Nothing New There Then

L and the boys claim to come home from their morning walk with a thin layer of snow on them. Where did they find that? I didn’t get any, which was perhaps a good thing as I was on the bike... on slick tyres. At least I didn’t get a puncture today, although I have developed some irritating noise on my front wheel that I can’t track down.

It proved to be a very good call to cycle because the A52 shut was this morning. An overturned vehicle or something like that. So I probably wouldn’t have arrived before mid-morning had I driven or got the bus. The only problem with that was that all the traffic displaced from the A52 was on my route instead, which meant a fair amount of weaving in and out of it. Smiling and waving at the frustrated motorists of course as I overtook them.

Here’s a nice photo.



So where’s that then? Austria? France? Switzerland? USA?

Nope.

Cairngorm Mountain in Scotland last weekend. We’ll be up there soon, not actually at Cairngorm but it’s looking like it’s worth a day trip.

Note however, the train track on the left of the photo. The track is submerged under the snow about three quarters of the way up. So no train running, which is a problem they’ve had all season. The building of the horrendously expensive and loss making railway has been a complete disaster from day one. A gondola would have had no such problems.

As I come to cycle home I see that my rear tyre has gone soft. Oh dear. I did use a repaired tube, perhaps it wasn’t a very good repair. I pump it up and thankfully it stays up.

MD’s a bit lippy at dog class again, so nothing new there then.

Reasons To Be Cheerful

I get a few jobs done today, walk the dogs, go to the tip, build a new computer for Daughter and change the tyre on my bike. As the new winter tyres I want are currently out of stock and on order I put an old summer slick tyre on instead. I’m sure we’re not going to get any more wet or icy weather... are we?

Then I spend the afternoon in the gym, mainly on the bike. L and I both do ten miles. I take the exercise bike next to hers, give her a head start and then wave politely as I overtake her.

I power along averaging something like 220-250 watts, so I’m well on Hutch's tail. Not. That’s Michael Hutchinson who’s reckons on needing to average 400 watts for an attempt on the world hour record. So just another 150 to find then.

In the evening we’re back at Broadway to immerse ourselves in ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’. This is of course the new biopic of the late Ian Dury. Personally I was never a great fan of his music but I was still intrigued enough by the man to go see the film. I knew his life would make an interesting story.

Ian Dury contracted polio at the age of seven, most likely from a swimming pool during the polio epidemic of 1949. This resulted in him spending a year and a half in hospital, including six weeks in a full plaster cast, followed by an extended stay at a institution for disabled children, which resembled a prison and whose ethos was to toughen their 'inmates' up. A view further endorsed by Dury father, Bill (Ray Winstone) who aside from seeming to abandon his Son in the institution also believed in encouraging his son to stand on his own two feet and callipers. It was his sufferance of polio and his resultant treatment that probably moulded Dury into the determined and uncompromising man he became. If he felt he missed out on his childhood was lost, he was about to make up for it.

Golum himself, Andy Serkis, plays the role of Dury putting in a passionate and brilliantly believable performance. Serkis is uncannily like Dury and no mean singer either, performing all the songs himself along the real Blockheads.

Early on we are introduced to his first band, ‘Kilburn and the High Roads’, who are rehearsing at his home. Their session is ‘disrupted’ by the birth of his son upstairs. The film then takes us progressively through his career and chaotic life whilst throwing in flashbacks, animation and live performances along the way. It's all very well done.

His first band soon implodes but out of that he meets groupie Denise Roudette (Naomie Harris), who becomes his girlfriend, and Chaz Jankel (Tom Hughes). Jankel, a talent musician ten years younger than Dury, takes on the task of fashioning Dury's offbeat lyrics in to the songs that would make him fame as Ian Dury and The Blockheads. No much is actually said about their chart success, although we do get a demonstration of how quickly things can go awry once stardom is achieved.



The film is much more interested in his complicated relationships which Dury struggles to reconcile with his music career. Dury and his father; Dury and his women (his long suffering wife and his girlfriend); Dury and his Son, Baxter (Bill Milner of Son of Rambow). Baxter appeared on the sleeve of 'New Boots And Panties' with his father. Re-enacted here.



Dury is not a good role model for Baxter. Initially alienated by his father, he becomes increasingly in awe of his rebellious father and starts to mirror him and becomes a regular truant from school. In fact did he ever go? Baxter goes somewhat predictably off the rails.

Always the absent parent, Dury moves in with Denise and they live in a tower block in Vauxhall. A tower block that he calls ‘Catshit Mansions’. All the while he continues to do things in his own anarchic way, practising his well honed ability to rub people up the wrong way.

Then keen to give something back to people with disabilities like him, Dury records the notorious 'Spasticus Autisticus' as his contribution to 1982's United Nations Year of The Disabled. It is perhaps good intentioned but is subsequently banned and brings him into conflict with the Spastics Society who disagree with his assertion, passed down by his now late father, that people like him didn't want sympathy, they wanted respect.

Overall, it’s an excellent and playful film, just like its subject matter. Never sentimental although it had plenty of opportunities, had it wanted to be. Towards the end, as presumably Dury approached his own end, he died of cancer in 2000 at the age of just 57, he himself appears to regret nothing. ‘The only thing I've missed is a few buses’ he declares.



The end credits roll to Serkis’s rendition of ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’. Good stuff.

Not In The Traditional Style

I wear the boys out on the park and then try and follow Derby’s away game at Sheffield United on the internet, via the text updates. I used to listen to it on the radio on Medium Wave but Radio Derby now use Medium Wave for Burton Albion’s games which I can receive in perfect clarity, should I be interested. Unfortunately our FM reception is very poor and they don’t yet have a DAB channel. I could pay for internet commentary but don’t see why I should, as I don’t really understand why BBC local radio should be banned from broadcasting its own commentary across the internet, as they currently are. It would be different if someone else was broadcasting it, but no one is.

Anyhow Derby nearly win but concede a late equaliser. Although I think we would have been happy with a draw before the game started.

In the evening we get the bus out to Keyworth and meet some friends for a curry at the Cinnamon Indian restaurant there. My friend rarely has a good word to say about any meal he’s eaten in any restaurant, anywhere. However he says he rates this place so L and I, along with two other friends of his, have flocked there to find out why.

It’s not obvious. My starter is good but my main, my favourite Jalfrezi, is one of most anaemic I’ve ever had. Even my friend who recommended the place isn’t impressed on this occasion and complains about the Tarka Daal. They promptly bring him another one which is in a different league altogether. I wonder whether someone nipped out to the neighbouring takeaway when we weren’t looking because it’s so different and so much better. It has taste. The owner explains that the one he’s has just brought us has been done in traditional style... it is what the chef would cook for himself and his family... I’m confused here, I thought we’d come out here to sample the chef’s cooking but instead he’s cooking in the style of someone else. Someone who thinks none of his customers have any taste buds. This doesn’t say much for the good folk of Keyworth. Apparently if we’d asked the chef to put taste into all our meals he would have done. Well NOW you tell us. So now we’ll probably have to go back to sample it all over again, traditional style, but tonight was a wasted meal really.

Even the naan bread wasn’t very good, thin and uninteresting and it certainly didn’t have the face of Christ on it like that university student claimed his did or perhaps I just hadn’t drunk enough bottles of Cobra. That student must have been well trollied. Supposed we've all been there, drunk and hallucinating. Seeing Kate Moss walk into the curry house naked just as you’re dipping your poppadom in the lime pickle. Seeing that fit young lass from your maths class decades ago sitting at the table opposite, she’d always been too aloof to speak to you, but she’s winking at you now. Seeing that lass with the Oboe from the Guillemots tucking into her Madras... personal favouritism creeping in there.

We check out a few local pubs, a fairly uninteresting estate pub that did as decent a pint of Bombardier as you’d get anywhere, it’s just that all pints of Bombardier are on the dull side, and a better more traditional pub that forced me to drink the dreaded banned brewery closing Greene King’s Abbot Ale because all the other options weren’t that exciting. Yes, I’m a traitor.

Back in Nottingham we pop into the Canalhouse’s Beer Festival to see what they have left. The answer to which is very little, they have been more or less drunk dry. So, as it’s a Castle Rock house, I have the old faithful Screech Owl instead. The Canalhouse is an interesting pub, well it's a Canalhouse you know. It has a couple of barges and a canal in the middle of it.



Photo Matthew Black

Taking It Seriously

L has the day off and indulges in a lie in whilst I take the bus into work. It’s long run day again and I’m saving it for after work again.

I think perhaps L regrets the lie in as this disrupts the dog’s routine. They’re used to an early walk and then being left in peace for the rest of the day. A disrupted MD is more boisterous than an undisrupted one and that doesn’t bear thinking about. No squirrel or cat will be safe or anything else for that matter. I think she learnt her lesson; she won’t leave his walk this late again.

Can L’s day get any more stressful about taking MD out? Well yes. She makes herself a flask of tea and heads off cycling. Of course if she was really taking it really seriously she’d have remember the Battenberg and the Cherry Bakewells as well.

She’s taking it seriously enough to check out Fearne Cotton’s bike apparel. She’s in training for her Sport Relief ride, which is no Cheshire Cat... but it’s a good effort for a worthy cause. The relay team of seven are cycling from John O’Groats to Lands End in a bid to raise £1 million. The rest of the team are David Walliams, Davina McCall, Jimmy Carr, Miranda Hart, Patrick Kielty and Russell Howard.



Poor old Fearne dismounted (fell off) her bike twice, I hope she didn’t scratch that nice new carbon bike.



L is right, she does look quite stylish but then L has some nice cycling stuff too. The difference is that Fearne is only wearing one of everything, whereas L needs four cycling tops and three pairs of trousers just to keep her body temperature stable. L has one thing though that Fearne doesn’t and that’s cycling socks with elephants on them.

After work I do my run and despite a tight left calf manage to do twelve miles. The tight calf is quite worrying. It eases after about eight miles but I don’t really want to have to wait that long on race day. Perhaps doing more of a warm up might help.

I end up in Beeston, where I again meet L and the boys for sustenance at the Victoria.

Green And Paperless... Sometimes I Wonder Why

I run in to work and considering I find running in the morning quite a drag it wasn’t too bad. In fact, I nearly enjoyed it. Well... I suppose I must have enjoyed because I do something really stupid in my lunch hour.

I can’t believe I’ve actually entered two half marathon but I’ve got the confirmation emails to prove it, so I guess I must have done.

Here’s a farcical situation. L has been trying to cash an old endowment policy in. One of those policies that has done practically nothing for the last ten years and is forecasted to continue doing so until maturity. It currently offers a return that would have been bettered by stashing your fivers under the bed.

To cash it in she needs to prove her ID with a bank statement or a utility bill in her own name. This is despite the fact it will be sent in cheque form to the address they’ve been sending statements to for the last decade, so I fail to see the point but anyway... All the utility bills are in my name. I've asked the various companies before if they’ll put them in joint names but they won't. So the utility bill route is out. Then there’s the fact that all our various banks have encouraged us (or forced us) to go green and paperless. So subsequently we don't receive any paper statements through the post for any of our accounts and apparently one printed off the internet won't do.

So we set about trying to get the banks to send us one... which they won’t do unless we pay for a duplicate. How can it be duplicate when we don't receive statements in the first place? Well, naturally me being me, I have no intention of paying. So there follows a game of email tennis between the banks and I, followed by a stand-off on both sides. Eventually I get one bank to back down. However, the Nationwide still won’t budge. A compromise is that I have to opt to revert back to paper statements and then re-sign up for the paperless option after I’ve received one statement. What a charade... and you watch, it’ll end up where a lot of our post does, through the door of the house with the same number as ours in the next street.

Squash goes well and I win my one game. I even manage to keep a lid on my celebrations this time. That’s two for the year now, at this rate I’ll pass last year’s total of nine by the time summer starts and I’m dragged kicking and screaming onto the tennis court.

Surveying The Damage

With the bike temporarily out of action, perhaps it’s a good job I planned to be in the car today anyway... or perhaps not. It takes over an hour to get to work in the car. Just too much traffic I think, which is why I hate driving to work. L runs to work and then rubs it in.

I was late going to Sainsbury’s today and whereas when I usually go, in the traditional lunchtime window of 12:30-13:30, you get a shop full of well dressed office workers when you go later this gives way to the tracksuit wearing fraternity. Who are out buying their weekly supplies of Stella and Doughnuts.



There are probably some pyjamas wearers in there as well, which is topical at the moment, but they probably inhabit a different aisle.

Thing is these people give sports clothing a bad name. I’m sure when I was a lad they didn’t even make tracksuits in XXXL? Those of us who do actually use these garments for what they were intended wouldn’t of course be seen dead out shopping in them. Perhaps shopping is what they regard as a workout.

This week must be my week for computer support. My father has contracted a computer virus. Well not him personally, although he has got a bit of a cough at the moment, but you know what I mean. So I drop round after dog training to survey the damage. The dogs are thrilled with this development, after a night out at training they now get to spend half an hour playing football with my father. I’m not sure who will sleep better tonight, him or them.

A Long Standing Tradition

Yesterday’s ice gives way to an old favourite, rain. So I bike. As I meander through the estate I can see L and the boys up ahead of me. I can also hear them, well one of them, MD. He seems to be in good voice this morning.

I pull up at a red light in Spondon but the cyclist behind me simply carries on regardless, as do the two cars behind him. I know it’s a long standing tradition that at every set of traffic lights at least two cars jump the red light but the cyclist should have known better and all of us cyclists get the blame for that. He’ll stop one day though, when he meets those two cars coming the other way.

One of the events I’d fancied doing for a while was the Humber Duathlon in April but now I’m rapidly going off the idea. Mainly because there were only 27 entries in the last one, so I could end up doing the event and hardly seeing a soul for most of it. This defeats half the object of doing a ‘race’. This April’s event would be the third running of it. They had 41 entries for the first one but then it dropped to 27 for the second... so it’s getting less popular, either that or they lost the other 14 over the side of the Humber Bridge... I expect it's a bit blowy going over the bridge. Depending on where they land, that would make it a triathlon, technically speaking.



I was describing to L the other day my plan for avoiding a head on collision when a car overtakes another car and is coming towards you on your side of the road. This is when cycling. Basically it’s a case of getting ready to hurl one’s self sideways and home there’s a soft landing, like a hedge, there. I nearly got to put it into practice today on my way home. It was a close run thing.

My eventful journey continued a few miles down the road when I got a puncture going through Bramcote. I pull over and install a new tube, getting nice and cold doing so. I do the usual check for nails, shards of glass etc, which may be imbedded in the tyre. Nothing. I do notice that tyre is very thin though. Is that a hole? Hmmm, to be honest I have known that these tyres were on the way out, since... well, before Christmas. Half a mile down the road, whoosh, all the goes out of the tyre again. Another tube blown. It must be the tyre. I have another tube but I don’t wish to waste it, so I walk the remaining mile home.

All this means that I don’t get my swim again but still I get home at almost exactly the same time as if I’d been. Not the best day on the bike.