Grappling Irons

Being offline right now as I am (aboard the M/V Bretagne between St. Malo and Portsmouth), I have no real idea what grappling irons actually are, though I’ve a suspicion they’re something to do with climbing. I have my doubts, therefore, whether they’d help me successfully grapple with the self-imposed dilemma I’m currently facing.

You see, like many of us, when things are swimmingly along quite nicely I get this temptation to complicate them a little. The plan had been to buy next door in France, then spend the next year to 18 months doing the place up progressively, whilst I carried on working in the UK when work was available. We’d move in to it this summer after a few basics were addressed, and all would be well.

Well….that still might turn out to be the plan, but there’s a bit of me that’s mighty tempted to take some extended time off now – till the end of July say – and blitz all the jobs that need doing. As I write, I have no confirmed work for the coming weeks, and I’ve been messed around a bit over the last couple of weeks by my regular source of work, another factor contributing to the consideration of a working sabbatical. (You might ask why I’m going home at all, if I’ve no work next week. Good question, but there are some loose ends to tie up, including confirming an agreement to do a minimum of 6 days work over the next few months with a new source, which is good).

A further factor still is that the “jobs” are, in the main, such damn fun. Over the last ten days or so I have, in roughly reverse order:

-         -  Had a fantastically aggressive bonfire last night with all the things we’ve cut down, pruned or pulled out of the ground; inevitably the wind was blowing in precisely the wrong direction, so the few neighbours we have would have been overcome by smoke till the thing was damped down (sorry to them. Sorry also if they witnessed me peeing on the compost heap earlier in the week; it needed watering, I needed a wee and I was outside, it seemed like a happy confluence of considerations)

-          - Bought and now used in anger a ride-on lawnmower. Three quarters of an acre of mowing done in an hour, bosch. Letting the 10 year old son of our new Scottish neighbours drive the thing a couple of nights ago also put a big smile on his face, which was nice

-         -  Dug and planted some of the veg plot.  God knows if anything will germinate, but if it does, we’re in for a salad-based treat

-         -  Knocked down two internal walls and made good the resulting holes and assorted other damage.  That’s the least interesting thing of all, but also the most time-consuming; the skirting boards took ages to fit and fill

-         -  Bought a roll-end of lino and fitted it in a bathroom, and not too disastrously at all as it turned out

-         -  Jet-washed anything that moved; good job the cat was inside

-         -  Conspicuously failed to get a tap working from an outside tap. I know that sounds like it should be straightforward, but with nearly 80 metres between the tap and the outer reaches of the veg plot, we opted for two cheap hosepipes and equally fittings. Mistake. Leaks, punctures and frustration abounded

I’ve been ably supported by Mrs M of course, who’s undertaken a Herculean amount of weeding herself, along with the catering, and if she could catch me, supervision of my efforts.

The point is, it’s been fun, and apart from one ride and one run, I’ve denied myself my usual athletic pleasures. If I was here for a longer period, those sacrifices wouldn’t be necessary – it was a delight to re-acquaint myself with French backroads in temperatures of 24c plus – and I (we) could both take the raw materials we’ve bought and turn them into a very splendid French home, and make the existing place more rental-friendly.

So there we are: should I stay or should I go, and all that? Going (back to France) would be the slightly irresponsible thing to do, in that I’ve never either been unemployed or turned down work as a self-employed person in my life, and whilst I would probably only be lighting a candle under my bridges rather than burning them down completely, it still goes against the grain a little. On the other hand, I’ve spent nearly all my working life being sensible, and when I have taken risks (changing employers, changing professions, becoming self-employed), they’ve always worked out ok. And whilst taking the time off would feel irresponsible, the fact is that I’d be creating value on a property rather than squandering it on world tour or suchlike.

Well, I’ve got the next 8 hours to contemplate things, as that’s how long I’ll be sitting on this ‘ere boat. I’ll let you know what happens.

Les grands travails

After last week's post Mrs M suggested that maybe this blog should evolve into a record of our new adventure in France. It's not a bad idea actually; I've been droning on about running, cycling and anything else that exercises me for some time now. I don't think I'm going to abandon the old stuff completely, but there's going to be plenty of goings-on to record from the southern side of the Channel over the next few months.

So we duly took delivery last Friday of our next door neighbour's place, which consists of:

- one large, empty, abandoned, uninhabitable house

- one small, one-bedroomed, quite cute inhabitable house

- one stone building, left half acting as laundry, right half currently a wood store

- one garage of wooden construction, in pretty good nick

- one hen house

- one greenhouse with approximately a third of its panes missing

- one shed, most recently used as a sheep shelter

- one fruit and veg plot

- about half an acre of grass; lawn over-glamorises it

- two ponds, connected but each on different levels

- half a menhir (basically a ancient monumental rock; think Stonehenge in extreme miniature)

- an 11 tree orchard

And stone me, there's a lot of work to do to get it looking half-decent. As I mentioned last week, the previous owner has managed the decline of the place over the last couple of years. He has, we discovered to our horror, undertaken some DIY however. I mentioned the one-bedroomed house above, which, as far as we remembered, had a rather lovely mezzanine bedroom and study area above the living space below. Well, blow me if he hadn't put a plasterboard wall in behind the balustrade and boxed it off, and done the same thing at the top of some nice granite steps on the way to the living room. Many Euros-worth of deterioration.

We need to be able to camp in that house, if not occupy it properly, by the second weekend in May, when the French national mountain biking championships are being held in our village, and the house in which I'm writing this now is rented out to some French mountain bikers. And making lots of dust after that point won't be ideal, so bringing the wall down is an early priority. Is....was....down the wall duly came yesterday. I employed a modicum of subtlety rather than just attacking it with a sledgehammer which was my first instinct. I blame You Tube - there's no excuse not to see how to do things properly these days, and Canadian Steve was my friend when it came to demolishing a plasterboard wall.

I'm only here till next Monday though, and I'm keen to get as much done as possible before then, so besides the demolition job I've:

- weeded, dug and levelled about 25 square metres of the veg plot 

- planted beans, chard and petits pois

- made the balustrade a bit safer, such that anyone leaning on it won't find themselves on the ground floor two seconds later

- started the marathon weed clearing process

- removed the first 20 metes of fencing that kept the previous owner's sheep in the right place

- bought and assembled a petrol-driven strimmer

- ordered a ride-on lawn mower. It arrives tomorrow afternoon, and I have to say that slightly to my surprise I'm not that excited - it just feels like a necessary tool

And that doesn't even begin the scratch the surface of what needs to be done. It doesn't even begin to identify which surface needs to be scratched. It would be easy to be hugely daunted by it. But it doesn't need to be done at once, and it could be, will be, terrific in the future. It's going to be a long journey though, and I'm sure there'll be ups and downs along the way. I'd love to jack work in for six months and crack on with it, but that's not going to happen. If I'm honest, I'm not entirely sure why we've bought this lot (other than the fact I'd have been heartbroken if someone else had bought it), and what we'll end up doing with it all. We will, however, have plenty of time to ruminate on that as we get stuck in. Expect more in due course.....

Chalk and cheese

As a rule, I'm not the kind of fellow who tends to extremes. Everything in moderation and all that. I'm not teetotal, but nights like last Saturday excepted, I rarely drink to excess. I'm not vegetarian, but I don't eat that much meat either. I'm conscientious enough at work, but not to the point of workaholism; good enough is, well, good enough. And so on.

Yet there's one part of my life where this rule doesn't apply, and that's physically where I spend my time. For the majority of my working life I'm in central London, buzzing between buildings, meetings and a hotel room. I know you're never supposed to be more than a few feet away from a rat, but I'm never more than a few feet away from a Londoner (though there are some shared characteristics). In fact, I'm never more than a couple of dozen yards away from hundreds of other people, and for an essentially miserable, introverted, middle aged git, that's quite hard. There's always, even at 3am, background noise; somebody, somewhere close, doing something. 

However, on the distressingly few recent occasions I've had the chance to go over to Brittany, the opposite is true much of the time - within a radius of two miles (I should probably say three kilometres), there might be a couple of dozen people, and the chances of bumping into those are pretty low. When I wake up in the morning, then assuming neither the missus nor the cat are snoring (and both have their moments in that department), the sound of birdsong is deafening, for no other reason than it's filling a total noise vacuum. And that, I do like.

I'm mentioning this because the week or so from Saturday promise to be even more solitary than usual. The explanation for this is that motorways and ferries permitting, we shall be siting in a notaire's office at 11 am on Friday going through the arcane, anachronistic and incorrigibly French process of completing the purchase of a house. Two in fact, though as I've explained before lest you think we've turned into some sort of moguls, one is one bedroomed, and the other doesn't have running water, let alone any internal walls. However, they come with land, some of which was in its heyday, a mighty fine vegetable and fruit garden.

Unfortunately, the French owner for the last two years has been more interested in planting his seed in a romantic way than a green fingered style, and the state of the garden bears testament to his neglect. I'm hoping that once cleaning duties in the new house are concluded, I'll get chance to start to restore the glory of the veg plot, not least because Mrs M has made a hefty (for her) £9-worth of investment in seeds, and it'd be a shame to waste them.

The point of this is that when I'm in that garden next week, it will feel like a world away from work, and a nice world at that. Suits, PowerPoint and hustle-and-bustle will give way to wellies, a spade and peace-and-quiet. I'm not quite ready to hang my computer keyboard up yet, not least because I can't afford to do so, but I tell you, as I printed and bound earlier today the 150 or so pages that represent my post-Christmas labours, I reflected on how little satisfaction they gave me compared to the courgettes I hope to harvest later this summer.

So when you read, if you do, my grumpy tweets of a Thursday night, you'll understand why I'm in that place. It's not the work, that's not too bad; it's the constant presence of other people, other strangers. That probably explains too why I love running in the hills so much; back to that subject, probably, next time. Unless I have an overwhelming urge to tell you about my cultivations. 

This week's absurdities

In no particular order:

1. People being upset because Jeremy Clarkson was sacked, or more accurately, didn't have his contract renewed - it pains me to admit it, as I like Jezza, but the Beeb got this one right: you just can't hit work colleagues and there not be consequences. And let's face it, Top Gear had got a bit tired and repetitive in the last couple of series, so this might be the creative kick up the backside he/they need. (And to anyone who thinks worse of me because I like Clarkson/Top Gear.....well, I like tofu, lentils and bicycles too, but that doesn't make me a Hoxton hipster now does it?)

2. People on Twitter saying that all those who'd signed the 'Keep Clarkson' online petition were, variously, "condoning bullying", "saying it was ok to hit people", "standing up for a racist, sexist idiot". No they weren't; they were just in their own little world, hoping that their favourite presenter on their favourite TV programme wouldn't be sacked. Worthy? No. Bad people? Probably not.

3. "Jazz hands" rather than applause at some women-only branch of an NUS conference. Apparently, applause can unsettle and disrupt speakers, so delegates were urged to do "jazz hands" rather than clap when they agreed with a point. I'm not making this up, honestly. First, I'd loved to have seen it in action, would have been the best laugh I've had in ages. Second, I'm thinking of encouraging my colleagues at work to do the same - every time I make a particularly good point in a meeting, I'd love it if they could "jazz hands" me, as it were; it would brighten things up no end. No sure how well it would work on conference calls however

4. Cameron and Miliband playing "how big's my willy" over which taxes they could rule out raising. It might have been quite entertaining, and the look on Miliband's face when Cameron ruled out increasing VAT was priceless, but really fellas, 1) how the hell do you know what's going to happen economically and fiscally in the next five years, and 2) have you checked the national debt level recently?

5. Strava - for those not of an athletic bent, Strava is an app for recording rides, runs, walks etc. It maps your route, gives average times, total distance, and compares your efforts to others. According to Strava, I ran 5.6 miles at 5.24 a mile yesterday morning. Also, my name is Mandy van Hoogenstrat. How can the app not keep hold of its GPS signal at 6am in central London for goodness sake?

Anyway, the servants have arrived with supper, so I'll love you and leave you.

Cambridge Boundary Marathon

Here's a rarity: a report on an actual event. Yes, yesterday I did the Cambridge Boundary Marathon, so called because, unsurprisingly enough, the 26 and a bit miles are basically a large anti-clockwise of the city.

I entered the event in January, thinking it would be flat, on road and therefore quite quick. However, there were no actual details on the website - the thing is run by Cambridge University Hare & Hounds, i.e. its athletic club, i.e. students, and therefore, shall we say, perhaps not as professional as other events. That said, it's about a third of the usual price of a marathon, so you can't grumble too much. Though when I was a) driving round looking for a completely unmarked car park at 7.15am yesterday, and b) running an extra 400 yards because a flour direction arrow had washed away overnight, I grumbled muchly. There were an extra few hundred yards at the end of the course too, meaning I was just under 27 by the time I stopped running.

305 people did the half-marathon, 230 did the full monty. I came 33rd out of the 230, disappointingly losing 4 places in the last mile, with an official time of 3:39. The winner did it in 3:08, second place 3:17, then a big cluster of us 3:25 to 3:45. So it wasn't fast, and it's easy to understand why; there were three big impediments to speed. First, near enough 6 miles were off road, and some of that was in a right state - we were coming off fields with an inch of mud on our soles. The student organisers, bless them, recommended using road shoes rather than trail shoes. I'd have ignored that advice had I known what it was truly like.

Second, there were many, many roads to cross, quite a few of them main roads. I and everyone else much have lost several minutes cumulatively. And third, a blast from the past. Oh, how I remember peddling round Cambridge in the winters between 1985 and 1988 with Arctic winds blowing straight off the Fens and up my trouser legs. I got a reminder of that yesterday, with a strong north-westerly hindering progress between miles 18 and 24 - just when it's toughest going in any case. At the end, my face was caked in a layer of salt, despite the fact I didn't seem to have broken sweat. I had, but it had been dried instantly, just leaving the salty residue.

I'm a bit disappointed if I'm honest with my performance, especially in the second half of the race, which was nearly 20 minutes slower than the first half, but given the conditions and the fact I've worked in London since 12th Jan, so limiting my mileage, I'm kind of ok with it. 

As an event, it was ok. You don't get to see much of the attractive centre of Cambridge, and some of the organisation was a bit iffy, as I've described, but it's friendly, it's a proper athlete's event (there was nobody carrying a fridge or dressed as the Honey Monster), and it's cheap. Would I do it again? Possibly. However, with that one done and nothing else entered, it's time to go and do some research.

Love and understanding

In a shock move, this post actually concerns one of the original subjects I intended to concentrate on when I started it four years ago.....viz., cycling.

More accurately, it's about road use. Now, I'm both a cyclist (less so than I used to be, but I still just about qualify), and a motorist. I'm also a Libran, and if you believe in all that astrology nonsense, that means I tend to be able to see both points of view in any given argument. And given that cyclists and drivers seem to have quite a few arguments these days, here are a few things it would be helpful for each side to understand about the other, where they may be less experienced in the opposite discipline.

First, listen up motorists:

1. The fact you pay Road Fund Licence (not 'road tax'), and cyclists don't, does not mean you have more right to be on the road. The public highway exists to facilitate travel by all modes, whether that's car, bike, horse, tractor, unicycle, walking (if there's no footpath), or anything else you can think of. Paying to use the road makes you the odd one out, not the other road users. Besides which, many cyclists also own cars, and so pay RFL. Or they own an electric or super low emission car, in which case they don't. Oh, that's right, RFL levels are based on pollutant levels these days, and guess how much cycling emits (bottom-related baked bean induced gases excepted, obviously)?

2. Unless there are double white lines down the middle of the road (but one of those may be a broken white line, rather than a solid one) cyclists have every right to cycle two abreast. Not three or more, but two is fine and legal

3. Some cyclists travel quite quickly. So don't think that because it's a bike you absolutely have to overtake it, or else your manhood will shrivel up and die (reverse sexism at work possibly there, but it is usually men). Many times have I heard a car accelerate to go past me when I've been riding at or near 30 mph in a 30mph zone). Similarly, just because it's not a car or a lorry at a junction or a roundabout doesn't mean it's not there

4. Very few cyclists - a tiny, tiny minority - are deliberately trying to piss you off.  Examine your own attitude. Would you be as annoyed if you were being momentarily held up by a horse or a tractor? Why not?

5. Just because you're a great driver with fantastic spatial awareness who knows exactly where your near side wing mirror is does NOT mean it's still not flipping frightening for cyclists for said wing mirror to miss them by a matter of centimetres. Give cyclists room. Please. The sooner we have the 1.5 metre rule in this country, as they do in plenty of others, the better.

Now it's your turn cyclists:

1. Unless you are totally, utterly confident that a vehicle is not going to pull to the left or turn to the left when it's moving, do not ride up the inside of it. Even then, try not to. The driver may not be able to see you, or even think of looking for you. If it's a large vehicle, and maybe if it's a small one, you will be run over, and you will probably die

2. Do not pick and choose whether you're a road user or a pedestrian, depending on which set of rules suit you more at the time. If you want to be treated as a road user, behave as a road user; obey red lights, treat junctions properly, don't ride on pavements ideally at all, or certainly at anything more than walking pace, etc. etc.

3. Do not ride in such a big group that it's virtually impossible to overtake you. If the overall overall footprint (wheel print?) on the road of the group is greater than than of, say, a small bus, break into a number of smaller groups, with a decent gap between them. Yes, drivers should be patient, but don't try that patience unreasonably - they'll only end up taking chances, which ultimately are likely to result in harm to you

4. For those of a more sporting bent, don't drop litter like gel packets and the like; you're not riding the f***ing Tour de France, and even at that event, there are designated litter zones these days, with riders fined if they're spotted jettisoning stuff elsewhere

5. Do try to make eye contact with drivers at junctions, roundabouts etc. Two reasons: first, it helps you read the driver's intentions, and whether they're likely to do something stupid. Second, it humanises the whole road using situation - it's not a big machine against a little machine, it's one person engaging with another. Acknowledging good behaviour is also good practice (eg little waves when drivers slow up on single width roads), as it encourages more of the same. Works on kids, why not with drivers?

There we go, my Wednesday night recipe for driver-cyclist harmony. 

Six Nations

So the rugby's started. Every year I hope the final table will look like this (with reasons):

1. England - I'm English; born here, live here most of the time

2. Wales - Land of my Father's

3. France - love the place, and if I hadn't have hit the jackpot by being born an Englishman, being French would have been a good runner's up prize

4. Italy - generally self-regarding narcissists; same can't be said of the rugby team though and I love them for that

5. Ireland - troublesome Celts, but as not as bothersome as they used to be

6. Scotland - more troublesome Celts, and ungrateful ones at that

😉