Alien Invasion Imminent? Natural Disaster on the Horizon? Get yourself a dog, and you just might live

I watched Cowboys and Aliens last night.  Ruth has been wanting to see it since it was on at the cinema, but I've completely resisted going to see it  because I assumed it would be a giant pile of dung.  Then, when I found out Graeme, Carol and Suzanne were all going to be watching it last night, I thought 'Oh well, why not?'.  Even though they were watching it in Grantham and we were watching it on Teesside, it still felt like a shared experience.  Sort of.

In actual fact, it wasn't half bad.  There seemed to be some gratuitous Daniel Craig getting his top off while getting dripped on from above nonsense, but other than that it was quite engaging.  Another thing I've noticed about Daniel Craig, other than him getting his top off, is that he also seems to really enjoy punching people, because he doesn't just hit people once, he keeps pounding away on their faces until they look like mincemeat. I'm sure it's not fully necessary.

Harrison Ford was in it too, and he seemed on good form.  Last time out, as a geriatric Indiana Jones, he hardly seemed to be able to move, but he looked quite sprightly again last night, he was chinning aliens and all sorts.  I suppose in the style of the later Roger Moore Bond films, I didn't see him do much bending, but he seemed to compensate for this, by riding round on a horse and firing guns all the time.

I think I lost it with the last Indiana Jones when he survived an atom bomb by hiding in a fridge, and when the fridge landed after being blown about 3 miles from the epicentre of the blast, Indy just walked out without a scratch.  I fell asleep after that.

There was a dog in the film last night.  A collie.  And of course he made it through till the end.  There was shit blowing up all over the place for nearly two hours, except for around the dog, where all was calm.  And it reminded me of all those other films, where people are getting rolled over by buses, and are falling into craters in the Earth, and getting melted by volcanos, and there's always a dog, and the dog always makes it.

It made me wonder if I should consider getting another dog.  As insurance against the coming apocalypse.  Will Smith's girlfriend had one in Independence Day and she got away, there was a tramp in The Day After Tomorrow who had a dog, and he was fine, even when loads of people were getting frozen outside.  There  was a dog that was right next to a Sumo man in the middle of New York in Armageddon when he was hit by an asteroid, and the Sumo man ended up down a big hole, but the dog was unharmed.

This dog-friendly habit amongst film-makers probably isn't helped by our tendency, as an audience, to join in  each time and start rooting for the dog.  We're willing the dog to get away, even when in the background New Yorkers are being swept away by tidal waves and aliens and Godzilla, and oh dear, the Chrysler building seems to have fallen on a coach load of nuns again.  Never mind.

The one film that I can remember, which is the exception to the 'dog always makes it' scenario, is I Am Legend.  Sorry to spoil it for you, if you haven't seen it.  The dog's death scene in I Am Legend, is, by the way, genuinely upsetting.  The ending is complete baloney as well, but even though this film has some good bits, I would never want to see it again.  Because I wouldn't want to see the dog buy the farm again.

Yet, I've watched Independence Day, Armageddon and the Day After Tomorrow about a hundred times each.  In these films thousands of people get blown up, crushed, burned, frozen, incinerated, melted and otherwise killed in an endless array of horrible ways, but that never puts me off watching them.

I just keep smiling and say to Ruth 'Oh look, here's the bit where that reporter gets crushed by a billboard, pass me another chicken wing, will you?' or 'Oh look, Jeff Goldblum's boss has just been crushed by a bus, how about a nice cup of tea?'

I even kind of felt sorry for the wolves in 'the Day after Tomorrow' when they were trying to bite Jake Gyllenhaal's legs off.  I mean, they had been swept out of the zoo, and so they weren't getting regular meals any more, what were they supposed to do?

And the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, of course he wanted to eat Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill.  All he'd had to eat all day was a goat.  That wouldn't even fill me up.

Roger Moore as Bond - get that man a Zimmer frame!

This week I have been mostly watching Bond movies.  The ones with Roger Moore in. They keep showing them on ITV4, a channel with advert breaks so long, you can make a three course meal and cross-reference the other work of the whole cast during one single ad break.  Sometimes the ad breaks are so long, I can't even remember what I was watching.

Anyway, some people aren't a big fan of Roger Moore as Bond, but I think he's ace.  If you're going to be a ruthless killer, at least have a sense of humour about it, that's what I say.

And one additional bonus of watching him, particularly in the later ones, is that he's an encouragement to old and inflexible people everywhere.  He's in his fifties in these films, and even though he can hardly bend, he still manages to cuff aside assailants as if he's swatting flies.

Last night I watched Octopussy (yeah producers, don't bother burying sexually suggestive names for characters deep in the movie, get it in the title, get people's attention straightaway), and he wasn't only able to deck old blokes like himself, he managed to knock out a few circus performers as well, and some of them were extra bendy.  Even they couldn't get the better of him.

He must have been doing some sort of secret martial art, because even though he was up against really flexible people, he managed to fight them all without doing any bending at all, and he also managed at the end to hold onto the top of a plane with two tiny little rails as it was going upside down.  No-one could do that.  

In Octopussy he was really up against it.  Not only could he not bend to start with, they kept putting him in a vast array of costumes, that would have taken away even the small amount of flexibility that he did have.  They had him in a gorilla suit and a remote controlled crocodile suit, and when he had to run fast near the end to disarm a nuclear bomb, they put him in a clown suit with big clip cloppy shoes.  He nearly didn't make it.

Not since Peter Shilton in the World Cups of 1986 and 1990 have I seen someone so ill-fitted to the task he's been assigned to.  As I've no doubt mentioned before, I don't blame Maradona for 1986, or Germany for 1990.  I blame Shilton.  If, as a six foot goalie, you can't outjump a tiny little Argentinian, even if he is using his hands, then you shouldn't be on the pitch.  And as for trying to keep out Germany's penalties in 1990, he was diving in instalments.  I thought I was watching the slow motion replays until I realised it was in real time.  The Germans on the other hand had a young fit lad between the sticks.  Even if our lot hadn't been shinning them over the bar, he probably would have stopped them anyway.  He did at least look athletic.  Shilton needed a winch to get back up after every dive.  He was 40 at the time but he looked older.  I know he was a brilliant goalie at one time, but I think he should have quit sooner.  Like in about 1985.

For the last few years, I've had some problems with arthritis.  I'm nowhere near as flexible as I used to be.  When I was a teenager I used to play rugby and football, and both of these involved diving around a lot and getting back up again really quickly.  Now it takes me about 15 minutes to pick up a tea towel I've dropped on the floor.  And that's the thing I don't get with Roger Moore (and Shilton for that matter).  There would have been loads of young people around at the time.  Have you ever seen those guys doing that Parkmore or Parquet or whatever it is, where they fling themselves from building to building.  I mean, you could go get one of those guys, stop them hanging around outside Morrison's and give them a WaltherPPK or a pair of goalie gloves, and they'd probably do a better job.

Another ace thing about Roger was this.  As well as being able to fight without being bendy, he could also change women's minds really easily, a feat which I have found impossible to this day.  If a woman didn't want to do it with him, all he had to do was grab her by the head, and make her kiss him, and then she would magically change her mind.  I've never actually tried this, and I'm not going to start now, but if I did, I would expect at the very least a smack over the head with a woman's shoe, and possibly a visit from the authorities, but even a non-bendy wrinkly like Bond seemed to be able to get away with it then.

That was another great thing about Octopussy.  Instead of a load of Chinese blokes running round in coloured boilersuits inside a volcano at the end, they had loads of young women in red skin suits running around doing circus type stuff.  It was a visual treat.

One more thing.  Watching the film this time had some extra resonance for me, as there was a rickshaw chase through New Delhi, and from what I could see, between 1983 and a couple of months ago, when I was there, it doesn't look like it's changed much in (although I can't recall being chased by any ninja style assassins, only beggars and tuktuk drivers).

For some reason, probably because he was the most famous Indian around at the time, they stuck Indian tennis professional Vijay Amritraj in the movie.  Ruth said you could tell he wasn't an actor.  Having seen how things operate in India, I wondered if the casting went something like this.

Cubby Broccoli:  Hello, is that the Indian High Council of Film Things?  We'd like to do a movie in Delhi
Indian Guy:  Oh, we have a form for that.  In fact, we have several.
Cubby Broccoli:  That's okay, I'll get my Indian form filling guy onto it.
Indian Guy:  There is one other thing.  If you want to film in India, we'll need Vijay Amritraj to be in it.
Cubby Broccoli:  What, the tennis player?
Indian Guy:  That's him.
Cubby Broccoli:  But he's a tennis player, not an actor.
Indian Guy:  Well we want him in.  No Vijay, no movie.
Cubby Broccoli: Okay, deal.

I'm probably completely wrong about that, so don't sue me.

So there's plenty of good news, it seems.  If old inflexible people like Shilton and Roger Moore can still get employed doing the work that a younger man could do so much more easily, and if Indian tennis players who can't act can get picked to star in a James Bond movie, it appears there's plenty of hope for the rest of us.

It's my dog's birthday - he's 16 today.

I used to have a dog.  He was a big black labrador type of dog, only with longer legs. We got him from the Dogs Trust at Sadberge near Darlington, in November 2002.  We weren't sure we should get a dog at all, because we were out quite a bit in the daytime, and it meant leaving him on his own.  He won't mind, they said, he's been in the kennels for months anyway.  He won't mind a warm house instead.

He didn't seem very well behaved.  We took him for a walk round a muddy field, and they made him put a halter on, to try and help with steering him.  It didn't help much.  He just kept pawing at it, and he pretty much went wherever he wanted.  At one point he managed to get the lead tangled up in Becky's legs and  tripped her up in the mud.  That didn't go down too well.

After we'd walked him round the field for a bit, we took him back into the shelter and even though he wasn't supposed to, he stood up on his back legs, put his front legs on the desk and licked the girl's face behind the counter.  I think that was when I knew he was ours.

We wanted a few days to think about it, so we put a reserve on him.  There won't be any need, the girl said, I don't think he'll be going anywhere.  Anyway, a few days later we went back for him.  He cost £60 and he had a birth certificate and everything, although I think his Date of Birth was probably just a guess, as he'd been picked up as a stray in Leeds.  It was 2nd April 1996.  That means he would have been 16 today.

I wasn't really cut out to be a dog owner.  I'm not really alpha male material.  I used to give him bits of my dinner straight from the dining table, and let him up on the sofa, and I didn't like telling him off, even if it was the right thing to do.  The first time I let him off his lead he looked like he was rocket powered.  He hurtled round the field as if he was in the Large Hadron Collider and when he eventually came back towards me at about a hundred miles an hour I realised that between me and him was a barbed wire fence.  By some genius bit of mid-air manoeuvring, the like of which you'd expect to see in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, he managed to turn sideways and dive through the gap between the two horizontal pieces of wire.  I inspected him all over for cuts but I couldn't find any.  I think he knew what he was doing.

A few days after we got him, my friend Mark brought his German Shepherd round.  This was probably a mistake, as after a bit of snarling my dog pinned his dog to the ground by the head.  Mark managed to get his fingers in my dogs throat through a gap in his teeth to stimulate his gag reflex, and eventually he let his dog go, but it freaked us all out a bit.  I think on reflection, it was our fault more than the dog's.  I think he was just defending his new patch.

He did once try to eat a Weimaraner as well, which belonged to a big burly neighbour of mine.  The guy came after me with a stick, after my dog got his dog by the ear.  Oops.  Again, I think it was my fault.  I think he picked up on my nervousness, and he thought he better stand up for me.

We think he must have come from a good home at some point, because he knew all his commands, and he used to make the other dogs look bad at the dog training classes I took him to.  He was literally the teacher's pet.  The teacher used to let the other dogs mess up, and then call mine over to show them how it should be done.  The dog training was at the Dogs Trust, where he'd lived a long time, and I think they all knew him and had a soft spot for him anyway, but it was fun.

I won't go on.  I think sometimes that when people talk about their pets, it's a bit like when they talk about their children, and something cute they've done.  You can sort of picture what they're talking about, but as they're describing it, they're full of love, whereas to you it's just a story.

My dog was called Hudson and he died in 2006.  We only had him less than 4 years, and then his heart started to fail, and we tried to give him some medicine, but when he started to go and lie down on his own in the garden, and he wouldn't eat, we knew it was time.  I was in the room with him when he died, and that was six years ago.

In the early days of having him, when he was going through his awkward big dog eating phase, we tried a muzzle on him for a while, but he hated it, and one day we lost him in a field and when he came back, he'd managed to wriggle it off.  He looked so pleased with himself.  We never put one on him again.

At the time when he lost his muzzle in there, that field was just a field, but a few years later, and they're building houses on it.  I was cycling past there the other day with Ruth, and there was a big sign up advertising new build properties, and it made my day, when I saw what they were calling the development.  It's called Hudson Park!

I think it's unlikely that a whole housing development has been created, in memory of my dog.  I doubt very much that anyone connected to the building company knows that a dog named Hudson lost his muzzle in that field ten years ago, and even if they do, I don't suppose they would care.  But it made me smile when I saw the sign.  And apart from the times when I had to try and get other dogs' heads from out of his mouth, that was pretty much what happened every time I spent time with Hudson.  He made me smile.

And during the time I knew him, I did some really stupid things, and sometimes no-one in the house where I lived wanted to talk to me, except him.  He was always there, and he was always happy to hang out with me.  He loved me when I was an idiot, and he loved me when I wasn't.  I don't think he knew the difference.

Anyway, today's his birthday.  Probably not his real one, but it's his official one, from his birth certificate and all.  And that's good enough for me.  Happy Birthday Hudson.  I still miss you.


Postscript:  I found out from the developers Taylor Wimpey that the name Hudson Park was actually put forward by one of their employees to commemorate two plane crashes that took place in this area during the Second World War.  The Hudson was in fact a twin propeller engined aircraft and details of the two unfortunate crashes are detailed below.  Both very sad stories.  Thank you to Jenny Mothersdale of Taylor Wimpey for taking the time to reply to my enquiry.


http://www.yorkshire-aircraft.co.uk/aircraft/yorkshire/york41/v9032.html

http://www.yorkshire-aircraft.co.uk/aircraft/yorkshire/york42/ae627.html

Sorry Nicolas Cage - You lost me at the vending machine

I saw a terrible film last night.  So terrible that I had to watch the last 1 hour 20 minutes of it by myself.  Ruth had seen enough after 20 minutes.  And so had I, to be honest, but like Bolivia vs South Korea at USA 1994, that I stayed up till 2.45 in the morning to watch, even though I had to be at work for 7, I didn't know when to admit defeat and just go to bed.

For anyone who doesn't remember that classic footballing encounter, it was a Nil-Nil draw between two terrible teams who were both lucky to get nil.  I think if the goals had been the size of blue whales neither team would have been able to hit them.  The goalkeepers would have got more touches of the ball if they'd sat in the crowd, because that was where the shots at goal mostly ended up.

But anyway, back to the film.  The film was called Justice.  It's about a man played by Nicolas Cage whose wife is attacked and hospitalised by a man in snake skin cowboy boots.  I think my step dad had some of those.  While he's sitting in the waiting room, a man played by Guy Pearce (formerly Mike in Neighbours) comes up to him and offers to get his wife's attacker 'dealt with'.  The legal system will take too long, and he'll probably get off with eleven months, blah blah blah.  This is where it gets absolutely mental.

Even though Guy Pearce has just been openly advertising his rapist nobbling services in the waiting room of a hospital, he then tells Nicolas Cage that if he wants to accept the offer, he has to go buy two chocolate bars out of a vending machine.  Why don't you just give him your phone number, mate?, I wanted to yell.

And so what ensues is what seems like a ten minute walk to the vending machine to get a couple of bars of chocolate.  I'm not as good at suspending my disbelief as I used to be, but this was plainly ridiculous.  I've been in hospital loads of times, and when I say loads, I mean loads.  And generally speaking, although seeing your ailing relative is also quite important, heading for the vending machines is one of the few highlights of being in there.  If this was really how you hire a hitman, I would have hired one every time I've been in a hospital.  There would hardly be anyone left in the Teesside area.  Between 1994 and 1997 my first wife alone spent 70 nights in hospital.  That's enough vend to have wiped out half of Stockton.

And so from there I thought the film was completely nuts.  And it was.  After watching Knowing I'd been prepared to give Nic another chance, but I think he's had plastic surgery or something, either that or he hasn't had the make-up removed after doing Ghost Rider, and his face looks bonkers.  I liked him in Con Air and The Rock (apart from his untidy hair in the former), why didn't he just stick to having a normal face?

By the way, it wasn't just the vending machine scene, the plot was completely nuts all the way through.  These vigilante types had such convoluted ways of doing things.  Like instead of just texting him, or ringing him up, they kept breaking into his heavily fortified house to write things on his fridge in fridge magnets.  It's the bloody twenty-first century, man, what about 3G?  Fridge magnets are so last century!

They even made him start getting the bus to work, instead of taking his car, so that he could wait under an underpass to throw someone off it.  I think the killers in this movie must have been trained by the inverse Time and Motion people, they were completely inefficient.  'Yeah, well, we could just shoot the guy, but then the film will be about 20 minutes long, why don't we have him followed by a remote control helicopter with a poisoned dart attached to the nose, and when he stops at the grocery store, we'll remote control his ass into oblivion!'.  It was that bad.  Not since the end of a James Bond movie, have the means of killing someone being so ineptly conceived and carried out.

So, to sum up, my advice to you is this:  Save your money, and don't see Justice.

Working in a factory - like Germany in 1987, except for the naked showers

I started work in a factory yesterday.  Making frozen desserts.  Yesterday I peeled about a thousand bananas and helped in other ways to make a job lot of banoffee pies.  I did most of the tasks in the production line, although I never got to feed bananas into the banana slicer, but that at least means I've got some goals left for the next time I'm in.

I have worked in a factory before, in Germany in 1987, although that one was packing powdered paint into sacks, and this was making frozen desserts.  Despite the different products, there were similarities.

The shifts are virtually the same.  6 till 2.  2 till 10, and 10 till 6.  Yesterday I was on a 6 till 2, so arriving at the work in the dark, and leaving in the heat of mid-afternoon.  Very like Germany.

I had to wear a white uniform, and standard issues boots.  Same as Germany.  I had to clock in, and out.  Same as Germany.  A large proportion of the factory staff are from countries other than the host nation, same as Germany.

The main differences were that I was working in a production line with others yesterday, so if I didn't keep up, it would affect the whole line, whereas in Germany it was just me and a machine, so as long as I'd emptied the machine by the end of the shift I could go at my own pace.

The other big difference was the absence of naked communal showers at the end of the shift.  In Germany these were necessary because you would be so completely covered in paint dust by the end of the shift that you had to go into a big shower and wash it all off.  And not just with a regular sponge, you had to scour it off.  You got so much paint inside your clothing as well that it was necessary to get someone else to scrub your back clean.  I am not joking.  So, a big communal shower, no clothes on, scrubbing each others' backs with the equivalent of a pan scourer.  And from experience I have to tell you, the thing you do not want in this situation, the thing you absolutely must not get, is an involuntary erection.  Anyway, enough about that.

So, thankfully, the cake factory, no communal showers.  Your feet get cold, especially if you're working near the freezers, and you do get some cake on you, but it mostly washes off quite easily, without the aid of stripping down to your birthday suit.

There are lots of rules, but these all make sense, as they are all to do with not getting food poisoning into the pies, and not letting foreign objects fall into the mix.  I have to say, from a lifetime's experience of eating pies, I consider both these things to be very good ideas.

Everybody has to wear a hairnet, but there is a very sensible colour coding system in operation.  Most people wear white ones, but supervisors wear red ones, first aiders wear green, and the people who come along to clean up and empty the bins wear yellow, so you know who's who, without having to know exactly who everyone is.

I didn't mind that the tasks were repetitive, and this was helped by the fact that you are rotated onto a different task about every half an hour.  I got a half hour break in the middle so I only had to get through 4 hours in one stretch.  There isn't a lot of time to talk, especially on some of the tasks, like the spreading cream around with the back of a spoon task, but the people I did speak to seemed friendly and helpful.  There's a quiet efficiency about the place, which I hope to emulate in due course.  I think I've got the quiet part right, I just need to work on the efficiency.

The main problem I had were that my feet were like blocks of ice.  The temperature at floor level is around 5 degrees C, because of the cold air coming out from the freezers.  This is especially noticeable when you're working near the end of the line, doing the finishing touches.  By then I felt like the liquid metal guy out of Terminator 2 after he'd fallen into a lorry load of liquid nitrogen.  When I started walking again afterwards, my  legs didn't exactly snap off, but I did have trouble getting them going again.  Thermal socks needed, I think.

Anyhoo, there it is.  I've done a day, and it was fine, and I'm going back to do some more on Friday.  I'd like to have warmer feet next time, and I'd like to be better at using the back of a spoon, but apart from that I have no complaints.  Especially not about the lack of showers....

CSI Rudby - I haven't seen a hanging chad since the year 2000

I've ridden nearly 1000 miles by bike this year.  All on the same bike.  200 miles of it was in India.  Until today that is, when I got on a different bike.  And that was my first mistake.

Apart from losing one or two non essential parts which were literally shaken off the bike in India I haven't had any serious mechanicals all year.  I got through the entire Winter, some of it riding around Asia, without a single problem.  And then we passed the Spring Equinox, and things started to unravel.

I never should have changed bikes.  But it's the Spring I thought, so today I got my Spring and Summer bike out.  By the same logic I also wore shorts.  I can't be bothered looking out the window every time I go out, so I have a basic rule with shorts.  If it's Spring or Summer, I wear shorts.  If it's Autumn or Winter I wear longs.  Last weekend it was Winter, so I was out in the blazing sun wearing more lagging than an elderly boiler, today it's the Spring so I was out in the freezing fog in shorts.  Simples!

Anyway, I finished putting my Spring bike back together this morning, after I'd dismantled it in January during a pre-India panic attack.  It all looked fine.

I set off around 8.15 this morning, with Stephen and Adam for company.  It should have been at 8, but I was late.  Partly because of all the things I had to adjust once I'd set off that I thought I'd put together properly before I left, and partly because I had quite a long conversation with my 2 year old friend George once I got to Stephen's house.  His vocabulary has expanded somewhat since a few months ago, when I managed to keep him amused solely by  using combinations of  the words Cheese, Pie and No, so it took me a while to get through his new words before I could leave.

Once we eventually got going, I led out the ride from Stephen's house and I kept up a good pace for about 8 miles until we reached Rudby.  I stopped at the give way line just before the sharp up and down into Hutton Rudby and as I came to a standstill my back tyre exploded.

The three of us decamped to the small triangle of grass next to the road, and began our investigations.  Stephen and Adam kindly agreed not to help, so as not to spoil the broth, and thankfully they had their i-Phones with them to keep themselves amused while I investigated what had gone wrong.

A very strange puncture it was.  It was not unlike a hanging chad.  About six inches from the valve.  I couldn't find any sharp objects in the tyre or in the wheel so I put a new tube in and off we went.  About 10 yards later another identical explosion.  The plot thickens.

Again I took the tyre off and found an even more prominent hanging chad in almost the same place as before.  It was a big hole, but it looked like it had been made from the inside out rather than vice versa.  Like a window smashed from the inside after a murder that's been contrived to look like a burglary gone wrong, this set the minds of CSI Rudby thinking.  There were no sharp objects lodged in the tyre, but as we manipulated the tyre a bit we noticed that the actual tyre wall was split, and although the split was a couple of inches long, there was one point in particular that looking more hole shaped than slit shaped.  Was it possible the puncture had been caused by the tube pushing out through the tyre, ie by air pushing out rather than a foreign object pushing in.  It was not 100% conclusive but the consensus amongst the CSI Rudby team was that it looked plausible.

At this point Stephen offered to lend me his bike so I could ride and get a new tyre from the nearest bike shop.  'Why don't I just get a new bike', I asked?

'Don't you think that buying an entire new bike is an over-reaction, and also a quite expensive solution to the situation?', the guys asked, 'a new tyre would definitely be enough'.  There was clearly a misunderstanding going on.  Although I am not famed for my willingness to spend time maintaining bikes, things have not got so bad, nor am so I flush with funds, to be just throwing faulty bikes down at the roadside, and going off and buying a new one.  Besides, they never have them ready in the bike shop anyway, you always need to leave it with them a couple of days, for them to tighten things up and lube the chain etc, so that was never going to work.

'No, I mean, I could ring Ruth and ask her to bring me another bike', I said.  The one drawback with this, of course was that she would have to lift the replacement bike onto the roof, which since I sent her skidding down the wrong road on a patch of oil, she hasn't been able to do.  So I decided to just bail out.  It's good practice for the Coast to Coast to Coast in the summer, I thought.

I knew Ruth was at home, at least that's where I left her, so I thought.  It'll be simple.  I'll give her a ring.  I wasn't too concerned when her mobile was switched off, I just rang the home phone.  But no answer.  This is where having two companions with i-Phones came in handy.  She's been on Facebook this morning, Stephen said, she's commented on a photo I put on.  At this point Adam was also uploading a fresh photo of me not being able to fix the bike.

Well, the phone isn't working, I said, can you Facebook her or send her an e-mail and tell her I need picking up.  So that's what we did.  We sent her a Facebook message and an e-mail to tell her that the home phone was ringing and she needed to answer it.  And I thought, being rescued in the 21st Century, it's so easy!  Adam had even managed to get on somebody's unsecured wireless network whose house was near the triangle of grass, so we didn't even need mobile phone coverage.

And it worked, eventually after being badgered by social network, Ruth picked up the phone.  The guys kindly waited with me, and when she arrived she looked at me like I was an idiot, and then I took my shorts, and my Spring and Summer bike, and my tyre wall with the big hole in, and I went home, and I thought to myself, why oh why didn't I just wear long trousers and an eiderdown and why didn't I just stick to the Winter bike, that I've done a thousand miles on, and that hasn't gone wrong at all, and why didn't I just leave the Spring bike where it's been for 6 months, leaning up against the garage wall?.

Although sometimes it feels like it's a skill I have, Stephen pointed out with impeccable logic that it isn't by touching the bike that I've broken it.  It's because the tyre is worn out.  After nearly 5000 miles on that tyre, it's not surprising, and if it was worn, no doubt the six months in the garage won't have helped the integrity of the tyre wall, so there it is.

The 8 miles or so we did was fun, and I was really enjoying myself, until my bike blew up.  But if you're going to spend a foggy Saturday morning standing around on a triangular piece of grass hacking into unsecured wireless networks and analysing hanging chads, I can't think of nicer people to do it with.

And if you're going to have to interrupt your wife while she's relaxing, having a nice cup of coffee and enjoying your absence, I can't think of a better way to do it than via a Social Networking Site.  It seems to work so much better than the phone.

I don't need facial recognition software - I've already got some, in my head

I keep getting disappointed at the cinema.  Not necessarily by the films either, although some of the tosh I've seen at the Arc would come into that category.

I keep seeing adverts containing young, vibrant, happy people, and they're all over the world, and they're obviously having an amazing time, and I catch myself thinking, I wouldn't mind a piece of that, and then it turns out that the advert is for a mobile phone, and so then I think, no thanks, I've already got one.  Or it might be an advert for a car that can recognise your mobile phone, and get all your music off it, and Facebook, and in-built satnav and all that jazz.

And it just leaves me thinking.  I don't really like travelling by car, but mostly when I get in the car, it's because I want to go somewhere.  So can't I just go there?  Do I have to be riding in a mobile disco / social networking site / atlas type thing.  All I want is to go round to the chippy.

One of the mobile phone adverts I saw.  I may not have understood it correctly, but it seemed to be about taking a picture of someone else's head, and then using the phone to remember what their head looked like for next time you saw them.  But I don't need one of those.  I usually just use my own head for that.  There's people I haven't seen for years, but if I saw them, I would probably just say 'Hey, I remember you!'.  I doubt they'd say.  'Wow, how do you do it?', but if they did I might say 'Well, I've got this pile of mush inside my skull called a brain, and one of the things it can do is remember what things look like'.

And all the phones are called Galaxy or some other space agey bollocksy name.  If you want to see a galaxy, try looking at the sky with the eyes in your head, not through the hand held device you're carrying.  Your phone might be able to augment reality, and tell you what you're looking at, but have you ever considered just looking at regular reality, without any augmentation?  I mean, does augmentation really make things look better?  It doesn't seem to work on women's boobs, I'm not sure it works with the stars either.

I was out cycling the other day, and when we stopped for a breather, the Chief was checking his work emails while we waited.  My own view about going for a bike ride is that I'd like to get away from stuff, I don't want it following me round.  It's easy for me to say, since I don't have any work to follow me, but hey ho.

I think the message these mobile ads are trying to send me, is that there's a better life out there for me, if only  I had a smart phone, that could do loads of stuff.  Like if I was walking round a city, and I wanted to eat something, I could Google the nearest eating place, and ring them up, and pay for it all over the phone, and just go and collect it.  Which I'm sure for some people would be very handy, but where's the adventure in that?  Where's the pleasure that comes from just wandering about, looking at stuff?  From getting lost?

I didn't even have a mobile phone till I was 37, and I said I wouldn't get one, and I thought texting was absolutely ridiculous, but now I've got one, and I send texts, and I've got music on my phone, so I have embraced technology to some degree, but I'm quite happy to continue to have separate things for separate things.

Like a phone for ringing people up, a car for driving places, a computer for doing email.  I don't need an emailphonecar that does everything.  And I'm quite happy to keep looking at people's faces, for the purposes of finding out who they are.  Sometimes I can remember them, sometimes I can't.  And if I need facial recognition software on my phone to remember who you are, chances are you're not all that important to me, sorry and all that.  To borrow a phrase from Graeme, I don't want to have to start an electronic 'Who the fuck are you'? register.  Life's complicated enough.