’nuff said?
Crisis Consequences Homeless Charity Concert
The Roundhouse is an architectural triumph and is small enough that people like me, with er, less stamina, can sit out the thronging party at the Crisis Consequences Concert whilst still feeling connected to what’s going on.
We went to see the eclectic, genre-bending Danny’s Last Dance, but in the supporting line-up were Paul Weller, Supergrass and Dirty Pretty Things. My contact there said that security on the back gate apparently got a roasting from the management once they realised that Danny’s limousine had been turned away so that Paul Weller could park his trelicopter. As if… I don’t even know what a trelicopter is.
It was reassuring to see that Banksy had maid a reappearance after a clearly less talented rival had painted over it. Graffiti? No thanks, but this is art that elicits a smile and adds great value to the whole quirky Primrose Hill / Camden thang. Especially as she keeps the pavement clean ’round there.
The morning after the night before
Both Daren & Nick are friends with Jamie at The Half Moon in Warninglid, so it seemed only right and proper to go and sample the fare there last night. Jamie has apparently transformed the place in the last year or so and it’s now a real, proper gastropub. The food was totally delicious! I had tender liver & crispy bacon with mash potato and shredded cabbage that would have won a competition in a sculpture contest – I ate every last scrap despite the fact that it was a rather large portion. In fact, all six plates were virtually scraped clean! And despite having a full-on meal for six with liberal quantities of wine, yummy sticky puddings and coffees, the bill was only £25 per head.
My only beef was the fact that of the range of great bitters that Jamie serves, he doesn’t currently have any Hepworths… I can see I’ll have to work on him!
Anyway, it will come as small surprise that the 7.30am gathering this morning was slightly more muted than normal! But it was a beautiful, brisk morning and it didn’t take us too long to get over the edge of tiredness. Once again it was a real pleasure running with Daren (his being slightly less fit than normal) as the pace was gloriously manageable and we could all chat contentedly without running out of steam. The Bok would shoot off every so often like a springer spaniel, egging us to join in the fun, but was eventually reigned in to enjoy the gentle run & conversation.
We headed out to the Royal Oak and round the back of the (fast becoming monstrous) St Georges Retreat, out to Hundred Acre Lane, back across to Wellhouse Lane and returned alongside the railway. The going was firm with muddy interludes and I managed to get called rude names when I, er… missed my step and splashed in a puddle. Twice. I felt particularly triumphant that Nick’s trainers looked as if they had actually seen some countryside! Mine, of course, were still dirty from last autumn and were once again dripping with mud by the time we got back: so no change there then.
We ran for one hour twelve minutes, covered 7.25 miles at an average speed of just over 6mph and used sufficient of the calorie intake from last night to be able to woof down half-a-loaf-of-bread’s worth of toast with honey & peanut butter.
The big man cometh
We had a rare treat this morning when the big man came round to take me out for a peramble. For those of you who don’t know him, Daren is the same kind of height as Cliff, Steve or Clive, but has (ladies, look away now) another couple of inches width on each shoulder and a chest to match. Add this to the fact that the stripes on his new running top were designed to accentuate the shoulders of people of a smaller build like me and it was like running along with Judge Dredd ambling beside! And for those unladylike females who are still reading, the answer to the question forming in your mind is probably yes… suffice to say that I had to run with a hat stuffed down my running tights so that I could hold my head up!
We all claim unfitness on occasion and it was Daren’s turn this morning, but I reckon that we’re pretty lucky as a group because we’re really quite fit compared to your, average, run-of-the-mill bloke. For example, despite saying that it felt like he was running through gazpacho (he said it with such conviction that I can only conclude that he often trains in cold tomato soup), he still shrugged off a 50 minute run with ease. Okay, he wasn’t bounding along like normal, but that was the only giveaway.
We took a leisurely route out to the Royal Oak, across to Wivelsfield and along through Hundred Acre Wood, chatting all the way and catching up on news… which always slows you down. The ground was lovely, with most of the mud ruts trampled flat and the kind of give that you normally only get on a running track. It was so lovely that at one point I decided to take a closer look (my foot slipped out from under me on a tree root and down I went) but I just bounced gently. Despite having my camera with me, there was no sensational headline splash of Foster mud-monster to record… I know that Nick will be disappointed!
Even with the gazpacho, we completed about 5.25 miles in 52 minutes, giving a speed of just over 6mph: pretty good going considering it was a conversational run over a bowl of soup kind of morning.
Dessert
After all the serious fun… there was a day of ice-karting!
Last year I won the ice-karting and could have written loads of stuff about it.
This year I came third so I’ve not much to say for myself.
Except that I didn’t start using the brakes until we were messing around after the final. That’s when I started to remember how to go quickly! DUH!
Tracks in the UK would be unfamiliar with the concept of letting the punters carry on driving, round and round, until they actually get tired of driving. Or it gets dark. Which in our case happened around the same time! In fact, at one point Benny even re-started us in the other direction so that it would be more challenging!
The casualty of the day was my boot, which now has a radically remodelled sole… on account of me trying to warm my feet up by putting them too close to the fire! It actually took an hour in the jacuzzi and ten minutes in the sauna for me to feel my toes again at the end of the day. And a large G&T, a terrific bottle of wine and another evening of hilarious conversation to stop smarting about losing!
I must work on that!
Nice ‘n icy
A couple of busy days later, I finally find time to upload a couple or three photos of the lake at Alvdalen. But it’s time for bed so I’ll have to fill in the details later!
And here are the details.
After another four-thirty alarm, I drove to Stansted in the pouring rain, left my car with a delighted parking attendant and checked in. And all before coffee, which I find remarkable. My traveling companions were Mark and Mike, both IT consultants and David, a dentist: all easily identifiable as fanatics by the stack of car mags in their bags.
We flew in to Skavsta, which is to the south-west of Stockholm and picked up our hire car: a Saab 95 2.0t estate, which by the way, is an excellent car with a whole lot of space. With four trained drivers, the journey north to Alvdalen was very pleasant, but contrary to previous years, the roads were largely tarmac coloured. I managed to get the graveyard shift at the end, which although only 45 minutes out of an almost six hour trip, was had by far the most interesting conditions. Here the roads were white and it was now dark, but the car was capable and we made good progress to the hotel.
At the hotel were the other three members of our group, Simon, Richard and Victoria, but also the previous group of friends which made for an excellent evening full of discursive conversation. Also present were our host and trainers from Volvo: Bert, Jerry and Tomas basically think we’re weird as, despite meeting a large number of highly committed drivers and test-drivers every year, we are apparently the only group that can spend the evenings discussing steering methods or the optimal order in which to train novice drivers in advanced driving techniques.
Out on the ice the next day, they were also surprised. They expect a very high standard of driving from this group, but despite having four ‘ice wirgins’, they didn’t have to pull a single car out of the bank in the whole day.
I should explain: we are on both a test track and a lake (with a frozen surface about half a metre thick), which are to all intents and purposes, low grip. Not slippery enough that you have to fight for balance (although Victoria did slip over a couple of times) but enough that you will stand stock still with your wheels spinning beneath you if you are too boisterous with the gas on take-off. The tracks are created at the beginning of the season by compacting the snow and they are then lovingly cleared, groomed and tended-to by Benny each night, much like a piste, so that all the car makers, tyre manufacturers and test drivers using the track have optimal conditions.
The exercises we were doing were designed to challenge our control over the cars, pushing us to experience cornering, braking and avoiding obstacles at relatively high speeds. The winter tyres that the Swedes use are studded in the main, which is a very good thing: the reason that the UK grinds to a halt in an inch of snow is because we drive on summer tyres – in northern European terms, these are the prevalent conditions that we face.
With summer tyres, a corner that might be comfortable on studs at 40mph would only be possible at 10mph without a loss of control. I know from experience that in very low grip conditions (on Mira wet-grip test-track) I can drive my car neatly round a corner at 10mph or slide it sideways under control at 12-15mph, but I am totally out of control at 17mph… the window is a really small one! The problems really start to pile up for someone driving in UK snow when they think that sufficient grip extends beyond about 10mph… or beyond an almost horizontal gradient!
During the course we get to drive a mixture of front-wheel’, rear-wheel’ and four-wheel drive cars and learn how to drive each to its strengths. The biggest grin factor for me has changed over the last couple of years. It was always the rear-wheel drive cars that gave me the greatest satisfaction and though it was a real hoot guiding the limousine around our little track sideways (it has such a long wheelbase that everything happens really slowly, making for some really graceful arcs), this year the four-wheel drive cars got me hooked.
Volvo’s new V70 and especially XC70 are absolutely marvellous cars and very quick with it!
But there’s a common misperception, which is that because four-wheel drive cars accelerate more quickly in low-grip conditions, they also brake more quickly and corner at higher speeds. Alas, it’s the same old rubber at each corner whether you have the latest 4×4 or a… pedal car. Same old limit of grip to expend on either cornering or braking, or some lessened combination of the two. Sure, in the safety of our one-way track, we can slide the car sideways into each corner and neatly power out. But this surface is much more forgiving than even wet tarmac… and in the dry the speed at which the car can bite back, if you get it wrong, increases significantly!
Which brings us back to steering techniques, although I don’t begin to have enough space here to even start that discussion again!
Sheet!
Okay okay OKAY! I go away occasionally… and occasionally I go away again! But I’m back now, so I’ll be running again very soon!
In the meantime, I thought you may be interested in my latest annual Swedish pilgrimage to worship at the alter named VCDA: The Volvo Cars Driving Academy. (I hope you can read Swedish!)
I’ll write more about it later, but I just saw this photo from the route home and thought I’d whet your appetite.
It was an interesting morning, conditions-wise with roads so slippery that at one point when I tested the brakes in a safe place, the wheels locked and we shot along like a bobsleigh. It was so slippery that the anti-lock brakes were fooled into thinking we were stationery and didn’t kick in until we had almost slowed to a halt under our own weight. Although we were in our Saab hire car, to be fair!
You might notice that in the photo above, Mark seems to be standing gingerly and holding on to the car… yes, it really was that slippery! You can actually see his reflection in the road!
So I particularly wanted to thank Jerry who, on an earlier course, insisted on teaching us how to power-turn a front-wheel drive car. At the time he described the situation we had found ourselves in perfectly: having finally run out of traction on a narrow hill. Steering on full lock, engage reverse, let out the clutch and blip the throttle; then straighten the wheels as the car finishes a graceful pivot around its rear wheels.
Watching the highlights of that day’s Swedish Rally, it was reassuring to know that we weren’t the only ones finding the conditions challenging!
Ski legs
WAKE UP DAVID! Time to SKI!!
We’ve stayed with Ray & Yvonne quite a few times in different chalets and what keeps us going back is them… they are truly excellent hosts! And I guess great friends now too!
Their current chalet is in Chandon, just below Meribel, which makes it a quieter, more comfortable choice and less tempting on the shopping wallet, which is useful at the moment!
The weather was crisp and sunny, the snow in great condition and Yvonne wasted little time in dragging me off piste in search of my old ski legs. To no avail, alas, as four or five connections to earth attested. Ray tried again the next morning and over lunch pointed out where I might find them and the afternoon saw my skis working more in line with the instruction manual, but not totally. Day three heralded the arrival of the unpaid debt collector in search of candle-wax that had been overdue for a couple of weeks: I lay comatose on the sofa for most of the day with only Kim’s twisted knee and our skiing buddies one-year-old grandson for company.
Our skiing buddies are Tim & Anna, whose family company Nursey is the real deal when it comes to leather & sheepskin products, having been manufacturing since 1790! That’s not to say that they are quite that old, of course… tee hee! The rest of the party comprised their son Adam, his wife Sandra and aforementioned grandson Thomas; Property developer Martin and his super-cool, ace-boarder son James (a budding Richard Branson if ever I met one!); Sue, Keith, Phil and romper-suited Nick.
After my day of rest, it was the forth day before I finally discovered the ability I think I must have left behind when I was taken out head-on (spun round length-ways in the air and left to hobble home with a broken collarbone) four years ago.
The first couple of runs felt like I was turning a credit card on a glass table but then it suddenly came back… you know, that roll of the knees into the turn as the shoulders push downhill. The edges were biting hard again and though I’m sure I’ve been more graceful, I no longer felt like a cookie. I spent the rest of the day gently pushing the boundaries and rediscovering the joys of carving.
Day five was more of the same but that night Ray went out with James’ can of spray cream and pasted all the slopes with about a foot of extra white stuff. So day six was a tricky day, with even Ray confessing it was heavy going.
I went out and pushed myself to do lots of difficult things. There are only so many jump turns that you can do with rubbish ski fitness but I had a jolly good go. In fact the steep pistes and off piste sections were easier on the core muscles than trying to ski across the lumpy bumpy flat bits. Once it gets too flat for a rhythm of regular turns, you have to pretend you’re sprinting whilst dribbling a ball through the England defenders, knees wobbling from side to side like jelly… or your back gets jarred on every lump!
And since I reckon to learn something every time I do it wrong, I had a really great day!
So now we’re home and the ski gear is all packed away for another trip. I hope I get a chance to use those ski legs before I forget where I’ve put them again!
Latte: whisked doubleshot please!
Point 65 have just launched a couple of new kayaks, both of them designed by Nigel Foster.
The Doubleshot is a kayak for two, whilst Nigel says that the Whisky 16 is the kayak for me as it’s slightly shorter than a normal sea kayak and designed to be FUN! I’m really looking forward to trying one out and might have to schedule a trip to Seattle to hasten the experience!
And for those amongst you who have not tried the turning technique that Nigel is demonstrating above, it truly is amazing. Takes a bit of getting used to though, as every fibre in your body is screaming at you to lean into the corner!
Maybe he’ll explain how it works some time?
Things to do when you don’t feel like running
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!