Just experimenting with adding a photo

The seven sisters on the Beachy Head marathon.

We ran from here to over the horizon in this picture.




And then there was this.
Clockwise, using forum names, we have TT76 (nearest, with the back of her head to me), Kazzah, Yums, Mrs Pig, Nick, Greeneyes (I think), M1, Lurker, Womble, and Hippo.
Others were behind me.

Provisional diary for first half of November

Thu 1 stop over at Karen’s

Fri 2 Folk music meeting 7:30 / Anne arriving?

Sat 3 to Aber, B&B booked for two

Sun 4 Back from Aber

Mon 5 Mary's birthday

Tue 6 choir

Wed 7 WAH: diabetic review 1230 / Bass lesson / Running club monthly pub meal

Sat 10 Dance thing Colden Common 2pm / Scotty’s 40th party Sevenoaks / stop over at Karen's

Sun 11 Visit Fred??

Tue 13 Choir rehearsal

Wed 14 Choir performance Brooks shopping centre 6pm and/or running club 7pm

Sat 17 Hypnosis "Continuing Professional Development" session Kingston Hospital 2->5 pm

Sun 18 Brighton 10k social (not racing)? Or Mytho day (doubtful, to be confirmed)

I Thought I'd Seen Everything

But this takes the cake. The grand prize for hypocrisy.

Front page story in the Evening Standard. The whole front page.
Shock Horror two inch high headline.
Paparazzi tried to sell pictures of dying Diana for £300,000.
Shocked indignant tone. How dare these photographers act like that?

Helloo? This is a newspaper adopting this tone?
And putting a photograph of Diana next to the story?

Is it just me?

Liquid Lunch

Interesting paper in the most recent International Journal of Obesity.

They compared people's food intake giving them similar foods in liquid and solid form. When given the food in liquid form, people tended to consume about 15% more calories. (And 15% is a lot).
They tested different kinds of foods: high fat, high protein, and high carb. And they tested both lean and obese people. In all cases the result held up. If you need to lose weight, beware of taking food in liquid form. (Slimfast anyone?)

Clavicle

I was examined today by an independent doctor, for insurance reasons. It went well.

He checked my clavicle, and said that if it was him, he definitely wouldn't operate on it. That makes three consultants who've told me that, as opposed to a couple of more junior doctors who thought I ought to get it repaired. Basically, if there's no serious loss of function or discomfort, leave it alone. Nice to have yet another opinion.

He wasn't so happy about my wrist. He thought there might still be a broken bone in there, and suggested I should ask for an x-ray of it. I hadn't become aware that it was affected until weeks after the accident, so it didn't get looked at at the time.

And if I may blow my own trumpet for a moment, he said that he thought I had done really well in "getting on with things" and not allowing the injuries to bother me. I told him about Beachy. "You obviously don't feel pain like the rest of us" he said. Not true, actually. I've been very lucky.

By A Strange Coincidence

Not that I believe in coincidences. Literally as I pressed "publish" on that last post, the doorbell rang, and it was the nice man who's been painting my windows, coming round to fix a couple of snags.

He started telling me how he'd been at a wedding at the weekend, "doesn't drink", having given up in his twenties, but had drunk a lot of wine at the wedding and was now suffering badly.

I'm glad it was him up the ladder and not me. My legs are stiffening up. I shall try a jog later.

Cutting Down A Bit

I have the feeling I've been drinking too much recently, so I've decided to cut down for a while.

I don't think the alternation of "drinking too much" and "cutting it out completely" with each other is a good strategy -- "drinking moderately all the time" would be better. But I wasn't exactly doing that. I'm just back from a fairly alcoholic weekend in Eastbourne -- some of that RW crowd unfortunately take pride in how drunk they can get.

The next couple of months are tricky. There are already three dates in my diary that would normally involve serious drinking: a college feast (happens once every 15 years or so!), the RW Christmas social at Doggetts, and another RW social at Luton. But Christmas is coming up, there will be several other parties I'm sure, work-related, choir-related, various friends (Roger and Debra always give a good party, Paul and Gerry will, Andy and Jane probably will) ... oh and Scotty's 40th ....

I think the plan for the rest of the year has to be moderate drinking at "functions" and nothing in between. You heard it here first. Moderation in all things.

Stop sniggering at the back there!

Don't Mention The War

Did I imagine it? Or was there a weird item on the Sunday programme on Radio 4 this morning… about the Vatican beatifying nearly 500 priests in Spain who'd been against the socialists in the civil war and were killed?

"Coincidentally" the Spanish socialist government are trying to bring in a new law to ban any memorials to those who died on the other side, including any in churches, or even streets named after them. (Presumably they'll be expunging them from the history books too?)

"We're against fascism, so much so that we're bringing in a new law to tell you what you're allowed to say"?

(Of course, I shouldn't believe what I hear on Radio 4.)

The state is fighting against the church, just as a good socialist regime should, while, at the same time, the programme said, the church in Spain could not survive without government subsidies? So the government is subsidising them like a lame-duck industry?

Just goes to show how a government uses its subsidies as a political weapon to control and shape whatever it subsidises, for its own political ends. Subsidise nothing, I say.

Is it just me or is that all a bit weird?

The Clocks Go Back

Thank goodness

And my train takes a circuitous route home via Staines.

My rate of posting will probably settle down a bit over the next few weeks…

Beachy Head

Beachy Head was wonderful. Mind you, I'm still in the "I'm never running a marathon again ever" phase. "It's been emotional" as they say. The weekend was a roller-coaster ride, both in terms of physical elevation and mental. The profile of the route is a series of ups and downs totalling 3500 feet of ascent. And sometimes you have to go quite close to the edge.

The night before was chaos about where the RW people were meeting up: talk of the Odyssey chip shop, a false rumour of The Pilot pub, and eventually everyone seemed to be in The Ship. I met a few old friends, and a couple of people that I know online but had never met in person before, which was nice. I need the "I-spy book of forumites" (like a train-spotter) so I can cross them off as I meet them. Yums and Mark1 are now ticked off.

The B&B was way too hot -- probably heated for the elderly -- and I had a lot of trouble sleeping, which was not ideal preparation, as I'd only had a few hours the night before that. And they were not expecting to serve any breakfast before 8, which needed a little bit of negotiation.

The race itself was much better than I expected. Very scenic. And fine weather. I had been apprehensive but felt good nearly all the way round, until about a mile from the end, when one knee started to hurt. No trouble from my collarbone. No "hitting the wall". I felt able to sprint up the first of the "seven sisters" at about mile 20. Okay, she's the littlest sister, but still…. There was a lot of walking too, I don't want to give the impression that it was all running. We finished in 5:50 (whereas on the flat I would do maybe 4:30). I am very happy with that result over that course.

I'd never run a marathon with someone else before. It's better. No music, but conversation, and amazing scenery. Oh, and Karen had run another marathon a week earlier in Amsterdam. So she would have been fully entitled to have a lousy race; but she didn't. (She's Superman's big sister.) And the "water stops" were something else. Mars bars, fruitcake, sausage rolls, tea and coffee… it was a continuous pig-out …

And then another evening in The Ship …

Suzanne Vega

The Suzanne Vega concert last night was wonderful. I am re-enjoying it this morning, with flashbacks of musical moments.

It started out not too well, when it transpired that the venue's website and Suzanne's website had both been selling tickets .... the same tickets... and quite a few seats were double booked. There were little knots of people comparing tickets and wondering how it was possible that yes, they BOTH had genuine tickets for the same seat, and yes, it was today's date, and yes, they HAD got the row correct... The staff started out confident, then retreated to "all I can do is apologise", and eventually took to hiding. However, it all seemed to get resolved in the end, and our seats were not in debate. It gave us all something to talk about, anyway.

The support act turned out to be Gary Daly, one of the two main people from China Crisis. China Crisis? "Black Man Ray"? No?
And his friend (or possibly daughter?) Megan. They were quite good, too. Better than most of Suzanne's support acts. (I didn't like Nerina Pallot who supported her before, nor that over the top Christian guy).

Suzanne's set was excellent, and I particularly enjoyed (as before) the session with just her and bassist Mike Visceglia (Small Blue Thing, Left of Center, and Blood Makes Noise as I remember it).

And the instrumental version of Tom's Diner was excellent, much better than the "everybody join in clapping hands" attempt that she used to do. There wasn't a dud one in the whole set, really. I've not been that keen on her latest album, but she definitely sold me on one or two of the tracks last night, and she also did lots of old favourites.

Of course, us VIPs got to hang out briefly with Suzanne afterwards and take photos, while the lesser fans queued outside the stage door in the rain hoping for a glimpse.... what? Me shallow? Yes, but I find there is something about being "up close" to someone, in their physical presence, seeing what they're like after their stage persona drops (a little bit).

The price of coal

An interesting piece on the "Freakonomics" blog that I saw recently: apparently (and anything it says on the web must be true, obviously) there is a higher contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere from underground coal fires in coal mines in China, than there is from all the cars and light trucks in the USA. Not from the coal they actually use ... just from what's wasted in mine fires.

I've always felt that there was a deep vein of racism in the environmental world ... "junk food" is always characterised by MacDonalds, though how grilled meat on an unbuttered bun is supposed to be more junky than the stuff they sell in chip shops (cooked in fat that's been cross-linked by being kept too hot too long), or good old british pork pie, or chicken tikka masala, is beyond me ... but there it always is ... junk food ... American ... and CO2 ... caused by American cars. We need somebody we can all agree to blame...

Returning to coal, for a moment though: I always remember a friend of mine who is an X-ray technician telling me about the effect on his instruments when the wind was in the direction from the local power station. He could tell by the fallout when the wind was coming from there.
This was not a nuclear power station. It was a coal-fired one. And coal contains radioactive elements, and when you burn it, they go into the atmosphere, and then fall out.

Beginning Again

I've decided to start INWAP-ing again, this time on the web. For anyone who doesn't know, INWAP was previously published by printing it out on paper and posting it to people. (I may still have to do that for one or two who don't surf.) I rather liked the precise control that gave me over the format -- I could even choose the type of paper, and I liked to obsess over things like where line-breaks occurred. The premise of it was that it would never take long to read or write; hence the title.

I've had a busy week. Last weekend, I went to Devon to run in the Dartmoor Vale 10k, which sounds scenic, but is actually around the rather less scenic town of Newton Abbott. And then a social with some RW people afterwards. Our host told us just to turn up and go on in to the house, even if she wasn't there. There would be a dog -- a large german shepherd -- but "she only wants to play" .... I declined this opportunity. Country folk eh? What if I'd gone into the wrong house?

On Thursday evening I'm off with Karen to see Suzanne Vega. And then next weekend, we're running the Beachy Head marathon. Which is hilly. VERY hilly. Aargh. I've been doing a fair bit of marathon training, which means I've been eating like a horse, which means I'm now feeling all tired and fat and bloated .... this running is so good for us .... I've booked the Monday as holiday to recover.