anyone where they were.  It could have been a dead person's mother I was asking, or a dead person's son, and I didn't want to look like a disaster tourist, even though that's probably what I was.

I did go to the local church and there was a massive gravestone in the graveyard, much bigger than all the others, and I wondered if that might be the memorial, but there wasn't a path to it, and I didn't want to start walking over other graves to go and have a look, so I just stayed at a distance.  When I got home, I checked up and I wasn't even in the right place, so the one I saw was probably just belonged to somebody important whose family could afford a big gravestone, or one of the town's founding fathers or something.

I went to Tesco at one point, and there was a ghost in the entrance collecting money, and Dracula and some other people dressed as dead people were wandering around inside.  As it happened, they were Tesco employees dressing up for Halloween, but it seemed surreal to me to be wandering around somewhere so synonymous with death and tragedy, and to be seeing people dressed as ghosts.

But then again, if dressing up as ghosts is normal at this time of year, why should Lockerbie be any different?  Even though it's a place that's known for something so out of the ordinary, shouldn't it be allowed to do the same normal things as everyone else?

In the end, I only stayed a couple of hours in Lockerbie.  I had some fish and chips and I got the bus back to Moffat.  The feeling I kept having was that I was an intruder at the funeral of someone I didn't know, and it wasn't a feeling I liked.

The experience seemed even more incongruous to me, because I was spending the weekend in such a positive environment with loving friends and families, and to take time out from that to go see a place that's known worldwide because of something so terrible made me feel uneasy.

I don't really know what it means to pay your respects, I don't know if it's just empty words or not, but somehow by going to Lockerbie I'd felt like that's what I was doing.

For the short time I was there, I spent some time thinking about those terrible and tragic events, and how they must have affected, and still continue to affect the community where it happened.  I thought about the scars that must be there, even if they're well hidden,   Like the people of Dunblane and Hungerford, and others, it must seem at times like they're living under a terrible curse, and I certainly didn't envy them for living with that legacy.

But even though it felt strange to be there, and I didn't see any memorials and I didn't offer any condolences to anyone, and I didn't in any way acknowledge to anyone why I was there, by the time I got back on the bus I felt like I had at least made an attempt to understand.  Even if I came away thinking that what happened there can never really be understood.

One of the really inspiring things I read about Lockerbie before I went was about how the community had pulled together at the time of the tragedy.  For example, in the days following the disaster:

Volunteers from Lockerbie set up and manned canteens, which stayed open 24 hours, where relatives, soldiers, police officers, and social workers could find free sandwiches, hot meals, coffee, and someone to talk to. The people of the town washed, dried, and ironed every piece of clothing that was found once the police had determined they were of no forensic value, so that as many items as possible could be returned to the relatives. The BBC's Scottish correspondent, Andrew Cassell, reported on the 10th anniversary of the bombing that the townspeople had "opened their homes and hearts" to the relatives, bearing their own losses "stoically and with enormous dignity", and that the bonds forged then continue to this day

And when I got back off the bus in Moffat, I walked back up the road to the hostel where my friends were all gathered together, and I was welcomed back in, and we all had a meal together.

And the sadness I'd felt earlier in the day might have amplified the feeling, but as I sat there I felt grateful for my own community, and I was glad to be a part of it.

I never needed a nanobot to fix it when my stereo was a sideboard

I bought 2 cds last night and since then I've spent about 3 hours trying to copy them to my phone, more specifically the micro sd card inside it which is the same size as a grain of dust and which I need to pick up with tweezers because my giant monkey hands can not grasp it. 

Why am I even trying to work with stuff that's so small it only functions on a subatomic level? It's beyond physics. I'm just going to do what I used to do in the old days and play the bloody cds, in a bloody cd player! 

I've got other stuff going on in my house, like the cups I need to wash which are all individually 100 times bigger than this sodding sd card....if aliens are watching me from space, they will be laughing their heads off.

maybe I'll nip down to Currys and see if they'll lend me a fecking nanobot to take a subatomic trip down to the bloody thing's molecular level and see if it can convince the atoms in there to start pulling together as a team?

When I was a kid in the 70s my mum bought a stereo that was as big as a sideboard...the reason being it was a sideboard, it just had a stereo inside it.  If that broke, which it never did because it was made of cast iron, you could still use it to stand your nine types of Christmas veg on which wouldn't all fit on the dining table at Christmas.

These days even the adaptor that the bloody micro sd card fits into is so small it could be stolen by a motivated ant while I'm in the kitchen making a cup of tea, which I am going to do right now, and I'm going to settle for playing the cd on an actual cd player, because I haven't evolved the teeny tiny action man hands yet that are required to deal with microscopic music players.

Bye for now...

The future's not very bright, and it doesn't have any oranges in it

The government keeps telling me the retirement age is going up.  Last time I heard I was going to have to work till I'm 68.  By the time I get to 68 it'll probably be 80.

Well, I went to Scotland in May and I spent about half a day in the Co-op trying to buy an orange.  I've seen the future, and if it's going to be full of old folk working in shops it ain't that bright.

This poor old sod behind the till, he moved about as fast as the waxworks in Madame Tussaud's, and after giving him my money I thought there was a real danger of him expiring before the end of the transaction.  In times of soaring inflation, my money would have been going down in value while he had it in his hand.  Also, you'd have thought he'd have had some training with modern technology, but he seemed utterly baffled by the notion of having to use a scanner.  Eventually some young bloke had to step in and deal with me, otherwise I'd still have been there now.

If he's a sign of things to come when there aren't any pensions any more, I think we better get used to eating tinned fruit, because in the time it took him to sell me a fresh piece, it had already gone off.

Another thing about old folk, they're always having to go for scans.  I'm only 44 and even I've had to start going for scans and tests, and to be put in a lead box and have lasers fired at me.  One of the jobs I worked at, where the staff were all in their late 50s, every week there was someone having a camera sent where the sun doesn't shine, or having a brain scan, or some other sort of test.

Can you imagine trying to staff a place with only old dodderers?  What a nightmare the rota would be.  What the government doesn't seem to realise is you can't just keep working people till they keel over.  They need to be at home struggling in and out of Shackleton's high seat chairs, and spilling dinner down themselves for a few years before they pop off.  They shouldn't be trying to sell me fruit and veg.  What if I tried to buy 5 pound of potatoes off someone with osteoporosis?  I'd hand them over to be scanned and their arm would probably snap off with the weight.

At the moment I mostly work with young people, and their main problem with work seems to be getting up for work early enough after going out getting hammered the night before.  Sometimes they don't get in till 5 in the morning, and then they have to be at work for 8.30.

Well, old people are always up at the crack of dawn, maybe they could just do a job share with one of the youngsters, just do a couple of hours until the 20 somethings have had time to down 15 pints of water and a sausage sandwich and get themselves out of bed.

You never know, it just might work...

Goldfinger - the low budget remake

I've just had my bones scanned by possibly the most humourless woman on the planet.

I wasn't expecting cabaret or anything, but a bit of friendly banter would have been nice.

Considering I had to unfasten my trousers and have a laser shot at me (which is a slightly unnerving experience) a few words of introduction would have been nice.

It may have been the fact that I've been talking about action movies all afternoon but the above scenario did remind me a bit of the scene in Goldfinger where James Bond aka Sean Connery is about to be lasered in half, and he says to Goldfinger 'Do you expect me to talk?' and Goldfinger says 'No, I expect you to die, but I'm not hanging around to make sure it happens because I'm off to blow the shit out of Fort Knox, and even though it would be a good idea to make sure that any enemies I've got are six feet under before I start, especially if they've got a licence to kill my ass, I'm not going to bother to put the effort in and wait 5 minutes for your body to be cut in half, so I'm off. See ya!'.

I wasn't expecting this poor NHS woman to enter into some sort of action movie role-play with me, my expectations of hospitals aren't that high, but it would have been nice if she'd just passed the time of day  with me, and said something like 'I just need you to lie down on this bed for a bit while I fire a laser at you, it totally won't hurt and it will only take a few minutes and there's absolutely nothing to worry about'.  Just something like that.

I didn't want her to ask where I went for my holidays, or if I've got any pets, like she might have done if she was cutting my hair, but just something.  By the way, I have a theory about hairdressers, which is that they make conversation with you to help ease the awkwardness which arises from touching a complete stranger's head.

And if there's a small amount of unease which comes about from being touched on the head, imagine if you will the slightly larger portion of unease that is felt by being asked to unbutton your trousers, empty your pockets, lift up your shirt and wait for a laser to be fired at you.

Under the circumstances, establishing a bit of rapport with me first would have been nice.  I haven't felt so processed since I went to the all you can eat Chinese buffet at the Banana Leaf in Middlesbrough.  By the time I crawled out of there heaving under the weight of barbecued spare ribs and overpriced drinks I could barely fold myself into the car to drive home....I felt positively violated.

But that's another story...

If Looper's the future, I think I'm off to Dignitas

I went to see Looper last night.  It was set in the future but it was all dusty, and people were driving round in beaten up old cars, and shooting each other with blunderbusses.  This is not the future I want.

I want the future like in I Robot where I can get a big smooth shiny Audi that drives itself, and a personal slave robot who, until he goes mad and tries to kill me, does whatever I ask him to.

I don't want a future like in Waterworld either, where people are going round on boats collecting soil and living on rusty oil tankers.  I want tin foil everywhere, shiny stuff and frickin' lazers.

And that wasn't the only thing about Looper.  To make it almost impossible for him to act the main actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt had been given a prosthetic face to make him look more like Bruce Willis.  I haven't seen such an unconvincing mask since Vanilla Sky.  Even my favourite actress Emily Blunt couldn't save the film.

It was so bloody loud as well.  There was hardly a minute went by without some poor sod getting blown away.  Most of the victims were bound, gagged and hooded and just got gunned down as soon as they landed in the past.  At least there's normally a bit of running about before folk get shot, this was like watching somebody shoot fish in a barrel.

It was totally and utterly humourless as well.  It was like watching Terminator 2 or Back to the Future with all the humour taken out.  Bits of it did remind me of other films but I found that mostly depressing too because they were all films I'd rather be watching instead.

It's rare that I dislike a film before the opening credits have finished but I think I managed it with this one.  And not since Justin Timberlake in In Time have I seen such wooden acting.  They could have got a plank to play Bruce Willis, and by the end I was wishing I'd hit myself with one.  Films are meant to be escapism, but with this one I could actually feel my life slipping away minute by minute.

Ruth mostly slept through it, she said it was such a monotonous shoot-em-up-athon she thought she'd just skip the middle two hundred shootings and just wake up in time for the ride home.

The sad thing is, I generally love time travel films.  I like getting my brain scrambled by shit like the Grandfather paradox, but with this one, I couldn't even be bothered to do any thinking.  I remember going to see Timecop with Jean Claude Van Damme about 15 years ago, and that certainly wasn't the best film in the time travel genre, but it was like Citizen Kane compared to this tosh.

If I had a time machine myself, if I could cobble one together out of bits of old bike and half used tins of paint out of the garage, I could do a lot worse than go back to yesterday, and go see something else instead.....or failing that I could just stick my head in a bowl of custard for two hours.  It would probably be just as good.

Rome wasn't built in a day - and neither is a Scottish holiday

Two years ago I planned out a fortnight's cycling holiday in Scotland.  Looking back, and bearing in mind the cyclist I am, it wasn't a very good plan.

I say that because 4 holidays and 6 weeks in Scotland later, I'm not even halfway through my original itinerary.

The original plan was this.  I planned to get the train to Glasgow, whizz down to Ardrossan and whizz over to the Isle of Arran, cycle the 56 miles round there in a day, spend about 3 days doing the Kintyre Peninsula, nip over to Mull, whizz up to Tobermory, whizz back to Fishnish, and get the ferry over to Ardnamurchan, Morvern, keep going up to Mallaig, whizz over to Skye on the ferry, whizz around Skye for a bit, and then speed back to Inverness to catch the train about 13 days after my original arrival in Glasgow.  Alternatively I was going to forget the Skye bit and just whizz directly up the Great Glen from Fort William to Inverness in time for my train.

Actually it may well have been a perfectly good plan, if you're a lot faster cyclist than I am, and if you don't like to be able to see the faces of individual sheep and blades of grass, but you're happy to just leave them all behind in a blur.

But, for me, with the aid of a few things going wrong, the plan never came to fruition, and this is what happened instead.

Instead of 1 day on Arran, we spent 6 there.  We did cycle around a bit, but we never managed to cycle round the whole island in a day.  The weather was bad, Ruth was getting over her road accident, the ferries off the north of the island were cancelled due to high winds, the planes weren't flying because of an ash cloud, the trains were full of people fleeing the ash cloud, dog walkers were being blown over, wind turbines were melting, and so we ended up going south instead of north, along Lochs and Glens Route South, and visiting such places as Ayr, Newton Stewart and Kirkcudbright before making our way home from Gretna.

So that was attempt 1.  Didn't get any further north than Arran.  Ended up cycling in the opposite direction, but did get to see Dumfries and Galloway which we wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Then, before I got the chance to go back and have another go at Kintyre and Mull, and a second attempt at cycling round the Isle of Arran in a day, I fortuitously met the manager of the Port Charlotte Youth Hostel (which is on the Isle of Islay) during a slightly confusing search for Bhandari Swiss Cottages up a hill in Rishikesh in Northern India.  She was very lovely, and the first English person I'd seen for ages, and I wanted to shake her hand, but she was busy picking up filth out of the street, and so she wouldn't shake my hand because she didn't want to give me any horrible diseases.  But I resolved to go and meet her later in the year in Islay, to get my handshake.

This chance encounter knocked my original plans sideways again because now I wanted to take a detour to Islay before I went to Mull.  This I did in April this year, I shook lovely Lorna's hand on the Isle of Islay, I got lectured by a shopkeeper who was running for Parliament, I met a sheepdog called Len and I had the most amazing time, cycling around the Atlantic Coast seeing golden beaches under pure blue skies and it was great, but as I said, not my original plan.

On the way to Islay I did finally get to cycle round the Isle of Arran in a day, although this nearly resulted in my divorce and only the fortunate incidence of me electrocuting myself in front of Ruth averted a full scale marital disaster.  I also did get onto the Kintyre Peninsula off the north of Arran but only did the 5 miles to get the ferry to Islay and didn't do the other 115 miles to get to Oban for the ferry to Mull.

So, that was attempt 2.  Ended up on a completely different island, having an absolutely fantastic experience, but no trip to Mull.  No visit to Tobermory.  No 120 miles of exploring the Kintyre Peninsula, no ferry from Oban.

Then in May this year, I went back and had a third attempt at my original route.  This time however, instead of the planned whizzbang trip to Tobermory, we spent nearly a week on Mull.  We hung out at Craignure for a while, played on a big swing, we swerved around the tourist traffic and made our way to Fionnphort, stayed on a lovely campsite on the beach, took a wonderful day trip to Iona, and then took a breathtakingly beautiful and scenic route around the back of the island, and back to Craignure.  The trip to Tobermory did take place but it was very short, and we were buttonholed for most of it by a retired boxer who kept trying to tell us new and exciting ways of chinning people or tripping them up with just two fingers.

So that was attempt 3.  We were still nowhere near the Great Glen, or Fort William, or Skye, or Inverness.  We could see Ardnamurchan and Morvern, but we didn't get to visit them.

Then last week I had another go.  Attempt 4.  And even after that we're still nowhere near completing my original route.  This time we did get north of Oban, but instead of hot footing it up through Morvern and Ardnamurchan to get to Skye, or sprinting up the Great Glen, we discovered that time spent pootling around the NCN Route 78 between Oban and Fort William was to reveal a treasure trove of unbelievable scenic gems.  In fact we didn't even get as far south as Oban, or as far north as Fort William, but we did discover the magical island of Lismore, and the just as magical 20 mile circuit of Loch Leven on a B road near Glencoe.  And lots of other places, leafy lanes, beautiful wide tarmacked cycle paths, sea views, blah blah blah.

So after 4 holidays in Scotland, I'm still nowhere near completing my original planned route.  At times I've been frustrated by a perceived lack of progress towards my intended goal, but along the way I've discovered that there's really no need to worry.

I'm sure I would have had a good time, if my original 14 days of scurrying and hurrying, and whizzing around and speeding here and there had gone to plan.

But what would I have missed, if I'd succeeded?  Those amazing weeks spent on Islay and Mull, and the equally magical week I've just spent in and around Port Appin and pottering around Route 78.  And Lismore, and Glencoe, and Kinlochleven....and Len the dog, and the big swing, and the campsite on the beach, and the Atlantic Coast, and Lorna's handshake....and all the other things...

I think with holidays in Scotland there's always more to see, and more to do.  I've already had 11 holidays there so far, and still I've only scratched the surface.

When things went wrong on that first trip last year, and when the route I planned got literally blown away, I lapsed into thinking of it as a failure.  But it wasn't. Because inside that trip were the seeds of the three trips we've had this year, and all the fantastic things that have happened on those.

As my friend Stephen is fond of saying, when it comes to plans, it's not the plan that's important, it's the planning.

And with each return trip to Scotland, my determination to stick to that original plan gets steadily weaker.  Because I've realised that main thing with holidays isn't to reach a target, or a goal or a particular destination.  It's just to enjoy the journey, and the experiences you have along the way.