You know how to whistle, don't you?

As it wasn't freezing cold and/or p1ssing down with rain yesterday, I thought I'd treat the wife to a walk.  It's important to keep the magic alive like this when you've been married since the last hurrah of britpop, as we have.

Sometimes we jolly down to the coast of Essex or Kent on our Sunday constitutionals as Mrs O grew up on the coast and gets the yips if she can't dip her trotters in the briny once a calendar month.  But we decided to give the Thames Estuary a swerve yesterday as when the weather is half decent, the less-agreeable denizens of the capital head off there en masse and make a holy show of themselves and generally despoil the environment.  I know one isn't supposed to kowtow and amend one's plans to accommodate ruffians like this, but to tough it out and go for a stroll down there anyways would have constituted a massive Pyrrhic victory.

So it was then that we stayed in town and walked up the Thames path from Greenwich to town.  Clearly all of this walk was conducted on Her Majesty's highways, so we set off with scant equipment: a pair of flips-flops each, a loaf of bread and a block of Gruyere.  And this proved to be ample.  We are rather unusual in this regard, Mrs O and I, as most walkers tend to pack tonnes of gear before leaving base camp.

I've never understood people's obsession with kit for walking.  I mean, all you've got to do is place one foot in front of the other until you've reached your goal.  I do all my walking in civvies.  The only concession I make to "kit" is that I'll wear trainers if the mileage means the walk might exceed four hours.  Other than this though, specialist equipment brings nothing to the table.

I suppose people buy this stuff in order to protect themselves against mishap somehow, a kind of secular GORE-TEX amulet, if you like.  But most wouldn't recognise this as the reason; they'd probably explain to you at heart-breaking length why you simply must pull on a pair of £400 trousers to walk across wheat field in zone 6 of a Sunday.

Part of the Thames Path in south east London also doubles-up as a cycle path.  Cycling is particularly poorly served by "technology" (by which I mean injection-molded plastics plus marketing).  This is due to its perceived status as a sport.  And sport requires kit.  That's why people (i.e. men) put on lycra onesies and irridescent goggles to ride to Oddbins.  But utility cycling is walking to bike racing's running.  If you're not racing, you don't need a carbon fibre bike.  Honestly...would I lie to you?  I would, but not about this.

equipment overload

Look at me I'm vendredi...

It's Friday.  And as is customary at the end of the working week, I sprang from the nuptial bed with a song in my heart and a smile on my chops.  Also, as is Friday's wont, I was cream-crackered after a long week at the coal face of nebulous office brouhaha.

It just goes to show that mood is subjective and a fickle mistress to boot.  Had today been a Tuesday, I'd have been massively disheartened by the leaden feel in my limbs and brain as the alarm rang out.  So one cannot ascribe mood to the objective material conditions one is in.  No, it's the perception of those conditions that counts.  All I need to do then is harness the Friday ambiance and shoehorn it into the rest of the week.

When my sisters and I were children, we subsisted almost exclusively on boiled potatoes.  This is par for the course for those of us lucky enough to have been blessed with Irish lineage.  But like youth, boiled spuds are wasted on the young.  We absolutely loathed them.  One day I occurred to me as I chased another tattie around my plate, hoping an eagle might swoop down and finish it for me, that chips were basically anorexic boiled potatoes with tans.  We of course adored chips.  I suggested to the sibs that we recreate the chip experience by pouring vinegar all over the offending potatoes.  Moments later, fat chips were born.

We couldn't get enough spuds thereafter.  The only downside to this arrangement was that my urine had to be buried in the garden because it was corroding the lead pipes in our Victorian plumbing.  Still, it was worth it.  I eventually extended this idea to putting Andrews liver salts in our still orange squash.  It tastes delicious, but makes you catastrophically bilious, so we had to knock it on the head.

How, then, to convince the old brain that Monday is just like Friday?  Hmm...I could try and recreate the routine of Friday for it.  This introduces problems: of a Friday I normally scoot home and start eating and drinking like a condemned man until fatigue overwhelms me and I pass out on the faux-Persian rug in the front room.  Good form dictates that I remain motionless in this prone position until dawn and then climb into bed for a hour or so.  Doing that on a Monday would spell disaster for my capacity for paid work.  No, that won't do.  Perhaps I'll join the Quakers.  They seem a contented bunch - not hysterical, like your evangelical Christian - but happy with their meagre lot.

Today's cryptic bingo number: Game GIs confused by little Edward reversing (7,3)

It's for charadee

A friend of mine is undertaking a trial by exercise in June this year to raise money for a children's charity.  It's a worthy cause.  And just as well too because what he's proposing to do boggles the brain.  He is cycling from London to Paris in twenty-four (count 'em) hours.

It's 280 miles all in, and in a sadistic piece of scheduling par excellence by the organisers, the first tranche covers the 100 miles down to the coast to catch the ferry, leaving 180 French miles to be covered in one go on the final leg.

My friend is a relative novice in matters cycling if his blog is anything to go by.  This is just as well.  Anyone who's done any distance cycling at all remembers the first one well.  You set off with the best of intentions, full of vim and anguished anticipation.  Five hours later you're in a dark place.  No matter how diligently you eat and drink or how well you pace your effort, the horrors seep in.

It starts with seemingly inexplicable extremes of mood and physical discomfort.  For no apparent reason, you'll suddenly feel nauseous and tearful.  Moments later you find yourself singing to the hedgerows as the spirit soars.

The secret is to be aware of these peaks and troughs and what causes them.  The body is trying to protect itself from your idiocy - and quite right too.  If you have an iron enough will, it is more than possible to kill yourself on a bicycle.  Because the machine supports the rider's weight, there is no "wall" that simply stops you in your tracks when the tank hits empty, as is the case with runners.  You need, therefore, to detach yourself from your emotions.  Acknowledge them, yes, but do be fooled into thinking you must do as they implore.  It's important in (near) extemis to reassure the body that you know what you're doing, and that you will allow it stand down ante mortem.

This is the kind of caper James Bond used to get up to when he was being imaginatively tortured inside a hollowed-out volcano in Fleming's books.  He used to have a mental cell that he would retreat to to ride out the physical maelstrom.  It's easier said than done though...particularly when the leather saddle you're sat atop turns out not to have been sufficiently broken in after twenty minutes' cycling, as happened on my last marathon undertaking.  I couldn't sit down for a calendar month after that one.  I had to pretend to colleagues and friends that I'd given up sitting for Lent.  I'd actually given up castor sugar.

...still, what doesn't kill us and all that.

Because it's there...

I decided today that the life of the jobbing office-Johnnie-about-town needed spicing up, so at lunchtime instead of wandering aimlessly around the environs of Canary Wharf with my snout buried in a Graham Greene, comme d'habitude,  I thought I'd jump on the DLR, and take him to Greenwich for an hour.

Okay, it's not exactly white knuckle stuff in terms of distance and culture shock, but a cee is as good as an ar, as they say.  And so it proved to be.  

The weather, when I reached my destination, was shithouse (what rotten luck, 'eh?), but I was determined to make the best of it.  I ducked into the Waterstone's there, found a comfy chair and ploughed through a couple of chapters.  And very convivial it all was too.

My wife and I chunter down to Greenwich at the weekends now and then.  It's usually rammed to the gunwales at times like this, and can be a bit of a chore to be honest.  It's like being at a festival, but without bands and tempura - i.e. diabolical.  

The absence of my best girl by my side also added a tinge of sadness to proceedings, but that's the quintessential point of travel, isn't it, to challenge oneself?  Generally, we scoot straight home apres-G and dig out the sherry, and I did rather miss the ritual when the time came to head back to the office.  I had to make do with the half truckle of brie and bottle of port that I'd hidden in the stationary cupboard instead.

Stupid boy

Louis Theroux's back on goggle box.  I've a strained relationship with Louis.  His subject matter is interesting, and the production values etc. of his shows are very high, but he's such an incorrigible twat.  

I should probably nuance that last statement.  It's not that he's a twat per se.  It's just that his schtick is this faux-naive persona that drives me crackers.  For example, last night's programme was about dogs in LA.  This, unsurprisingly, required a segue into the world of south central LA's gang culture and, by extension, its strained relationship with the hound.  For hound, read pit bull.

Louis met up with a former gang member who now earns a crust "weaponising" dogs for customers who fear crime more than they fear being eviserated by their pets.  The meeting culminated with a trip back to Mr Former-Gang-Member's modest bugalow in what looked for all the world like one of the shabbier backwaters of Helmand.  In the yard, Mr FGM keeps his fiercist hound; I didn't catch its name, but let us suppose for a mo its name is Edward.

Edward, I think it fair to say, went absolutely spare when Louis and crew hoved into view (I know how he feels).  Luckily for the squeamish, Edward is kept permanently under lock and key in a cage, and wasn't able to "get at" our host.  

Even Mr FGM didn't feel he could trust him, which when you consider Edward had the build and temperament of a enraged hyena was fair enough.  Going straight for the faux-naive jugular, Louis asked Mr FGM what would happen if Edward were released.

"He'd bite you," came the response, "no question."  That's right, Louis, that's no question.

Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks...the ones on your face

We've been having some weather of late in London.  I was up in town on Saturday, shopping for birthday gifts for a 14-year-old boy (good luck with that, by-the-way).  I was mooching through Oxford Circus when a bank of angry-looking grey cloud coalesced overhead and decided it had had enough.

An almighty peal of thunder rang out, which was as surprising as it was alarming because it was a decidedly chilly day.  Here in Eng-er-land, we exclusively associate thunder with extreme heat, i.e. anything over 19 degrees cee.  Shortly after the sound and fury came the payload: a short, but genuinely violent hail storm.  

I hid under the auspices of John Lewis to let the weather do its thang when out of the store rushed several excited tourists, phones in hand, and started filming the downpour.  They'd clearly never seen hail.  And some of them appeared so amazed and befuddled by the experience that I can only conclude that they never even heard of it.  Where on earth could you live to have not heard of all possible weather conditions, even the ones that don't attend in your locale?  As Del Boy once rightly observed: I've got a pair of desert boots indoors, but you don't see me down The Sahara, do you?

I've just finished reading The Mayor of Casterbridge.  I read quite a bit a Hardy in my youth.  Everyone in England seems to do this.  We read it under sufferance.  I'm not sure why.  I supposed because it so beloved of the public exams syllabus setters.  His work is afforded a certain caché, therefore, like Dickens.  I must say I quite enjoyed old MofC.  It's a bit of a curate's egg, but I was genuinely affected by the incorrigible descent of the protagonist.  Sad to witness.

Another Country

I happened across a fascinating documentary last night in BBC4.  It was the harrowing tale of Japan's worst-ever train crash, in 2005.  The material details of the crash were laid out, as one might expect, and there were interviews with several survivors and the families of those who died.

It was all elegantly and dispassionately presented, as good documentary always is.  Any pathos that emerges is wrought from the stories that are told; it doesn't need to be cynically prompted by music, insensitive prying journalism and/or mawkish cinematography.

One of the most intriguing things about the programme was its lifting the lid on Japanese inscrutability.  It's felt that a major cause of the crash was the intolerable pressure that train drivers are put under in Japan.  Timetables are cut several times a year, and extra stations commissioned to accommodate the insatiable demand.  But no quarter is given to the drivers, who are expected to magically summon extra speed without compromising passenger safety.

Former drivers spoke bitterly of the quasi-military disciplinary culture of the railways.  Drivers contrive to make their station stops by driving dangerously fast and braking dangerously late.  The results was this catastrophic crash.

What's interesting about this that it foregrounded for the first time for me that the Japanese are just like the rest of us.  That sounds a strange utterance, but I think it's a common assumption among westerners that the Japanese are like polite automatons, or cartoon characters.  They don't really have the same preoccupations, emotions and petty fears as the rest of us.  I never supposed for a moment that they were possessed of cynicism or bitterness.

They've always inhabited this human hinterland for me, the Japs.  I thought for years that, like dogs, they couldn't metabolise chocolate for example.  Turns out they love a Curly Wurly as much as the rest of us.  Fancy!