Destroy All Onions!

Yesterday I worked out that maybe it hasn’t been raining every night when I noticed a sprinkler going. But it definitely rained heavily last night, since it woke me up. But also today there was finally a little sunshine at lunchtime, the first I’ve seen.

Finishing work a bit earlier, I managed to get to the hotel gym last night. Small panic when the cycling machine told me my heart rate was 190, which is a just a bit high. Fortunately, the next machine reckoned it was 90, which is a little low given I’d been cycling for 10 minutes. But the average was probably about right. Made it back to the gym tonight.

Today I got hold of a hire car, and have managed to successfully drive it back from the airport, and out and about for tea. It’s a Kia Optima, which does not fire my imagination, but it works fine, and it does have Sirius XM and an Ipod connector. Sirius is pretty cool – lots and lots of radio stations to choose from, including Radio 1 and the BBC world service. As long as I stay away from the 50 country stations and Radio 1, I should be fine 😉

I’m clearly not from round here – I caught a couple of people staring in my direction on my way back from the office this evening. It could be because I was walking (which is obviously unusual for the US) or it could be because I was wearing a coat. Wearing a coat seemed perfectly sensible to me, since the weather forecast predicted thunderstorms, and according to Fleetwood Mac “thunder only happens when it’s raining”. But I was nonetheless the only person I saw all day with a coat.

Maybe it’s related to the not walking much thing…

So, 17 hours after arriving at Belfast City Airport, I arrived safely at my hotel in Dallas. And I’ve managed to survive my first day in the states.

The office is just across the road from the hotel, which is very civilized as I can walk to work. I spent most of the day in a meeting with my new team, which could have been in any office building, so I kind of forget where I was until we left for the evening, when it once again became obvious I wasn’t at home any more – the cars and buildings were all wrong for Belfast.
And rather splendidly the guvnor here took a couple of us out for tea, so I had a chance to see a little of the local area, and enjoy a nice Mexican meal.

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 finished my first holiday book standing outside the airport waiting for a coach to take me to my resort.

It was Moonraker, by Ian Fleming, one of the original James Bond books, and in fact only the third in the series (though it was a much later movie).

I like James Bond books to take on holiday. They’re physically small and light, and psychologically not too heavy going. Because of our familiarity with the films, they’re often quite predictable, but not this one, where the film has almost nothing in common with the book. In this book, millionaire Sir Hugo Drax is building an independant nuclear deterrant for the UK, in the shape of the Moonraker rocket, thus cementing Britain’s place in world politics. But all is of course not quite as it seems, and James is sent to investigate.

In this day and age, the idea of Britain having a world-leading nuclear missile programme, seems preposterous, but of course Trident is still up for replacement, so you never know. The action takes place mainly in M’s gentlemens’ club in London, and at the Moonraker launch site in the south of England, so there’s not a lot of glamorous locations.

But I do like the plot, which is much more straightforward and reasonable than that of the film, involving a massively complex revenge rather than the extinction of the human race. I found it just predictable enough to make me feel clever, with action and some vintage charm. There’s also an unexpected twist at the end, which I rather liked.

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!!