Destroy All Onions!

On holiday, I brought my new little mp3 player with me, the one I bought to replace the one I landed on when I fell off my bike (crunch). It’s a Zen Stone Plus – a tiny little player, with 2Gb of memory, and an FM radio.

Unexpectedly, it took a complete fascination with one song (out of the maybe 200 or so on it), and decided to play it most days, in a very un-random way. I started to wonder what it was trying to tell me.

The song was “This land is your land”, by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings (do give it a listen – here for example). The Dap Kings are the backing band Mark Ronson used for his Version album, backing the likes of Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse. This is them in their natural environment, with their usual lead singer. It’s very funky, and I do like it.

The song is clearly inspired by Woody Guthrie, with its message of a land to be shared by all. But I reckoned the bit that stood out most for me was the 4th verse:

One bright sunny morning
in the shadow of the steeple
down by the welfare office
I saw my people.
They stood hungry
and I stood wondering
If this land was made for you and me.

And in this verse, there was one word that stood out. The word “my”. The writer did not see “the people”, or “some people”, or “a crowd of people”. They saw “my people”. I think that one line challenges a lot of what is wrong with the world today.

Are the hungry in the welfare line my people?  Do I associate or identify with them? Or are they just “some people”, or “poor people”. We can give money to good causes for good reasons without giving ourselves.

So that’s what I think my MP3 player was challenging me with.

Or I could be reading too much into a poorly written pseudo-random playlist function.

But it’s worth thinking about.

I had a good holiday for cycling. One of the local bike hire shops was doing basic mountain bikes for 3 days for 25 Euros, which seemed like a good deal to me.

So on my first day with my bike, I cycled along the coastal path down to Papagayo, the beach at the left end of the resort. It was trickier than I expected, since I ran out of path, and then ran out of road and had to go cross-country. Then that got decidedly steep, so I ended up back-tracking my way back onto the road again, to make a longer but safer way down to the beach.

Once I got to the beach, I realised I didn’t actually have any beach stuff with me admired the view, then turning around and cycling off.

The next day, I cycled the coastal path in the opposite direction, to the other end of the resort, where the lighthouse was. My poor bike is almost invisible beside the lighthouse, but it is there, chained to the gate. That day I also cycled to the bottom of the local volcano, locked the bike to a gate, and then climbed the volcano. Maybe more on that some other day. It was a quite awesome volcano. Though I was quite surprised to find that my resort was equipped with a  volcano.

On the third and final day of my hire, I decided to push the boat out, and go for a proper cycle. I think it was probably about 30 or 40 kms, out of town, then along the coast, finishing up at El Golfo. Lanzarote is a volanic island, and it’s an amazing place to cycle through – parts of it are just so desolate – nothing but lifeless looking black rock for miles. I know that probably sounds quite dull, but it’s so unusual that it’s very interesting. Especially at the sea, where the black of the rock contrasts with the blue of the sea.

So, having enjoyed that cycle, I went back to the bike shop a few days later, and hired a road bike, to  do a bit more cycling. This is where the troubles began, naturally. The picture shows the nice Bianchi road bike just outside Puerto Del Carmen, which is a couple of resorts along from where I was staying. What you can’t tell from this picture is that the chain had come off twice by this point. It came off again before I stopped to look at it, and found that one of the links was coming apart. Fortunately, I found another bike place in Puerto Del Carmen, and he tried to fix the link so it looked less like it would come apart. But that didn’t work, and although I nearly made it home, the chain fell apart on me. Fortunately, I was only about 7 km from home by that point. Even better, when I rung the bike shop, they said they would come and pick me up. By pushing the seat down, I was able to Fred-Flinstone the bike another km or two (mostly downhill) by the time he picked me up. He said he’d never had anyone break a chain before. Worse still, he said he’d only put a new chain on the bike 2 weeks before. But it couldn’t possibly have been my fault!!

But anyway, I enjoyed my holiday cycling!

I’ve been packing to go on holiday. Fabulous! But of course it always brings with it its own set of small problems. Like what to bring and what not to bring. I remember a debate between two male friends over whether they could really get by sharing a single hairdryer while away for a weekend. I like to think I’m not just as bad as that, but I have my own problems.

I did some book shopping in preparation for going, and can’t bring myself to leave any of my new books behind, since the last thing I want is to run out of books on holiday, and I don’t know which ones I’ll like most, as it’s a whole set of new authors. So I’ve got my books, some clothes (including ones suitable for eating in the hotel, which specifies long trousers for gentlemen), lots of power supplies and cables for laptop, ipod, camera, blah blah blah.

All of which pretty much fills my travelling rucksack.

But should I bring my cycling gloves and padded shorts? Currently, neither are in, because I don’t think I need them. I can cycle in ordinary shorts, and with bare hands. But I can’t help wondering…

I’ll let y’all know what I decide, and whether I regret it.

I went out on my bike on Monday evening, and managed to fall off, embarrassingly.

So when I went out today for a nice cycle (Lisburn and back, 25 miles), I was a little more wary, and paid a bit more attention to what I was doing. And so now I think I understand what went wrong. Like a teenager going too fast in a sports car on twisty country roads, my new road bike is a bit too fast for twisty pedestrian paths.

This conclusion came as a bit of a surprise to me, I have to admit. But it turns out that my road bike can go from nought to quite fast for a bike without me having to try very hard. So I was simply going too fast to turn the corner when I came off on Monday. This never happened before on my mountain bike, because it took more effort to reach a decent speed.

So it’s much easier to ride on a road, and I guess that’s why it’s called a road bike.

that a bailiff cannot enter your house by force, but can come in through any open doors or windows.

So watch those windows!!

1. I hate it when I get to the gym and realise that I’ve forgotten my headphones, and can’t listen to my own music. Instead I have to listen to Kiss, which is truly awful. Why is the music in the gym always so bad?
2. At the end of the stupid house-buying program that was on tv (in the gym), it said in the credits that he house prices were accurate in Autumn 2007. That’s nearly 2 years ago, and house prices have dropped like a brick since then. That explains why the people featured looked so smug – they’d sold their old house for a fortune no doubt, and had no fears of their new mortgage. Channel 4 – shouldn’t these episodes be dumped in the bin rather than be shown?
3. Big Brother is still irritating when you can’t hear what they are saying. That was on tv in the gym too – I promise!!

I’m catching up on all the stuff I’ve been recording over the past few months. In the past week I’ve seen the series finishers for Lost, Fringe, and Heroes.

All of them were pretty good, with a nice build up that explained a few new things, wrapped up a few loose ends, but then left me wanting more. Which I suppose is exactly what they’re meant to do. The other good news is that because I got so far behind, the long summer of having nother on tv is nearly over, and I haven’t suffered too badly.

I’ve also been enjoying Season 1 and now Season 2 of Smallville on DVD. It’s fairly lightweight, but it is fun.

Hello Internet!

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. I’m sure you haven’t missed me at all, but I’ve been rather busy. Here are the things that I didn’t blog about over the past while.

• Being a puppeteer.
  Our church was looking for a bit of gimmick for our children’s club and we hit on the idea of using puppets. So Christine and I duly spent over a week putting together scripts for nightly sketches, plus a big sketch for use in the local schools, and a final sketch for church on Sunday. It was hard work! But in the week before the club, we did our puppet show in front of over a thousand children, as we were able to get into all of the Primary schools in Craigavon, where we got a great reception. We then had a very successful kids club, and one of the most unusual church services we’ve ever had.
• Having a sore finger.
  I know it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I hurt my finger playing basketball over a week and a half ago at our teenager’s club, and it’s still a bit stiff and sore. I always said no good would come of playing sports.
• The changing mobile phone market.
  It’s offical – I can’t have an iphone. Because my contract has several months to run, O2 have no intention of letting me upgrade my phone. And they told my brother in law the same thing when he tried to blag an upgrade. Changed times in the mobile phone market, when they used to be very keen to give you new toys as long as you spent more money with them. Oh well. I’ll just have to be patient.
• Andrew’s wedding.
  My old school-friend Andrew got married a few weeks ago. It was a great day, and the most unusual wedding I’ve ever been to – very customised. But what was most strange was that no-one mentioned his tendency to break things (for which he was truly legendary during his school and university days). I guess he got better as he got older.

It was a beautiful day again today, so off I went again on my bike. Not going for any dramatic distance or speed, but just to do something outside.
My cycle was going very well until I was unexpectedly bombed by a bird. I didn’t see the varmint, so I don’t know if it was a precision strike from a great height, or whether he come in low and took time to aim.
But in any case, it hardly matters. I got bird crap on my bare leg. Any time this has happened before, it’s usually been on a good suit, or my nice coat. When it’s on your bare skin it’s even worse – you can actually feel the heat of the birds body still in it. Or maybe it was just burning my skin. Or maybe even my imagination. But it felt real.
Worse still I was going quite a good speed along a road, so I couldn’t even clean it off until I could get pulled in somewhere safely.
So cyclists – be careful out there! It’s not just the drivers that are out to get you!

I went out on my bike today.
Since the not-entirely-excellent Marie Curie cycle ride (here and here) a few weeks ago, I’ve been looking a bit lustfully at new road bikes. So today I decided to prove to myself that here’s nothing wrong with my current bike. So I pumped the tyres up (which helped it a lot – amazing the difference it made), charged up my ipod, and headed out down Cycle Route 9 towards Lisburn.
I’d planned to go further than I’ve gone before, and do the whole thing non-stop, but I failed. I made it 20 miles out, to Maze, and was doing well coming back, but it was warm, and I was thirsty, so I gave in at Shaw’s Bridge and stopped at an ide-cream van to buy a drink. But I missed and bought a 99 instead. The 5 minutes that took to eat made a big difference, and I made it home successfully from there.
So yes, I can cycle 40 miles on my bike heavy mountain bike. But not without getting slower and slower, or stopping for a break at some point.
So that road bike is still tempting…