London - Adventures in Babysitting

There's a story I've been telling for about 20 years of how my brother got invited to go out for a Chinese by Robert Smith of the Cure after a small intimate gig at a pub in Leeds , but he couldn't go because his friend who was driving was too tired.  I'd never thought to check the facts until last week, and it turned out I had some of the details wrong.

This was supposed to be a picture of the Gherkin

It was actually at a massive venue in Manchester, it wasn't a Chinese it was an Indian, it wasn't a friend it was just someone with the same birthday (and that was all they had in common)  and it involved some sort of car chase through the streets of Manchester following the Cure's tour bus.

They have these signposts everywhere in London - Even idiots can't get lost

The comforting thing in all this, was that I did have the central and most important fact right.  It was Robert Smith, and there was an invitation for a meal.  I guess with all stories, especially the ones I write or tell, it's the central point of the story that's important, the details are flexible.  I'm not writing a history book, or making a documentary, I'm just talking about things as I experience them, things that inspire me, and which have a point, which I want to share. At least to me, there's always a point!

These new geese were readily available in the park - No entrance fee required

Probably because I know my brother still feels somewhat robbed when it comes to spending time with Robert Smith, I agreed to go to London this weekend, to babysit my 4 year old nephew, so he and his wife could go see the Cure at the Royal Albert Hall. They don't perform very often, but once a year they do this concert for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

Luckily I got some more chances to see the Gherkin

The day before leaving for London, I nearly got hypothermia going to the corner shop for some milk. It was like a Perfect Storm out there. The kind of the rain that comes in sideways at the back of your trousers, so only the backs are wet, but not the fronts. You only realise this when you sit down.

I've been trying to say Yes to more stuff this year (the Mens' Retreat at Alnmouth being a case in point), and although I considered saying No to the babysitting, I thought in the interests of trying to have better family relationships, I'd give it a go.

Here's me trying to relate to my nephew - Monkey to Monkey

In the spirit of last week's Edinburgh early start, and to get the most possible from the weekend, I caught the 06.31 from Darlington on Saturday morning. On the way to Darlington station, it was that grey mist that seems to wet you through, and I wondered if I had brought enough layers.

You don't see this on the Underground!  Look at those colours!

An attractive, smartly dressed smiley woman, probably in her 30s, carrying a coffee, came and sat next to me at York. I had a couple of attempts at 'passing the time of day' with her when she got on but she seemed prickly at both attempts, so I gave up. Maybe she was watching out for the nutter on the train, and she was worried it might be me. It was trivial stuff, to do with window vs aisle seating, and use of the overhead racks vs not spilling her coffee, but I thought if things had got off to a start as bad as this, no point trying to talk about the meaning of life.

It's a bit hot for running around!

Before I'd left for London, I'd checked the weather forecast. It was due to be 13 degrees in Darlington, but 20 in London! 20 degrees! I'd got to see this for myself, so when I got off the train at King's Cross I decided to get straight up onto the surface instead of travelling any distance by underground.

Don't walk around without shoes.  You'll burn your feet off!

It was amazing, I suddenly felt like I'd left the oven door open and walked in front of it.  I was wearing far too many clothes. I'd brought a scarf and a hat! But here there were people frying eggs on the pavement! (I made that part up).

This is pretty much my Day 1 Route

Despite the heat, I had that initial feeling of being a bit overwhelmed once I stepped out of King's Cross, so I reverted to known knowns and had a greasy mcmuffin from McDonalds.  

King's Cross - actually quite nice above ground

After being in Edinburgh, London was a bit of an adjustment.  At least McDonalds are all the same food and decor wise, so I could at least centre myself while I got used to the new background noise.

And Edinburgh it was not.  For example, there was a young black man on his mobile attempting to communicate in a language similar to the jive talk I last heard on Airplane the Movie.  He was talking so loudly the whole restaurant could hear.  He was talking about Crime Mortgages (which I'd never heard of) and about how if you make money from crime, the police can seize yo' assets etc.

Whoever he was talking to, he really didn't need a phone, he should have just opened the window, but the nice thing about his overall message was that it seemed to have a moral tone.  His central argument seemed to be, that if you're going to buy things, it's best not to buy them with money that's been earned from criminal activity, because then you can most probably keep them, whereas if you buy things with drug money, the police can take break your door down and take them away.  Very sensible I thought!

I didn't bother with a Boris Bike - I don't think they come with a Support Vehicle

Two young someone else's at the next table, one white, one black, but who both looked like they'd climbed straight out of the window display from the local Superdry store, were saying how tired they were and how they could do with a sit down, and everything they said they finished with the term 'bruv'.  Their conversation was like Eastenders but with all the anger taken out.  Then there was a young lad at the next table who couldn't believe his luck.  Not only had he won a free hash brown in some sort of raffle where the prizes were more grease, but they'd served him with it in no time!  

Then, an elderly Indian man came along and sat next to me.  He asked me if I wouldn't mind looking after his bag and his food while he went to get some ketchup.

Sometimes when you look at your own reflection, you might not like what you see

I hate the fact, that even for a split second, I am capable of  having the thought that someone Asian with a bag might be a terrorist.  I suppose it's all part of the horrible legacy of the 2005 bombings, that innocent people can be regarded with suspicion, when there's no reason for it.

As with any irrational fear though, I think it sometimes works just to reason it out statistically, and so I did.  What's more likely I thought, that the guy next to me is about to blow up McDonalds, or that he just wants some ketchup with his meal? I decided ketchup, and I was right.

The Post Office Tower - I'd never seen that before

Some people don't like London, because they think people are rude and it's impersonal. I've never found it that way. I've always taken the opposite view, which is that it's incredible how so many different races and nationalities blend effortlessly together, and in all the thousands of people I saw this weekend, the only raised voices were a white family from Sheffield on Sunday night, who after a full weekend away together, had gone into full Jeremy Kyle mode. Everyone else was just having a good time!

As I was walking along Euston Road, I became very aware of the bottom of a woman of indeterminate nationality in front of me, who was listening to a white I-phone with it halfway hanging out of the back of her skimpy jeans pocket. "You want to be careful love, someone could have that off you", I didn't say.  I got the impression that the halfway hanging out of the pocket look was part of her image, and that was somehow more important than the risk of having it stolen.  In fact, almost every young person I saw had some sort of Apple product hanging off them, and white earphones coming out of their ears.  I've only got a pair of black earphones, so I didn't feel like I was riding their particular wave of cool.  I think I might have missed the boat on that one.

St Pancras - For some reason I always confuse this with Charing Cross

It was nearly 10 when I left McDonalds.  I'd arranged to meet my brother at the zoo, and it was about 2 miles away from King's Cross, through Regent's Park, so I set off walking, removing layers as I went. There was so much to look at, I didn't even bother putting my camera away, it wasn't worth it.

This doesn't even begin to capture how lovely it was in the Park

I find peoples' faces fascinating.  There's so much to see in a face, and what I saw expressed in so many faces on Saturday in the park was joy.  It was as if the joy was actually bursting out of people.

Another mad thing. People were actually sitting on the grass! As in, it was dry enough to sit on! Amazing. Up north for the last six months, you'd sink into a world of sludge.

Neither does this really - You had to be there!

It was as if the whole Earth had been woken from a coma, and everyone was simultaneously experiencing the joy of being alive again.  And that's how I felt too.  And all the people were beautiful. Or so they seemed to me.

London is full of beautiful people. Of all nationalities. Not sure if more beautiful people live there, or if it's just that it's more densely populated, so a greater number of people are likely to be beautiful, or if the people that are there, just look more beautiful because of the backdrop.  Someone must have done some research on this, but I haven't.  My evidence is just based on walking around and looking.

When I was leaving Starbucks in Edinburgh on Tuesday, I'd heard a snippet of a Talking Heads song, and as everything does at the moment, it reminded me of 1986 / 1987, and the first time I ever watched Stop Making Sense with my friend Dan at his house, during our Year Off.

I watched it again this week, and was once again transfixed by David Byrne's energy. I bought the audio version to listen to while I was away, and as I walked through the park, mixing with other coma awakeners, the song Heaven came on.  It seemed a perfect song for the moment, and I reflected that if  Heaven was like this, it would be worth going.

Eventually I did get to the zoo, which kind of broke my heavenly trance state.  I think I'd have been happy just walking round the park for about the next 10 years (or at least till sundown).  It was so relaxing.

Do they have Monkeys in heaven?

It was £26 to get into the zoo, which like a short sharp kick to the head, brought me back to reality.  I then resisted the temptation to start sprinting round ticking off how many animals I'd seen (do small fish count as one each?) but just to accept that the entrance fee is exactly that. That's how much it costs to get in, that's how much you pay the gatekeeper. Once you're in, you can do what you want. You don't have to look at anything if you don't want.

Once you're in, you can just sit around it you want.  Nobody makes you do stuff

I think I've learned this lesson since Alton Towers.  I used to go there and sprint round all day desperately trying to get value for money. Dividing the number of rides by the entrance fee. Trying to get it to less than £2 each!

This is the closest I got to a Tiger all weekend - safer that way

At one point on Saturday, I decided to sit in the sun and have a coffee, but I managed completely accidentally to get into a tense coffee purchasing racially sensitive stand-off with a young black girl who was trying to sell it to me.  On the menu Americano was £2.20 but white coffee was £2.35.  I asked for a white coffee but she didn't seem to hear me and only charged me £2.20.  I wanted white I said, you've given me black.  She seemed not to understand.  No, I don't want black, I want white!  It went on like this for a while.  Probably there was nothing in it, it was probably all in my head, but I've never felt so tense about wanting milk in my coffee.  The coffee was pretty horrible anyway, so I maybe should have just bought a bottle of water.

Meerkats - Generally likeable, which may explain why they are cynically used to sell insurance

A bit like at Edinburgh Zoo last year, at first I couldn't find any animals.  The tiger wasn't around for a start.  A young enthusiastic zoo employee was explaining to a group of children that tigers don't come out much until the evenings, or at all at this time of year.  That's not really very convenient for me is it, I didn't say.  I don't go to zoos to see their star attractions anyway. The Pandas weren't out in Edinburgh last year, so no Tigers, no biggie!  Tigers are just big cats anyway, and I've seen loads of cats.  I did want to see some monkeys though.  I like monkeys, they're always good value for money.

Spot the Monkey!

To be honest, I found that watching the people who were watching the animals was more interesting than most of the animals.

Here's some monkeys queueing up to look at a monkey

Some children seemed to have got the concept of a zoo mixed up with the concept of the circus, especially in the Gorilla enclosure.  "Oh, but Daddy he's just sitting there, make him do something!"

Yes, dad, why don't you go in the cage and see if you can start a fight with the occupant to amuse your son? The zoo might be more fun for certain children if it was like this statue.

Hold it there Dad while I get the lens cap off!

Later when I met Phil, we talked about this, and wondered if zoo attendances would be any higher if zookeepers electrocuted sleeping lions and tigers, to get them to move about more.

But Gorillas aren't clowns in the circus, they're not even very good footballers.  They're certainly not paid by results.  At one point the really big Silverback did get up, but only to squat and have a number two somewhere else but in his own bedding.  That's more advanced than some humans, I thought!  Good for you!  Of course this went down a treat with all the small children present, there's nothing funnier to a small child than poo.

Giraffes - easier to find than Tigers and good value for money on account of their size

If any of this sounds cynical and it might, there's an antidote for cynicism and it's enthusiasm.  Something similar happened to me on Saturday that has happened previously at Edinburgh Zoo.

You can't stay cynical for long when there's penguins about

If there's anything certain to shame me out of any negative feelings whatsoever, it's motivated parents teaching their children to wonder at nature, and at life.  It blasts me out of my cynicism every time.

Here's a monkey watching some monkeys

It's a cliche I know, but parenting is the hardest job in the world, with the longest hours, the worst pay, and no guarantee whatsoever of even the slightest reward blah blah blah.  But despite the drawbacks, it's possibly the most important job there is, and on Saturday I felt genuine admiration for the hundreds of parents I saw, taking the time to educate and nurture and love their children.  Just watching their efforts alone was tiring me out.  All that effort has got to count for something.  I hope so anyway.

Parenting - Harder than it looks!

It was probably a good thing, that I'd started to think like this, because pretty soon my nephew turned up, and tonight I was going to get a few hours practice, as a stand-in parent for the evening.

Some relations of mine

It was just as well they turned up when they did at 1, because I was starting to run out of monkeys to look at.  I'd already been in the zoo two hours, and by now I'd justified the entrance fee, so I was quite happy to tag along with them for the rest of the day.  Just as well, since progress with a 4 year old can be slow at times.

Progress through the zoo slowed down somewhat after I gained a passenger

It had actually been a target of mine to try and tire him out during the day to such an extent that he would sleep the whole evening away, and things were looking good at the zoo because he didn't even have a snooze, although I was disappointed to see that he'd arrived in a pushchair.  I'd been expecting him to walk everywhere and I knew that would really exhaust him, so the fact that he was getting little rests in the pushchair wasn't such a good sign.

Actually, the babysitting was fine in the end, although the first half an hour went a bit wrong.  I was on my own with him from 6.50 pm, and by 7 he was crying his eyes out because I couldn't find any more Scooby Doo for him to watch.  Thankfully I did find a different rubbish DVD to watch with some talking animals in and by about 9 he'd passed out.  I'm led to believe that once he's asleep there's no waking him, but I didn't want to chance it so I pretty much spent the next 3 hours silently watching him, just in case anything happened.  Nothing did!

We were staying at Ramada Docklands, and we'd had some nice views of the city as we headed out to our hotel.

Father and Son - No idea what they were on about

On previous visits to London, I've never made it as far down the river as Tower Bridge and the Tower of London and beyond, so the location of the hotel, although quite far from the city, was good for me, because I got to see lots of things I hadn't seen before (like the Millenium Dome or whatever it's called now and the Gherkin).

On Sunday morning, because the Docklands Light Railway dropped us back at Tower Bridge, I decided that was going to be the start of my Sunday activities.  I was awake for hours on Sunday morning.  Even the loss of an hour due to the clocks changing didn't stop me being awake before 7.

I think Selfies are easier on those new Smartphone things.

I spent a bit of time reading the guide book to assess my route for the day, and I also killed a bit of time photographing myself in the mirrors in the hotel room.  I think these days it's called a Selfie, although I'm sure it's much easier to do one with one of those new fangled smart phones.  This is the best I could do with my 19th Century camera.

Tower Bridge, Tate Modern, Trafalgar Square, here we come!

The four of us had a nice breakfast in the hotel (breakfast and room were provided courtesy of my brother so that was a nice treat) and then we parted company around 12.  My train back to Darlington wasn't booked till 7.30 but theirs was at 3.30 and they wanted to go to Covent Garden before heading back, whereas I was more determined to see Tower Bridge and the South Bank.

This was my walking route for Sunday.  It's further than it looks!

On Saturday night I'd bought a day ticket for the underground for Sunday, but when Sunday looked weatherwise to be just as perfect as Saturday, there's no time to be wasted under the ground I thought.

Sunday - Not a day to be under the ground!

I nearly saw Tower Bridge in 2008 from the top of St Paul's but I was so scared of being up at the top of it, that I daren't look over the edge.  I found it much more pleasant to be able to see it from ground level on Sunday.

Tower Bridge - At last!  Only 6 years after my first visit to London

If Saturday had been notable for the regularity with which I saw people wandering around as if they were in some sort of post-comatose thankful to be alive state of delirium, Sunday wasn't much different.  The weather was equally perfect, which of course helped.

With views this good, you can't really go wrong!

I passed the rebuilt Globe Theatre, and then I spent a bit of time photographing a show-off dressed as a Transformer, before I sat down and rested my feet and checked my whereabouts against the pull-out map from the guidebook outside Tate Modern.

No-one likes a show off (according to my mum).

I found myself sitting next to three generations of excitable Japanese, who seemed to be having the time of their lives.  The children from the group were having a lot of fun chasing pigeons while the older ones were content just to watch.

All the World's a Stage and Men and Women are merely players - something like that

I'm not an expert on language, but the language I seemed to hear the most at the weekend was Spanish.  I suppose it is spoken pretty widely.  One of the great advantages about listening to people speak in languages that you don't understand is that it all sounds very exotic and exciting.  They could be talking about doing their laundry, or the latest episode of TOWIE, or the difficulty of finding a reliable plumber in the Greater London area, but it sounds so much more exciting than that.  No wonder church used to be in Latin!

A late, and very sweet lunch at Tate Modern

At about 2 pm I realised I hadn't eaten anything recently, so I went and had a sit down and some sticky toffee pudding in Tate Modern.  It was delicious.  It wasn't exactly ideal lunch food, but it was what I fancied at the time.

Here's me full of pudding

Once I was suitably full of pudding, I decided to go and take another selfie on that bridge that they use in the Apprentice.  I didn't really have the corporate wear for it myself, but this is what I look like these days!

Back onto the North Bank

I stayed on the South Bank until I reached the Golden Jubilee Bridge, and then I crossed onto the other side of the Thames, carried on up Northumberland Avenue, past Charing Cross and into Trafalgar Square.  I sat there for quite a while just absorbing the atmosphere.

Trafalgar Square

Two for the price of one - Big Ben and Nelson's Column

Although there was a nice atmosphere in Trafalgar Square, it seemed a lot more frenetic and less relaxing than the area around the South Bank had been in the morning.  That continued into Leicester Square too.  I'd only been there at night before, and I'd really enjoyed the feel of the place.  But this was daylight, and there were security everywhere.

Quick!  There's a young lad in a suit on TV!

Clearly there was some sort of film premiere on, as there were a lot of young people hanging around.  There were big screens showing images of some impossibly good-looking kid who looked about 12.  I figured he must be in it.  I wasn't hanging around to see him.  Doesn't he know there are good looking people on every street corner in London, I'm not queuing up to see him.

I might have queued up to see Freddie Mercury if he'd been on

Seeing as I'm such a fan of symmetry, I took this picture because it was of the Dominion Theatre, and only a week ago, I'd been sat in the Dominion Theatre in Edinburgh.

I continued walking up Charing Cross Road, where I bought some indigestion tablets and a Frappucino from Superdrug and by the time I reached Tottenham Court Road, I was getting dangerously close to King's Cross with still about 4 hours to go before my train back to Darlington, so I thought I'd better take a detour to look at the British Museum.  If there're nothing else on, you can always look at the ceiling.  That's a work of art in itself.  It was all Norman Foster's idea, as I understand.

If there's no good art, you can always look at the ceiling

There was some exhibit on about life and death and about how people throughout the world find strength in animals and community, and making necklaces, and religious rituals to help them ward off evil, and deal with death, and so on and I thought 'Oh, no, not more stuff about loss, it's everywhere'. But I was still drawn to it.

Oh No, not more stuff about loss.  I can't seem to shake it off

After the British Museum I still had ages before my 7.30 pm train home so I spent some of it sitting in Russell Square listening to Talking Heads.

Russell Square

I was so tired from all the walking that by about 5.30 I couldn't walk any longer so I decided to go back to King's Cross and have a sit down before my train.  I was slightly alarmed when I got to King's Cross as it was full of football fans.  The first few I encountered were spilling out of a pub and trying to get themselves knocked over at zebra crossings and that sort of thing.  They were Peterborough fans heading home after their team had won the Johnstone's Paints Trophy at Wembley.

King's Cross - Football fans were there but there was no violence, only pasties

It's an annoying trick of the mind that thoughts form involuntarily around anything which might even remotely be perceived as threatening, especially things which the media like to tell us we should be frightened of, and just as I'd started the weekend thinking: Asian man + Rucksack = Terrorist, I now had a bit of a Football Fan + Drink = Hooligan moment.

But stereotypes don't work (I know this from my time in secondary school, but that's another story), and the longer I mingled with the fans in the station, a lot of them turned out to be families with small children, and ultimately they were just trying to get home after a nice day out.  And so was I.

Monkeys - more dangerous than they look

There was a succession of trains to Peterborough that came and went over the next two hours, but many of the fans only had tickets for the infrequent and small local trains so they had to be packed in like sardines to get home, while lots of big and long and empty trains to Peterborough went without them.  Their tickets weren't valid for the Intercity trains, like the one I was catching.  But no-one complained.  They just waited patiently, standing around talking about their day, and eating pasties.

No policemen got smashed over the head with paving stones, no police horses got punched, it was all very peaceful, like the rest of the weekend.  When I did eventually get my train home, a family of four Peterborough fans were on there who'd had the foresight to buy Intercity tickets, and they were just a lovely family going for a day out.  In fact, they were just like many of the families I'd seen at the zoo, although the chimps they'd been watching had been dressed in blue, and they'd been kicking a ball around.

This is a monkey, not a footballer

While the football fans mingled around very peacably, I did spend an amused 20 minutes watching a family of 4 from Sheffield implode before my eyes.  They seemed to have been doing the opposite of bonding during their weekend away, and they now had grown to absolutely hate one another (if they didn't already).

All four of them were technically adults but they were having the sort of absolutely furious exchanges that you can only really have with loved ones you've grown to hate, about various minor subjects such as whether they had gone under a road before they'd come out of the station, and whether they'd collected all their bits of orange cardboard for the train from the ticket machine.  Eventually there was some swearing and they all stormed off in different directions, like a very amateurish version of the Red Arrows.  It's very hard to storm off while you're wheeling a suitcase up and down kerbs, but they gave it a go bless 'em!

We're all monkeys really!  Even if some of us don't live in trees anymore

The only other person I saw at the weekend who looked remotely disgruntled was a woman at breakfast in the hotel on Sunday.  She was dissecting a fried egg she'd been given as if she'd been served a dead kitten.  She spent ages telling her husband how many different ways the egg had not only been cooked wrongly but presented wrongly.  Personally, I'm not sure there's much scope for creativity when it comes to fried eggs?

I can't be too hard on these people though.  When I look back at my own life, I know I've spent a lot of time complaining about the eggs I've been given, and stressing about whether I've been under a road or not, and whether I've got all the right bits of orange cardboard for the train.  A sense of perspective is a wonderful thing, but sometimes it's an easy to lose thing too.

Probably best not to take myself too seriously

Something I've been reading in 'The Age of Absurdity' which I'm probably paraphrasing terribly, is that the brain isn't static through life, it constantly keeps rewiring itself.  It's never too late to make new neural connections, to reprogram ourselves.

I've always found it too easy to jump to negative judgements about people, and it's something I need to guard against constantly.  Half the battle though is awareness of my own thoughts, to realise that thoughts I'm having are not facts, but just thoughts I'm having.  If I start labelling people Terrorists or Hooligans I have to take a giant leap back and wonder why am I using those labels?

Something about my impressions of visiting London reminded me of this parable, which I've read several versions of.

A traveller nearing a great city asked an old man seated by the road,

“What are the people like in this city?”
“What were they like where you come from?” asked the old man.
“Horrible,” the traveller responded in disgust. “Mean, untrustworthy, detestable in all respects.”
“Ah…” said the old man thoughtfully, “you will probably find them the same in this city as well.”
A few hours later another traveller passed by and asked the old man the same question.
“What were they like where you come from?” he similarly asked.
“They were fine people. Honest, industrious, generous, caring; I was sorry to leave,” the traveller responded.
“You’ll find them the same here,” the old man replied.

If the outer world we encounter is often a reflection of our inner life projected outwards, then thankfully when it comes to London it's a place where I usually like the people I meet, whatever colour or nationality they are, even if I sometimes get in a tangle ordering coffee.

Nothing to be scared of?

My perception of London after a few visits there is still that it's a vibrant cosmopolitan city where people who are very different from one another manage to peacefully co-exist, often at very close quarters to one another.

Added to that, at the weekend, the sunshine and the warmer weather made the majority of people I saw appear to be literally 'Full of the joys of Spring'.  I know I was.

In the beginning, I was nervous about going all the way to London to be a babysitter, but ultimately I said Yes to something I was a bit scared of, rather than playing it safe by saying No, and the thing I was scared of turned out to be okay, and I had a lot of other adventures along the way.

I caught a train to York yesterday, and the final destination of the train I was on was King's Cross, and I could already feel London drawing me back into itself for more.

I'm sure it was Samuel Johnson who said 'If you're tired of London, you're tired of life', and he lived in a time when the Thames was pretty much just sewage, so if he liked it then, there's no wonder I like it now.  I'm hoping to go back very soon...


PS.  If you didn't get the film reference, I got the inspiration for the title of this post from the film 'Adventures in Babysitting' starring Elizabeth Shue.  Well, I just looked up that film up on IMDB to see what year it was made.  You guessed it.  1987!

PPS.  That film premiere that I was so dismissive of that was going on in Leicester Square, I just found out that I only went and missed Kate Winslet!  I was just saying last week in Edinburgh that we don't mix in the same circles and there she was!  That's what the security was for.  I might have hung around if I'd known, instead of spending two hours sitting in King's Cross with Peterborough United fans!

Foals and Chimps 2 – Return of the Chimp (now with 74% extra chimpiness)

It's 11 months since I went on my first solo trip to Edinburgh, which I wrote about here. That trip was my first proper solo trip anywhere, so I tended to play it safe and spend time in multi-national conglomerates where I knew I'd get a smile and a welcome (sometimes it might have been the fake sort required by corporate training programmes, although in truth in Edinburgh it never felt like that).

And some known ones too

So this week I had a bit of time on my hands, and it's after the Spring Equinox and I thought there might be some blossom on the trees of Edinburgh again, and I thought it was just warm enough not to go slipping around on ice, so it's time to go back I thought.

Some blossom I found near the Royal Mile

I've been doing some internet dating recently. Or rather I joined a site. Judging by some of the people who use the site, it maybe should be called an Internet Avoidance of Dating Site. Some people on there, the best way to scare them off into the undergrowth / guarantee their abduction by aliens / have them relocated under the witness protection programme, is to suggest a meeting in the real world. Thankfully that's not the case with everyone, but you would think that being able to match up your interests with someone in advance would be pretty foolproof. In fact, it's made me reflect that maybe drunken disco dancing isn't such a backward way of meeting people after all. If it's true for a woman that you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince, I think it's probably also true that as a man you have to email a lot of frogs who don't reply, before you even get a shot at meeting your princess. More of that in a minute...

Here's my internet dating picture.  See how those offers just flood in!

I don't really know how to think up my own holidays, so I often borrow other people's ideas. I once spent two years on a single minded mission to cycle round the Isle of Arran, which resulted in near divorce, just from a conversation I had whilst delivering some leaflets with Carol Burr at North Tees Medical Illustration. The plans for the two weeks I spent in India in 2012 were completely turned on their head by a talk with an Indian waiter called PS who said we should go north to Rishikesh instead of south to Agra (he was right).

There's a whole other side to the Castle, which I missed before

So in the tradition of borrowing from other people good advices, I did that again this week. One of the pleasant side effects of the internet dating site, even if it hasn't delivered much in the way of dates, has been accidentally coming into contact with people who know things about things I don't know things about. One such person is Louise, who is not only Scottish, and a travel consultant by occupation, but also someone who used to live in Edinburgh. You see, talking to strangers isn't all being kidnapped and looking at puppies, there are happy accidents too.

More Blue Sky - 2014 Edition

Louise used to live near my blue sky thinking picture from my first trip and partly due to my over-reliance last time on Starbucks, McDonalds etc she was happy to recommend some different places to go instead. So once again, I set off on a trip, propelled by someone else's recommendations.

I'd booked the 07.07 from Darlington on Monday, but I could have had a lie in as it turned out, as it was 40 minutes late. I wasn't too bothered, as I was only doing this for fun. There were some people in business suits on the platform, worrying about being late for meetings etc, all with Costa coffees and smart phones.

It's not the End of the World - it's just a delayed train

When the train came it was a replacement for the one which had my seat reservation tucked into the back of the seat so there was a bit of a scramble for seats as all reservations were still in the broken down train. I thought it would make a change this year to listen to Doves rather than Foals and so I tried, but I fell asleep for a bit. When I woke up there were some white doves visible out the window (they were probably gulls or pigeons, I don't know) and also we were just passing Dove Building Supplies. It was at this point that I thought about calling the trip Doves and....something else, but I wasn't sure yet.

Dogs maybe?

I sometimes feel overwhelmed by big things, like cities and mountains, and by the time I exited the escalator onto Princes Street in Edinburgh on Monday at 10 am this week, I felt very small. There were people everywhere, and big buildings and a big blue sky. I thought about climbing the stairs of the Scott Monument, as I'd seen someone do that on Cloud Atlas, but then I remembered I'm scared of heights, so I decided not to.

Other Food options are available, but hey, this is Scotland!

I couldn't check into the Travelodge till 3 pm, but I thought there was a chance they'd mind my bag for me till then, so I thought I'd go ask. The receptionist in the Travelodge gave me such an overwhelmingly friendly welcome that I nearly couldn't get through the door. She happily took my bag, gave me a raffle ticket and asked me what my plans were. I ran Louise's recommendations past her, and in a show of Scottish solidarity, she seemed to agree with them, so off I went.

The Grassmarket - Beggars ain't what they used to be!

Last year in Edinburgh, I never really went south of the Royal Mile, into the old city. I just didn't know it was there. But Louise had recommended the Grassmarket, so I headed there. First I went and got a leaflet from the Tourist Information Centre with an incredibly non-detailed map in it (which came back to haunt me later) and for reasons unknown and possibly to do with my still disorientated state, I chose a leaflet that was written in French. Probably the fact that Edinburgh was spelt Edinbourg on the cover was a clue, but not a clue I was remotely aware of.

It's a shame Black Dogs are synonymous with depression, because having them around is a lot of fun, even when they get into fights with other people's dogs and try to pin them down by the neck sometimes

Partway down the Royal Mile I saw my first dog of the trip. At this point I thought about calling the trip Doves and Dogs, but I wasn't totally sold on it.

As I explained last year, I always struggle to know what to do with beggars, and I can never tell if they're genuine or not. There was a scruffy guy sat down in the Grassmarket with his legs under a blanket, presumably a beggar. Just as I was wondering if he was suffering from some genuine hardship or not, he took a mobile phone out of his pocket and started scrolling through some messages on his touchscreen. Bloody hell, I thought, beggars aren't what they used to be. To quote John Cusack in Grosse Point Blank, 'I've always felt very temporary about myself', too temporary to even enter into a phone contract, and here's a street bum with a better phone than me. What's going on?

Victoria Street - time to get some cake I think

After walking round the Grassmarket for a bit, I went to visit another of Louise's recommendations, which was the cafe at the Queens Gallery near Holyrood House. Now, without that bit of insider knowledge, I wouldn't have even known there was a cafe there, as it's behind the gallery.

There's a cafe and toilets there, which are not obvious from this picture

I went in and ordered a coffee and some bakewell tart, which cost about a million pounds and was very sickly. It sort of made me wish I'd ordered something savoury, but there was free help yourself water at the till so I got some of that to try and get the tart off my teeth. One of the really good things about last year's trip was how sitting still made me relax, and sitting in the cafe had the same effect this time. It was really cold outside, despite the sun, but inside the glass roofed conservatory where I was sat, with the sun warming me through the roof, I felt much more centred. 

This was the view from my table.  Not bad eh?

 I had a read of the French leaflet, which made very little sense because it was in French, and then I decided to go to Camera Obscura: World of Illusions. I'd wanted to go there last year, but ran out of time after going to see some chimps at the zoo. What I hadn't realised about Camera Obscura is that you can make your own chimps there. It's a bit like build a bear, but for build a chimp you use your own face.

This is the cafe from outside - Also nice, but look out for the Bakewell Tart

Before I went to Camera Obscura, and to help walk off the bakewell tart stodge, I went and found Greyfriars, and the monument to Greyfriars Bobby. The statue is black, and during my two days in Edinburgh I saw lots of black dogs. Seeing black dogs always reminds me of my own big, dumb dog Hudson who died in 2006. There aren't any statues of him anywhere, I don't even have any good photos, but I still think of him often. I had to have him put to sleep in 2006, his heart eventually would have exploded otherwise and he would have been in pain, and I didn't want that, and as has been documented elsewhere, the final injection was given to him by an Olympic Gold Medallist Kat Copeland's mum (her dad also killed my hamster), so if ever there was any doubt that all things are connected, well London 2012 and dead dogs are. 

Not all things which deserve a monument get one - There isn't enough space

Hudson would have followed me anywhere I think, in fact he did even till his dying day. I keep his ashes in my bedroom, I kept imagining I would scatter them one day in his favourite places, but I never got round to it. I don't know the veracity of the Greyfriars Bobby story, but it doesn't matter. The loyalty of dogs is self-evident, it doesn't require anecdotes. I'm glad that it's me mourning Hudson though, and not the other way round. I wouldn't want him hanging around my grave, wondering where I'd gone. At least I understand what happened to him.

It means Dark Room apparently - Don't stay in there too long though, it's sunny outside!

I got to Camera Obscura about 1.30 pm. I paid the 12 pounds or so entrance, and the incredibly cheery ticket seller told me what a great day I'd chosen to come, as the views from the roof would be spectacular. And she even stamped my hand with a smiley face in case I wanted to go out and come back in again. She also told me I was just in time for the next Camera Obscura demonstration, so to head right on up to Floor Number 5.

View!  - Now that's what I call Blue Sky Thinking!

She was right about the views. They were amazing. The first time I ever saw Edinburgh live was in 2005 from a faraway hill, through a pair of borrowed binoculars.  And now here I was right in the middle of Edinburgh, looking out in all directions in more borrowed binoculars. I love this kind of symmetry.

History - Another word for stuff that happened ages ago!

The most haunting thing about Camera Obscura was a photo on the wall from the year 1900, showing the exact same set of steps we were about to climb up into the Camera Obscura booth. I thought about all the changes in history between then and now, and two World Wars and the Moon Landing and Nelson Mandela and Italia 90, and I also thought about how every single person alive when that photo was taken is now dead, and well, it made me glad to be alive. The views certainly helped with that.

Castle with some people - Small or far away?

A young Eastern European called Irina took us into the camera obscura booth and showed us the sights of Edinburgh reflected onto a big dish. I wasn't actually all that amazed by this. It seemed a bit nuts to sit in a dark room and look at things reflected in a mirror onto a dish, when the sights were outside the dark room to see in full 360 degree panoramic full colour splendour anyway. I think the history of the building itself was more overwhelming than the camera.

Here's me - Three Quarters Chimp!

After the show, I descended the other 4 floors of the building. A lot of the displays were interactive and probably better for children or in a group but I did have some fun with the photo booths. There were various options. You could make yourself Black, Asian, Chimp, Manga or Caricature. The choice was yours. I had some fun with this. In the spirit of last year's trip, I just had to turn myself into a chimp. For some reason I came out with a score of 74.2% chimpiness. I'd always thought it was nearer to 98%.

I don't really get how this is supposed to be a caricature - it's actually a good likeness!

I also had some fun with trying to find my hot spots with the heat sensitive camera. I took what may well be called a Selfie. I'm not sure about that.

I'm so hot it hurts!

It was nearly 3 pm by now, so I went back to the Travelodge, got my bag out of the raffle and checked in. My room was bigger than last year, but equally as untroubled by natural light. After the bright sunshine and sky of Edinburgh, it felt very dark. But it was everything I expected from a Travelodge room. Cheap, anonymous and clean. In fact, if the room had been full of seafood and dancing girls, I wouldn't have wanted to go out, whereas I find the sensory deprivation of Travelodges act more like a catapult, firing me back out into the blueness of outside.

I suppose recently I've been a bit fixated on stories of loss, not just fictional ones, but also losses of my own, things I've personally suffered, and as I left the Travelodge I was reminded of a book 'Lost Worlds' by Michael Bywater, which I used to own. It was full of nostalgia for things we remember fondly but which are gone. Sometimes I feel like the Spitting Image caricatures of Lawrence Olivier and John Gielgud, 'Johnny Gonny' and all that.

Yes, it's still blue out there!

Although my fondness for Waterstone's isn't maybe as great as it once was, since they keep firing me, I went there on my way out, and I was reminded of the joys of browsing. This was because I didn't find 'Lost Worlds' but I found 'The Age of Absurdity' instead by Michael Foley. I just don't think you can replicate the experience of looking for one thing, but finding something else entirely, like you can by actually walking round picking stuff up and looking at it, like you know, with your hands.

Last year in Edinburgh, another favourite haunt had been the Vue cinemas, where I'd seen various blockbusters. This year another recommendation from Louise was the Dominion Cinema in Morningside. She had said this was either a bus or taxi ride away. I don't do short distances by bus, so I decided to find it on foot.

Sometimes it's reassuring to know that despite my advancing years, I'm just as dumb as I always was, and also that I don't learn from experience. Spending 5 hours looking round Edinburgh in 2005 without a proper map wasn't a lesson I was about not to make again. So, with my French leaflet in hand, I set off to find Morningside based on a terribly inadequate map. Another reminder of previous ineptitude was that I actually passed the B&B I'd been looking for in 2005 on my journey to find the cinema in 2014. In fact, this time I went straight to it! Better late than never!

I'd been walking for about an hour, and my feet were getting sore, so I thought I'd ask some mums coming out of an after school club if I was in the right area for Morningside. Oh it's miles away they said, you'll need to get a bus, but it's quite a walk even to the bus stop. They pointed me in the vague direction I should have been going and so I turned pretty much at 90 degrees to where I had been heading and walked some more.

About another 20 minutes later I asked another lady, and she said I was going the right way, but it was still miles away. By this time my feet were really hurting. Joggers kept passing me, and I kept passing bus stops but they were all going back into the City. No mention of Morningside anywhere. I nearly got on a bus at one point, just to have a sit down, but after about another half an hour I found myself on Morningside Avenue (or Street or whatever I kept wanting to call it Mornington Crescent). I still had no idea which way the cinema was, and Morningside whatever it was seemed to go on for miles. I turned right, which added a third side to the square I'd pretty much been walking in, and just as I thought my legs might stop working, I found the cinema!

The Dominion Cinema - I'm glad I found it before dark!

I checked out the showing times, and I was about half an hour early for Labor Day with Kate Winslet, so I bought some water and just sat in a massive chair and was glad not to be walking anymore. Before I sat down, I checked with the ticket seller that I'd be able to catch a bus back to the City, as I wasn't doing any more walking. I also had to check which side of the street to stand on to catch the bus, as I genuinely wasn't sure which way I was pointing.

The ticket seemed expensive at £10.95 and the cinema seemed to operate largely on special offers and coupons, but I was just glad to be there. The doors opened at 7, and on the way in the usher offered me some free Pringles (not technically free given the ticket price, but nice all the same). Once inside, I knew why Louise had recommended it. No broken knee or numb bum syndrome to be had here. All the seats were properly massive and soft double sofas. And not only with side tables for your drinks and Pringles, but with footstools, so you could put your feet up. Sometimes things are made for each other, and my sore feet and the footstools were one such match up. I kept my shoes on though.

I like Kate Winslet. Well, I like her acting and she's nice to look at, I'm not sure whether we'd get on in real life, and she doesn't go to many of the places I do, so I may never find out.  I also like that she's aging at about the same rate as me, so I can often tell how old I am by watching her. Although in films like The Reader, and now Labor Day, she does keep getting made up to look even older, which can be confusing.

Labor Day was set in 1987 (why are there always so many reminders to me recently of 1986/87?), and Kate was hiding a fugitive in her house. It was actually a proper love story, and there weren't any explosions at all, although there was some quite detailed stuff about baking and making pies in it.

Somebody got pushed at one point, but Olympus Has Fallen it most certainly was not. No vice presidents getting kicked down stairs, no bazookas in the face, no hand grenades down the trousers. And thank goodness for that. I'm on holiday, I don't need Gerard Butler blowing people away, I'm trying to relax here.

After the film finished, I got the bus back into the City. After the hours of walking it had taken me to find the cinema, I was really hoping as I sat down on the bus that it was more than 200 yards back into the city. I hate short bus journeys anyway, but suffice to say, the bus journey went on for quite a long time, and the longer I was on it, the better I felt about all the walking. It did appear that I had done 3 sides of a square to get to Morningside and the bus completed the square. Not so much squaring the circle, but squaring the square.

I got back to the hotel room at 10 pm, with very achey feet, and I got a sandwich from Sainsbury's Local before retiring. Once again, there was a black dog in the doorway. They're everywhere!

Unlike last year, when I was always up before 6, I slept in till 7.30 the next morning. I really fancied a bath, since my flat doesn't have one, but the water was lukewarm, so it was a bit pointless, as what I really wanted was to have a good hot soak, especially my feet.

My train was booked for 2.30 pm, so I went off and did some more wandering in the morning. I had porridge at Starbucks (it was so 2013 in there, lots of people in grey suits on Apple devices etc, Spanish and Eastern Europeans chatting), and I read some of 'The Age of Absurdity'. All the window seats were taken by people on tablets so I had to sit in the middle of the room, where the lighting was poor, so I didn't read for long. I think I prefer it when I get there earlier, before all the suits arrive. Next time maybe!

Black Dogs - Look out, they're always behind you!

I walked round some more, getting my bearings even more re: the layout of the city, and then I went and bought a present from my brother from 'Unknown Pleasures' a vinyl record emporium on the Royal Mile. It's directly opposite the 'I Love Edinburgh' shop. I nearly had a Turkish breakfast for lunch at Cafe Truvas, but in the end I decided to go and get some watery pea and ham soup from the Queen's Gallery Cafe instead. I'd wanted savoury food from there yesterday but didn't get it, so time to put that right.

Quick - there's a sale on!

It wasn't as sunny as the day before, and I sat in the main building this time, instead of in the conservatory. Starbucks it most certainly was not! 9 of the other tables in the room I found myself in were occupied by pairs of people. Not just couples, lots of pairs of people chatting. Everyone else in the room had a full head of grey hair, and unlike half a mile up the road in Starbucks, there wasn't an electronic device in sight. A few leaflets and other things printed on paper, but no tablets, laptops, smart phones etc. And all the tables except mine (I was the only one dining alone) were full of the buzz of animated conversation and laughter. People meeting in the real world, comparing notes on things they'd done, and what they'd seen. There was genuine enthusiasm all around, and an absence of loneliness, except for maybe a little bit in me.

A different view - No dogs allowed

I left Edinburgh soon after, and I was left to reflect on what it was like to come back there 11 months after my first solo visit, and about the changes I've made to my life since then.  There have been some gains and also some losses but it's always good to know that whatever is going on in my life, Edinburgh is always still there, feeling more like home each time I go.  Like a giant comfort blanket filled with museums and parks and other historic buildings and places just to wander round in the sun.

I've heard the expression before, that it's impossible to jump into the same river twice, well I reflected while I was in Edinburgh, that it's impossible to visit the same city twice too. Even if a lot of the buildings are the same, there are always new things to see, which may have been missed before, and even the me that sees these things is different one time than it was the time before.

And now I've had a good run at Edinburgh, I'm all ready for the trip to London I'm going on this coming weekend. Two capitals in a week, what an adventure! Although for that one, I may need to get a proper map!   

Bikes, Burgers, Bunting and Big Shoes - What I did instead of watching the Royal Wedding in 2011

In 2011, the year after guiding 14 cyclists Coast to Coast from Walney to Saltburn (including a Bishop) I was trying to think of another cycling challenge for my friends and myself to do.

Although it's a pretty arbitrary reason to organise a bike ride, I like bike rides that can be explained to non-cyclists. A start and end point they've heard of helps, as in one coast to another, although to be honest as soon as I start talking about cycling, they mostly just go to sleep in a big bed of disinterest.

People who don't cycle are astounded that I can even cycle to the corner shop. They have absolutely no frame of reference. A bit like how people who drive everywhere in a car are absolutely incredulous at any distance further than one end of a car park to another that can be covered on foot. The thing about both cycling and walking, is that you can pretty much go anywhere, if you allow enough time.

Anyway, since I like York Minster and Durham Cathedral, and because they are possibly the two most well known places in this area, I thought cycling between them would be an easy one for people to grasp. The actual ride was going to take place over two days, including an overnight stop in Ingleby Barwick, but the day before the official ride, some of us decided to ride to York Minster for the start.

A bit like with birthdays, where it's sometimes easier to enjoy the day before or the day after, this prelude ride turned out to be maybe better than the ride itself.

Stephen, Mark and I decided to do the pre-ride ride, and part of the reason we were able to do it, was because we got an extra Bank Holiday in 2011 for the Royal Wedding, otherwise we might have just got the train down, and only done the main ride.  

For some reason all our rides seem to involve a stray clergyman / bishop so this time we took Stephen's brother-in-law Dick the Vic. The route to York was about 60 miles. Dick doesn't ride a bike normally, so he'd borrowed one. 3 miles into the ride at Hilton we stopped to put our rain jackets on, and Dick announced that, 3 miles in, this was now his longest ever bike ride, although he does run up stairs a lot. This is going to be a long next 57 miles I thought.

I needn't have worried. As podgy as Stephen, Mark and myself are, Dick is a lean spidery specimen, with hardly any body fat. He made a mockery of any theories anyone might have about how to ride up hills by completely failing to understand how to use the gears on the bike, and riding up the hill incredibly fast in top gear, leaving the rest of us for dead. He just likes to get the hills over with, he said. Don't we all.

Actually the hills only started after Brompton (near Northallerton). There were a couple of big hills to cover during the day, but nothing too serious. My route planning ability was called into question a couple of times by other cyclists we met though. As we crossed the A684 near Northallerton, a thin reed-like cyclist we met said 'Oh, you're not going that way, are you?. It's hilly'. Then further on, we met another cyclist who was running alongside his bike holding it by the saddle. He was wearing tiny cut off running shorts and his disposition was that of a scared man running away from someone in a slasher movie. 'Don't go up there, he said, hilly'. He looked like someone who had spontaneously given up cycling on the spot, and he was taking his bike home to throw it in a skip.

Despite the scaremongering of the locals, we were having a lovely day. Each of the little North Yorkshire villages we rode through was decked out in bunting to celebrate the Royal Wedding, and none was prettier than Felixkirk. By the time we got there, we'd covered around half of our 60 miles, and it was just after lunchtime. We should probably eat something, we thought.

Clearly the pub (The recently refurbished Carpenters Arms) had just finished having some sort of Royal Wedding barbecue, there were big gas barbecues all over the place, but not many customers, we must have just missed the main event.

We went in the pub, ordered some drinks, and before we had chance to look at a menu, the barmaid said 'Oh, we've been doing burgers for the Royal Wedding, we can do you a burger each if you want'. Okay, that'll do, we said. Can we have chips too, we said. She looked puzzled and said she'd include them for free. That'll be £40 please, she said. Bloody hell, that must include the drinks I thought, but No. Blimey £10 each for a burger, I know it's sunny but I didn't realise we were at Wimbledon. Anyway, we went and sat outside in the sun, enjoying our drinks, while they powered up one of the giant barbecues. They chucked 4 slabs of beef on the thing, which didn't look like a tenner's worth each, but never mind, it's sunny, and what could be more English than this?

Once the burgers were cooked, they were brought over on some oversized plates, and they still didn't look much like £10 a go. Just then however, whole teams of waiters and waitresses started pouring out of the pub as if there was a fire alarm, except they were all carrying side dishes to go with the burgers. No wonder they looked puzzled when we wanted chips, there were jacket potatoes, coleslaw, whole boards full of salad, some sort of chilli salsa dip kidney bean thing which was a meal in itself. By the time we'd made a valiant attempt at all that, we could barely walk, never mind get back on a bike.

Anyway, we eventually wobbled off in the direction of York, we had to go up another big hill at Crayke. I guess eventually some of the food must have started being digested, because the pain from the food balls in our stomachs relented a bit, but then Mark and Dick started to get rucksack pain, both in their backs and also they started to get rubbed by the shoulder straps. Dick's rucksack in particular was very big and bulky, so I wasn't surprised. Seeing as I was actually more of an actual cyclist, I had panniers on my bike, so I wasn't carrying a rucksack, although for the last few miles I did carry Mark's, to give him a breather.

We got to the Minster around 5, where we were met by Ruth, and although we'd missed the Royal Wedding there was another wedding going on outside the Minster. The bride was quite a bit older than Kate, but she looked absolutely stunning and she was worthy of a Royal Wedding all to herself, but, as lycra clad middle aged men, we tried not to spoil the moment by wandering into the background of any of the wedding photos.

As I observed the wedding, and the tourists milling around, looking absolutely thrilled to be in York, and I reflected on the day, all the little villages we'd ridden through decked out in red, white and blue, I thought if there was a day you could bottle to define how great it is to be English, and living in England, this was it.

Once we'd all checked into our hotels / B&Bs and as if we'd not had enough to eat already, we then walked for about an hour into York to do that other very English thing, going out for an Indian. At the Viceroy of India.

As well as being very tall and thin, Dick the Vic has got enormous feet, and as we walked into York, I noticed he was wearing a giant pair of clown size beige shoes. Dick, where did you get those?, I said. Oh, I've been carrying them all day. I couldn't believe it. I've been on week long cycling holidays with luggage that weighed less in its entirety that just the leather in Dick's shoes. Further evidence of his amateurishness.

But there are some advantages to being a proper cyclist. Despite the fact that Dick had made a mockery of our hill climbing and then he'd cycled all day with a giant pair of shoes on his back, one thing you can't avoid as a novice is the damage done to your, how can I say politely, contact areas, if you don't have regular saddle time, and as well as the welts on his shoulders from the rucksack straps, he had some on his sitty down bits too. Not so me.

For the second time in a day, we ordered way too much food and mine came in a bucket. It was delicious except there was so much it wouldn't fit on the table, a fact which the waiter greeted with absolute apathy.

The next day we cycled from York to home, and then the day after that we cycled from home to Durham, and although those two rides had their good bits, I felt a bit stressed by the whole being the leader thing, whereas the pre-ride ride was a pressure free bonus day, and I probably enjoyed it more for that reason.

So to sum up, thank you for getting married William and Kate. Although your wedding was an irrelevance to me, the extra Bank Holiday was one of the best days out I've ever had.

I was going to put a link to this ride in a recent blog post, and I couldn't believe I'd never actually written the post I was going to post the link to, so here it is. Better late than never.

The Still, Small Voice: Part Two - This time it's personal

There's something quite disconcerting about waking up from a dream at 1.25 in the morning to find Jesus hanging on a cross just above your head. But that's what happened to me in the early hours of Saturday. I was in Room 16 of Alnmouth Friary, a bit hungover from two bottles of cider, I'd been in bed since 10 pm and I didn't want to set my alarm for the following morning's breakfast, so as not to violate the silence that's supposed to exist between 9 pm and 9 am. Probably this is why my body clock decided to wake me up around 7 hours early for breakfast, just to be sure.

Annie Lennox's Tartan Suit - It's the stuff of nightmares

A lot of Christian traditions seem to prefer to depict an empty cross, to emphasise the fact that Jesus is risen, and not on the cross anymore, but at Alnmouth they have gone in for images of him still being on the cross in a big way. I got up to go to the toilet just after I woke, and there was almost a lifesize Jesus on the cross just outside my room. And there's another one in the garden. In fact, they're everywhere. The dream I'd been having was pretty weird, and some of the resulting thoughts which arose from it made me feel sad and bit teary. I guess if anyone can relate to suffering, it's Jesus..

In the dream I was at work and just finishing my shift and someone I'd been chatting to online but who I'd never met turned up at the office looking for me. I was about to ask her loads of questions about what she was doing there, but all she said was 'It's okay, there's nothing that needs saying'. Okay I'll get my coat I said, but that was the point when I woke up...

When I woke I still had my earphones in, and the song that was on was 'The Lovers are Losing' by Keane. To paraphrase the lyrics of the song, it's all about 'having a dream about having nothing at all, and looking at your past and your future from a distance, and taking the fragments of your dreams, which you don't like the way they've been going, and rearranging them with hopefulness into something new'. I was maybe reading too much into this...

Somehow from that I started thinking about my dead dog Hudson and the merits of cloning technology. I reflected that, although I've got his ashes in a box next to my bed, I don't want to have him cloned. The reason for this is all to do with nature and nurture. The dog I loved was terrified of fireworks, and he hating hearing angry voices, and sometimes he'd get a bit insecure around big male dogs and try to pin them down by the head, which could sometimes result in some awkward moments with other dog owners I met whose dogs were pinned to the grass by Hudson's fully extended jaws...

But that was the dog I loved. Despite his faults. And if I could take some of his ash and swill it round in a test tube until I got a little black puppy, I wouldn't want to. Like in the Boys from Brazil he wouldn't be Hitler, he would just look like him.

I suppose the logical extension of this thought was that I don't want to be cloned either. The last 45 years or so have made me who I am, and that continuous narrative that spills out of me every time I write or start speaking wasn't written into my DNA, and can't be reanimated from a box of ash. How would I even explain the 70s to a newborn me, living in 2014? He'd think I was making it all up.

The night before in the pub we'd spent a lot of time talking about the movie Robocop (mostly the 1987 version of course). By the end of the film, despite nearly having his body blown to bits and almost having his humanity overwritten by computer software, he still knows that the same Alex Murphy is in there somewhere, and he hasn't become a machine. Despite life's admittedly massive setbacks, he's still got his narrative intact...

I slept for a bit after that, but then I woke up again at 5 (Jesus was still there) and again at 7 , and as I'd not brought any books with me I read the Bible for a bit, mostly the old favourites (James and Ecclesiastes). Just before going down for breakfast I read the verse from James 4:14

Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

It was at this point (8.05 am) that I went down and sat through the silent breakfast. At first I found the silence oppressive but then I started to settle into it, and I didn't want to be the one to break it, when it finished at 8.45. Unfortunately, I spent a lot of the silence with a song in my head (All in vain, by the Vaccines), and the verse about being a transient vapour from James going round and round, and that made me even more aware of my narrative, and I kept thinking:

I don't want to be a mist that disappears when the sun comes out, I don't want to have lived my life in vain, I want it to count for something, I want to be the heroic star of my own show, who'll be remembered for ever...something like that.

At one point one of the brothers interrupted the silence to ask us if we were going to be in for lunch, but in the style of Keanu Reeves in the Matrix with his sewn up mouth, we couldn't answer him. Was this a trick, to see if we were following the rules?

Perhaps the effect of being squashed down like a spring during some of the night's thoughts about my own impermanence and by the silence at breakfast can explain what followed:

Stephen, Adam, Mark and I set off on our 10 mile walk to Amble, Warkworth and back and I suddenly turned into an airborne story telling projectile. Each and every subject that came up during the walk I greeted with the phrase 'Ah, I have a story about that'. To be fair, the other 3 had plenty of stories to share too, but stories were bursting out of me like popcorn out of the top of an uncovered popcorn maker on a high heat...

Subjects covered included Little and Large, lemon curd, the difference between rivers and seas, Blue Peter, Annie Lennox's Tartan suit and House of Pain...the list goes on.

Despite the fact that this was a walk and not a cycle tour, I decided to carry an oversize bag of spare things (in this case shoes in case the new boots I was wearing started rubbing), similar to how I always carry a bag of anvils and dark matter on our cycle tours, even when we've got a support vehicle. This also reminded me of our Royal Wedding Ride (I'll post a link later).

After about 4 miles, we almost got to Amble, but there was a river in the way, so we turned back to Warkworth and had a meal at the Hermitage Inn, which Adam researched on Tripadvisor before we went in. We were nearly put off by the age of the clientelle, as there was a man in a mobility scooter doing a 57 point turn outside, but inside there were some young people too.

Further strange rumblings from 1986 and 1987 came in the form of a playlist in the bar that included 'The Power of Love' by Jennifer Rush (she's half German, I saw her interviewed in German on German TV when I lived there in 1987) and 'Never gonna give you up' by Rick Astley, which came on about half an hour after I said 'The way this playlist is going, the only thing we need now is 'Never Gonna Give you up' by Rick Astley.

Also, there was a telly on near the bar scrolling through some photos, and at one point it settled on someone wearing Annie Lennox's tartan suit (there can't be more than one). This was getting more and more like the Matrix or The Truman Show...

The meal was excellent. I had some sort of salty brisket roast dinner followed by Spotted Dick (in honour of Dick the Vic with the massive shoes from the Royal Wedding Ride). Then the 4 mile walk back. My feet were feeling bruised by now, but the boots were still comfortable.

On the way to Amble we'd walked almost the whole way along the beach, and then on the way back from Warkworth we walked back along the cycle / footpath for National Cycle Network Route 1. Both routes were roughly parallel separated only by sand dunes, and each one reminded me of something from the past, two episodes almost exactly 10 years apart.

On 20^th July 1995 I walked along that beach with my first wife Beverley. She was a teacher, it was the first weekend of the 6 week holidays. After spending 70 nights in hospital in the months preceding that, and having had 3 major operations, there was a point she thought she'd never see anything else ever again, except the inside of hospitals. I think the emotion she felt on that walk along the beach that day, the ordinary wonder of being alive, had been sharpened by the months of fear and pain preceding it. This wonder can be lost in the noise of life, but feeling almost as if she was back from the dead, I can understand why she called it her 'perfect day'...

Having said that, it wasn't perfect for me. It was red hot, I'd forgotten to pack shorts, and as we wandered in and out of the sea, I removed my wet bottomed jeans and walked along feeling quite embarrassed in just my pants for a while. On reflection, for her, my embarrassment might have just added to the perfection, or maybe it made no difference at all...

Ten years later, 18^th July 2005, on the other side of the dunes, I cycled my first cycle tour with Ruth. That day we'd cycled from Whitley Bay, heading for Alnmouth, via Amble and Warkworth. It was by coincidence the first weekend of the six week holidays, and also our 6^th wedding anniversary. We ended that day in Alnmouth with a massive sleep inducing meal (at Beaches) and a walk along the beach before passing out at 8.40 pm. The next day didn't continue quite in the same style as we awoke to find a cat disembowelling a dead bird on the carpet next to the bed, but you can't have everything.

It may not have been apparent to my companions on Saturday, during the unleashing of my unlimited reserves of stories and anecdotes on the 10 miles we covered, but I was nevertheless on some level paying my respects to two previous versions of myself on the walk, the 27 year old version of myself who'd been there before in 1995 and the 37 year old version from 2005.

It's a bit cheesy, but something in the day reminded me of that cathedral book shop staple bookmark fodder quote about 'Footprints'. About alternating between one and two sets of footprints on the beach. It was another reason why I don't want to be remade in a test tube from a chunk of my own DNA. Because as well as all the thousand stories I did share on Saturday, there were other personal stories I didn't share. I didn't just carry an unnecessary pair of shoes all day. I also carried those two remembrances from earlier in my life. I wouldn't swap the memories of either day for being rebuilt from scratch.

A really nice part of the day was that I didn't have to remember them alone this time. Instead of being aware of my own pair of solitary footprints in the sand, next to where my previous ones had been, there were four pairs on Saturday, making a brand new memory from scratch, to add to the previous two. And it's another one I wouldn't swap for anything...

I did reflect afterwards on whether there was any meaning in my dream of the night before, or in fact no meaning at all. A day I spent moving between extremes of silence and an attempt on the world speed talking record made me wonder about the person in my dream, who said there was nothing at all that needed saying. Was that person God, or an actual person in my life, either past, present or future, who already understands me so fully, there's no need to explain anything?

On Saturday night, after my speed-talking-a-thon, I got chatting to an Australian called Dave, and he said as well as listening to the words I was saying, he was listening to the silence in between them, to the pauses. I was quite relieved to hear that there were some!

As I said to the glazed over faces of my friends in the car on the way back on Sunday, Ecclesiastes talks about there being a time for everything under the sun, but how do you tell when it is? How do you decide what to say, and what not to? And more importantly, how do you decide when? I read the whole of Ecclesiastes on Sunday, and it doesn't tell you when to do certain things, just that there's a time for them...

The last thing I read before I left on Sunday was this: From Ecclesiastes 6:12

For who knows what is good for a man in life, during the few and meaningless days he passes through like a shadow? Who can tell him what will happen under the sun after he is gone?

I guess everything I say and have ever said, whether in person, or by blog post, or in the olden days by letter, has been an attempt to explain myself, to put myself across in a way that conveys more than just the basic DNA of me that could be collected from a cheek swab. My very essence...

And that's important to me, because I don't want to be just a mist that vanishes...or a shadow that is passing through. I want there to be something in my story (and endless stream of anecdotes) which is lasting and indestructible, and which will continue long after I'm gone. 

 Is that too much to hope for?

28 years later – Still Desperately Seeking Someone (or Something) on the Road to Nowhere

This weekend I went on a mens' spiritual retreat. To Alnmouth Friary. About a million things happened, or rather I had about a million thoughts about things that happened.

Where are we going again?  And what is it we're looking for?

The car journey alone I could write a novel about, or at least a decent sized pamphlet. I travelled up after work on Friday with Stephen, Mark and Adam. The playlist in the car included 'Road to Nowhere' by Talking Heads. Amazing how one song can set off a chain of memories that became pretty much the equivalent of seeing your whole life flash before you, except when you're just about to die it only takes a few seconds, in this case it lasted the better part of 24 hours. Unfortunately, I didn't just let these images flash before my eyes, instead they set off a stream of consciousness type monologue that had some of my companions reaching for the glasses with the eyeballs painted on the outside of the lenses so they could get some sleep...

The theme of the weekend was 'the still, small voice'. I am surmising that the idea behind this was to sit around being quiet for a bit, so that we'd be open to hearing the 'still, small voice' of God. That's all very well in theory, but in my case this weekend my internal monologue was so deafening, stomping around noisily in massive clown shoes and shouting through a loud hailer, so full of stories and reminiscences that I barely stopped to listen for any other sounds (actually I did a little bit, but I'll put that in Part 2).

I suppose I got a strong sense this weekend of the cycles that life goes in, and there were so many references to 1986 / 1987 on the trip. Those were the two years when my life started on the path it's on now, and in many ways despite the 28 years in between I feel I'm back at the same crossroads, with the same choices to make all over again, except with a few more aches and pains..  It's a bit like the 28 year long equivalent of trying to get out of Kirkby Stephen in a thunderstorm in 2007, where thanks to my complete lack of navigational skills we managed to cycle for 7 miles and for an hour along roads which were under water, only to find we'd been going round in a big circle and ending up back again in Kirkby Stephen, soaked to the skin, and with shoes full of water (it's a metaphor for life!).

Anyway, this weekend I found myself in a car going north in a VW Passat on the A1 listening to Road to Nowhere, in 1986 I was in a mini going south on the M1 to Nottingham when the same song came on.  I was going to a university open day there with my friend Andrew. We were visiting separate departments so we didn't go round together for the whole day, but part way through the day I passed his car and the lights were on (it had been raining when we set off, but dried out and he hadn't noticed they were still on). No way of contacting him (mobile phones were still walkie talkies), this could be bad, I thought.

Sure enough, when we met again around 4 pm the car wouldn't start. I think we may have tried to jump start it. Then in one of those dreamlike sequences that you think you must have imagined, 4 very attractive female medical students pulled up next to us in an almost identical Mini and asked us if we needed any help. They even had jump leads! That would have been good, except when we put the cars back to back to use them (old Minis had the battery in the boot), Andrew realised the boot key was still in Leeds with his dad...

Anyway, the girls gave us their address and said if we were stuck later, to call and see them...by this time the only way to get into the boot was to get a new key from the local Mini dealership but they were closed till the morning...so we went to find the girls' house. They invited us in, and they let us use their landline to phone our parents...one of them (from Ireland) thought it would be absolutely hilarious if just at the point when I was trying to explain to my mum that I was stuck in Nottingham she would shout 'Oh, Jonathan, put the phone down and come back to bed, will you!'....

Although they were all very attractive, my favourite one was called Honey (I'm not even making this up), I guess if you can be in love based on one viewing only, in the style of Jack Palance in City Slickers, I was that night.  Actually the same thing happened me again recently, at a church fair in October, when I fell in love with someone who looked a little bit like Geena Davis, who was queuing up to buy some soup and sandwiches, and despite having to wade her way through a bewildering queueing system manned by deaf geriatrics, which had left me a sweaty mess just to get a slice of apple pie and a coffee, she managed to exude style and poise during the whole thing, even managing to calm her two children and elderly mother from a distance, who were waiting for the soups...but that's another story.  Actually, it isn't.  That's it, in its entirety.

There is of course a fantasy ending to the story of Andrew and myself and the 4 female medical students in a house for the night, which you can make up for yourself if you want to, but the reality was something else. 

Honey and her friends had some male friends in another house who were away for the night, and we slept there, in an empty house (I don't think anyone fantasises about this sort of ending), we got the key the next morning from the Mini dealership, borrowed jump leads from the Physics Department at the Uni, and got back to Leeds in time for afternoon lessons the next day. By this time, the story had got round of us being stuck overnight in a house with 4 medical students (all our classmates seemed to have chosen a variation on the fantasy ending), but never one to pretend, I sadly had to tell them that nothing happened...probably based on this incident, I ended up choosing to go to Nottingham Uni, but that didn't work out too well either...

Shortly after this trip to Nottingham, aged 17 and a bit tired of most of my friends having girlfriends and me not having one, I formed a group called On the Shelf (a group as in a collection of people, not as in a band). There were three of us (myself, Fraser and Ben). The timing was pretty good because it was just before Valentine's Day, and there was a Valentine's Ball coming up at Leeds Girls' High School, which we planned to go to. This was in the mid 80s, internet dating wasn't even a glimmer of shiny in the long distant future...  It wasn't long after the film 'Desperately Seeking Susan' had been out.  We thought it would be a great idea to turn ourselves into a 3 man advertising hoarding by having the words 'Desperately Seeking Someone' ironed onto 3 matching white shirts and wearing them in formation at the Valentine's Ball. Even that didn't go quite to plan, as two of us got girlfriends before the night anyway, but we still wore the shirts. In fact, although I'd been seeing a girl called Joanne for about a week before the Ball, that night was the first time we held hands or kissed (Ahhh!).

Possibly the thing you want to happen least immediately after you've had your first kiss with a new girlfriend on Valentine's Day aged 17 is to get picked up by coach and sent to Italy on a rugby tour for a week, but that's what happened to me. I left at midnight with the rest of the pumpkins, and for the next week, apart from a couple of payphone calls to Joanne, I had to just wonder what was going to happen next.  The story of the rugby tour, in particular my Rambo impersonation can be found here

What did happen next was me embarking on an intense 9 month relationship, during which I deferred my entry to Uni, and took a year out (Germany 1987 there's more about that trip here).  Before this relationship some of my friends had described me as in incurable romantic.  I thought there was just one special person for everyone and when you met them you'd just know.  Well, lucky old me, at aged 17, I'd met her already, and I was going to live happily ever after, in a rosy tinted future full of furry bunnies, and fluffy clouds (actually I might be confusing it with being dead)...

However, my notions of incurable romanticism were processed through that relationship like clothes through a mangle (ask your parents if you've never seen one).  It turned out that Joanne was the cure.  By November I'd been dumped.  We did meet for a final time in March 1987 (I think we went to see Children of a Lesser God about a man trying to communicate with a deaf and dumb girl which wasn't unlike the rest of the evening) before I left for Germany.  She had the shutters up towards me so completely it was like being out with an ice sculpture for the evening.  I think we had the 'let's stay friends' conversation, but I think what that actually translated as was 'I hope you get shot into space, and never come back'.

I even got the wrong bus home after that evening, and had to walk about 3 miles home in a thunderstorm where the trees were almost snapping in half all around me. At the time I was reading a story called 'The Cyclone' by Hermann Hesse about a young boy, who's about to leave home for the first time. In the story the cyclone had smashed up his home town and changed it forever and he now had to go out on his own 'to become a man, to stand up against life, whose first shadows had grazed me in these days'. I guess I felt the same at the time.

Well, here I am aged 45, I've been grazed by plenty of shadows in the intervening 28 years, I guess I'm still standing up against life, with mixed success. I'm still seeking, although these days I don't go around with felt letters on the back of a shirt, advertising myself to the opposite sex (you can advertise yourself online now, different levels of subscription are available).  

NB.  Just an update on the other two members of On The Shelf.  Fraser lives in Sydney with a beautiful wife and 3 beautiful daughters, Ben lives in Newcastle with a wife and 2 children (I haven't seen the photos, I'm sure they're beautiful too)....somehow the shelf is empty now, except for me....

Here's me sending out the wrong signals...

I'm not sure the tagline 'Desperately Seeking Someone' sends out the right signals anymore, if it ever did...probably something about the word desperately, which was of course, you've guessed it, my word.   

Now, all these memories came flooding back to me, just out of hearing one song on the radio. And I haven't even started on the weekend yet. At this point I'm still in the car on the way up the A1, and it's still Friday night...

To be continued....