Marie Curie - Serious over-achiever

Because cycling is something I do voluntarily for my own good, I'm very reticent about asking for sponsorship to do it. It feels a bit like asking for sponsorship to take your kids to the beach for an ice cream. For me, it's a leisure activity, a way of getting some fresh air and exercise. At one time, I might even have described it as fun.

I've previously completed 4 Coast to Coast bike rides. One was over 4 days in 2006, one over 3 in 2010 and then there was that incident when I nearly committed suicide training for and cycling Coast to Coast and back over 2 days in 2012.

There was also another aborted attempt to ride East to West from Alnmouth to Workington in 2008. I gave that one up 10 miles from Workington, because I had a devastating loss of form in a cafe after having two punctures and a nice cup of tea. With hindsight, it would probably have been better to carry on rather than booking into a Travelodge in Cockermouth that night, especially after the thunderstorm Ruth and I got caught in, which resulted in near hypothermia, and an attack of shivering so violent Ruth nearly smashed her own teeth out.

The only way to combat the shivers that night was to leave the restaurant without even getting the dessert on a 3 course Indian meal we'd paid for, just so that we could get her warm again under a blanket. Anyway, enough about that. I should probably at some point get round to doing a full write-up of that one. The losing and finding of my favourite bike lock would also add something to that story. Then again, maybe not.

Anyway, I'm riding Coast to Coast again in 2 weeks. This one will probably be a bit different from others I've done in that I'm doing it with 50 people I haven't met yet, and also sizeable chunks of it are off-road, so I'll be riding a mountain bike. Luckily I just bought one. The ride is being organised by those Purple People at Purple Mountain bikes, and I've decided to go on it, because their advertising says it's really good, and also they said that there's the possibility of making some friends for life on it (although this doesn't appear to be guaranteed, I haven't read the small print).

I hope that I've already got a handful of people in my life who are friends for life, but most of them seem pretty busy, and so I don't see any of them as much as I'd like to. This being the case, I probably ought to get some more. Just in case. Like for spares.

Anyway, the latest ride I'm doing is a sponsored event in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care. Although I already had some idea what the charity does, I thought I'd better check: It turns out they're pretty sound.

Marie Curie Cancer Care is a registered charity in the United Kingdom which provides nursing care, without charge, to terminally ill people at home and in hospices. It was established in 1948, the same year as the National Health Service.

In financial year 2010/11 the charity provided care to 31,800 terminally ill patients in the community and in its nine hospices, along with support for their families.  More than 2,700 nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals help provide this care.

At the nine Marie Curie Hospices, quality of life for patients is actively promoted as is providing much needed support for their carers. Marie Curie provides the largest number of hospice beds outside the National Health Service.

My first wife Beverley died of cancer in 1998. She was 34 at the time. Towards the end of her life, and as her illness progressed, a pretty horrible situation was made somewhat easier by the many doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals, who were on hand to support me, as I was trying to support her. For that reason, I'm not in any doubt how important the work of Marie Curie Cancer Care is.   

If none of the above is interesting enough for you, you should read the life story of Marie Curie herself. Here's just a flavour. I borrowed all this from Wikipedia. Some people criticise them for being open source, but the people on there know loads of stuff I don't. They can event tell you how an atom bomb works (I didn't understand that though).

Anyway, I quote:

The physical and societal aspects of the Curies' work contributed substantially to shaping the world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Cornell University professor L Pearce Williams observes:
The result of the Curies' work was epoch-making. Radium's radioactivity was so great that it could not be ignored. It seemed to contradict the principle of the conservation of energy and therefore forced a reconsideration of the foundations of physics. On the experimental level the discovery of radium provided men like Ernest Rutherford with sources of radioactivity with which they could probe the structure of the atom. As a result of Rutherford's experiments with alpha radiation, the nuclear atom was first postulated. In medicine, the radioactivity of radium appeared to offer a means by which cancer could be successfully attacked.

I used to think I was pretty clever when I was at school. I can't remember forcing any reconsiderations of the foundations of physics though. I once put a test tube that I'd heated up over a Bunsen burner under the cold tap to see what would happen, but that was just stupid. That might have been in danger of reshaping my own eyebrows, but it didn't do much for the twentieth century. 

Amongst other things Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and if you'd been around during the First World War, you would have been able to observe her somewhere very near the front line with her 17 year old daughter, operating some mobile X-ray units that she'd managed to invent. They were pretty useful for seeing through wounded soldiers to locate things like fractures, bullets and shrapnel.  This was of course a big help to the surgeons of the time, but the X-rays had the somewhat unhelpful side effect of causing radiation poisoning. Unbeknownst to her, the pioneering work she was doing was contributing indirectly to her future death.  Wow doesn't even cover it.

And if you're still not inspired, here are some quotations from her:

“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.”

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

Anyway, as inspiring as that is, in practice my confidence in myself isn't fully developed yet. Whatever I'm gifted for is some way short of being attained. I do have some experience of trying to understand things though, but I also remain afraid of lots of stuff too, so what to do next?

Well, I'm going to start by going on a bike ride.  If you want, you can sponsor me.  

here's my justgiving page

All the costs of this trip are being paid for by me, so any money you'd like to donate will go directly to Marie Curie.

The Memory of Running

I recently re-read the Memory of Running by Ron McLarty. Broadly speaking, it's a made up story about a very overweight 43 year old Vietnam veteran from East Providence, Rhode Island called Smithson Ide who spends his time lounging in front of the TV drinking, smoking and eating Pretzels. At the start of the book, his parents have just been killed in a car crash on the way home from a holiday, and just as he is absorbing this news, he finds out his mentally ill sister who has been missing for 20 years has been found dead in California, and he has to go collect the body. In a drunken stupor he gets his old 3 speed Raleigh bike out of the garage and rides it with flat tyres until he passes out in a field. From there his journey begins, cycling across America from East to West to collect his dead sister.

It's called the Memory of Running because as a wiry youth he would run everywhere, as he describes it, like a duck being shot at. There's a lot of flashbacks to his life of 20+ years ago, as well as the main narrative of his present day journey.

Recently my life too has undergone some pretty radical changes. Thankfully not as tragic as the ones that befell Smithy, but still pretty major. Part of it has been that a few weeks ago, I moved back to Leeds, after nearly 25 years away. I guess when I left, my life was all potential for the future, whereas now a lot of it is past history.

Although I'm not as fat as Smithson Ide, and I've never been shot at in any wars, I can relate to his feelings of loss and sadness in the book.

Having recently passed my 46^th birthday, I recently spent some time looking at my rugby team photos from school, wondering where those 30 years have gone.

In the days when those pictures were taken, I was like the young Smithy Ide, I could just run and run. I could run beyond tiredness into a place where I felt like I could run for ever. I was always out playing football it seemed, often till well after dark, jumpers for goalposts and all that, even in the summer. Some nights it would be so dark, you couldn't see the ball anymore, although you generally knew it was somewhere near when it either hit you in the face or went whizzing by your ear, but we'd keep playing anyway.

As well as playing rugby for school on Saturdays, I used to play football for a team in Garforth on a Sunday. In those days running was incidental, a way to be faster at chasing a ball. It wasn't an end in itself.

I suppose, in some ways, running for me has always been a bit like the cycling was last year. A series of false starts. I used to be made to run cross country at school, but after 3 weeks of it, when I was just getting good, we'd stop. I ran a 10k in around 45 minutes when I was 18, but in those days running was just something I did to kick start my rugby and football training after a summer off, so I never stuck at it for it's own sake.

I started running briefly in 1994, and again in 2002 in preparation for the Great North Run which I never took part in because I was having trouble getting beyond 5 miles at a time.  The last time I even tried running was before I got Rheumatoid Arthritis in 2002. After that my joints were so sore I couldn't even run for a bus.

So anyway, here I am, back in the place where I grew up, dealing with a sense of loss over the potential that was my life 25 years ago, and also feeling somewhat melancholy over stuff that has gone wrong in the intervening years, and I wanted to do something to help make me feel better about myself, as well as helping me feel more at home and part of the community. And I'd somehow stumbled across Parkrun when I'd been Googling something or other, and I thought it sounded good.

In some ways the previous few months prior to moving back to Leeds had been good preparation. The autumn and winter I spent walking to work through roads lined with dogshit in Darlington coupled with not eating as much crap as I used to had helped me lose a stone in six months, so I thought at my current weight of around 13 stone I might be able to run for a short while without my knees shattering. I was sort of right.

Running is very low tech compared to cycling I thought. You don't need to know about anything mechanical, and you don't even need to carry a puncture repair kit.

Anyway, it took me a week to get my Parkrun barcode printed, due to the library printer breaking pretty much every time I tried to send a print to it, and when I turned up 4 Saturdays ago at the start of my first Parkrun, I hadn't even managed a practice jog.

The parkrun at Temple Newsam, like all parkruns is 5 kilometres long. It's basically 2 laps of the park, and at Temple Newsam it starts by going uphill and over the brow of a hill. It's probably about 200 metres before you're out of sight. My goal was to get over the brow of the hill before I started walking.

I surprised myself on that first run, because although I was progressing at a snail's pace, I could breathe okay, and I was managing to keep running. I didn't look back but I knew there must be a few people behind me. At one point I overtook a man who looked about 70 who was walking with his grandson. In your face grandad! I thought. Actually I made that part up.

Although what I was doing seemed to be barely above walking pace, I did manage to get round the full 5k without stopping, in a time of 35 minutes 46 seconds. Just as I was approaching the finish someone shouted to me 'next time try not doing it in a jumper!'.

For 3 days after that I was pretty much unable to walk. I'd been too tired to warm down properly and my legs were just smashed from the shock. And my feet were killing me because my 12 year old running shoes were apparently no longer a very good fit, if they ever were. But the boost to my mental state was impossible to calculate. Partly the social side of meeting new people but also the actual running made me feel better.

Since then I've bought some new running shoes, and I've done 3 more parkruns, as well as a few other 3 mile runs. Over the first 4 parkruns, I've been improving by around a minute a week timewise. Clearly that won't go on for ever, because if it did, I'd be in the Olympics in about 3 months, but if you're slow to start with, it's easier to get faster. I may have overdone it by doing a bit too much too soon though, because I'm currently getting a lot of knee pain, and having started cycling again too, I need to manage how much I do of each.

But after re-reading 'The Memory of Running' and after doing a limited amount of running again myself, I've started to remember the sense of joy and freedom that can come from being out there on the road. Although there are a lot more aches and pains than there were 30 years ago, I know that, whatever the rest of the circumstances of my life are, on the days when I run, I feel better than on the days when I don't.   

Of course England lose at penalties - our goalies are just not mad enough

Some people say England lose in big football tournaments, because they can't take penalties, I say it's because England goalkeepers are just not crazy enough..

It can't be any coincidence that the only big game that has ever ended satisfactorily for us on the world stage was at the end of the Second World War in Escape to Victory when someone snapped Kevin O'Callaghan's arm in half so they could send on a big dumb American to play in goals.  He didn't even know how to play football but he still managed to save the last minute penalty.  The German penalty taker didn't miss it because Sylvester Stallone was any good between the posts.  It's just that he was larger than life and he had a right gob on him.  And he jumped around a lot in slow motion.

I occasionally used to play in goals when I was a kid. Mostly when none of the first five choices of goalkeeper were available. I once played in goal in a pre-season friendly against the age group above us that we lost 13-2. I was about 12 at the time. The only save I made in the whole game got knocked in on the rebound. And do you know what the manager said to me afterwards?

He said: “To be fair, although basically your all round game was shit, your main problem was that you were nowhere near angry or dangerous enough. None of the attackers at any point were afraid for their lives, none of them expected to lose a limb when they got near the penalty box.”

I'm 46 now and I've got arthritis and if I drop a tea towel on the floor it can take 15 or so minutes for me to bend down and pick it up, but I think if you stuck me between some goalposts doing my tea towel thing in slow motion I could probably still save one penalty in 10. Most of them just go down the middle anyway. And if you were to wonder where you'd seen that old tea towel recovery manoeuvre before, that's right you've guessed it, it was Peter Shilton in Italia '90.

I don't blame Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle for 1990. It was Shilton. He was 40 at the time, and he wasn't so much going down in instalments, he was going down in those weekly instalments that you get from the newsagents that you used to spend your pocket money on. You know, the ones that were cheap for the first two weeks, and then they cost a fortune every week after that for an unending load of old crap. He seemed to spend the entire shootout waiting for Issue Z.

Now, admittedly Shilton is the most capped England player of all time, and I've won, well no caps for England, but let me advance a theory...

England don't get knocked out because they lose on penalties. They get knocked out because their goalies just aren't hard enough. England goalkeepers are neither the right sort of crazy nor the wrong sort of dangerous to make truly world class stoppers.

And Robert Green throwing the ball into his own net wasn't even the start of it...Oh no...

Maradona in '86, for example. All that controversy about the handball should have been academic. Maradona shouldn't have got anywhere near that ball. The much taller Shilton, who was actually allowed to use his hands, should have cleaned him out well before he got even close. I'm not sticking up for Schumacher and his atrocity against Battiston in the 1982 World Cup semi-final when he nearly killed him, but at least in that incident, and despite the clumsiness and recklessness of his actions, Schumacher was at least alive to the danger. The ball hadn't even got into the penalty area.

And Maradona's second goal in '86, you know the greatest goal of all time and all that. If it'd been Ramon Quiroga of Peru circa 1978 he wouldn't only have stopped the first Maradona goal, he's have stopped the second one too, by strangling him on the halfway line.

Going back to Shilton, it should never even have got to penalties in 1990 against Germany. If Shilton hadn't fallen over into the net after Paul Parker's deflection, it would have been 1-0. If Peter Schmeichel had been in goal he wouldn't have even needed to jump for it, he would have scared the ball away just by screaming at his defenders. And in the penalties themselves Shilton was like a statue. The German lad was half his age. Why didn't he retire in about '87?  He didn't even think to try and put the Germans off by doing a jelly legs Bruce Grobbelaar impersonation.

Then there was Seaman in 2002. Falling into the net and crying into his ponytail, because he got chipped from the halfway line by Ronaldinho. If he'd been a nutjob like Higuita from Colombia he wouldn't have only stayed on his line, he'd have cleared it with a Scorpion kick. Or if he'd been more like Chilavert from Paraguay he'd have gone up the other end and smashed in a free kick of his own to equalise, then if they'd still got knocked out by the world's first ever Golden Goal from Laurent Blanc he wouldn't have sat around crying in the goal and feeling sorry for himself, he'd have gone round and commiserated with all his team-mates

And I wasn't old enough to watch Bonetti in 1970 but I do know his challenge on Gerd Muller for the winner was non-existent, I've seen the replays...

It's not as if the English haven't had any role models to follow. If only we'd paid attention. When Bert Trautmann was running around with a broken neck snapping the legs of anyone who dared come near him in the 1956 FA Cup Final, why wasn't this being put into an FA coaching newsreel to be shown to our up and coming goalkeepers. I could have done with a dose of that myself. I might have only lost 12-2 then.

Some people have said that I can be a bit harsh on Shilton, and admittedly I'm no football expert. So here are some words from Brian Clough, someone who managed him for a number of years at Forest, from around 1989. (I met him once at a book signing, but every bloody local journalist in the greater Teesside area was trying to get 5 minutes with him, so I never got the chance to ask him about the 1990 penalty shoot-out)

"Shilton has shot his bolt," insisted Clough, after the veteran keeper gained his 102nd cap against Sweden.

"The World Cup finals are 18 months away, but 18 months is a long time for a goalkeeper who is already 39 years old".

If he'd retired sooner, instead of going on to amass a record 125 caps, he could have avoided the spectacle that was his final game, the third place play-off against Italy at Italia 90 when he ended up wandering around his penalty box for about half an hour, like a man who'd forgotten where he'd parked his car. Of at least if he'd chopped Baggio or Schillaci down, like Trautmann would have done, he could have gone out in a blaze of glory.

I suppose in retrospect he was still a better goalkeeper than I was. I never got another game in goals after that 13-2 defeat. Although I did go on to become quite an aggressive outfield player, who at one point circa 1982 did my very own Ramon Quiroga impersonation, by rugby tackling a big fat kid with tree trunk legs who I otherwise just kept bouncing off. I didn't even get booked. Everyone just laughed, including the referee. It was in the days of Schumacher when football was more like cage fighting, and you had to more or less kill someone to even get a yellow....But that's another story....

Borrowing the will of the ball

For about two years now I've pretty much hated cycling. Even seeing people in lycra has annoyed me. I hated it so much I gave it up. For 197 days since last October.

Mentally for me, cycling had become an attritional and miserable activity involving being wet and cold and in the middle of nowhere, and bikes had become the kind of obstacles that you fall over repeatedly indoors when you're trying to get the hoover out of the cupboard, rather than things for outdoor use. A hobby that started out as a bit of fun and a chance to get some fresh air and see some new places had turned into the sort of thing that Peter Jackson could have made a new trilogy out of.

Arriving in Arnside in June 2012 under a misty, soggy, dark and rainy sky, after a 108 mile, 13 hour bike ride, and being unable to remove my own socks, knowing I had to do it all again the next day, then being up most of the night downing Powerade and doubting my own legs and then getting up and doing just that might have been my greatest ever achievement on a bike, but it was also the point when I realised most clearly that it had stopped being fun. I pulled more muscles trying to get those socks off that I ever did on the road.

But that wasn't the start of the misery. No, that came a long time before. At the start of 2011. With a whole year's worth of cycling for Ruth and I having been not only planned but written down in felt pen on a laminated wall planner (being so organised for once must have been a bad omen), Ruth was hit by a car in January and all those plans were ruined.

Except I didn't notice. Instead of adapting to the new information, I kept plodding along the pre-planned track, thinking that it was just a ripple in the stream that would correct itself.

The low point of my evidence denying lunacy was attempting a 200k Audax on a baking Easter Saturday, while Ruth was at home in the garden. I was being driven by forces I didn't even understand. After 30k of it, having pulled a few muscles going off too fast, and stunned by the bewilderingly long list of places I was supposed to cycle in and out of in the next 12 hours, in weather so hot I could have fried an egg on the pavement, I gave up and went home. But by then Ruth and I had become out of sync.

I persisted in arranging a cycling holiday for us in May 2011, when for Ruth even the sound of a car engine could induce panic and fear, and it became less a holiday and more a post traumatic stress filled, ash cloud and hurricane strength winds fleeing misery.  

With that, my main fortnight's holiday of the year was gone, and plodding along as I was in a job that was driving me round the bend, by the summer of 2011 I was completely unravelling mentally.

By August I reached a breaking point. I walked in to work one day and walked straight back out. At a time when Ruth needed me to be there to lean on, instead I was collapsing under the weight of my own anxieties.

2012 started with some unemployment and a trip to India. I'd become a dead man walking, and it was an attempt to bring me back to life. For someone like me, who hates unpredictability, it should probably have been kill or cure. In the end I'm not sure it was either.

Another accident in February 2012 put paid to Ruth's cycling recovery, and our chances of getting back into sync on the road. By that time I was heavily into training for the absolutely bonkers challenge, that was cycling Coast to Coast to Coast over 2 days with a bunch of other 40 something mid-life crises made flesh. The irony is, despite the unremovability of wet socks, and the appalling weather on that ride, and in all the training rides that led up to it, it may well have been my finest hour on a bike. It just didn't feel like it. It was nothing like the fun-filled, sun-filled lengthy pub lunch enjoying (and occasional trip in an ambulance) jamboree that had been 2010's C2C. No, it was grim.

After 2 years of being disconnected from her bikewise, I resolved at the start of 2013 to put the emphasis back onto cycling with Ruth but again January was a disaster. I was miserable all through a group weekend away, feeling mentally completely fatigued and all at sea, and within 4 months we'd somehow contrived to split up altogether.

As a cycling year 2013 was a failure. At first I couldn't get going on a death trap of a bike that had a special gold ring missing from the steering (cue Peter Jackson). Overweight and with no motivation or will to continue, I was half-hearted at best. Instead of completing things in a weary and bedraggled state a la 2012, I stopped completing them at all. I'd gained two stone since the high point of 2010 when I'd done nearly 5000 miles, and I was feeling sluggish in every way.

By May 2013 I was living alone in Darlington, and the few rides I did with friends that year, rides I would have coasted through previously, I either grovelled through, or gave up part way. Going uphill in particular had become a crawl-a-thon.

By the summer of 2013 I decided to start at the very beginning again. Instead of trying to be a macho man riding the big distances in the wind and the rain I decided to start small.

Instead of thinking about distance, I tried to just enjoy being on a bike again. And for a while it worked. With no car anymore, I really started to enjoy the 3 miles each way to work and back on the mountain bike (the other bike Ruth had bought me, the less death trappy one).

The roads were pretty potholey but with the suspension and the big tyres I didn't feel the bumps, and I was really enjoying being able to ride up the kerb. I also liked the fact that I didn't need to carry any spares, because the longest distance I'd have to walk in the event of a breakdown was a mile and a half.

And so I had a brief relapse into enjoying cycling again. I rode through South Park each morning with the morning dew still fresh on the bowling green, getting abuse off parrots and talking to dog owners and on those short sun-filled journeys, whatever it was that had ruined cycling for me was being repaired bit by bit but then in August some little shite stole that bike I loved and that was the end of that. My enthusiasm was lost all over again.

For a while I continued tackling the potholes on the road bike, but I felt the bumps a lot more, and getting up the kerbs wasn't anywhere near as much fun.

There was a bright spot of going to Scotland in September to ride round some Scottish Islands on the finally fully functional former death trap, but mostly that was about using the most efficient means of transport at getting round the islands, rather than wanting to ride. Even an 80 mile dash back to Ardrossan to get home in time for Graeme's Audax was ultimately a bit of a let down, when I didn't complete that ride either.

By October when the clocks had changed and I was going to and from work in the dark, on skinny tyres, and over potholes everywhere, I just thought 'Ah, fuck it, I'd rather walk'.

So for almost six months, from October till the end of March at which point I gave up my job to move to Leeds I walked to work every day. 3 miles each way. In the dark, and in the wind and the rain. Along roads lined with dog shit, under a railway bridge that had to be power washed every day to get the pigeon crap off. Because I didn't have a car, I walked lots of other miles too. Some days up to 10 or 12 miles. I know this because for a while I carried a pedometer.

I don't really do strategy, but if there was any vague strategy behind my actions it was that I was going to spend six months walking, and then if I ever did get back on a bike again, I'd have lost some weight, and I'd have some residual stamina in my legs to start with.

When I moved to Leeds last month, I thought the move would help revive the cycling. Having somewhere new and different to ride. At first it didn't. I bought the Sustrans map of West Yorkshire, but for a month I only ever looked at it from a chair, and never from the road.

I even took up running instead. There were various reasons for this, but some of it was undoubtedly bike avoidance.

Then one day, shortly before I passed 200 bike free days, I finally took the road bike outside again. The cycling was pretty much how I remembered it. Fatigue, mental confusion, inability to map read, going round in circles, mud, dog's climbing up my leg, potholes, dirt tracks, bin lorries scaring the crap out of me, so tired I lost all language skills by halfway. That sort of thing.

But despite all that, it gave me the push I needed to finally replace the stolen mountain bike. And then a morning of nearly removing my own fingerprints trying to attach an old style bike computer and magnet to the mountain bike convinced me to buy a Garmin, and so the ball was rolling again. But I was still felt somewhat lacking in real motivation.

For a long time in the last year or so, I've been fixated on the past. On the pivotal moments in life when I've chosen certain paths. And I've been very aware of the things I've lost. Sometimes those feelings have seemed overwhelming. The decision to move back to Leeds after nearly 25 years away brought back a lot of memories and it made me weigh up everything that has happened during that time away.

I know that there's a tendency, which I'm invariably guilty of, of sometimes looking back on large periods of life, and only picking out the salient events which demonstrate the areas where things have gone wrong. Woe is me and all that. It's probably that thing called awfulisation that my counsellor was on about that time. Well, for a long time that had been me and cycling (it was also me and Darlington, but that's another story). For those 197 bike free days I was only thinking about the bad stuff. Like a child with an otherwise happy childhood, who couldn't stop thinking about being force-fed Brussel Sprouts at mealtimes.

Anyway, as far as the recent past goes, and the cycling in particular, well somewhere in the misery that I got myself lost in, I managed to separate and alienate myself from the person who was most responsible for getting me into cycling in the first place, and who was the one who would pick up the pieces on the road when I crumbled, mentally or otherwise. The person who I was most evenly paced and in tune with, and who would take charge and go order me some food when I was imitating the action of a zombie in Killin or Berwick-on-Tweed. And in other places, when I couldn't remember my own name, or where I'd come from that day. That's not to suggest it was all plain sailing out there, all sweetness and light. Far from it, there were plenty of instances of near divorce at the roadside too.

As for things as they are now, well whatever the rights and wrongs of the past, you can only start where you are. I suppose, in the end, with life, as in cycling, eventually you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself, thinking about what's gone wrong, and just get on with things. For the sake of the present, and for the future. Otherwise 197 days can turn into the rest of your life.

Re: the cycling, some advice I'm probably misquoting came some time ago from my friends Graeme and Stephen, who have both said (sort of) that if you don't set any goals, you won't do anything.

If I know myself at all, I know that I lack the motivation for going it alone. I just don't have the will to do big stuff by myself. It's why I never decorate. Historically I've always been better in a team, or a partnership. It's why I was good at rugby and football but crap at squash and tennis. When it was only me I just didn't care.

There's a scene in the film Awakenings with Robin Williams, based on the real life experiences of Oliver Sacks, where otherwise seemingly comatose patients will stick their arm out to catch a passing tennis ball, and he describes this as 'borrowing the will of the ball'. Sometimes I lack the means of giving myself the push I need to do things, and so I also need to borrow some willpower from outside myself.

Anyway, since I want to do some stuff, but haven't got the heart for going it alone, I decided that the only way to properly kickstart my enthusiasm for cycling again, was to join some organised events.

Because I lack the get up and go to get up and go by myself, a possible way round it is to find some other people who are going, and get up and go with them instead, even if I don't know who they are. So that's what I'm going to do.

Today I've signed up to do a Coast to Coast ride at the end of June and an End to End (Land's End to John o' Groats) ride in September. Both trips will work out somewhat more expensive than if I were to do them alone and unsupported. But that's kind of the point. To do them alone and unsupported means in all likelihood not to do them at all. Because for me they are big things. Not just physically but mentally and emotionally. And to do them I know I'll need the benefit of mutual encouragement / shared experience / no man is an island and all that.

Now if it would just stop raining for 5 minutes, I could go out and do some training..

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!