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Civic pride

It was such a glorious morning and there was ice on all the cars so I dressed warm for a short run.  The first thing that hit me when I went out into the sun was how warm it was.  Odd really, as whilst all the shady parts were slippery with ice or crunchy underfoot, everywhere else had that look of Spring having arrived.  And the depth of the mud attested to how unfrozen it was!

Still knackered from my Friday run and from refurbing all week, I fancied a short, unhurried run around town.  I quickly revised my intentions when I realised how slippery the shaded pavements were, so I headed for a more forgiving surface… mud is always slippery!

I ran out towards Keymer  and then round to the South of the town by Tesco’s.  There was a rumour of a path being created so that people could walk right around the outside of the new perimeter road and a few months ago I managed to get lost whilst trying to discover where it went.  That was August and uncertain whether the local Council acts quickly or slowly in these matters, I decided to try again.

The path has certainly been extended, but only as far as Gatehouse Lane, but I persevered by trying to get around the back of St Pauls School again, to no avail again.  Chastened by the memories of getting caught astride a barbed wire fence last time, I sheepishly retraced my steps and ran along the rest of the perimeter road.

I continued through Sheddingdean Industrial Estate.  I think it is such a shame when an estate such as this, with some excellent companies such as Sussex Sport KTM and the wonderful Earthworks, has so little self esteem as to allow an age old and decrepit sign to herald the entrance.  Far worse still, it’s one of the first things that visitors see as they enter Burgess Hill.  If anyone from Burgess Hill Town Council reads this and wants to understand how a few small (and inexpensive) changes might make a large difference to the feel of the town, please get in touch!

Beyond that, I ran past Burgess Hill Football Club ground and on through the tunnel to Valebridge Road. Here I was tempted to run through the twitten and up to Ote Hall, but to be honest, I was knackered, so I ran back up Junction Road instead.

In all I was out for one hour twenty minutes, covering about 7.4 miles at a sedate 5.55mph.  I’m not sure where the boundary between short run and long run is, but it sure felt like the latter!

The day has turned grey now, so I’m really glad that I made the effort while the sun shone… and my Oakley’s were happy to get a breath of fresh New Year air too!

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Transmogrification

After working on a project late into the night, the alarm seemed to go off all too soon this morning but though it was still dark, I alighted from the bed with a spring in my still-stiff-from-the-last-run legs and got the coffee pot on.  It’s amazing how much easier it is to run (or motivate yourself to do many other things) when there are two or more of you.

Nick duly arrived and we headed out into the grey morning, which was not as cold as I had anticipated.  He was after a short run so we looped across the Common as far as the industrial estate, but on the way back the Bok in him decided 35 minutes was too short so we continued on into Wivelsfield and came back via Ote Hall.

Lots of surface water & mud today so lots of slip-sliding-away (we know a song about that mate) and Nick tried patiently to explain the idea behind transmogrification, which I now reckon might have been one of the inputs that Philip Pullman had in his mind when creating daemons in The Golden Compass.  It comes from a comic book strip, but I’ll get him explain it to you some other time!

I can imagine that I was a bit like a sack of spuds for company this morning and having dragged the sack around most of the way, I think we were both surprised when I picked up my heels and sprinted (only for a minute of so) towards the end.

Overall, 6.06 miles according to super watch in one hour one minute makes 5.96mph and not, somewhat importantly, the 9 point something that the watch was claiming… which casts doubt on the Bok’s earlier claim of an 8.57mph run last week.  Some quick retro calculation puts the figure more correctly at 7mph for his run, which is still great by any standards after the excess of Christmas!

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Showing the outgoing year a clean pair of heels

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It was a really good start to the year… waking up about 30 seconds before my alarm went off at eight.  Not that early I know, but too early for most and a great time to go for a run.  

The morning was mild , quite still and slightly misty and sound seemed to be deadened, which meant that I probably scared the tails off about 20 squirrels.  As I ran out towards Ote Hall there was no-one around and the first person I saw was a farmer going about his chores.  There were a couple of cars on the main road at Wivelsfield, but I could have crawled across on all fours with no danger.

The Alpacas eyed me hungrily but I made it past both them and the sheep in the next field without becoming a tasty new year snack.  I passed a cheery family out for a walk as I dropped down into the village centre and then I headed out onto Hundred Acre Lane where I saw the bunny-rabbit tail of a red deer bounding into the undergrowth… clearly a relative of the Bok.  Down through the wood, a slight detour around a field looking for the exit and then back up into and through the wood along to the end of Spatham Lane.

From here I cut across the Common, over the railway line and down to Wellhouse Lane, past the water tower and over to the other railway line.  There I following the path alongside it to the station, stopping en route to take the weird photo above, before pushing up the last hill to the top of town and back down to home.

In all, I was out for one hour twenty-nine, covering 9.125 miles (or so!) at a speed of 6.08mph.  I was very happy with this, despite the fact that Nick had emailed me to quite frankly, er… gloat, that he had run nearly 6 miles in 45 minutes… a speed of 8.57mph.  I always said he was faster!!  Way to go Nick, although that was technically last year!

The rest of the day was spent relaxing in front of the… that’s rubbish, of course… we’ve been working our little socks off lately doing up Kim’s flat and today was no different: cutting down an old cupboard-side that I just cannot remove as it’s had the gas pipe and the dist-board for the heating system carefully woven through it; cutting the kitchen worktop (and pulling the muscles in my back trying to test it for size… which I didn’t manage to do!); working out where the tiles will go in the bathroom and fixing the first couple of rows; getting the bathroom door-frame ready so that I can hang the door on the other side; failing to remove the skirting and having to rebuild it (work in progress… sorry Kim!); drinking tea and occasionally swearing… though these latter seem to be the only aspects of being a builder that come naturally!

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Things to do when you don’t feel like running

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It’s cold and generally wet out and you’ve not yet fully recovered from the lurgi, so what would you choose to do?

a) Put the heating on and cuddle up with a hot water bottle and a good book?

b) Continue with the current refurbishment project, involving figuring out how to assemble kitchen units from daft instructions?

c) Take a three hour drive across country, spend most of the day in the car apart from an hour standing outside in the chilly wind, before driving home again in the dark, hissing rain?

I know, the answer should be a), but…

Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground is a really good place to warm your tyres up mid-winter, so it was there that I chose to spend the day with the mobile switched off. 

I was in good company too, with about a dozen 911’s, a couple each of M5’s, Elise’s, Caterhams, RS4’s, 968’s and M3’s (one old E30 stripped out for racing), a Boxster and a Tuscan.  The folk that were there were good driving friends, out to blow the cobwebs from their heads and their exhausts… all except Peter, who would have triggered the noise meter if he’d have done the latter!

I won’t bore you with the blow-by-blow detail, but the day broke down into two halves: a dry morning and an increasingly wet afternoon and having sat in with some other folk to steal all the best lines, I got progressively faster and paradoxically safer the more the day wore on, with the rain making the harsh tarmac more forgiving. 

Despite a long lunch and lots of breaks, I covered over 100 miles just going round in circles, apart from the hour spent marshaling when there was pretty much nothing to do apart from take photo’s (well, one only actually as it was so cold & windy!) and work out the best line for the tricky bottom corner from the parade of drivers streaming past.

With the day over, I followed Mark and Justin back down south on a mainly non-motorway route, though in my memory it was just a lot of bright tail-lights and blazing headlights on a black, rain-lashed screen!  A welcome cup of tea at Mark’s was the only break before I landed at home with a grin the size of Spain!

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The Golden Compass

Based on the book Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, first published in 1995, The Golden Compass is the first in the His Dark Materials trilogy.  The story could easily be based loosely on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but it seems much richer and far darker.  Also, as it is filmed using interpolated rotoscoping, it is a much more realistic flick than the slightly less-whelming Chronicles of Narnia.

I went along with lowish expectations (possibly because I’ve not read the books and what I’d heard about the plot made it seem complex, which could have resulted in it being wooden) but the film exceeded them by a long, long way, swallowing me right into the plot and carrying me along until I reluctantly left my seat when the credits had finished and even the cleaners had gone. 

If you’ve been reading my other film reviews, you might think that I get sucked into each of the plots and rave about each film I see, but I have a vivid imagination and we also try to save the more average films for DVD or TV.  We saw so many films one year that it seemed like an age before there was anything new for our small screen.

For this film, I would recommend looking at the web-site above, as there are some interesting elements to retain your (or your children’s) interest… not least the ability to find out what your daemon is… in my case, a female snow leopard called Aleona.

Strangely, there is also a Rough Guide to His Dark Materials, suggesting that it might be a real place with some nice beaches and cheap hotels to stay in… though Nigel & Kristin‘s direct experience of Polar Bears in Labrador suggests it may also have a very dangerous night-life.

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Walk to work

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I’m sitting here basking in the rays of sunshine beating (weakly) on my desk and thinking about my Australian friends (hey y’all) sitting on their various East coast beaches eating turkey salad, washed down with Pimms, for Christmas. 

We’ve already had our now traditional early Christmas lunch and food-fest weekend, pictured serenely above before the action got started, and we get to celebrate Christmas all over again tomorrow!

I’m actually sitting here trying to get my head around a new concept from America that my brother has alerted me to in the I.D. magazine.  I often encourage my clients to stand up to have meetings (it helps people to keep to the point), walk around the block (to clear their minds before a brainstorm session, or to have a confidential one-on-one meeting with someone, which helps promote consensus and beats sitting across a desk) but this takes the idea in a different direction: walk while you work!

The idea is that your desk is a high-tech piece of gym equipment, designed to allow you to walk (at a sedate 2mph) while you work.  The desk curves at the front to hug your stomach, while the desk whirs into place to allow your hands easy access to your keyboard with your wrists resting on a thick pad.  It took the writer around 15 minutes to come to terms with the new arrangement and zone in on his work, which I think is pretty good, all things considered.  He even felt productive when staring off into space!

Priced at between $3,500 and $4,500 (from Steelcase’s Details subsidiary if you’re interested) I think the Walkstation is going to be next years hot corporate toy, although I suspect that, though they may be used to intimidate visitors (the possible permutations for calculating CEO’s are wonderful!!), they will otherwise sit forlorn and idle like so much other gym equipment after the month of January.

Hmmm… wonders… how much of your power cost you could save if all your employees were walking their working week?  Not only would they feel warmer (lower heating costs) but you might be able to power their laptops.  And think of it, no need to shut down your machine at the end of the day either, just get off and go home.

Heck, why stop there?  Why not make these things mobile so that you can work as you walk home?

Walk as you eat in restaurants.  Walk as you watch TV in the evenings.  Walk as you sleep… you may think that’s daft, but some people do this already.

Next thing you know, there’ll be some whizz-kid working out how to speed the process up so that you can run while you work and then they really will have reinvented the wheel. 

The hamster wheel, that is.

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Happy Birthday Big-Big Bro!

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I posted an early photo of my other brother, Nigel, on his birthday a couple of months ago and Kim suggested I do likewise for Michael, above… please note the subtle shifting of blame here after the threats of sibling retribution I received before! 

As a Queen’s Scout with an MA in Pure Physics from Oxford, Michael is a really bright guy and well deserving of his place as first child.  And as you can see from the photo, he’s a good looking chap too. 

Although if I’m honest, he’s a touch older than this photo, taken by Peter Foster in [I daren’t say!] suggests…

Happy Birthday Bro!

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Battery chickens

One of the reasons for writing this blog in the first place was to encourage me to run.  And visa versa. 

So the test is whether I can continue writing even though I’ve not had a run, or been to see a play or a film, or finished one of the books I’m reading.

I went to an interesting dinner the other evening, set in a Dickensian London in the vaults beneath London Bridge Station.  The layout was rather good and although most of the brickwork was already there (it holds the station off the ground!) the mock shops, bars and snugs fitted right in.  The actors were what made the evening for me, each dressed in period costume and playing quite deep roles with tremendous verve, whilst dry ice added to the atmosphere.  We’ll skip mentioning the food other than to say that I think most people on our table wished they had skipped the food… oh and that the tall cylindrical portions of chicken fricassee clearly looked as if they had come from battery chickens.  How glad I was for having chosen the seasonal (?) salmon.

Part way through the evening the dry ice started to affect my throat and despite escaping at a reasonable hour (the last trains heading South from the capital are timed to truncate any London outing early) I was too late.  Two working days of sore throat and headaches have now been followed by a weekend relaxing at home, trying to recover for a busy week ahead.  So as you can imagine and despite it being a beautifully sunny day, a run didn’t seem to fit into that programme.

With the heating on gently in the background, I had not even appreciated the temperature outside until I noticed that the water that our neighbours had washed their car with had frozen solid in rivulets across our drive.  Brrrrr! 

I am hopeful that I’ll be sufficiently recovered for a midweek run, but in the meantime, winter drawers on!