CatastrophicInversion

I’ll be so happy just to have spoken

2012-01-22T17:18:00.004Z

I realise that this is the second post I’ve made that consists almost completely of a Fleet Foxes song, but I’m okay with that.

On another note, it’s become time for this blog to do a Darren Fletcher.

Health and Safety: At Work

2012-01-06T10:30:00.002Z

This is a matrix which is used by my employers to judge risk. You estimate the likelihood of an event happening and the severity of the consequences on a scale of 1 to 5 and multiply them together to get the overall “Risk”. If the final score is 5 or less, the risk is acceptable and you are allowed to do whatever the activity is. If the final score is 6 or more, the risk is unacceptable and “control measures” are required before you can do anything. So far, so normal.

Let’s take a closer look at the definitions though, as they are described in the Standard Operating Procedure and taught at the associated training course. The X-axis is on a scale from “nil or slight injury/illness, property damage or environmental issue” to “fatal or long term disabling injury/illness, massive property damage or environmental issue. Fine. The Y-axis is on a scale from “highly unlikely event (20% chance of occurring)” to “highly likely event (100% chance of occurring)”.

So, looking at the locations of a risk rating of 5 on the matrix, the risk is acceptable if there is a 100% chance of you getting nil/slight injury, i.e. you are definitely going to get slightly hurt, but that’s okay. Hmm, maybe there are inherent dangers in what we do and all that. More worryingly, the risk is acceptable if the probability of you being killed or disabled is anything up to one in five!

I think this procedure needs some work, or a good dose of salt.

Juxtapose

2012-01-03T18:35:00.001Z

Snapped outside Hyndland station, two posters for very slightly differing productions of Sleeping Beauty:

I hate Christmas songs...

2011-12-21T20:26:00.002Z

...but nearly every week, Get It On and Travelling Folk between them manage to find me one 100% belter.

In your endo

2011-12-16T21:38:00.005Z

I would like to preface this by saying that there is nothing about any of this that is not funny.

Engineering must be the worst profession for innuendo, and I think process engineering in particular is the worst. At uni, the classic sample exam question was “how much suction is required to develop 9 inches of head?” (which I’m not sure really makes sense in either context of what it is supposed to mean) and there is always talk of orifices, strippers and bottom entry. Maybe we are all massively immature.

Our process safety design specialist has a certain way with words. He has plenty of innocent catchphrases like “teaching granny to suck eggs”, “designed by Heath & Robinson” or the one I don’t get “motherhood and apple pie”. He even sometimes quaintly instructs the scribe (me) to type a “carriage return”. But he also hits out with some absolutely cracking double-entendres – intentionally or otherwise I wouldn’t like to guess, but he always manages to phrase them in the dodgiest possible way. These are his greatest hits of the past two weeks’ process safety review alone:

- On suggesting a larger nominal pipe size to the (female) client: “Can you accommodate 8 inches?”
- While rummaging in his pocket for his flash drive: “I’ve definitely got a stick, but I can’t put my hand on it.”
- Instructing the scribe to format some text: “Can you embolden my colon please?”
- On a valve testing regime: “Do you actually take it out or do you just stroke it up and down and fiddle with it?”
- Questioning the PPE requirements for inspection of a vessel: “So you do wear protective equipment for man entry?”*
- And finally, on proposing a new valve configuration: “How would you feel about a three-way?”

But I shall give the final word to my American friend from the thing, who during the spider’s web teambuilding task was heard to remark, “Okay guys, which holes haven’t we tried yet?” I mean come on, I was trying to be taken seriously.

*I admit that I may have paraphrased this one slightly to make it more funny. The rest are bona fide.

You spelled “attention whore” wrong

2011-12-12T12:04:00.003Z

Now some people could really do with seeing this film...

Team Building Exercise ’99

2011-12-07T21:59:00.005Z

I don’t know if I missed the result of the 2010 Edinburgh Fringe best joke award, but it seems I blogged about the 2009 winner, and now I’m going to riff on this year’s. Well, actually on this year’s ninth placed joke. (The winner was one about a password that was not entirely terrible but has come in for some abuse anyway.)

In an annual tradition stretching back for over one year, the people with whom I was thrown together for some form of solidarity enabling us to survive school until the necessary exam results were in, or “friends”, meet up each festival time to attend a comedy event at the Fringe. This year we saw Andrew Lawrence, who has made a decent comedy career for himself despite the handicap of having Andrew Lawrence’s voice. This joke of his placed ninth in the best joke poll:

I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can't even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails.

This was not even the ninth best joke in Lawrence’s show, and not because it was a particularly good show, but because it is a rubbish joke. He did have some enjoyable material though, and the bit that gave me a warm feeling inside was when he outlined what he would explain to a child who when asked what they wanted to be when they were older replied with something like “astronaut”. It went along the lines of this:

An astronaut? That’s unrealistic. I’ll tell you what to say when someone asks what you want to be when you grow up. You’ll say “I want to get a job that doesn’t make me want to kill myself, and I want to live somewhere I’m not afraid of getting stabbed, and I want to share it with someone I don’t find physically disgusting...”

Anyway, all of this is basically a long introduction to saying that the cracker factory decided it would improve me in some way to send me for a weekend-long jolly to the Lake District. I have to write a report on it, so let’s blog it and see if that produces anything useable.

For starters, the trip lasted from 2.30pm on a Thursday until 5.30pm on a Monday. That is 4 and a half days of what I consider work. Not being paid for Saturday and Sunday I can just about tolerate, but I was only allowed to book 12 hours to the training overhead and told to work the rest back. I made up for this by going on strike for a morning and sitting at my desk in a funk. But this was a non-optional event, so I made the journey to Windermere, including nervously getting a lift with a Cumbrian taxi driver. What? Too soon?

When I was shown to my dwellings, grandly titled “Lodge 3” but in reality a furnished garden shed in the middle of a forest, I remarked that the boy from Hong Kong was going to shit an actual brick when he saw it. For while they could not afford to pay me properly to take part in the weekender, they could afford to fly people in from Canada, Papua New Guinea and everywhere in between.

The two days of team building exercises, which came second, were in fact very good fun. I particularly enjoyed the raft building, the rope swing and the free bar. Of course none of these bear any relevance whatsoever to the 9 to 5 (or even to the 4(8 to 5.30) + 8 to 12) even if I said they did on the report which I have now turned in. It is with the first two days that I take issue.

Two days of presentations and Q&A sessions with the senior management. It’s nice to see they are taking an interest in our futures, isn’t it? Except that seemingly they are only interested in your future career if you are planning to become one of them. Sample Q: what should I do to advance my career as quickly as possible (or similar)? Sample A: You must do internal sales.

What the fuck is internal sales?

The assembled people were supposedly some of the cracker company’s top young bananas, destined for great things. (This may be true of the foreign delegates, I know not, but for the ones from this country attending the weekend is apparently a compulsory part of the training, so that was wrong from the start. I certainly don’t consider myself a “tall poppy”, mainly because that is yet another bullshit term.) So why is it that they want to bring together the “best” young engineers we have, then try to encourage them out of engineering (then complain that there are not enough young engineers being produced by the “schools”, but that is another story). Have they lost sight of the fact that this is an engineering company (the word is in our name for goodness’ sake)? Project managers, “internal sales” people... group vice presidents. All of these are all very well, but at the same time you keep saying that we are “a people business” – in the sense that we don’t own property, we don’t have much intellectual property, and so on – which means that the engineers who work for us are the business.

Not everyone can become a group vice president. Not everyone wants to. Not wanting to be a manager does not signify a lack of ambition. More importantly than this, no one should be made to feel bad for wanting to be “just” an engineer. Over the course of these days my motto became that if the furthest I ever go in my career is the eight steps from my desk to my boss’ desk then that will be plenty of success for me. (This is already a journey I make several times each day to ask him just exactly what it is I am supposed to be doing, but that’s not what I meant.) Of course, I gave the GVPs a strongly-worded piece of my mind, through the anonymously completed course evaluation form.

Then when it was all over I went back to work and found out what I knew all along – that 99% of people aren’t like these assholes, and 90% of people never were. Most people are working to the Andrew Lawrence model, and that is just fine by me.

I would like to finish this with some half remembered words from PostSecret:

I am suspicious of people who are more passionate about the idea of success than they are passionate about the thing they want to be successful about.

Munich

2011-11-30T22:19:00.008Z

My brother and I have a running joke (one of many) to which the punchline is always “one way ticket to Switzerland” which is to be used when one finds oneself in a particularly undesirable situation – it’s a euthanasia joke. Our parents may have had reason to be worried, then, when a one way ticket to Switzerland was exactly what I bought. But you see while it may be expensive to fly to Switzerland, leaving that country is relatively cheap. Or I think so at least, from comparing the price of a Zurich-Tokyo flight I saw advertised (1300CHF) to a pair of trousers in a shop window (1100CHF). Um.

Anyway, when we were done with Zurich, rather than return directly to Scotland we headed off by train to Munich, and despite passing through Austria and even stopping in a couple of stations on the way this did not count and I was not allowed to colour in my map with the flag of Austria.

In Munich we may have accidentally stumbled into some beer halls, beer gardens and obligatory Irish pubs, and while Steven nearly wet himself with excitement at being able to drink beer outside, IN OCTOBER, I was more tickled by the fact that I could have a glass the size of my torso, but there was also some time for some cultural sightseeing. In fact that is unfair, since drinking beer is certainly cultural, but anyway.

There were some surviving buildings from the Nazi party’s early days, including some I would later recognise in The World at War Ultimate Restored Edition (11 DVDs). These were dealt with pretty tactfully on the interpretive panels.

We also saw two of the most architecturally important/impressive stadiums there are: the Olympic Stadium from the 1972 summer games and the more recent Allianz Arena. They have a wall of honour with the names of all the gold medallists from the games. The name that jumps out is that of Mark Spitz, for this is where he won his then record 7 gold medals in a single Olympic tournament. Also on site is the Olympiaberg – a 564m high man-made hill, built of rubble collected from buildings of Munich that were destroyed during WWII. Yeah.

On the final day I even convinced Steven to visit a museum – the Deutsches Museum, which is one of the best I’ve been to. One highlight was the section about the oil industry, with mock-up units and a scale model of a refinery, as well as REAL LIFE safety valves, pigs and column trays, not to mention the map of the FPS mentioning such world-famous locations as Cruden Bay, Aberdeen and Grangemouth. It was all a bit sad. (You’d love it, Mark, and I should show you more of the photies.)

Although the Foucault’s Pendulum ran it close, my favourite piece in the museum was found in the musical instruments department. This wacky contraption is designed to be played like a piano but sound like a violin, or even a quartet of them. There are four violins mounted in the top section with a circular bow playing one string on each and metal “fingertips” like small saxophone keys to do the left hand. I reckon it could be a solution to the shortage of viola players, but I don’t want to put myself out of work.

Redundant in Situ

2011-11-19T16:48:00.005Z

Last week I was walking across the refinery and I saw a sight I found amusing. There were four ladders, each on a corner of a square facing inwards and each one with a platform and a streetlamp type of light at the top, if I remember correctly. Clearly a tank or some such used to be in the middle of them. It was funny that they had removed the tank, but left the ladders in place.

This reminded me of my slight fascination with things that are still there but no longer used. Derelict buildings, disused railway stations, that kind of thing, and it gives me an excuse to post up a picture of my current favourite building in Glasgow. It is the Caledonia Road Church, designed by Alexander “Greek” Thompson. There are more pictures of the church here.

Also redundant in situ are the legs of a motorway gantry at the junction of the M80 and M876, which I pass every day. The gantry was struck by a lorry, and obviously the powers that be decided there was no need to remove the legs, so they stand as a memorial to the enormous traffic jam that must have occurred on that day.

And finally, after starting to watch the 11-disc ultimate restored edition of The World at War, I think I would like to visit Oradour-sur-Glane the next time I am in France.

Excuses

2011-11-09T19:51:00.001Z

October just passed was Catastrophic Inversion’s least productive month since October 2006, despite the many happenings that, uhm, happened during the month. These have yet to be covered, and may include any or all of the cracker factory trip to the Lake District, my second rebirth as a footballer, a holiday to Germany and some new rants. The problem, however, is this:

I call it “life”.

This is what has occupied my every waking hour (nearly) since the beginning of August. It is what I would optimistically term a “schematic” of a crude oil distillation unit. Each of the coloured lines (black, red, blue, green and green dash, because I ran out of colours) represents a route pertaining to a calculation I have carried out. The orangey bits are heat exchangers where the calculations intersect with each other. This means that when one calculation is complete, you have to start the other four all over again. And again and again and again. It’s interesting work (you’ll just have to take my word for it) and I have been throwing myself into it with renewed gusto following one of the events of the first paragraph, but it is a bit of a nightmare.

On the plus side, I now have a reasonably decent idea of how a crude oil distillation unit works, which after four years of high school chemistry and physics, a masters degree in chemical engineering, and two years of professional experience at a refinery (whose main purpose let’s not forget is the distillation of crude oil) is no bad thing.

What the flip, Zurich?

2011-10-30T20:40:00.008Z

If anything, Zurich reminded me a little of Bruges. It had nice buildings lit up at night and that, very nice to visit for a day. The only problem was that it was too expensive for anyone to get smashed and sacrilegiously take an outdoor piss (an act so frequent it has become known in the common lexicon as an OP) on one of the beautiful churches. One of the main landmarks is the largest clock face in Europe, which I presume to mean the largest four, although none of the literature makes this point. However, my most memorable sight was the totally natural combination of goods and services on offer in this shop: tattoos, piercings... bicycles?

Wonders of Street View (2): Glasgow sous la pluie

2011-09-30T15:55:00.008+01:00

The wonder of street view 2 is that the places I want to put in it can mostly not be found on street view. The places I like are the little streets I choose to walk through on my half-drunk wanderings home, such as the rows of miners’ cottages that remind me of the history of my part of Glasgow, or the seemingly private lane in Partickhill where you slip through a gate and are suddenly miles from the city, or this lane near home. I’m not sure why I like to walk down it so much; after all, it’s just a road where people park their cars and put their bins out. But it’s also a country lane where the gardens have perfectly formed topiary arches and beautiful Tudorbethan (always wanted to use that in a sentence) garages. Yes, beautiful garages.

The rest is just a collection of random trinkets. My favourite, most random trinket is the stained glass decoration in a pub I have been known to frequent that reads Thibaut IV, comte de Champagne 1201-1253 with what I guess is his coat of arms. I just wanted to shoehorn that into a blog post somehow. But in the lane described above, particular kudos is due to the family with the Défense de stationner: sortie de voitures sign above their garage door.

Further along you will find some very out-of-place-looking streetlamps. In a perfectly ordinary street they stand, for no apparent reason, emblazoned with the City of Glasgow coat of arms.

And on the other side of the railway tracks from that you can see that on the fence of a small park, a “no dogs” sign has been craftily Banksied into a “no zebras”, presumably by a local resident angry about the frankly ridiculous number of people walking their stripy horses there and letting them crap all over the park.

The Attraction of Mountains

2011-09-18T17:02:00.010+01:00

I hadn’t planned to be chronicling another hill walk so soon, but when our shinty was cancelled on a Saturday I decided to make a day of it and climb Schiehallion in the morning then carry on up the road to watch the big match at Kingussie. The only problem with this was Walk Highlands said it would take four to six hours to complete the walk, meaning it would need to be an early start for the 2.30pm throw-up. Apparently it is a little bit ~~weird~~ morally wrong to get up at 5.30am on your weekend. Obviously nobody told that to the guy who was coming down from the mountain as I arrived at the car park.

I am not the kind of person who romanticises his childhood, but the reason Schiehallion was so high on my list was probably something to do with the fact that between the ages of about zero and 10 we went to Loch Rannoch every October holiday. We were too young to climb Schiehallion then, and it did seem massive. Even now the name of it conjures up the image of a sentinel standing over Rannoch Moor, the largest expanse of fuck-all in the British Isles 1. As it turns out, there are a couple of problems with this; the classic view of Schiehallion is the one below from across the loch, but this is not a view you see if you approach from the A9, and while it may now have become the highest hill I have (deliberately) climbed, it is not in fact that big an effort. The Munros book suggested it would be 2 hours 20 minutes to the top. I was there in an hour and a quarter, and it seemed rather like an anticlimax.

But besides childhood memories, there is another point of interest to Schiehallion 2. I consider it a Site of Special Scientific Interest, because it was used in the 18th century in an experiment to determine the weight of the world. Now this sounds wacky and Olde Worlde and we may scoff, but before the experiment which now bears the mountain’s name was carried out it was a common belief that beneath the Earth’s crust the planet was hollow inside. The scientific endeavour and inquisitive nature of the good old Fellows of the Royal Society should be saluted, because while attempting to weigh the world may seem like a frivolous undertaking, the Schiehallion Experiment yielded (at least) two very significant outcomes.

The experiment was done by measuring the deflection from vertical of a “plumbline” caused by the gravitational pull of the mountain itself, a phenomenon know at the time as “the Attraction of Mountains”. In order to determine the mass of the Earth, it was first necessary to determine the mass of the mountain, which in turn required the volume of the mountain to be calculated. To do this, the experimenters developed the system of contour lines which are now used universally on maps to show changes in elevation. The second is that in addition to proving that the Earth is not hollow, the experiment led to the first calculation of Newton’s gravitational constant, g. 9.81m/s². A number we process engineers and many others use almost every day. This number allows us to do anything from working out the pressure loss in a pipe to sending people into space. Without the Schiehallion Experiment so many things we take for granted would not be possible.

Plenty to think about when you’re standing with the weight of the world beneath your feet.

A bit early for a sit down, isn’t it?

Plaque commemorating the experiment

Notes:

1. That, or the FPSO.
2. A third point, just as an aside, is that it is almost in the dead centre of Scotland.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about that

2011-09-07T21:17:00.006+01:00

For now.

Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!

2011-08-25T19:27:00.014+01:00

I am not too bothered about seeing zombies or even Brad Pitt, but if my “hometown” is going to be dressed up as a city on the other side of the Atlantic I thought I should check it out. At least I got to see the set-up aftermath of a car crash, but that is not among the photos because it was behind fences and such.

There’s only ONE WAY to a good sausage roll in Philadelphia. See also: Your Global Greggs.

The true face of Jim Carrey, revealed by the Philadelphia Philanthropic Foundation.

Believable.

Yikes, the 44 has certainly changed since my day.

Take the Philly bus tour, with ZoneCard G1 or G2.

Crazy Taxi: Hey hey hey, you’re going the wrong way... up.

Yeah, right.

Centre City Area? Not “Center”? Interesting.

In every job that must be done there is an element of fun

2011-08-19T23:17:00.002+01:00

I often find myself sniggering in work when I hear someone quote a film or a book and let a little bit of their culture out. There are probably more times one goes over my head and I don’t snigger, but when I do spot one it is often the best moment of the day.

For example there is the boss who when presented with an anomalous P&ID is liable to remark, “Curious, said Alice”. Or another engineer who was being shown one of those nasty spreadsheets where you have to hit F9 to make it calculate: “As if by magic...” began the person demonstrating, and he completed the sentence with “...the shopkeeper appeared”. “And don’t call me Shirley” is a popular one, but on one occasion the perpetrator followed it up in an affected voice with “frrrankly, nooo” and was asked, “what’s that out of?”, to which he replied that it wasn’t out of anything, and was in fact original material.

I am disinclined to make such cultural references. The one time I was tempted was when someone was told to ask Martine about getting PPE, and he wanted to check that it was “Martine next door?” The sarcastic part of my brain was screaming for me to say “No, Martín Scorsese,” but I did not think that La Science des rêves was sufficiently well-known to register. Others are less perturbed by the possibility of their reference going unheeded. One process engineer has a particular dedication to comedy (he was the only person who, when we got a new colleague named Valerie, was brave enough to follow through with the “why don’t you come on over” joke) and I remember him recounting the events of a milestones meeting shortly after I began life at the cracker factory. In said meeting, someone had wondered aloud what the French call a milestone. To this, our friend replied “They call it a Royale with cheese.”

Everyone stared at him like he was a mental.

Words for a Saturday

2011-08-11T21:41:00.002+01:00

Or “Inspirational Quotes in Unexpected Places”

I snapped this at Dealey Plaza in Dallas while visiting the JFK assassination zone. Words from a man I’ve never heard of to commemorate another man I’ve never heard of:

Be noble! And the nobleness that lies in other men, sleeping, but never dead, will rise in majesty to meet thine own.

I have been flicking through a book called Played in Glasgow about the history of sports in the city. In it I found a photo of this engraving of some words of Hippocrates which is to be found at Cathkin Park, the ground of Third Lanark. The story of Third Lanark is not for me to tell, but this blogger has given it a decent round up and linked to some other sites. The carving reads:

Life is short,
art long,
opportunity fleeting,
experience treacherous,
judgement difficult.

As the book states, these words “carry a surreal resonance”, adding that “for Glasgow nostalgics... this modest arena is a place of pilgrimage. Haunted, but magical also.”

And because things always have to come in threes, there is an episode of Family Guy in which Stewie starts a company in the business of pyramid selling and takes Brian into his employ. On Brian’s “first day”, Stewie gives him a pep talk concluding with this absolute gem:

Remember: whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right!

He was paraphrasing Henry Ford, but it sounded better in the voice of a cartoon baby.

Campaign for Real Ale

2011-08-05T19:52:00.002+01:00

On my recent travels I have discovered that the drink I most like to drink – when I’m drinking I mean – is real ale. I realise that this may mean I am an old bastard, but that’s okay. I’ve come to terms with it. This process possibly began with the first pint of the USA trip – an Abita Amber. Admittedly after a day’s travel and tramping from the hotel we were choking for a pint and just about anything with hops in it would have seemed incredible, but USA dweller Mark used his local knowledge and chose well.

After that the Mull trip came and went, with the local brews in Tobermory’s most happening place already having been mentioned in these pages. The penny finally dropped, however, during my solo travel around the north coast. Sitting in what must be one of the most north westerly pubs on these islands I flipped over my coaster to reveal the immortal words “We like consistency. That’s why we guard our Master Recipe as rigidly as you guard your perfect pint” and I thought [high pitched] “Why the hell does Tennent’s keep pretending it’s a decent beer?”

Of all the attributes they could have lauded, consistency is not the one I’d associate with Tennent’s. Sometimes you can get a nice enough pint of it, sometimes it can be truly horrible. If any beer can vary dramatically, this is it. I expect this is because it is made with whichever barley and whichever hops are cheapest on the market at that moment. “Brewed with care at Wellpark Brewery”? Sounds picturesque, but fails to mention it’s in the east end of Glasgow. They boast that it’s made with water from Loch Katrine, and that is worth boasting about, because Loch Katrine water is the clearest, most beautiful water in the world. But it is also just the standard tap water we get in Glasgow, so it’s not like they’ve gone out of their way.

Anyway, the reason this coaster enraged me so was that the beer I was drinking off it was Dark Island from the Orkney Brewery. This beer has a long description like you might expect to see on a wine list, mentioning chocolate, figs and dried fruits, but all of that is bullshit. Most telling is that it has twice won CAMRA’s Champion Beer of Scotland award. Normally I would not let the possession of an award influence me, but I think it is well-justified. This is a truly refreshing, good-tasting beer.

I looked up and saw a poster proclaiming “Budweiser: King of Beers” and shook my head in despair. Bud and the rest can fuck off and stop pretending. I could resolve that from now on I will drink only real beers, no matter the cost to my pocket or my street cred, but that is somewhat impractical. There’s nothing wrong with being Tennent’s, but just don’t try to be something you’re not.

Final Sights of the North Coast

2011-07-31T19:29:00.012+01:00

The northwest corner of Scotland has some absolute beauties of beaches. Who knew? And the sea is colours you never thought it would be, not in Scotland anyway. Now I want a boat more than ever. This is the “award-winning” beach at Durness, but there are dozens of hidden gems.

Just along the road from here is Smoo Cave, which has a chequered past involving tales of murder and pacts with the devil, and a pretty cool underground waterfall inside it.

I took a photo of this sign in Lochinver purely because Lochinver is no more than a dot on a map – Google maps has a range of zoom from four copies of the globe being visible to a scale where you can pick out individual cars and even people, and you need to be over halfway towards the small end of this range before the name of Lochinver even becomes visible. And yet this sign is necessary because Lochinver has a harbour which is full of trucks from all over Europe and have driven here (on roads that are ridiculously undersized for this kind of traffic) for the sole reason of picking up fish which are landed here from the north Atlantic.

The curved bridge at Kylesku, designed to be “in harmony” with the surrounding scenery, which is like a Norwegian fjord, probably.

I had wanted to go all the way to Cape Wrath, but I was too late for the ferry across the Kyle of Durness. Here is the “ferry” and also a somewhat worrying notice – the MoD uses the wilderness of this top corner of country as a practice range, and all branches of the armed forces bombard it.

Now, my early hillwalking career was not going well, seeing as I had failed to reach the summits on any of my last three expeditions. I was therefore determined to reach the top of “the Queen of Scottish Mountains”, Ben Loyal. Here it is from the causeway across the Kyle of Tongue, which I also enjoyed seeing.

From every angle the hill shows another face, so I will try to be selective in which photos should accompany this. There is not much to say about the ascent really, other than the shot with the trig point proves that I made it all the way this time.

The approach, the top, incontestable proof.

Climbing Suilven

2011-07-24T21:27:00.011+01:00

Suilven is an icon of a hill. The Scottish Mountaineering Club’s Corbetts and Other Scottish Hills book is usually sober and to the point, but even it comes over all misty eyed when describing it:

It may come as a surprise to many hillwalkers that such a spectacular and dominating mountain as Suilven fails by a fair margin to reach Corbett height. Nevertheless, by any mountaineer’s standard it yields nothing to any of the higher Scottish hills. An “Inselberg” or “Island Mountain” of Torridonian sandstone, surrounded by a sea of Lewisian gneiss from which the softer rocks have been stripped, the Grey Castle when viewed from the west stands as a rather forbidding bastion defying the ravages of wind and weather.

From the west you can only see the mountain’s bulbous nose, and from the east it appears as a towering spire. Only from the northern or southern approach can you see the true shape, a “narrow serrated ridge with three main summits”. It short, it is a big ugly beautiful bastard of a mountain.

The problem with climbing Suilven is that it is so isolated. I took the route via the Falls of Kirkaig, and it took me a good two and a half hours to reach the foot of the mountain, having gone into mud above the knee twice. As I approached, the wind was blowing wispy white cloud over the top, like dry ice over a witches’ cauldron in a lo-budget production of Macbeth. This soon cleared, and the outlook moved from ominous to promising. As I got close I realised just how steep the ascent would be – hard to tell from photographs, but it looked like this couldn’t possibly be the recommended route.

It was a bit of a rocky scramble, but I made it on to the ridge – complete with its wall that made me ask “Who built this? And why?” Having seen no one but a couple of fishermen on the way there I arrived at exactly the same time as a man and his three boys made the ridge from the north side. After saying hello I realised I was wearing a baseball cap back to front with no apparent irony. Having pressed the chicken button on Stac Pollaidh I was determined to reach the summit this time, but the wind reduced me to kneeling by a rock and crying for a while. In places the ridge is no wider than the path, and getting blown back down did not appeal. I realised the wind wasn’t going to go away and so descended to find somewhere a little more sheltered to have the best cup of tea I have ever had and admire the view of a domain that is more water than land and reminded me of this. By the time I got back to the car I’d been walking for seven and a half hours, and I can hardly think of a better way to spend a day.

A Man in Assynt

2011-07-19T21:32:00.011+01:00

- Coming up?
- What’s up there?
- The view.
- The view of what? The view of down here? I can see that from down here.

My new thing, as of about four weeks ago, is walking up hills. I have not climbed many, as evidenced by the abortive attempt to conquer Ben More on Mull. I don’t think Munro bagging is for me, partly because if I started now (I already have one – Ben Lomond, which happens to be the most southerly, i.e. closest to Glasgow) I might be lucky to finish by the time I’m fifty, and partly because it is unrealistic – one of them is called The Inaccessible Pinnacle (or “In Pinn”) for goodness’ sake. But the main reason I don’t think Munro bagging is the way to do it is that some Munros are pretty unremarkable, or repetitive, or (whisper it) boring. To climb a particular hill purely on the basis of it being above a rather arbitrarily selected height has something of the Edmund Hillary “Because it’s there” attitude. On the other hand some of the hills most worth climbing are nowhere near Munro status. I set out to climb a few of these in Jonathan’s Great Scottish Adventure.

My plan was half-baked, and mainly consisted of throwing a bike, a tent and a few books and maps into the car and going. At 4.30 on a Monday morning. Five hours later I was in a Tesco car park in Ullapool and ready for my first challenge: Stac Pollaidh (Polly).

After an hour and twenty minutes of back-breaking effort I was... at the Stac Pollaidh car park. You see, somewhere along the line someone had convinced me that a “bike-hike” was a good idea. That person was sadly lacking in local knowledge of the terrain of the greater Ullapool area. I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I do not own a bicycle. Hence I cycle rarely, and the bike I was using was borrowed from one sibling or other. I am proud that on the way there at least I did not get off and push it up any of the hills.

Anyway, Stac Pollaidh stands at a puny 613m above sea level, but is considered possibly the most difficult summit on the British mainland, there being some debate as to whether it is more or less difficult than The Cobbler, and The In Pinn being located on Skye. To get to the true summit, however, is not compulsory – you can get to the ridge or one of the lesser summits fairly easily and the effect is much the same. The highest point is made rather inaccessible by a series of rocky towers which would need to be scaled. These are what give the hill its unique shape and one of its major points of interest. The other is the spectacular views over the “wilderness of Assynt”. I remarked on approach that this must be what the landscape is like on Mars. Because all the surrounding hills are Inselbergs or “Island Mountains”, with the aid of a map you can easily pick out each one individually. It was like looking at a Norman MacCaig poem “in the flesh”:

Glaciers, grinding West, gouged out
these valleys, rasping the brown sandstone,
and left, on the hard rock below – the
ruffled foreland -
this frieze of mountains, filed
on the blue air – Stac Polly,
Cul Beag, Cul Mor, Suilven,
Canisp – a frieze and
a litany.

So it seems all you need to do to write a poem is make a list of things you can see. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that this first part of the trip was something of a pilgrimage for me, as a MacCaig fan. He spent his holidays in Assynt and draws on it often in his poems, sometimes mentioning specific places by name or other times just the influence of the landcapes, the nature or the people. He didn’t mention cycling much though.

Too many photos. I kept taking more from new angles. So, Stac Pollaidh from afar, the Martian landscape, closer up from the bottom, the way to the top and the view from (almost) the top.

Da da da-da daaa daaa...

2011-07-10T18:44:00.005+01:00

I may have forgotten to mention that the trip to Mull took in part of the route for the only UK entry in National Geographic’s 50 Tours of a Lifetime, which is a section of the Scottish Sea Kayaking Trail from Loch Linnhe to the Sound of Arisaig, presumably via the Sound of Mull. This was why the ferry journeys were so very tolerable. While it may not be part of that route, another boat trip, to the Isle of Staffa, was pretty special.

Staffa is where Fingal’s Cave is found, and it was a visit here that inspired Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, as is well known. Various versions of the legend of its formation seem to exist, but essentially they all revolve around this being the “other” end of the Giant’s Causeway which was built by either the Irish or the Scottish giant so they could fight. However, while the Irish giant was building his end with Lego, his Scottish adversary was playing with Rollercoaster Tycoon. Although I can’t deny I was impressed by the Giant’s Causeway and took a lot of photos of it, Staffa is like the causeway times one hundred. Rather than just the regular structure of the columns, Staffa also includes caves, extra islands, sloping sections, horizontal parts and bits where the columns are curved and twisted into a half-pipe shape.

You know something is impressive when it makes you start re-evaluating the Grand Canyon, but I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

McCaig’s Folly

2011-07-05T23:55:00.000+01:00

I can’t lie; usually I am keen to get out of Oban as quickly as possible. But, on the trip to Mull we did have to kill some time there. To be fair, everyone I know who doesn’t play shinty describes it as a lovely town, and it was quite pleasant to be there without the spectre of a horrible game culminating in the concession of a last-minute winner looming over me.

So while waiting for the ferry we took a drive (I am ashamed of this and would far rather have walked) up to McCaig’s Tower, sometimes known as McCaig’s folly, which overlooks the town. It consists of a Coliseum-like ring of stone, with two levels of arches. You can see a panorama of it here.

The tower was designed and commissioned, if that is possible, by John Stuart McCaig, a wealthy banker from the Isle of Lismore. It was explained to me that he decided to build the tower as a philanthropic act, to provide jobs for local people. That is all well and good, but it later transpired that McCaig was also a mental and envisaged that the site would be a memorial to his family, also including a museum, an art gallery and a large tower in the centre. This would contain statues of McCaig, his parents and all of his many siblings, each of which was to cost not less than £1000 – which is more like £100 000 in today’s money.

Anyway, it is one of the things most worth seeing if you happen to be waiting for a ferry in Oban.

Mull It Over

2011-07-01T17:42:00.004+01:00

A while ago we turned up at a certain shinty pitch near a beach before the game. It was typical summer shinty weather and I remarked that this was just like being on summer holiday – it’s raining and I’m at a beach eating sandwiches in the car. Upon hearing this, everyone else in the car turned and looked at me as if I’d grown horns. So it turns out not everyone spent their childhood holidays on various Scottish islands eating reams of Dairylea slices. This is why this summer I had to begin educating my friends by dragging them to the Isle of Mull for a weekend.

Having recently decided that Scotland is the best country in the world and that that is not open to debate, the drive and ferry trips were less a chore and more a valid part of the holiday, and we stopped in nigh-on every lay-by like Germans or Yanks do, ignoring the fact that I’m up the A83 every other Saturday anyway.

Imagine a pub where they play Runrig CDs back to back and serve local real ales with names like The Red Monk of Iona... and I don’t think I’ve ever drunk whisky so close to the distillery where it was made (except for on a distillery tour). Don't worry that it was probably sent to Glasgow to be bottled first. After a few of these I managed to convince my friends to attempt to climb their first Munro. We would have made it as well, were it not for the fact that the upper 70% of the hill was inside a raincloud, and after a valiant 2-and-a-bit hours we could no longer see the path and decided to abandon the attempt.

The rest of the time on the island was filled with twisty roads, boat trips and geological wonders (to follow). This was my kind of holiday... but the less said about bloody Balamory the better.

Wonders of Street View (1): The Commute

2011-06-19T19:32:00.009+01:00

It started with a quiz question: which two SPL or SFL stadiums can Jonathan see on his way to and from work? Although I saw some pretty amazing things in America, since returning from the other side of the pond I have been doing my best to appreciate things that don’t require several hundred pounds and an eleven hour flight to see. In fact this is easy to do when you live in a country like this, and that, rather than any economic factor, is why my next two planned holidays are going to be “staycations”. I do not like this new word.

But in the spirit of seeing what is great in everyday things, here are some of the views I get every day driving to Grangemouth and back. Google street view is perhaps not the best medium for showing the scenery, but it makes it authentic and in keeping with the concept. Is this art...?

Not far from my front door, but after you have already passed the bit of Govan where work is still apparently being done on ships, you come to the Glasgow Science Centre and Glasgow Tower, which I’m sure have featured on these pages already. Here you can also see the masts of the Tall Ship, although it has now been relocated to the new Riverside Museum. The museum itself is not yet on street view, which is a shame because it looks great and I expect I will have to make a visit to it sometime. I don’t know what the building with the square tower with the clock on it is. There is also a point on this road where you can see up to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Glasgow University, but street view doesn’t capture it.

As I join the motorway I pass the magnificent Mitchell Library, which is even better when lit up at night. I like the library, if I may be overly sentimental for a moment, because after a long journey it is the sight that lets you know you are almost home. Except if you are walking home from town half-cut, in which case you’re only just setting off on a long journey.

Castlecary Arches: a staple of Scottish traffic reports since time immemorial. It’s a fairly standard viaduct, hardly Glenfinnan in terms of size or scenery; rather it looks like something out of a toy set.

This straight section of the M9 is where I experiment with steering the car by opening and closing the windows to alter the drag coefficient on either side. I’m still waiting for the big breakthrough. It is also where you can look across the fields at what passes for hills on the east coast. Not far down the road from here you get a good view of the refinery from the opposite angle from this, especially if the KG flare is going off. Sadly it shows up too faintly on street view to include this time.

On the elevated section of the M8 on the way back through Glasgow you get a great view of the west end, especially on a sunny evening. You can see the spires of the churches along Great Western Road, and the ones around Kelvingrove too, with hints of Park Circus. The tower of Park Church used to be my favourite building in Glasgow, until I found out it used to be Cracker Factory HQ.

Near to picture one but in the opposite direction I finally pass the Squinty Bridge, Finnieston Cran, Armadillo and BBC Scotland building at Pacific Quay. You can barely make out the BBC logo on the building just to the left of the Armadillo. It often passes me by that the sounds I am listening to are coming from that building.

Bass Solo. Bass Solo Over.

2011-06-17T15:45:00.005+01:00

In the absence of any proper posts, here is a song I heard on the radio this week:

And here is Murray Hewitt on the same subject:

Your Pictures of My Scotland

2011-06-07T21:06:00.003+01:00

One of the latest additions to my multi-slacking hub (over there on the right) is Your Pictures of Scotland. This is a page on the BBC site where, each week, readers can send in photos of “anything that depicts life in Scotland”. About a month ago, this picture of where I work was featured.

From this viewpoint it looks pretty amazing. Based on this picture I’d hazard it might be one of the most picturesque oil refineries there is. And seeing this photo reminded me of how detached from the outside I am, most of the time, sitting in my Portakabin wrapped up in my drawings and maps, and often not really visualising the reality of it. Despite the fact that my office is located at the refinery fence, I am party to very little knowledge of what is going on in there. I could be working on a project and what happened in Wales could happen and I could carry on, blissfully unaware. At this point I am contractually obliged to add the words “provided there are approved manhours in the budget”.

The other week I was out wandering about on some of that tall stuff and couldn’t help thinking how amazing it is and admiring the view, failing to follow what my Sherpa for the day was explaining to me and eventually ceding all credibility when I lost the line I was supposed to be sketching. Later on in a meeting the instruments engineer in charge of one of the units arrived late and gave his excuses, explaining that he had been tied up in meetings all day. He was forgiven, “That’s alright. Oh, by the way, I think your plant’s tripped.” A reminder that at least it’s not only me who gets detached from the outside world.

Things That Happened in the USA

2011-06-02T21:02:00.004+01:00

Or “Never in the field of human consumption were so many Subway sandwiches devoured by so few people in such a short time.”

If the Hard Rock Café incident didn’t ward me off ordering nachos, I certainly won’t be doing so again after Nacho Fail II: Las Vegas. If something in America is described as “mucho mucho grande” you should take the hint, or at least learn Spanish. Having said that, this was the only time I failed to clear my plate in the US. If America couldn’t make me fat, my plan to become a massive fullback is scuppered.

The only other incident of note to do with eating was when we became victims of racism in a Chinese-run café in LA. With Mark and me already finished our lunches, the owner/server then tried to give me Steve’s meal as well. When she realised her mistake she apologised, “Oh sorry, you all look the same!” Get that: a chink said we all look the same.

Staying with the theme of casual racism, we wandered into a couple of dodgy neighbourhoods in Dallas and LA, for instance when visiting the Watts Towers. There are some clues to look out for so you know when you’re in such a situation; if you find yourself on the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Malcolm X Boulevard you might not want to hang around too long. If when you exit the Metro four locals welcome you “What’s happenin’ dudes?” your best move is to walk round the corner to the other entrance of the station and get back on the train.

You can take the boy out of Glasgow... department: the route from LA to Las Vegas takes you through the Mojave Desert close to Death Valley, the hottest, driest place in North America... and it fucking rained. When we got there we discovered that Las Vegas is the strangest place you’ve ever been, stranger even than Los Angeles. It’s like a cinema where they never ask you to leave. That is, if the film you are watching is set in a city which it later turns out is actually inside a building in a much larger city, in which the streets are full of guys handing out leaflets for “hot girls” you can have delivered to your room in 20 minutes (or if you prefer to be more discreet you can just pick up one of the free brochures from a dispenser on the pavement.) Everything about the place is weird.

I did have a wee play at the casinos. I’m not going to be one of those bastards who claims he came out on top – if I wanted to make money I could have quit after two hands of blackjack, but would be the fun in that? No, I lost (or spent) a fair whack, including $13 in a Kenny Rogers-themed one-armed bandit. Sure, I could regret wasting so much money, but that’s all water and bridges.

If there is an item of clothing that suits me less than a purple hoodie (or sunglasses or a baseball cap) it is surely a cowboy hat. We tried them on in Texas, as well as a few pairs of cowboy boots, which were unexpectedly comfortable. I think they’d be great in Scotland in winter, and so will not mock Mark for wearing them, but the pair I really wanted were snakeskin, and weighed about the same as a baby sparrow, and cost a thousand dollars.

As for the rest – Mark losing his sunglasses then finding them then losing them again, Steve pouring out half a bottle of beer onto his seat to prove it was empty then getting arrested by the Austin PD, me accidentally launching a Snickers I’d just bought with my very last dollar off a balcony at George Bush Intercontinental – well, I guess you just had to be there.

Things the USA Calls Sports

2011-05-24T21:32:00.003+01:00

These are just my impressions of the American sports. If you want a more detailed approach you should see Mark’s recent series on the subject.

Where to begin... okay, I will cover the “big four” sports even though I only saw two of them. Briefly, the ones we didn’t see were baseball (rounders) and the still hilariously named “football”. I can’t say much about American football. I’ve seen highlights of it once when it was on at Wembley, but while we were in the States it was on strike or something similar. I think I’d quite like to play baseball, but by all accounts it is horrible to watch since it lasts approximately all day and for 85% of the time nothing is really happening. For this reason we were not allowed to go to a game.

So, on to basketball. We saw two-time defending champions the LA Lakers lose at home to the Utah Jazz. It happened that the Lakers then went on their longest losing streak for several years, which didn’t really matter because they had already qualified for the playoffs ages ago. That is the problem with these sports: many of the games are meaningless because all you have to do to get into the ridiculously overblown playoff stage is finish in the top half of all the teams. (I think it’s actually more complicated than that, but basically that’s the gist of it.) I won’t even try to explain how it all works, but the regular season contains 82 (eighty-two!) games, and the playoffs are then a 16 team knockout, with each round being a best of seven match series. They play nigh-on every night. If you think there is too much sport on TV in this country, don’t go to the USA. You won’t be able to drink in a pub or even eat in a restaurant without being subjected to the endless coverage of several games of several sports every night of the week.

A few years ago, at the end of the football season FourFourTwo produced a guide to alternative sports to follow over the summer. When it came to basketball it explained that the differences to football include that “if the score doesn’t change every 9.2 seconds, the spectators are entitled to a full refund.” While this was clearly an exaggeration, it’s not all that far from the truth – they have a clock that counts down from 24 seconds each time a team gains possession, and if they don’t attempt a shot before the timer reaches zero it is a foul. As far as I can tell, this is necessary because otherwise the first team to score would then keep possession of the ball for the remainder of the game, which would be easy to do as there is no tackling. In short, I thought basketball was pretty rubbish.

But for all this, it was actually a pretty exciting game to be at. The rules seem to artificially engineering a situation where going in to the last few minutes there is rarely more than a couple of scores in it. This, I believe, is why idiots are engrossed by it. By the final quarter I found myself accidentally supporting the away team despite having gained the friendship of a morbidly obese Lakers season ticket-holder who engaged me in a conversation about how he used to be able to fit in the seat before they squeezed a few more into the Staples Center in order to increase the capacity. This was after he had spent the whole first period in the concourse buying “snacks”. Anyway, the Jazz’s new star Gordon Hayward apparently had the game of his life, and single-handedly got his team into a position from where they could only have lost if MVP Kobe Bryant hadn’t dropped the ball under no real pressure in the last 3 seconds.

Of course, my favourite of the American sports was (ice) hockey, being as it is distantly related to shinty, and it is also the most European in nature of the big four. You can have draws (kind of), there aren’t so many ad breaks, definitely no cheerleaders and the fan culture is somewhat closer to what we are used to. I now consider myself a bona fide San Jose Sharks supporter, having seen them defeat the actual Mighty Ducks (disappointingly now rebranded the Anaheim Ducks). The best part is that their goalkeeper is called Antti Niemi, though Wikipedia has quashed any suggestion it could be the original having done a Gavin Hastings late in his career.

Here there is no question of the tension being artificially generated; this is a sport where possession counts for next to nothing and speed is all that matters. The physical battle, the skill of doing it all on ice and the fact that violence is positively encouraged (at 4-2 with 9 seconds to go and the game over as a contest a fight broke out almost because it was required to send the crowd home happy)... there is much to be admired and enjoyed. Whether or not I will be tempted to a Braehead Clan or Paisley Pirates game, however, remains to be seen.

Things That Are Big

2011-05-16T12:05:00.003+01:00

Hoover Dam is big, but I pretty much covered it last time. Saturn V is big, but I’ve spoken about it before, twice. The USA is a big country; the number of miles we put on the car during the holiday is equivalent to driving from Glasgow to Naples and back. For a lot of the trip we were at elevations higher than it is possible to get in this country, drifting through the desert across three time zones with our ears constantly popping and unpopping. Texas has, and is very proud of the fact, a larger area than France.

Just outside Las Vegas we visited Red Rock Canyon. It was a beautiful, sunny day in the desert. The temperature was 52 degrees. Fahrenheit. The scenery was pretty spectacular and we took a lot of photos. I was hoping to see Wile E. Coyote waiting to drop an Acme anvil on Roadrunner, but had to settle for purchasing a bookmark featuring the actual bird from the gift shop. At the time we thought Red Rock Canyon was impressive. All I can say for it now is that it is lucky we saw it before we went to Grand Canyon.

There are a lot of things I have seen and said they are cool or impressive or beautiful, but nothing has ever taken my breath away like Grand Canyon did when I first saw it. It’s hard to describe. Walking towards the rim from the car you first see some of the cliffs along the ledge or on the other side and it’s much as you expect. But as you get closer, more and more is revealed, and it just keeps going down and down and then down some more, in a jaw-dropping, vertigo-inducing way. Everyone says there’s no point taking photos of it because you just can’t do it justice, and that is why there are none here, though of course we tried, but while we were there I heard at least five separate people remark “that’s one of the best photos I’ve ever taken!”

Of course, since it goes down so far, the top of the canyon is pretty high up – 8000 feet, nearly twice as high as Ben Nevis. I failed to realise this. I did not expect there to be snow on the ground at any point of the holiday, so I rocked up there in shorts and a t-shirt, and had to borrow Mark’s purple hoodie (since his bag was the most accessible). Never has any item of clothing suited anyone less than that, and of course there are several photos to prove it now.

So Red Rock Canyon was lucky we saw it before Grand Canyon, but everything we saw after Grand Canyon is unlucky for the same reason. Everything felt like a come-down after that. Nothing was really impressive any more. See Grand Canyon and die, because after it there really is no point.

Things the USA Has Built

2011-05-10T21:20:00.005+01:00

Hoover Dam describes itself as a “monument to American determination”. My affronted inference that this suggests that Americans are any more determined than the rest of us aside, it is a truly impressive structure, more so when you consider that it was designed and built in the 1930s. It is the biggest dam in the Western Hemisphere, which means it was the biggest in the world until China came along. 1 What I didn’t know is that the main reason for building it was not to produce electricity, but to manage the water of the Colorado River effectively, both preventing floods and providing a steady supply to downstream users. The hydroelectric power was sold originally to pay for the building of the dam and now for its upkeep, and supplies, we were told, one million homes across three states. Perhaps its other title of “Modern Civil Engineering Wonder of the United States” is more fitting. 2

A true monument to American determination is, naturally, provided by an immigrant – the towers of Simon Rodia in Los Angeles. In Hollywoodland, Walk-of-Famers are buying up insanely beautiful houses in Beverly Hills for $20 million, just to tear them down and build new ones in their place, and chumps like us (but also many worse ones who think that the lives of celebrities are worth anything) are paying thirty-odd bucks to watch them do it. When a landslide cuts some letters off the name of their neighbourhood, rather than fix it they simply change the name to suit the remains of the sign. Meanwhile, half an hour across town in Watts, Simon Rodia is spending three decades of his life picking up other people’s garbage and building it into towers that no one really took any notice of. He drove himself half mad doing it, then moved upstate and told anyone who would listen about his towers. Not many did, it seems, but maybe that was his American Dream. I don’t really know what that means, but I am contractually obliged to use the term at some point in my holiday reportage.

Notes:

1. They have also just finished building this insanely high bridge beside it.

2. When I was checking a datasheet on my first day back in work they had put 80” instead of 80mm NB. This reminded me of reading the guide at Hoover Dam: “the valve houses contain seventeen 30-inch needle valves.” 30-inch, pretty big but not unreasonable I thought, oh hang on a minute, there’s only one dash there: “the valve houses contain seventeen 30-foot needle valves...” I did not tell my boss this anecdote.

(Perfect) Practice Makes Perfect

2011-05-03T22:47:00.005+01:00

Bounce by Matthew Syed is a book that could change your life. I do not say this lightly, and don’t consider myself particularly given to hyperbole, at least not most of the time. The central premise of the book is this: there is no such thing as natural talent, and therefore by extension anything can be achieved by anyone who devotes enough practice to it. Although written with a focus on top-level sports, the idea applies equally to any skill, from music to business to public speaking. If you buy into it, it has the power at least to change the way you think about yourself.

Syed’s evidence begins with himself as exhibit A. Before becoming a journalist he played table tennis, and was Commonwealth champion three times. However, on (almost) the same street in Reading lived ten more of the top-ranked players in the country. Was it “something in the water” in that particular neighbourhood that made it such a hot-bed of talent? No, says Syed, it came down to two factors: practice and opportunity. These young players all became members of a club where each had a key and with it the ability to practice 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Syed became the pick of the crop because he also benefitted from a full-size table in his garage and an older brother with whom he unknowingly accumulated thousands of hours of practice.

This is why he was able to become world-class: the ten-thousand hour rule. This is how much (effective) practice is required to reach the top echelon in any activity, according to one well-established theory. The book illustrates it with a study that was carried out at the Music Academy of West Berlin. Violin students were divided into three groups: those expected to become international soloists, normally described as “super-talented” and thought to have been born with special musical genes, those expected to go on to play with a top orchestra, but not as a star, and those studying to become “mere” music teachers. It was found that the histories of students in the three groups were on average almost identical, except for one important facet – the amount of time spent on serious practice. The first group had spent around 10 000 hours, the second group 2000 less and the third group 4000 less than that. Most strikingly, though, there were no exceptions. No one had put in the 10 000 hours and failed to make it, and no one had reached the elite group without that amount of practice.

Another interesting example is that of Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian educational psychologist and early advocate of the practice theory of excellence who believed that emphasis on hard work rather than innate ability could transform the education system. To prove his theories he declared that his children would become world-class in... something. Then he wrote away for a wife, as seems to have been the way in the Eastern Bloc of the 1960s, who would agree to help him undertake his experiment. By the time his first child arrived he had decided that the ideal medium by which to prove his point would be chess, on account of its objectivity, and began to train his three daughters from a young age. All three went on to smash all kinds of records, and are universally acknowledged as the three best female players of all time (and all have beaten the top male players as well, I hasten to add). Still the sceptics would not be convinced, instead believing the daughters’ skills to be hereditary, despite Polgar the father being no more than a “hobby” player. When challenged to repeat the results with three boys adopted from a developing country he jumped at the chance, but was forced to back down by his exhausted wife, who believed the first experiment should have been enough to prove the theory.

Syed outlines the neurological processes that explain why large amounts of practice both allow and are needed for a person to develop advanced skills. He explains how the brain stores large quantities of information by a process elegantly referred to as “chunking”, and this is why he is able to return a smash in table tennis with only 250 milliseconds to react, but when facing a tennis serve from Michael Stich with 450 milliseconds to make the shot the ball was past him before he knew it was struck. It was not his reaction times that were at fault, but the fact that he did not know what signs to look for that would give him clues as to where the ball was about to go. Possibly more important is the many hours of repetitive practice required to absorb techniques from the conscious part of the mind into the subconscious, in a state known as “expert-induced amnesia” which is often incorrectly called “muscle memory”. This is where you can perform an action, but would not necessarily be able to explain how it is carried out. The point of these two processes is that in a performance situation, such as a sports match, there is not time to think through the techniques required to, for example, hit a topspin forehand, so the skill must be deeply ingrained in the subconscious, and this can only be achieved through many hours of practice. Syed also explains how choking happens when expert-induced amnesia is reversed, and subconscious actions begin to be played out consciously.

The book goes on to reveal why neither Mozart nor Tiger Woods is a prodigy – young Wolfgang began composing at the age of five, and so was a comparatively late developer given that he was in his mid-twenties by the time he composed most of his major works, while Woods received his first golf club before his first birthday, accumulating more hours of practice by the time he was five than many people achieve in a lifetime. Trust in the “talent myth” is cited as a factor in the Enron collapse, it is proved that taxi drivers have larger brains than the rest of us, the placebos (or not) of drugs, superstition and religion are discussed, and you find out what not to tell your children and why a statistically anomalous proportion of sportspeople have birthdays in the first half of the year, before Syed finally solves racism in the concluding chapter .

It’s a compelling exposition of an idea that, if it could take root, could greatly advance not just sportspeople, but education, political systems and, most importantly, individuals. What a difference it would make if people who say they don’t have the coordination for tennis, or a head for numbers, or the balance for ice-skating would be convinced that while the starting point may differ between people, there is nothing to stop them doing these things. It now makes me incredibly (and hypocritically) frustrated to hear people make negative statements such as these.

Is this just my latest self-improvement fad? Possibly. But I feel that everyone who coaches sport, every teacher and every parent (actually, strike out that last one on account of there already being more than enough infuriating career parents out there) should read this book. More than this, it should be required reading for every teenager. I wish I’d read it when I was fifteen, which incidentally is exactly what Gabby Logan says on the back cover.

So I’m sorry to say it kids, but your teachers and parents were right: practice really does make perfect, sort of. But let’s think about that ten-thousand hour rule. This entails three hours of (key word) effective practice per day, nearly every day, for ten years. It is acknowledged that beyond 1000 hours in a year it is difficult to maintain the efficiency of that practice, hence the rule is sometimes referred to as the ten-year rule. Think of the willpower required, the faith and conviction that it will all be worth it. That dedication is rare, the opportunity perhaps even more so. So while every person may be capable of greatness, it still takes a special type of person to achieve it. However, the concept of Bounce is not limited to the attainment of world-class sporting abilities, but can be applied on an individual basis to academia, to careers and to hobbies, and that is where the real power of the book lies.

Losers Eleven

2011-04-25T14:15:00.001+01:00

Do you know what I think are rubbish? If you do then save yourself the trouble of reading about it and check back in a week or so.

It’s those hoodies that people get nowadays when they’re leaving school that say “leavers” on the back with the names of all the people who are leaving arranged to form the number of the year they left. I just think these are so incredibly naff, much like the American-style college/“school” apparel but with the name of a British university on it. Message to countries outside the USA: Stop trying to copy America!

Anyway, I saw one of these “Leavers 11” hoodies being worn in the Kirkintilloch area… in February! If it’s February and you’ve already left school that makes you a dropout. You shouldn’t be advertising the fact! (Of course, I’m ignoring the possibility that the wearer of the offending garment had chosen to leave school having already secured an unconditional offer for a place at university, but it wouldn’t do to let (potential) facts get in the way of a good rant.)

Ame-ri-ca, F*ck Yeah!

2011-04-01T01:21:00.004+01:00

It isn’t like me to write about a holiday before it has even happened, but I have reason to worry about this one, not least that the price of the flights alone was more than more than the total cost of my last few trips. As of today I will be touring 12% of the United States and there are a lot of things to be afraid of.

Every time I fly I become more scared of flying. This trip will involve four flights. That’s four take-offs and four landings I have to try to sleep through. If anything goes wrong during the stopover in Amsterdam I will only have about €20 on me and my EHIC has expired. I am also wary of potential immigration fails when we finally touch down at SFO.

There are untold potential logistical failures that could happen in a visit to 9 cities in 21 days. Problems with car hire, missing any of the hotels, getting lost, breaking down... the language barrier when trying to communicate with Westpondians.

Add to these the species that exist in America that we don’t get in any meaningful way over here: bears, snakes, scorpions, vultures... zombies, monsters and aliens (in Hollywood). Hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes, oil spills.

Guns.

Barring disasters I’ll be back in three weeks. Maybe I’d be better off staying at home.

This Be The Verse

2011-03-25T20:29:00.004Z

Fishwifey Doc Controller: Has Pregnant Process Engineer had her baby yet?

Banterful Process Engineer: No, but I was speaking to Matey Project Manager and he said unless he sees a signed and approved change note it’ll have to go down as a missed milestone.

FDC: That’s quite funny...

It’s not quite funny. It wasn’t even that funny when he said the same joke the week before. 1

The only things you should be allowed to share about your children are things that are genuinely funny and do not rely on the child in the story being yours. Anecdotes about martial arts lessons are allowed. A two-year-old whose vocabulary includes “clutch alignment tool” is allowed. If the punchline is “she made a funny face”, that is not allowed.

Ultrasound scans of unborn babies look like weather systems or, at best, aliens. I’ve heard people say “I think it’s going to be a boy because on the scan it looks like my husband” and “we’ve got the scan of my daughter on the wall at home and it still looks like her – she’s sixteen now”. So, your husband/daughter is a black and white foetus? 2

When a child is more than 6 weeks old its age should be at least expressed in months. 14 weeks doesn’t mean anything to anyone. 14 and a half weeks certainly doesn’t. I’d prefer people’s ages to be expressed in years only. Yeah, he’s, uh, zero.

Seriously, I’ve worked in the cracker factory for 18 months and for the last nine all I’ve heard is baby baby baby baby... when will it stop?

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Notes:

1. It is a little bit funny. It’s the kind of joke I would make, in a different context.
2. This line contributed by Steve.

Hey remember that time when I would only read Shakespeare

2011-03-18T19:25:00.007Z

We didn’t get Hamlet in school, we had Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice. Adam McNaughtan, who also wrote Where is the Glasgow That I Used to Know? and The Skyscraper Wean, wrote this when working as an English teacher in Glasgow to try to interest his apathetic pupils. It is amazing. I didn’t know the story of Hamlet until now. Some of the rhymes in here are brilliant. I especially like “Claudius... fraud he is”, “Corpus Delicti... hempen necktie” and “interested pairties... Laertes.”

There was this king sleepin’ in his gairten all alane

When his brither drapped into his ear a wee daud o’ henbane

Then he stole his brither’s crown an’ his money an’ his widow

But the deid king walked an’ got his son and said, Hey listen, kiddo

I’ve been kilt and it’s yer duty tae get revenge on Claudius

Kill him clean an’ quick an’ show the nation what a fraud he is

The boy said, Right, I’ll dae it but I'll have tae play it crafty

So that naeb’dy will suspect me I’ll kid on that I’m a dafty

So to all except Horatio, his beloved trusted friend

Hamlet, that’s the boy, kids on he’s roon’ the bend

An’ because he wisnae ready for obligatory killin’

He convinced the king his uncle he was tuppence aff the shillin’

Took the micky oot Polonius, treated poor Ophelia vile

Tell’t Rosencrantz an’ Guildenstern that Denmark was a jile

Then a troop o’ travelling actors, like Seven-Eighty-Four

Arrived tae dae a special one-night gig in sunny Elsinore

Hamlet, Hamlet loved his mammy

Hamlet, Hamlet, actin’ barmy

Hamlet, Hamlet, hesitatin’

Wonders if the ghost’s a cheat

An’ that is why he's waitin’

So then Hamlet wrote a scene for the players to enact

While Horatio an’ him would watch to see if Claudius cracked

The play was ca’d “The Moosetrap” – no’ the one that’s runnin’ noo

An’ sure enough, the king walked oot before the play was through

So Hamlet’s got the proof that Claudius gie’d his Da’ the fatal dose

The only problem bein’ noo that Claudius knows that Hamlet knows

While Hamlet tell’t his mammy her new husband’s no’ a fit wan

Uncle Claud pit oot a contract with the English king as hit-man

Then when Hamlet stabbed Polonius, the concealed Corpus Delicti

Was the king’s excuse tae send him for an English hempen necktie

Wi’ Rosencrantz an’ Guildenstern tae make sure he got there

Ah but Hamlet jumped the boat an’ put the finger on that pair

Meanwhile Laertes heard his Da’ had been stabbed through the arras

He came racin’ back tae Elsinore hot-foot tout-suite fae Paris

And Ophelia wi’ her Da’ killed by the man she wis tae marry

Efter sayin’ it wi’ flooers she committed hari-kari

Hamlet, Hamlet, oh nae messin’

Hamlet, Hamlet learn’t his lesson

Hamlet, Hamlet, alas poor Yorick’s crust

Has convinced him that men good or bad

Some day must come tae dust

Then Laertes lost the place an’ wis demandin’ retribution

So the king said, Keep the heid, and I’ll provide ye a solution

And he arranged a swordfight for the interested pairties

Wi’ a bluntit sword for Hamlet an’ a shairp ane for Laertes

To make things double certain - the old belt an’ braces line

He fixed a poisoned sword-tip and a poisoned cup o’ wine

The poisoned sword got Hamlet but Laertes went an’ muffed it

Cos’ he got stabbed himsel’ an’ then confessed afore he snuffed it

Then Hamlet’s mammy drank the wine an’ as her face turned blue

Hamlet said, I quite believe the king’s a baddie noo

Incestuous, murd’rous, damned Dane, he said, tae be precise

An’ made up for hesitatin’ by killin’ Claudius twice

Cos’ he stabbed him wi’ the sword an’ forced the wine a’tween his lips

Then he cried, The rest is silence - that was Hamlet had his chips

They fired a volley ower him that shook the topmost rafter

An’ Fortinbras, knee-deep in Danes, lived happy ever after

Hamlet, Hamlet, oh the gory

Hamlet, Hamlet, end of story

Hamlet, Hamlet, I’m away

And if you think that was borin’

You should read the bloody play

Pedal Stools and Damp Squids

2011-03-11T17:22:00.003Z

If one more person wrongly adds their name to the process email address list on our scanner I am going to constantly scan “inappropriate” material to their computer. The reason I will do this is that when it happens my name will be relegated to the fourth page. When I joined I was on the first. The list is sorted alphabetically, so there’s no way I should ever be more than halfway down, but process is the most important department, so our list is rightly the default first page. This results is many new people in other departments mistakenly adding their address to the process directory and MAKING ME PRESS MORE BUTTONS THAN I WOULD OTHERWISE HAVE TO!

Also, in the last three weeks I have spent eight days scribing HAZOPs. This is a bantertastic experience such that when we break for lunch with the regular office inmates the master of ceremonies is inclined to jest that we have spent the whole morning down the pub. I therefore decided to create the HAZOP drinking game to make the endless procession of guidewords somehow more tolerable. The rules only got as far as: every time the chairman says “Safeguards adequate” everyone drinks a shot. That would probably be plenty though.

My additional bonus rule is: if after five days of hearing you say that something is a “mute point” you do it again on the sixth, I am allowed to grab you by the collar and drag you out of the room to the nearest cooling pond and hold your face underwater. Until. The. Bubbles. Stop.

The new king of office banter has a thing about calling people by their initials. Some people respond in kind. On the one occasion he tried calling me JO I resisted the urge to scream “I don’t want to be part of your shiting initial-calling club!” and settled instead for “Good morning.” He had no such good-natured response when he tried it on the lead engineer, who replied brusquely “I’m not going to call you XY.”

One thing I actually like in work: when I bust someone else multislacking. I am currently benefiting from a strategically-placed coat stand which means I have at least half a second between hearing the door open and my screen becoming visible to whoever has entered the room.

Get this American $hit to f*¢k

2011-03-08T12:42:00.001Z

The name of today is Shrove Tuesday, not Pancake Day. I’m looking at you especially, Radio Times. Won’t somebody please think of the children?

At the turn of the decade there was a big stooshie about whether the new year should be pronounced “twenty ten” or “two thousand and ten”. The public’s opinion remains split, but I side with the former. In line with this, a while ago I started retrospectively referring to the years from 2001 to 2009 as “twenty-o-one” et cetera. This was going well until a few weeks ago, when I heard Paxman doing the same on University Challenge, which has forced me to reconsider my position. I think I will persist, though, as it seems that in the future this is what we will call those years.

However, I have noticed a worrying trend on television and radio, including among employees of the Great British Broadcasting Corporation, to talk of years such as “two thousand five”. No. This is unacceptable. Stop it now.

P&ID Flipbook Movie

2011-03-04T17:40:00.004Z

I’ve got a few boring posts about work planned, and this is the worst.

If you scroll through quickly you can almost see the modifications as they’re built! (Were it not for the Cambrian explosion between versions 4 and 5.) Except that most of the stuff on this is software and so it doesn’t physically exist.

I think it was Johan Cruyff who said “Before I make a mistake I refrain from doing so”...

Johnnie/Jamie/Justin from the Block

2011-02-25T15:10:00.005Z

I was reading the Wikipedia page for my school recently, and it seems that these are its most famous alumni. There are also some politicians and that, but they don’t count as famous unless they’re the Prime Minister or something.

I once played Jamie Baker in a tennis tournament. He beat me 6-0, 6-0, which wasn’t that big a deal, but then he decided to mock me for it the next day in the playground.

Justin Currie of Del Amitri was a bit before my time, to be honest.

Bastard never passed to me once...

Save the Words

2011-02-18T16:23:00.005Z

The worst word in the English language (English) is intermingled. It sounds like the most horrendous amalgamation of simpleton-ness and management-speak. The inter- part of it is completely redundant. Hearing this word makes my skin crawl.

My favourite word of the moment is dappled, as in

The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,
the view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path

Glory be to God for dappled things -
for skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow

It turns out that dappled is quite a difficult word to use in conversation. However, I have discovered (via The Fiver, believe it or not) a new project: Save the Words. This is a campaign to resuscitate words that are endangered species or going out of fashion. The way it works is that people adopt one of these words and endeavour to use it in “conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible”. The only problem with the scheme is my nagging suspicion that it is all an elaborate practical joke.

Having decided to adopt a word I needed to choose one I could A) pronounce and B) realistically expect to use. After some browsing I had a shortlist of three. I googled prandicle to verify its meaning and found this, so not wanting to be unoriginal, it was excluded. I decided I couldn’t use foppotee without sounding like one, so it was out too. This left me with cloakatively, which is now my adopted word. It means superficially. Expect to see it in every blog post from now on.

Except that I won’t be using it, because somehow I fear the campaign is nothing but a ruse to trick people like me who like using long words so people think we are smart into banding about a whole vocabulary of fictional words and splurging many Singapore dollars on T-shirts.

Unbelievable Jeff

2011-02-04T16:04:00.005Z

As my CD collection is continually exhausted and re-exhausted by my commute I have come to appreciate the radio a lot more, but it is only natural that there are certain things that annoy me about Radio Scotland. For starters, Good Morning Scotland has a new presenter who is not only called Shelley, but also has the most ridiculous sing-songy voice which is not what I want to hear at 7am. None of the weather or regular presenters seem able to pronounce certain words properly; apparently we have had a lot of “artic” weather recently. I know this is just a little but lazy, but it grates when you hear it from professional bradcosters. They should know what they’re tonking aboolt.

But by far the worst are the sports presenters. I appreciate that they are supposed to have an in-depth knowledge of their subject, but are understanding of sport and understanding of basic grammar mutually exclusive? The only word required to make a sentence a sentence is a verb, yet this is the one they always choose to miss. I don’t want to be told that “Celtic 2-0 winners in the SPL last night”. “Andy Murray through to the semi-final” is fine for a newspaper headline, but not for the actual story.

Simon Barnes wrote about the perceived suspicion about “intelligent” sports writers, although it is possible he was being a twat. It is true that sports presenters, writers and commentators are not the brightest among their profession. Take the talkSPORT presenter who concluded an interview with a boxer with the classic line “Thanks for talking to us. We hope to see you back on the canvas soon.” But this does not match the top three sports commentary fails of all time (that I have heard of). Any or all of these could be urban myth:

3. The unfortunately named German striker Stefan Kuntz was the subject of the following from a certain John Motson: “Here come the Germans... Kuntz.” I can’t find the specific incident, but this should be enough evidence.
2. From cricket’s entry to the think-before-you-speak file, “The bowler’s Holding, the batsman’s Willey.”
1. Olympic weightlifting contains two disciplines – the snatch and the clean and jerk. During the latter section of the women’s event this allowed the commentator to assert that “The Bulgarian has a 150kg snatch under her belt.” (Based on a very limited amount of research I’d say this one is unlikely to be true. I have also heard it worded “I saw her snatch this morning and it was amazing!”)

You couldn’t make it up. Although someone probably did.

Toilet Humour

2011-01-28T19:01:00.004Z

It is an unwritten rule that in any kind of communal toilet area, be it in work or in a pub, there should be absolutely no conversation. Not while you’re doing your business, not at the sinks, not even while drying your hands. Maybe the unwritten rule should be written, because some people still see fit to flaunt it and continue to chat away inappropriately. They could put up a “No Talking” sign next to the “Now wash your hands” one. While they’re at it, they could post the rules for the order in which urinals should be occupied for minimum awkwardness, which I have spent an inordinate amount of time, not to mention computing power, developing.

Perhaps this rule contributes to the fact that any anecdote which took place in the “restroom” automatically becomes one degree funnier. I thought I’d transcribe the bizarre conversation I became trapped in while using the facilities at the shinty ceilidh, but when I replayed it in my mind I realised that while it was funny at the time, with hindsight it was just creepy. Extremely creepy. However, just a couple of weeks later I was in a trendy Glasgow nightspot (or Average Discotheque 98dB(A)) trying to avoid giving a black man 50p for providing a service that could be equally well provided by, say, a table or other flat surface, or a paper towel dispenser, which I noted was also one of the facilities on the establishment.

As he handed me the serviette an inadvertently helpful ned emerged from the cubicles and breezed past. The toilet guy, to give him his proper title, tried to call him back, waving a paper towel in his direction. Whether his motivation was hygienic or financial we may never know. It matters not, as the ned went straight from the cubicle to the urinal, announcing to the occupants of the room by way of explanation that “Ah cannae pee when ah’m shiting.” In the ensuing commotion I slipped the 50 pence piece back into my pocket and exited stage left.

I just paid a pound NOT to go to the toilet!

Raphaël Poulain n’aime pas pisser à côté de quelqu’un.

S Laughterhouse-Five

2011-01-21T17:07:00.002Z

Slaughterhouse 5 is not the book I expected it to be. It’s a strange book for a war novel. There is a film adaptation from the seventies and there are rumours of a new one directed by Guillermo del Toro. I’d prefer it to be directed by Michel Gondry. It involves the protagonist flitting between dreams and reality and believing he time travels and is abducted by aliens. While this scene seems to encapsulate the surrealism and anti-war sentiments of the whole book, the main point is just that I like it. This happens on Billy Pilgrim’s daughter’s wedding night when he gets up from his bed to wait for the aliens to come for him:

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people called Adam and Eve, he supposed.

It’s not really a funny book. The title would be a better pun if it was.

Calum’s Sporting Achievements

2011-01-14T20:20:00.003Z

The children in our house are very easily categorised. My sister is the one who’s good at music, my smallest brother is the one who’s good at sport, I’m the smart one (look where that got me) and my middle brother is the one who gets to be cool and have friends and a life. This is not to say that he has not done some incredible things in the arenas of sport. Here are some.

Al fresco darts last summer. I promise this actually happened in the course of a game.

New Year’s Day golf with a bright green ball: a low drive, bounced once and ended up here. It’s like something out of Shuggie and Duggie. Play the ball as it lies!

Here he is addressing the shot.

Other items on his sporting CV include:

- Scoring a Nayim into 5-a-side goals. I have no idea how this happened.
- Achieving a net distance of -180 yards with his second shot on a par 5. It was one of the ones that goes over a hill and has a marker to show you the direction to take. He managed to strike the guide post squarely in the face and end up back somewhere near the tee.
- In his shinty career he has scored one goal ever, but does not remember doing so.

Season’s Greetings from YouTube

2010-12-23T13:01:00.001Z

Merry Christmas…

… and a Happy New Year.

Antoni Gaudí, and Paella Crap

2010-12-18T10:38:00.006Z

Say it out loud, it’s a pun

The lion’s share of the next two days was spent visiting the works of Antoni Gaudí. This means that as well as filling in another country on the map, I can tick off another site on the UNESCO list. We begin in Parc Güell. With its mosaics and dragons it is a wonderful place, spoiled only by the copious tourists. What the man (and his colleague Jujol) made here with an almost blank canvas is quite fantastic, in all senses of the word. From here you get a good view of the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, or usually just Segrada Família. It is nowhere near finished, but stands three or four times higher than anything around it (except the cranes). What is important to consider when viewing it from afar is that one of the parts still to be built is the main central tower, which will dwarf the four existing ones.

When you get close to the Segrada Família you can see that not only is it massive, but every inch of the surface is covered with intricate details. It’s a bit over elaborate, almost to the point of ridiculous. In fact, the church looks like it is melting. It’s a must-see, but it leaves me cold. After this we go to Casa Battló and wangle student entries. To begin with, I am thinking that this place is a bit fancy too, but as the visit progresses I am more and more impressed. That the house contains no right angles initially seemed contrary, but the use of natural shapes as an inspiration to give the structure strength and avoid the over-engineering that was popular at the time wins me over. The highlight of this visit, however, is the message Gavin leaves in the visitors’ book: “I haven’t felt this good since Archie Gemmill scored against Holland in 1978! Mark Renton, Edinburgh”. He then steps across the room to observe the reactions, which consist of Spanish people wondering aloud “Who is Archie Gem-meel?”

Before my return to the Nou Camp there is time for the bizarre restaurant incident. Having decided it would be appropriate to eat in a Spanish restaurant other than a kebab shop, I left no stereotype unturned by ordering a seafood paella for my first course. The waiter says it will be a while; no problem. After a while the starters arrive, but one of our party has to send his cannelloni back. A new one is brought, and all seems to be well. Then we wait for the second course. I am having ribs. We wait a long while. So long that we consider leaving. We see the restaurant man walk outside and return a few minutes later with what appear to be ribs. This is the final straw. I don’t know much Spanish, but I know “Vamos!” and can hence work out “Vamos?” We do a runner, with the restaurant owner watching us and imploring us to stay. After half a lunch I am actually quite satisfied. The free paella was delicious. The secret ingredient is crime.

Finally it is time for the match – 10pm. This is the way over here. Barça are playing Villarreal, who are 3rd in La Liga. The stadium is every bit as imposing as it is made out to be. Gavin notes that there must be an awful lot of players who “shit themselves” when they run out of the tunnel. I quickly discover that Barça fans are among the least impartial in the world. Our seats are, incredibly, about 12 rows back from the pitch, giving us a perfect view of Joan Capdevila being tripped in the penalty area. No one expects the penalty to be awarded, and it isn’t. No one even questions it, apart from possibly the few travelling Villarreal fans, who are in a different postcode and a different layer of the atmosphere.

When the referee denies Barça a goal for offside the noise of whistling from the crowd is ear-splitting, though I am told it is nothing compared to that made by half as many people at Bilbao the other week, and the white handkerchiefs are out for the officials. David Villa gives Barça the lead only for Nilmar to equalise and silence the 87 000, for a while. In the second half, Lionel Messi makes it 2-1. The match then takes on a gladiatorial feel as Barça move the ball around and make the guests chase them to a chorus of olés (proper ones, not like the English “waaaay”) while never really trying too hard for the third goal that will kill them off. When the public of the Coliseum has had its fill Guardiola turns his thumb down, and Messi – possibly from an offside position – delivers the killer blow.

So yeah, I’ve been trying to write a concluding sentence to this for a while, but I’ve realised I did that in part 1.

Ricky Gervais, and Fish Sauce

2010-12-13T17:44:00.003Z

On day 2 I was left to fend for myself in a city where I wasn’t sure which language I was supposed to speak, and spoke neither of them anyway. With my eternal shame of being a tourist, and especially an English-speaking one, this was a problem. I decided the best course of action would be to pass the day on activities involving the bare minimum human-to-human interaction. The morning would be spent in the Museum of History of Barcelona and the afternoon in the Picasso museum.

The main attraction of the MUHBA was its basement. That sounds wrong. This wasn’t the Fritzl museum after all. No, the buildings housing the MUHBA were built above the remains of the Roman city of Barcino, which date from the 1st century BC to the 7th AD. The other sections of the museum I rather skipped through, but I was pleasantly surprised by the ruins. They are far more extensive than I expected, containing not only houses and shops, but a church, bishop’s palace, laundry, baths, wine production facility and fish sauce factory. The level of industrialisation is impressive and the remains are well preserved – much more than just walls and doorways – which meant I could actually believe it when I was told what each building was used for. This was added to by the use of coloured lighting – blue in the baths and laundry, red in the fish sauce plant – although they could have made more of this. The audio guide also explained the techniques of archaeology (I sound like such a simpleton) meaning I can now appreciate it as a science rather than just educated guesswork, if that is not what science is anyway.

After lunch it was time for some serious art and pretending I care. While I enjoyed some of the stuff from his “blue period”, the most important thing to take from the gallery was that Picasso was a massive pervert. The display includes several sketches which were basically him just doodling dirty pictures on his notebook, but because he’s a “great artist” these are deemed worthy of display to the public, including children. There is one entitled Two Figures and a Cat; what it doesn’t mention is that the two “figures” are doing it while the cat watches. Another drawing of a couple in the act features a giant vulva floating above the bed. Maybe it was a study in perspective, je n’en sais rien. The rest are what I can only describe as Flanimal porn: fishlike creatures with extremely long tongues, doing stuff. All of these are available to buy in the gift shop in postcard form.

I purchased a vase for my mum with an abstract depiction of a bullfighting scene. Under the circumstances it seemed the most tasteful thing to do. Just don’t tell her that’s what the picture is. I don’t want to have to explain how I could have picked out something far worse. Later on I declined to sign a petition against bullfighting on the grounds that it was in foreign. I felt guilty about it, but on a visit to Montjuïc – which Gavin routinely refers to as “Jew Mountain” with no apparent sense of incongruity. I mean, that’s what it translates as, but there’s no need to make it sound like an unreleased Disney film – my host suggests we sit down for a while to watch a team of women robbing tourists by distraction tactics involving a fake petition. I have to say the bullfighting one seemed legit though.

Dani Alves, and Casual Racism

2010-12-09T12:53:00.006Z

Day 1 in Barcelona: My hosts’ flat is on the sixth floor and has a view of the Nou Camp. This is not because it’s high up – it’s because it is just across a car park. The next door neighbour is a basketball player for Barça B team. Because he’s only in the B team he has to wash his own shirts and these can be seen drying on the balcony. To get to the supermarket we walk past the Nou Camp complex: as well as the main stadium there is the ice hockey, basketball and handball arena, the “small” stadium where Barcelona B play and la Masia, the farmhouse on the outskirts of Barcelona – by which they evidently meant the outskirts of the stadium – where the top youth players are brought up. Sometimes you can look in the window and see them playing table tennis. As we pass the stadium gate a flash-looking 4x4 is exiting – it is driven by none other than Dani Alves! After less than an hour in the city I have literally just seen Brazil’s second best right back.

From dinner to bedtime I am treated to all Spanish TV has to offer. On their BBC1 is the Spanish equivalent of The One Show, featuring a competition where representatives of each region of Spain attempt to spend €10 000 in one hour. On their BBC2 is documentary from the 1970s about guitar playing. There are also Catalan versions of BBC1 and 2. Catalan is a wonderful language. Because x = ch, crisps are called “xips”. The next few channels feature people shouting, people shouting, old women shouting, and then a charades-based gameshow. As answers for a mime of “ghost”, one team guesses “woman” and then “black”. There is also a hit comedy drama nostalgising (yep) life under the Franco dictatorship. Great stuff.

While it later transpires that I am the very last person out of all my friends and family to visit Barcelona, it’s still another country ticked off.

A Mystery Wrapped Up in an Enigma

2010-12-03T15:27:00.007Z

Or “This is what’s going down on Sunday, in which you are not interested.”

Sometimes what makes a particular piece of music particularly interesting is the story behind it. Pictures at an Exhibition was one, and Edward Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme, more commonly known as Enigma Variations is another. Each variation is supposed to depict a person in Elgar’s life and the snippets of information on these characters’ personalities and relationships to Elgar should, in theory, be expressed through the music.

These “friends pictured within” are easily identified, as Elgar prefaced each variation with a set of initials. The enigma in question is instead an unplayed theme “hidden” in the piece, for which Elgar left few clues. Apparently he believed that the audience at the work’s premiere would recognise it instantly, but a firm answer has never been found. It is thought that this theme is a tune that could be played over the main Enigma theme. Theories abound as to the identity of this tune ranging from hymn tunes to Rule Britannia to Happy Birthday. All I know is that after three months of rehearsals I’m none the wiser.

Enigma is one of Elgar’s most famous works. Specifically the ninth variation, Nimrod, is very well known, and so it helps give our concert what the leader of our section would call “a high pleb factor.” By this he means that the programme includes pieces that the public at large will know by name, which are necessary to get bums on seats. The piece with the highest pleb factor of all is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. This piece has topped Classic FM’s plebtastic and self-fulfilling Hall of Fame for the last four years despite being pretty rubbish. I just don’t find it interesting at all, and there’s a good chance I’d change the channel if it came on the radio. BUT when played live it may be a different matter.

Where I sit in the orchestra I have possibly the best seat in the house (It’s one of the few perks of being a violist) and I can hear the soloist playing so quietly that what Charles Rosen might call “the extramusical mechanical noises that have nothing to do with the score” – the physical noise made by the friction between the bow hair and the string – is louder than the note it produces. I can see from the way I’ve tried to explain it how this could be seen as a bad thing; in fact it is incredible control, and the audience should hold their breath.

Interestingly, the piece is not so famous outside this country, which will give the conductor the opportunity to tell his anecdote about our Portuguese timpanist who had not heard it before asking him in wonder “where did you find this music..?”

The remaining two pieces are less well-known. The first is George Butterworth’s rhapsody A Shropshire Lad. This is an orchestral interlude from a suite of six songs whose text is taken from A.E. Housman’s cycle of poems of the same title. The major themes of the poems include “life, death, nature and the foolhardiness of men” as well as “the senselessness of war and the arbitrariness of who would return and who would not”. Tragically, Housman’s poems were to foretell the fate of Butterworth, who was killed at the Battle of the Somme.

The programme is completed by Gerald Finzi’s Let Us Garlands Bring, which is a setting of five Shakespeare songs. I don’t know what to say about this, other than it has some hey-nonny-nos.

I’ve never had a concert postponed due to bad weather before, so this could be a first.

Monday Night Football

2010-11-25T15:35:00.003Z

Something strange has happened over the past year or so: I have started to hate football. It started with the terrible traffic that builds up every time I’m trying to get home and a midweek game is on. This leaves me hoping both Rangers and Celtic get humped out of Europe as quickly as possible. Since I’ve been working in Grangemouth they’ve been reasonably forthcoming on this issue. I think what has pushed me over the edge, however, is the office Rangers fan’s outraged and outrageous reaction to the news this week that the UK would lend Ireland £7bn, which I do not care to repeat here. “What has all this to do with football?” you might ask, and I’d say, “Yes, what has all this to do with football?”

The general paranoia and blinkeredness of football fans, and Old Firm fans in particular, has become insupportable. I regularly see perfectly intelligent and reasonable people choose to see only what they want to. During the Liechtenstein debacle a Rangers-supporting friend informed me that ex-Celt Stephen “McManus didn’t do very well there,” but the next day at work I discovered by overhearing a conversation between two Celtic fans that the real cause of the goal was (ex-)Gers Hutton and Weir being out of position.

Can these fans really be blamed when you consider their “role models”? Anyone who considers football players and managers to be role models needs to be put down, for so many reasons that everyone is all too aware of. It is them that have driven things to the current referees’ strike, which is as baffling as it is depressing.

Yet I have to keep in touch with football news so I can interact with these people in a “social situation” (don’t laugh…). What was it Andy Miller said? Sport is a universal language – if you learn to speak it, you can communicate on a superficial level with idiots all over the world. And still I remain blissfully ignorant at times. The day after the first Old Firm match of this season, during the small talk before my football game (I was coming to that) I was asked if I had watched “the football” at the weekend, and had to think for several seconds about what football was being referred to before replying that no, I had not, and making my excuses. For not actually following football I feel that I always have to justify myself.

But my football game… yes, I’ve been playing every Monday since the end of the shinty season, and it turns out that, depressingly, I’m better at it than I am at tennis or shinty, and that actually I love football. So maybe it’s just football fans that I don’t like. Football fans, and their cars. Oh, and racism, violence, swearing (in inappropriate situations), spitting, cheating, the worship of celebrity, the cult of the Premier League Sorry Barclays Premier League etc. and so on.

A Man in Assynt

2010-11-16T21:45:00.004Z

What’s this? A programme about Norman MacCaig on primetime television? He would have been 100 years old on Sunday.

This (and another abandoned post) mean that if Mitch Benn’s I’m Proud of the BBC wasn’t such a crap song I might have posted a link to it now.

6.25 Years in the Bank

2010-11-05T09:50:00.002Z

A 65-year-old retiring today would have had a life expectancy at birth of just 67 years, but might now reasonably expect to live to 86.

The Thought for the Day feature on Good Morning Scotland one day last week highlighted a recent study showing that life expectancy is increasing by 2.5 years per decade. The speaker pointed out that this means for every year you live, you get an extra three months; for every day that passes you gain another six hours.

This might not be strictly true as I don’t think the increases can be entirely backdated – there are factors to do with your early life that must be taken into account – although it also doesn’t consider the rate of change in the increase in life expectancy, which is generally increasing.

So maybe it’s not a simple bonus you accumulate, but still it’s comforting, when you consider that over the past few weeks I’ve spent 295 hours calculating how to prevent a range of events the most likely of which is expected to occur on average once every 13 800 years, that it is 15 months since I first drove bright-eyed to the Mouth of Grange, two-and-a-half years since I left university, seven-and-a-half since I left school, and however long since however many other milestones, and they all feel like yesterday.

Wastepaper Basket

2010-10-31T19:19:00.001Z

I don’t like to waste paper, and try to avoid doing so even to the extent that I write on both sides of Post-its. However, there are times during meetings or general office chat that certain information has to be committed to my notepad to prevent my brain from boiling inside my head. By “information” I mean the following:

“It’s APT not IRONIC” – on one of my colleagues’ reaction to the news that someone with the surname Lake would be leading the wastewater treatment job.

“That can’t possibly be true” – my reaction to someone’s claim that they are the only person in Scotland to ever be let off a parking ticket. I know this is not true because my brother was let off one, and also because it’s obviously not true.

“Finally!” – one and a bit years after I started work someone pronounced the name of the Katrine room kat-rin instead of ka-treen. In one building the meeting rooms are named after islands, in another lochs, including Loch Katrine. This was the first time I heard it pronounced correctly, except for when I have said it, sheepishly, and not been understood.

Doing a Derby: Some Thoughts on the Premier League

2010-10-25T14:17:00.002+01:00

What’s the worst that can happen, I get dropped...?

Rarely can a team have been promoted in less dramatic circumstances. A goalless draw against a team reduced to eleven men for most of the match, securing only second position in the league and promotion on a technicality amid a storm of controversy; if a team isn’t good enough to beat a reserve team, surely they are not good enough to play in the top division?

When Atlético Madrid were unthinkably relegated to the Spanish Segunda División in 2000, their (so many adjectives... flamboyant, controversial, maverick) chairman Jesús Gil asked the players and fans to stick with the club for what he called just one “season in hell”. For them, it would be a year (turned out to be two) in a division below where they thought the belonged. Our season in hell would be quite the opposite.

On account of a massive loss of confidence (from an already not particularly high starting point) and the run to the Bullough Cup final I have spent more of this season watching than playing, and this is what I have observed.

On the step up:

Some of the games were close. Alright, we lost our first match 4-0, but we were well on top before a dodgy penalty award. A lot of the games were like that (same old story) – failing to strike while the iron was hot and ultimately made to suffer for it in a much bigger way than in division 1. Some of games, however, were not. We set a new record for the heaviest defeat in premier league history and then broke it, losing 0-14 and 15-0. This was partly due to our own incompetence and partly due to the opposition chasing a title they knew could come down to goal difference.

On fans:

I don’t hear much from the sideline when I’m on the pitch, but having been a sub or observer more often than a player I’ve heard a lot this year. For the first few games in the big league some people I didn’t recognise started coming to watch. As far as I could tell, in addition to their physical presence they contributed nothing but abuse, head shaking and tutting, and I thought, “Is this what footballers have to put up with all the time?” (I don’t know why I thought specifically of footballers.) A constant barrage of criticism cannot be conducive to improved performance. I also thought, “Who the fuck are you? And where have you been for the last five years?” It seemed unreasonable to expect us to suddenly become world beaters, especially given the circumstances surrounding our promotion. Not unexpectedly, these faces started to disappear as results went from bad to worse.

On training:

I’d be interested to know how many people, and in particular how many first team players, turn up to training at proper premier league clubs. My guess would be more or less all of them, twice a week, every week. Certainly more than the half dozen we get, and that’s on a good night. This is not good enough at any level, and I’m not the only person who’s angry about it. And I wonder how many of these clubs’ training consists of a game of cuppy followed by half an hour of chatting. Not a lot, I imagine. We have some good players, but we’re in danger of wasting them.

On tactics:

We were roundly slated for doing a Levein (even before he did) by playing six at the back. But given some of the results we’d had (remember that 15-0?) could we really be blamed for trying something different? This is a sport where there are only two recognised “formations”, and they are essentially the same. And then look what Fort William did in the Camanachd Cup final. Where did they get that idea? (Okay, it’s not rocket science.)

On points:

We finished the season with four points, which is four more than a lot of people predicted we’d get. I didn’t play in either of the matches we won, but I was at them both. That counts for something, right? When we eventually won our first game the overwhelming feeling seemed not to be of relief, but of justification, as if winning one match proved we merited our place in the league. The league table doesn’t lie, but at least we showed that on a good day we can be competitive at the lower end of the premier. Now it’s just a case of playing like that every week…

Another Classic Grandfather Moment

2010-10-18T12:25:00.006+01:00

So, he’s round for dinner and we’re watching Scotland’s Commonwealth Games review. It transpires that the Scottish team did rather well in the shooting events.

“What range are they shooting from? 50 metres?

Oh for goodness’ sake, you could fix bayonets and charge from that distance!”

Vintage.

Now in my dial of glass appears

the soldier who is going to die.

He smiles, and moves about in ways

his mother knows, habits of his.

The wires touch his face: I cry

Now. Death, like a familiar, hears

and look, has made a man of dust

of a man of flesh. This sorcery

I do. Being damned, I am amused

to see the centre of love diffused

and the waves of love travel into vacancy.

How easy it is to make a ghost.

(From How to Kill by Keith Douglas)

Ed Smith’s Corinthian Spirit

2010-10-04T10:18:00.002+01:00

While I was waiting for a haircut on Saturday I read an article in a magazine from 2008. It was extracts from cricketer turned journalist Ed Smith’s book What Sport Tells Us About Life. Then when I got home I switched on the TV and the programme that was on happened to be Inside Sport: Is Professionalism Killing Sport? written and presented by Ed Smith, and featuring ideas from his 2008 book. What are the chances?

Some of the content chimed with some thoughts I’ve been having – usually when I find myself sprinting off the D towards the corner flag – about the conflict between heart and head that often arises during a match (in any of my sports). Although it would be scandalous to describe me as over-coached, my head probably dominates this contest, and when I do find myself playing on instinct alone I feel somehow out of control. However, I know that the best results, in terms of individual actions within a match, are achieved when you don’t overthink what you are doing.

But I compare this to the type of player who seems to want to play everywhere at once, and when playing on the left wing will suddenly appear in the right back area and the next moment be joining a counter-attack. You can admire their energy, but at the same time must ask if it’s being used efficiently, or is effective in the structure of the play. Perhaps you need both types of player in a team, or perhaps each individual player needs to find the right balance. Who knows?

These aren’t the same questions Ed Smith was asking, and to describe my thoughts as half-baked would be generous, but something clicked and I had to write this fast because the programme will only be on the iPlayer for a short time. It’s hard to disagree with anything he says. My hypotheses, on the other hand, still need a bit more thought.

The Men Who Fell to Earth

2010-09-29T08:30:00.002+01:00

I have a bad habit of starting a book and deciding within the first 50 pages that it’s the best I’ve ever read. Where have you heard that before? With Andrew Smith’s Moondust it was page 41. I know because, this time, I recognised it and checked. And then again on page 233, and again on page 341. All of which makes a pretty good case for this book actually being it, were it not for the fact that it remains unclear what the book is actually about.

Smith speaks of his book being about the idea of Apollo. I think this means why did we (mankind) go to the Moon, and what did we achieve by doing so, rather than just what was it like. The crux of the matter is only really arrived at late on:

From the start I’d been aware of a tension between the sepia attachments of my childhood and the curiosity I felt to see beyond them, to discover what would be left of the freaky adventure if I removed bright sun and thyme-scented hills and Credence on the radio from the picture, and let reason wash through it. The issue was simple: Without its cloak of childish wonder, was Apollo worth the costs. Was it good?

And some of the passages of childish wonder (Smith was eight years old at the time of the first Moon landing), often written in the present tense, are quite fantastic. Take, for example, the start of chapter 4, which is too long to repeat here. The bit that really gets me though is his reaction – as an adult – to seeing the Saturn V rocket while on a tour of the Kennedy Space Center. I found it almost impossible to describe. He does it brilliantly:

And now the bus has stopped and you’re climbing off and into a giant brick hangar and – fuck, there’s the Saturn V.

You can reel off figures and statistics all you like, but until you’ve stood underneath it, nothing can prepare you for this behemoth, suspended in segments from the ceiling, just astonishing. You try to fit a meaningful portion of it into a photo, but you can’t, so you give up. What you think is not “How could anyone make something this big?” because you know that people have been making big things for millennia. But to make something this big, and intend it to fly – the audacity of this conceit alone – and then to make it work, to conceive of this impossible twisty chaos of pipes and cables and weird steel tubers and nozzles as big as the bus we just rode in on, bigger, and make them do something predictable and controllable and reliable enough to bet a life on, three lives, every time... it’s just...

Even at thirty-five years’ remove, it’s barely credible.

So Smith embarked on a journey to meet all the surviving Moonwalkers along which his childish wonder would be thoroughly debunked. The course of his interviews and discussion takes in science and religion, philosophy and history, art and literature, politics and popular culture, all serving to contextualise the fact that over a period of less than three years, twelve men landed on the Moon, and none have been since. Perhaps it is this range of food for thought that makes this book so fascinating. In particular I found two interesting things I had not previously considered.

The first is that from the first manned flight by the Wright brothers in 1903, it took only 66 years to develop technology that allowed us to leave this planet and land a man somewhere else, and bring him back. Small wonder, then, that Neil Armstrong prefers to talk not of “feelings” and “emotions”, but of his position within the history of aviation, or that Apollo is such a powerful symbol of everything the 20th century was about, apparently.

Leading on from this, the second is that JFK’s promise to land on the Moon by the end of the 1960s (throughout the book Smith is keen to point out the distinction between the 1960s and the sixties) both stimulated deep space exploration and destroyed it. Putting a deadline on the landing meant that the technology used was what would get to the Moon quickest, but not the most sustainable approach. The landing was done by Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR), which meant sending two craft to orbit the Moon, which would then separate for one of them to land, while the other remained in orbit. Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) would involve creation of a base in Earth orbit where smaller, simpler ships could be assembled and launched to the Moon. This was considered a better long-term option, partly because the large part of the energy required to get to the Moon is spent in escaping the Earth’s gravitational pull, but would have taken too long to set up.

But inevitably Moondust is not a book about the science of the mission. For all the technological advances that were made by the Apollo programme (“We got Teflon”), Smith rightly points out that for $24billion (more like $100billion nowadays) and all the brilliant scientific and engineering minds, an awful lot more could have been done by concentrating on earthly matters. Rather, he concludes, the biggest achievement of the programme was in allowing us to see ourselves as small.

Only twelve people were afforded this perspective (24 if you include the command module pilots and the crews of Apollo 8 and 13). By trying to get inside these men’s heads, Andrew Smith succeeded in bringing us a little of this feeling. I think this is what leads one of the reviews to the conclusion that this is “an extraordinary book that sets you thinking about the vast picture as profoundly as any work of philosophy.”

Dear Points of View

2010-09-22T21:50:00.010+01:00

This is the Fort William line up from last Saturday’s Camanachd Cup final as broadcast on BBC2. Notice anything wrong with it?

I noticed two things: The players are apparently all going to line up in their own half, and on closer inspection, the game is apparently being played on a football pitch. It seems I was the only person to notice the second part of this failure.

Shinty on TV is never going to take off. There isn’t a big enough audience for it, but there’s no reason why the coverage can’t be better for the people who do follow the game, and the new fans we are supposed to seek to attract. And so I present Jonathan’s 7 point plan to save the future of televised shinty.

1. Remedy the above. Shinty may only be on TV three or four times a year, but this lack of attention to detail is infuriating. It would take one person half a day to look up the Wikipedia page on shinty, see what a shinty pitch looks like and update the graphic accordingly.
2. Bring back the yellow ball. The biggest problem with shinty on TV is that it is difficult to follow the ball. When we played in the sixes on tele we used a fluorescent ball to make it easier to see. I think it helped and, crucially, I don’t think it had a negative impact for the players.
3. Use the tornado cam. Further to point 2, the high-speed camera could actually be used to good effect in shinty, rather than its usual applications showing super slo-mo replays of Andy Murray dislocating his jaw like a boa constrictor swallowing a foal or a footballer spitting a massive greener at a disabled fan.
4. Get commentators who actually know what they are talking about. Hugh Dan MacLennan is supposed to be an authority on the game, yet in the last two matches I have watched on TV he has said that at a free hit the ball must travel 5 yards. Wrong. The other guy can barely complete a sentence for gasping and chuckling at any tackle, shot or long hit. If they can’t get anyone who’s been to a game before, at least just do it in Gaelic so I can’t understand what nonsense they’re spouting.
5. Stop pandering to the same players all the time. You could be forgiven for thinking that the final was a personal contest between three players, who I will not name because they have had more than their fair share of coverage already.
6. Cut out the interviews with the managers during the match. They’re embarrassing, and they wouldn’t happen in any other sport.
7. Start showing highlights of a match every week. It may be a minority sport, but public service broadcasting is supposed to cater for the whole public, which should include programmes that may only attract a small audience and are therefore unattractive to commercial channels. After all, they still show Songs of Praise.

Beaten To It

2010-09-17T16:51:00.003+01:00

His email was not pacific? Well, I don’t want to be here when he comes round...

Glasgow... wins?

2010-09-10T21:54:00.004+01:00

Do not adjust your web browsers! (Oh how unfunny am I?) GMA have won a cup. Alright, it may be a diddy cup really (for south area reserve teams), but to finally win something for Glasgow means a lot to me... way more than my three Littlejohn Vases multiplied by my Scottish Universities “cap”. If nothing else, it means that ten years of press ups and suicides have not been in vain. And that I was not completely wrong when I wrote this. Prepare to be wowed by the epic tale of How the Bullough Cup Was Won...

Saturday 5th June: GMA 1 – 0 Tayforth

A narrow win against a team our first team struggled to beat last year. I can’t remember much of this game except that it was extremely hot and they turned up with only eleven men. The forward I was marking asked, “This can’t go to extra time can it?” After I told him it could he seemed considerably less eager to push for an equaliser.

Wednesday 9th June: Inveraray 2 – 3 GMA

A glamorous midweek evening tie, just like playing in the Champions League, against a team our first team struggled to draw with last year. After a 1-1 draw, this match produced the wittiest comment of the season (yes, even better than the spaghetti one-liner or the riff on voting patterns in Glenorchy). As the referee explained the rules for extra time, one of our youngsters asked “Is it golden goal?”, only to be greeted with a mocking “Golden goal?! It’s not Euro ’96!”

This was followed soon after by my favourite moment ever in shinty. Having taken the lead, we brought on a 12-year-old (!) sub who scored with his first touch. After going absolutely mental for three seconds I turned round to see the full forward who must have scored ten or twelve goals against us over the last few seasons crouched on the ground with his head in his hands. It was a beautiful moment for me. They got one back after that, and what followed was a backs-to-the-wall job, but the clock just about ran out on them.

Saturday 17th July: GMA 4 – 0 Lochside Rovers

Admittedly they were somewhat depleted on the day, but this was still a team our first team was beaten by twice last year. I don’t do confidence well, especially not in shinty, but rather than my usual fears, before this match I remember being nervous because we might actually do it! I couldn’t relax until the fourth went in, and this match was a lot less easy than the scoreline suggests.

Friday 3rd September: The eve of the final

The chat on the internet suggests we are strong second favourites: “Kyles will walk it, lol”, “Kyles 5-1 GMA” and “Kyles 8-1 GMA” are some of the predictions. Gary the goalie decides to stick up for us: “Yous’ll be lucky to get 1 past me”. That’s right, get them angry. You don’t have to mark anyone.

Up to this point I have not even entertained the thought of defeat, but when Steve texts me “You will be sad if you lose the cup” I realise there are only two possible outcomes: either it will be the best thing ever or the biggest disappointment ever. And even if it is the best thing ever, that will only serve to show to what extent my general happiness is connected to sporting success, which is depressing enough in itself. What is going to make me happy when I’m too old for this shit?

Saturday 4th September: GMA 3 – 1 Kyles Athletic

12.00pm – We meet at Hughenden, wearing club ties and everything, four hours before the match. David’s wife has stolen enough packed lunches for everyone from a do last night.

1.00pm – It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon and Loch Lomond-side is busy. Perhaps it was a good idea to meet early.

2.30pm – Pitch inspection. Still wearing ties, most of the guys have a hit about on the Winterton. It’s just like school lunchtime.

3.05pm – I feel like Zinedine Zidane: I could spew at any moment.

3.15pm – Three-quarters of an hour till the match. The team is announced, with a few (well, one) surprise(s). If we lose after that, the manager will be looking very silly. We also have new socks.

3.28pm – An even bigger surprise is announced:

- “You can be captain today, Jonathan”
- “What? Why me?” I reluctantly accept.

3.59pm – After a warm-up involving lots of touches of the ball, it’s time for my first captainly duty – the coin toss. I’d like to know if the ref is going to let the coin drop or catch it and flip it over on his opposite hand. I’d also like to call after he tosses it, but he’s having none of it. I plump for tails. Inspecting the coin after it lands (on the ground it turned out) I can’t tell which it is, because the coin seems to be from the 19th century. Apparently I have won. What drama.

4.20pm – After Kyles have most of the opening threat, Donald gives us the lead with a shot into the roof of the net (or at least that’s how it looks from the length of the pitch away). I’m nervous now.

4.35pm – It is apparent by now that my style of captaincy consists of shouting “White ball!” at every hit-out, leaving myself open to all sorts of sarcastic retorts.

4.43pm – Donald makes it 2-0 with a bizarrely swerving shot.

4.45pm – Half time. The team talk revolves around the conviction that if we get the next goal of the game we will win.

4.55pm – Kyles get the next goal of the game. The noise their large support makes at this point is quite frightening. It looks like the defence might be in for a long afternoon.

5.02pm – With the match finely balanced, I make my second proper block of the season and third of my career.

5.10pm – Donald completes his hat-trick with a bouncer down the middle.

5.22pm – The referee and goal judge wrongly award a corner. Two of our kids react as if they’d just been handed a cone only to see the ice-cream slip off onto the pavement. I use my captain’s skills (shouting louder) to calm them down. After all, it’s only a corner.

5.30pm – The expected onslaught is not forthcoming. We’ve got this.

5.35pm – Full time. GMA have won their first (men’s) trophy in a decade. Handshake from the manager. He seems to have forgiven me for what happened at Lovat.

5.45pm – My next duty is to collect the trophy and read out the team’s names. It’s a replica, as the real one has been damaged and is at the silversmith’s. I get through the team in order up to number 7, then forget who was playing on the other wing (Sorry, James) and resort to saying the first person I see.

5.50pm – Team photo.

6.00pm – It is useful to have someone who works for Diageo in the team. The replica cup is full of whisky, which is a bit rich for most of the team, who are more used to cheap cider and blue WKD.

8.00pm – Back to the clubhouse for a small celebration.

9.15pm – It is apparent that my style of captaincy consists of buying pizzas for everyone.

11.30pm – I think my phone is drunk. The camera seems to be having difficulty focusing. That is one photo I won’t be uploading.

12.05am – I realise it might have been magnanimous to let the real captain receive the cup. Oh well, il n’y a rien à faire.

4.45am – On arriving home I post my Facebook victory message. Mark replies instantly: “Go to bed”. It’s a fair point.

Enlargements and Illuminations

2010-08-31T21:51:00.007+01:00

In Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, Andrew Smith set out to meet the nine remaining of the twelve men who have been to the Moon. He found each Moonwalker had been profoundly changed by the experience, and I plan to write more about this book when I finally finish it. (The book was lost in a kitchen cupboard for several years following an incident at one of my brother’s parties.) The change manifested itself in different ways, some good and some bad, in the astronauts’ lives after Apollo.

One of them, Alan Bean, became a successful painter, and sought to communicate the emotions of walking on the Moon through his art. One painting in particular, That’s How It Felt to Walk on the Moon, Smith describes as “Bean standing on the lunar surface in a reflective haze of greens and violets and golds, a palette which no one will ever see on the Moon, because these are the colours of the euphoria he felt as he stood there.” Bean himself puts it more modestly: “If I were a scientist painting the Moon, I would paint it grey. I’m an artist, so I can add colours to the Moon”.

I was reminded of this passage by the discovery of this Alexander Scriabin prelude; the kind of discovery that reminds you to look books out of cupboards, and that putting in at least a little effort to actually learn a piece that’s a little difficult is usually worth doing, and that generally inspires more cerebral activity than I have been engaging in of late.

Scriabin claimed to see sound through a spectrum of colour, one variety of a phenomenon known as synaesthesia. Newton and Goethe had theories that musical tones and colour tones shared frequencies, and Scriabin included a part for a luce or “colour organ” – an instrument played like a piano but which projected coloured light onto a screen rather than producing sound – in some of his works. Members of our orchestra were invited to experiment with a fine arts student earlier this year by playing from “scores” of colour rather than sheet music, but I didn’t go because it sounded like BS.

It seems to be in some doubt whether or not Scriabin was a genuine synaesthete, although quite how anyone other than himself would know I’m not sure. In any case, I can no more understand his supposed visions any more than I can understand Bean’s (or most other) paintings beyond a purely visual level. I was therefore sceptical of the composer’s claim until a moment of epiphany in the third movement of his piano concerto. I’m not saying I became a synaesthete, but the dazzling quasi-glissandi (I’m coining that as a new term) he wrote lend a certain credibility to his claim. Since then I have made several half-hearted attempts to play Scriabin, but always found his music rather inaccessible, with its slightly awkward key signatures and long, meandering phrases. The prelude might be my way in.

Scriabin’s biography is more interesting than most. He was a contemporary of Rachmaninoff at the Moscow Conservatory, originally studying as a pianist but eventually finding recognition as a composer, while Rachmaninoff took the opposite path. I heard a story that Rachmaninoff could play a major chord, say C major, with his second (index) finger on C, third finger on E, fourth on G and fifth on the top C, then tuck his thumb under and use it play the E above that. I suggest you try this to see how mental it is. Scriabin by contrast had very small hands for a pianist, but was determined to overcome this, and practiced so hard that his right hand was permanently damaged. This was to have an influence on his future composition, with his first important work written as “a cry against God, against fate.”

This prelude has a more personal, introspective feel, but with enough “splashes of colour”. I don’t think it would sound out of place alongside some of Alan Bean’s work. I guess what links the two for me is Victor Hugo’s famous quotation “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.” Both Scriabin and Bean, through their different arts, were attempting to express the inexpressible. I feel Hugo’s words are more true for Scriabin’s style of music than something more classical, but maybe I’m being unfair. Scriabin’s experiments with colour and atonality have divided opinion, and the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia asserts (via Wikipedia) that “no composer has had more scorn heaped or greater love bestowed.”

Synaesthete or not, Scriabin was definitely a mental of some description. His magnum opus was to be The Mysterium, a sound and light show staged in the Himalayas with dancers, smoke and water, which would bring about the apocalypse. Luckily for us, Scriabin died at the age of 43 before he could complete the masterpiece.

What you’ve done to me
by way of enlargements and illuminations
puzzled me till I thought of
what a kettle and an apple
did to James Watt and Sir Isaac Newton.

If you say (smilingly), “Ah,
but you’re neither of these gentlemen,”
I can only reply (weakly), “Nor are you
an apple or a kettle.”

What I know is, you’ve enlightened
my sense of gravity and raised in me
such a head of steam I’m filled
with new inventions...

Worst Phone Sex Ever

2010-08-26T20:43:00.001+01:00

I overheard the wrong half of a conversation in the office:

- I’ve got something you want.
- ...
- I’m holding it in my hand.
- ...
- 7.2
- ...

Turned out it was the disks for the newest version of HYSYS.

YouTube Superstar

2010-08-15T20:16:00.006+01:00

I’ve been HAZOPing this week. This basically means I’ve been typing under dictation with everything being projected onto a big screen in front of a room of people. It’s a typographical nightmare. I’ve so far avoided a tennis club newsletter style confusion of the adjacent U and I keys (I think they meant to say the bar has been SHUT on Sundays) but do have a habit of missing the first letters of words with the result that I said a valve should be changed over annually instead of manually. With hilarious consequences.

Anyway, the upshot of having my screen projected onto the wall is that there is no opportunity for blogging in one of my multi-slacking windows, an activity I like to call “doing a 99 francs”. So instead of an actual blog, here are some videos I like:

This is my favourite goal ever. I could not tell you the number of times I have tried to recreate it in the street outside my house. This week I scored this goal at shinty training.

Ever wondered what Weird Al Yankovic would have been like he was from the Midlands and supported Leicester City? Wonder no more: he’d be Dave Henson. This is his cover of Fake Plastic Trees.

The Chaser’s War on Everything is the best programme you’ve never seen, unless you have seen it, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who has. It’s 60% Trigger Happy TV, 30% Newsnight and 10% general ranting. It turns out this is an excellent formula, and it’s the best thing to come out of Australia since Summer Heights High. Particular highlights are the Citizens’ Infringement Officer, Mr. Ten Questions and anything about dumb Americans.

Things that are now banned at work, number 3

2010-08-10T21:18:00.003+01:00

Inappropriate use of the @ sign

This is banned everywhere, not just at work. My problem with it is threefold:

Firstly, “at” is not a very long word and is not difficult to spell. How lazy are you if you try to reduce two characters to one? It is really not necessary and, if anything, makes whatever you are trying to say harder to understand.

Secondly, it draws unwanted attention to what is a minor word in a sentence, like underlining the word “the”. Like when a word in the middle of a sentence has a capital letter on it, the emphasis is shifted to that word, so when you read it in your head you can hear the capital.

Finally, it makes everything look like an email address. 6inchsection@pumpdischarge.com? I don’t think so.

UNESCO

2010-08-02T08:05:00.001+01:00

An interesting if embryonic discussion was had on the final leg of the Ireland trip. After visiting the Giant’s Causeway, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, we compared how many of these sites we’d been to.

UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation and “seeks to encourage the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage”. It has designated around 900 of these sites in almost 150 countries as being “of outstanding value to humanity”. This list includes many of the world’s most famous landmarks, as well as national parks, buildings and whole cities.

I have been to 15 of the sites, some of them unwittingly. These are, in approximately chronological order of my (first) visit:

1. Old and New Towns of Edinburgh
2. Paris, Banks of the Seine
3. Heart of Neolithic Orkney
4. New Lanark
5. Town Hall and Roland on the Marketplace of Bremen
6. Place Stanislas, Place de la Carrière and Place d’Alliance in Nancy
7. Strasbourg – Grande île
8. Bordeaux, Port of the Moon
9. Mont-Saint-Michel and its Bay
10. Tower of London
11. Westminster Palace, Westminster Abbey and Saint Margaret’s Church
12. Historic Centre of Brugge
13. Belfries of Belgium and France 1
14. La Grand-Place, Brussels
15. Giant’s Causeway and Causeway Coast

I suppose if you’d visited all 890 sites you could call yourself well-travelled, although you could still have missed an awful lot of important places. You’d also have turned travel into a box-ticking exercise. A bit like colouring in a map with all the countries you’ve been to...

Notes:

1. Actually I’ve only been to one belfry, but I think that is enough to qualify.

Having my cake and eating it

2010-07-30T19:11:00.003+01:00

I mentioned a while ago that one thing that makes tennis difficult is that every single point has a winner and a loser (or a winner and a person who came second). However I have recently considered that this is also what makes tennis, and similar sports, so fair. If you make a mistake, you lose a point. In theory, the person who plays best should always win. In theory.

But of course it is perfectly possible to win more points than your opponent yet lose the match. That is why it is important to win the “big” points, which is not what I want to talk about just now. Instead, I will have greater opportunity to complain about something by comparing this situation to a team sport, like, say, shinty.

We are always told that if each of us in the team beats his individual man we will win, so maybe if the head-to-head contests are extended throughout the team the side with the most “points” will still win. But it’s not as simple as that: if the forward beats his marker then shoots wide, who gets a point? Which is why the theory doesn’t work for team sports.

If you are a defender, or just someone who wears a low-numbered shirt, you could beat your immediate opponent 19 times out of 20, but still lose the match and take the blame for it. 19 times you might stop him even getting a touch of the ball. His team mates could be on his back for the whole game, and then, the one time he does manage to get it he might stick it in the net.

You’ve totally outplayed him, but somehow everyone forgets his first 87 anonymous minutes. He goes home a hero and you go home feeling like shit. Of course, I’m not breaking any new ground with this. There’s a point in here trying to get out, I just don’t know what it is yet.

What I do know is that sometimes 1 out of 20 is good enough for the forward and 19 out of 20 is not good enough for the defender. Maybe it’s not fair, and maybe I have a persecution complex, but that is the problem that comes with the number 2 shirt.

Ireland Top 10: 5 to 1

2010-07-20T06:00:00.005+01:00

Bet you’ve been on tenterhooks waiting for this one.

5. The West Coast

If Ireland wasn’t so big it could just be another one of the Hebrides. The west coast is well known for being ruggedly beautiful. It has an edge-of-the-world feel that comes from knowing that out there, there is nothing until New York City. Except that a cursory glance at a map will tell you it’s not New York, it’s Newfoundland Island.

4. Enjoy the Music in Galway!

This item is so (stereo)typically Irish it was lifted directly from the brochure. Everyone enjoyed the “‘craic’ (good fun)” (hilariously this is what the brochure does every time it uses the word “craic”) and judging by the others’ reactions, the evening may have scored higher still in the list were it not for all the times I have previously been led astray in the Park Bar.

3. Guinness Storehouse

When we went to the Heineken Experience they pretty much told us that Guinness is made in the same way as normal beer except that the barley is burnt a little more to make it black. The Guinness tour told us more or less the same thing, but still it’s good. Guinness might be Ireland’s most popular export, I’m not really going to check, and the Storehouse is Dublin’s most visited international attraction.

2. Giant’s Causeway

This is exactly the kind of thing I like because I am an idiot. The others had to wait about an hour while I took hundreds of photos when four would have done. In fact, it is a difficult thing to photograph impressively because it is smaller than you expect. It would be easy to be underwhelmed, but think about it for a while. How did nature ever produce a structure like this? Perfectly hexagonal columns, 40 000 of them overlapping perfectly.

1. Hurling

Shinty’s cousin is about as unique to Ireland as shinty is to Scotland, which is reason enough to see a match. We saw London (yes, London) make an amazing comeback to beat Roscommon 1-15 to 1-14. Even the sceptics were turned around by the drama and excitement, not to mention the skill and fighting. The most impressive thing though was the top-class swearing from the crowd. You may think your ears are pretty tough, but you’ve heard nothing until you witness a mum with young kids yelling “a ye f***ing c***!” at (probably) the referee.

Things that are now banned at work, number 2

2010-07-15T20:27:00.001+01:00

People boiling the kettle all the time

Four people are in the kitchen. The kettle boils. The first person pours cups of tea for himself and his friend. I pour my cup of coffee. The fourth person switches the kettle back on to boil. What, is 99°C not hot enough for you?

Refining oil is a pretty energy-intensive business and uses a lot of steam. One of the ultimate objectives of everyone in our office is to make petrol from oil more efficiently, and I expect the intelligent people who work as engineers to understand the concept of energy efficiency. But I suppose it is just a kettle, and they also understand that it’s a drop in the ocean considering that Grangemouth is pissing literally thousands of tons of steam every day.

But still, when you are done with the kettle, is there really any need to fill it completely and put it on to boil for the next person who comes along? They’re just going to boil it again themselves anyway. Here’s a hint, people: if there’s steam coming out of the top, the water is hot enough for your coffee.

Ireland Top 10: 10 to 6

2010-07-11T09:10:00.002+01:00

Look, how am I supposed to keep up an average of one post per week if I’m not allowed to spread my holiday snaps over two?

10. Being in Europe but speaking English

In Ireland you feel like you’re in Europe: the road signs are funny and you pay for things in Euros. But they speak English there, and so you can too without feeling the shame of being an ignorant Britisher. Oh well, it’s two more countries coloured in on the map.

9. Tesco’s Irish Breakfast Pack

Two days’ cooked breakfast for four people for €5, all in a handy box. Calorific.

8. Mussenden Temple

I didn’t actually go here, and maybe that is why retains some mystery. It is a clifftop “retreat” built by the Bishop of Derry in the 18th century in the grounds of his (now ruined) Downhill House. An abandoned gatepost near the roadside completes the ensemble, and it looks like something out of a Stephen Poliakoff screenplay. Wikipedia tells me that round the temple is the rather apt inscription:

’Tis pleasant, safely to behold from shore
the rolling ship, and hear the tempest roar.

7. A Midnight Barbecue on the beach in County Galway

For some reason this whole episode seemed very illicit. It reminded me of being 16 and 17 at Castle Toward, and that can never be bad.

6. Dublin

Dublin seems a nice city... worth a visit, at least. I feel like we didn’t actually see much of the city itself due to other pursuits, but my impression was that it is very spread out and each of its areas is quite distinctive. I will need to go back and visit Dublin properly one day.

I always knew shinty would make me famous (2)

2010-07-04T13:23:00.003+01:00

When I appeared on the back page of The Buteman a few weeks ago I thought I was in the big time, but that was nothing compared to this weekend. At the Marine Harvest Clash of the Camans we somehow scraped into the semi-final, on goals scored after finishing the group stage level on points and goal difference with Fort William. This meant a live TV appearance on BBC Alba. If you don’t believe me you can watch it here. You’ll see they spelt my name wrong on the line-ups.

The program is two hours long, but we’re in the first game on. Highlights to look out for are my volley at 13.20 on the video and the referee getting cracked over the head near the end of the match. And if you’re wondering why I look really slow, it’s because I am.

Niclos Mahut v John Isner

2010-06-24T00:14:00.002+01:00

I have probably seen less than 1% of this match. It started around the time I was leaving work on Tuesday. In the time they have been playing I have driven home, watched a football match, eaten dinner, had a night’s sleep, worked another full day and played my own tennis match (securing top position in our league, thanks for asking). And they are still not finished. Alright, so they stopped overnight, but get this: the fifth set alone has lasted longer than any other professional tennis match ever played.

I don’t know what I can add to what has been said about this already. For a match to reach 59 games all in the final set absolutely defies belief. Simon Barnes wrote “Sport is the most intensely physical thing humans do, or do in public, anyway. And yet the tales we tell are not of bodies but of hearts and minds and souls.” If ever a contest was about hearts and minds and souls, this is it. Those can be all that are left, since both bodies must be completely drained. All I can say is that if you want to see a truly historic event in the context of sport, try to see some of this match.

It makes you wonder at what point they should stop and say enough is enough, call it a draw. Or agree that if reaches 100-100 they’ll play a tie-break. What can be going through the players’ minds, if anything? After serving to stay in the match 50 times, how do you summon the strength to send down a 120mph serve? How do you find the energy to make that move to the net? Where do you get the courage to play a touch volley at 15-30?

At what point does this match become bigger than the whole tournament? I mean, for whoever eventually loses this match, how do you get over it? To my mind, by its very duration this one match, one break of serve, must surely have become more significant than any title either player has ever won. It’s no longer about ability, or desire, or nerve: both players have already proved they have these in abundance. The outcome will most likely be decided by one or two strokes of luck.

Both players deserve heaps of praise, but for whoever loses it will be a hard defeat to accept. And for whoever wins, he’ll have to come back and do it all again the next day.

Things that are now banned at work, number 1

2010-06-18T21:44:00.001+01:00

Jokes that end in “Can I get a booking code for that?”

These are not funny. These are not funny to anyone who has worked in an office for more than two weeks. That person will already have heard this joke at least six or seven times. Frankly, I’m sick of it.

This can only be remotely funny if you actually follow through and phone your timesheet coordinator to ask for a job number for, say, sharpening a pencil. And then immediately phone back to ask for a job number for filling in a timesheet. Okay, so that guy was quite pally with the coordinator, but that is the level of dedication to comedy I expect. Otherwise STFUp.

Right, I’ve been putting up with this for 24 years too long

2010-06-11T18:07:00.001+01:00

J-O-N-A-T-H-A-N.

What exactly is so difficult about that? I am especially amazed by people who manage to send me an email that arrives successfully (i.e. spell my name correctly in the address) but begin their message with “Dear Jonathon” or something similar. The following are serious offences in my book:

Jonathon: This is the most common one. Apparently, it is a legitimate alternative, but it just looks ugly. I think the people who spell their name this way do so because their parents couldn’t spell properly.

Johnathan: Tellingly, this is not recognised by the spellchecker. I think people try to spell it this way because they think Jonathan and John are the same name. They are not. Granted, they have similar etymology (both are from Hebrew - Jonathan means “God’s gift” and John is “God is gracious”) but my name is not John.

Johnathon: A mercifully rarely encountered hybrid of the above two abominations.

Jonothan: Seriously, what? I think this is only perpetrated by people who think my nickname is Jonno. It is not. Don’t call me that.

Johnathen: I’ve only seen this once. Just bizarre.

Their Scrap of History

2010-05-31T07:53:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I do things that most people would consider boring beyond words. This is not limited to trawling the net for technical data on 12 distinct types of steam trap...

So began an ill-fated blog post of mine last September. Eight months later I’ve admitted I am nowhere near good enough a writer to ever make it interesting, and that enough people already think I’m a boring old man.

It was to do with this poem by Philip Larkin, this song and this one, being told that my gran used to get from her house in Knightswood to work in Scotstoun by cycling across fields and consequently wondering how Glasgow will look when I’m that age, and this place.

You should be able to piece it together from that.

Violas, Help!

2010-05-26T10:48:00.004+01:00

I received an email that said words to the effect of “We need violists”. I have a long history of making up the numbers, so I valiantly decided to answer the call. When they said they had few violists I thought that meant they had some violists. They do not.

Accordingly, as a section of one I will attempt to sight read Dvorak’s Symphony Number 9, From the New World in front of the paying public this Saturday. Well, strictly speaking not sight read, as I have played it before, but it was not this century. Even worse, there is a solo in the Grieg, but no one will know it’s a solo.

I’m sure you can appreciate that it is not a good idea for me to perform a solo in front of anyone. Come and watch if you fancy a laugh. Come and play if you can at least hold a viola. Pleeeeeease…

P.S. Seriously, any string players are badly needed.

Local Hero

2010-05-23T21:23:00.003+01:00

How amazing is this? Athletic Bilbao and Championship Manager 98-99 legend Joseba Etxeberria’s testimonial match: Athletic against a hundred local schoolchildren...

The final score was 5-3 to Athletic.

War without the fighting and all that

2010-05-11T21:03:00.003+01:00

I have a bad habit of starting a book and deciding within the first 50 pages that it’s the best I’ve ever read. Simon Barnes’ The Meaning of Sport was not such a book. There are too many typos for that. In (slightly) less pedantic criticism, Barnes uses too many colons, and the autobiographical sections sail a little close to the wind in terms of settling old scores. There are blogs for that.

In fact the book had been somewhere near the bottom of my foot-high unread pile, and not making its way to the top very quickly. But I turned to it in a moment of desperation (alright, it was after the Lovat game). The blurb promised that the book “asks the questions no one else has thought of, and finds some surprising answers”, but the question I was asking was: why does the act of a man in a white shirt propelling a leather-clad bit of cork between two posts while I am wearing a blue shirt make me want to self harm? I don’t think that was one of the questions the book attempted to answer, but maybe it has something to do with this:

The process of growing up might be described as a retreat from perfectionism, or as an enforced peace-making process between the warring factions of dream and reality, of ambition and talent...

This is a process that just about all of us go through: a realisation, a reluctant acceptance of the fact that life is difficult and that our wildest dream will always be both wild and dreamy...

Perhaps the great thing about people who have real greatness in them is that they have never had to make these little adjustments. No setback has ever set them back. Their own talent, their own mental powers were always adequate to the task in front of them. Their dream never needed to be compromised, perfectionism was never retreated from.

One review promised that I would find “gems on every page”, and while that may not be strictly true, I could easily quote at length and write a post of which 80% was contributed by Simon Barnes. Maybe I will later, but for now I will restrict myself to perhaps the most memorable. After describing a scene in which elephants take or give up the best position at the watering hole, with no apparent aggression and no obvious reason for one elephant to have precedence over the other, he writes:

The reason why one elephant deferred to another was, then, a mystery. And I have watched this mystery over and over again in the arenas of sport, and I have never tired of doing so. Sport is not only – perhaps not at all – an examination of how good you are at running, jumping, controlling a ball. It is also a matter of who defers to whom.

The reason I had been in no rush to read the book was that I expected Barnes to be some kind of apologist, attempting to justify the elevated position of sport in our society. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As early as the third pages he states that “Perhaps sport matters because it doesn’t matter,” and goes on at various points to express his dislike for sports fans, sportspeople, other sports writers and even certain sports themselves. At times he seems as bemused as anyone as to the “meaning of sport” and for my money never really finds the answer, remaining happy to accept the many contradictions he points out.

In the end though, it doesn’t matter, because The Meaning of Sport is not only – perhaps not at all – a book about sport: it’s a book about life. With lots of colons.

Literally

2010-04-24T12:14:00.009+01:00

When I saw these I literally had to check I hadn’t already written a blog on the subject.

People who are wacky and people who are not wacky

2010-04-16T15:56:00.001+01:00

And people who are just messed-up kids looking for their own peace of mind.

There is a double bass player in my orchestra with quite eccentric dress sense. He often wears an old man-style flat cap. He wore an Irish themed comedy t-shirt on the day after St. Patrick’s Day, and completed the ensemble with a pair of three-quarter length Burberry trousers. He has many piercings, including a ring through his nose like a bull might have and the kind of earrings that make massive holes in your ears like African or Amazonian tribeswomen might have.

There is a man who sometimes gets the same train as me in the morning. He looks like he could fit in with the mechanical engineers in my old office. He dresses quite austerely, in suits of dark, sensible colours. He usually wears a long, black overcoat and carries a black umbrella. Like me, he arrives a couple of minutes before the train. While he is waiting, he walks to the very end of the platform, to where it starts to bend. There, where he thinks no one can see him, he practices his golf swing with his umbrella.

Nutrition

2010-04-11T22:11:00.003+01:00

Unconnected Miscellany has had its day, but now it’s time for undisguised ranting again.

Sometimes I drink Diet Coke. Sometimes I drink Diet Pepsi, too, since I’m not sure I could tell the difference. Never Diet Irn-Bru though, because that would be like drinking the devil’s own piss.

If I want to drink Diet Coke I will ask for Diet Coke, and if I want to drink Coke I will ask for Coke. No further clarification should be needed. Sometimes it’s best to make sure, I suppose, BUT should you decide to make sure which somebody would like, do not, under any circumstances, ask if they would like “Diet or full-fat”.

Here is the nutritional information for Diet Coke:

Serving Size 1 can
Calories 0
Total Fat 0g
Sodium 40mg
Total Carbohydrate 0g
Protein 0g
Not a significant source of fat calories, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, fiber, sugars, vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium and iron.

And here is the same information for (regular) Coke:

Serving Size 1 can
Calories 140
Total Fat 0g
Sodium 45mg
Total Carbohydrate 39g
Sugars 39g
Protein 0g
Not a significant source of fat calories, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium and iron.

As you can see, the fat content is the same in both cans. And moreover, it is zero! The difference is in the amount of sugar. I don’t expect to have to repeat myself.

The Laughing Sort

2010-04-05T17:08:00.002+01:00

If your hand came, dead in the dead of night,
and touched my forehead, waking me to see
you standing dead there in the dead of night,
I who fear ghosts would have no fear at all.
I’d greet you with the tenderest hello
and you would smile, though sad. And then you’d go.

There would be nothing deathly in your death
for your love always was the laughing sort
that quickened life and would not die with death.
And when you'd gone, I would not want to weep -
that loving gaiety would still be there,

filling with its own peace the quickened air.

Except it doesn’t make sense because she didn’t have hands.

Palm Sunday

2010-03-28T00:43:00.001Z

The Donkey

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

(G.K. Chesterton)

Mr Brightside

2010-03-23T21:34:00.003Z

One of the most brilliant pieces of wit my ears have had the pleasure of hearing was uttered in a bar at Gatwick Airport. A Frenchman, midway through a pint of beer, suddenly had to rush off, the way people in airports sometimes have to do. As he pulled on his jacket, grumbling Gallicly about his unfinished drink and probably feeling a little foolish at having braved an attempt at the full, British pint 1, an observing physics graduate deadpanned, “I suppose in this situation it's the optimist who sees the glass as half empty.”

One day a few weeks ago I left for work at the ridiculously “late” time of 7.13am. Not five minutes from my house the road was closed while an accident was cleared up, and I sat with my engine off for close to half an hour. In order to preserve my sanity and cardiac health I decided to spin this to myself as a lucky escape: had I left in time I would almost certainly have been caught up in the carnage.

On that day I arrived in the office feeling strangely relaxed and at peace with the world around me. I resolved that from then on I would be a happy-go-lucky, glass-half-full person, changed forever and unrecognisable from the misery who once narrowly avoided a beating on an early-morning walk home after telling a hitherto happy drunk in the vicinity of Kelvingrove Park that “every silver lining has a cloud”.

About a week after this epiphany work kind of dried up on the refinery. The owners asked my employers to “de-man” me, which I thought sounded like a bit of an extreme reaction. It turned out that this merely meant that my talents were to be redeployed to the Glasgow office.

Just as I was completing my transformation to an eternal optimist I was forced into an extra half hour in bed every morning, my quality commuting time slashed by over half, 12 minutes every morning and evening which I can devote to nothing but reading and judging other train-dwellers on their literary choices, denied the privilege of spending £140 per month on pouring the hydrocarbon fruit of my labours into my car, and a project on gasification, the energy panacea. (You make clean electricity and useful by-products from any old shit – literally, if you wanted – with no environmental side effects. Really.)

It is impossible to see light at the end of this tunnel. I am defeated. My hope is crushed. I am living in a nightmare. I have submitted to the darkness that surrounds me.

Notes:

1. Actually if I am honest I quite like the continental preference for small beers.
2. In case you haven’t noticed there’s about a two week delay between things happening and being published, and I’m now completely miserable again.

Just a Pint of Milk

2010-03-09T19:32:00.003Z

As if Catastrophic Inversion wasn’t close enough to being euthanized, cutting social satire on the profusion of idiots posting shite on the internet:

All Time High

2010-03-04T08:08:00.002Z

Look at that league table… amazing. I never thought I’d see the day…

This will be the last shinty post for a while due to my self-imposed media blackout starting tomorrow.

Unconnected Miscellany (5)

2010-02-27T11:47:00.005Z

Or “Random thoughts about nothing in particular, the kind you might see on one of those boring blogs that nobody wants to read. Oh.” But that was too long a title.

I have visited more cheese factories than I have theme parks.

Why do you see people out jogging with a jumper tied round their waist? Surely you know you’re going running and you know you’ll get warm, but for some reason you still see this.

The Renault Clio estate: WTF?

It just doesn't make sense.

Every time I read The Sacred Art of Stealing I imagine the narrative being played out in the Apple Store on Buchanan Street, when I know fine well it is set in the recently-deceased Borders across the road.

Every time I imagine telling someone where I got my Kaka’ T-shirt (which is surprisingly often – I’m very much in the habit of having imaginary conversations with people in which I decide what they are going to say and can therefore answer confidently and articulately, and for some reason the people in these conversations frequently ask where I got it) I imagine myself saying I got it at the Nou Camp. This is clearly nonsense, since I got it at the San Siro. I’ve never been to the Nou Camp and neither has Kaka’.

In the same way that a sarcasm font is required, I think there is a need for a rhetorical question mark.

I’m not a man... I am Cantona

2010-02-16T20:59:00.004Z

Eric Cantona talked a lot of crap in his career. He also said this:

It is easy to battle it out on the pitch without having prepared fully and then say “I gave it my all”.

Fitter, Happier

2010-02-07T16:59:00.005Z

Work, or as I like to call it, “the disappointingly shallow well of blogging material,” has thus far proved to be a disappointingly shallow well of blogging material. I’m already halfway through my career and it has only supplied a few isolated tragicomic moments, many of which I’ve had to forsake in order to maintain the illusion that I am a mature and employable person. Even the obligatory night out failed to provide much “banter”. Over a period of two hours I listened to three versions of a story about how someone I don’t know pulled someone else I don’t know’s sister, who I also don’t know.

In my Portakabin dungeon there are process and mechanical engineers. Process may be a collection of grotesques managed by the Chemical Brothers (Ed and Tom Chemical) from Rock Profile, but mechanical are something else; a living, breathing illustration of the development of balding in human males, who express their personality through their KARAZEE ringtones. (I express mine by changing my computer background weekly.) They are slackers to boot, turning up around nine and going home just after four, leaving their department unmanned.

On one such occasion and elderly gentleman walked in, surveyed the vacant desks to his right and announced “I can never get a mechanical man when I need one.” Everything in me was dying to burst out “That’s what she said!” It took all my effort not to, because that is a “joke” a 15 year old would make, not a high-flying professional like I am supposed to be.

The stationery midget, who is actually just short, does not like me, or is generally unfriendly. I seem to have irked her further still by giving her the impression I am some kind of bluenose. I only asked for a highlighter that is “any colour except green” because I already had a green one, but she was like, “an orange one then,” and gave me a disapproving look.

In any case, I think that highlighters and especially Tipp-Ex are bad for my health. After a busy afternoon spent passively inhaling both of the above I started to feel rather woozy. I made a mistake in the drawing I was working on and instinctively thought “Control Z”. My fingers got as far as the keyboard before I realised I was doing the drawing by hand.

I think the most important thing I have learned so far is how it would be possible to cause complete anarchy. Don’t go round smashing things up; instead, put “Fault Reported” and “Engineer has been called” signs on everything. Not that I have any plans to create such chaos any time soon, as I am feeling quite calm. I am constantly amazed by how little anger I feel at being forced to spell the word “tee”, as in T-junction, T-E-E.

In short, I would describe work in the same way war has been described: long periods of boredom punctuated by short bursts of intense fear. My daily activities are summarised by the pie chart below. It would be easy to start thinking that this isn’t where I belong, that I should be out there (wherever that is) doing something with my life, but then came the moment I realised I had become one of them: when discussing his never ending surge simulation, one of my colleagues remarked that the pressure had reached a ridiculous 5 million bar. Everyone laughed, and then I joked “Gauge or absolute?” There was an awkward silence while they wondered whether to laugh politely or fire me on the spot. It was during those three long seconds that I knew that this is what it’s come to.

But if I may be serious for about eight words, having a job is better than being unemployed. It is therefore crucial that I don’t allow my crushing shyness to cause me to find myself out of a job in August. For that reason I should really pull my finger out. That, and the fact that petrol is £1.10 a litre.

DISCLAIMER: If you are reading this over my shoulder in the office please assume I have used gross exaggeration and the persons portrayed are caricatures. Otherwise you may take this entirely at face value.

In a proper sport...

2010-02-01T19:00:00.000Z

Imagine football had a British Premier League with all the big teams from England plus Rangers and Celtic in it. Let’s say the teams that were in this league were also allowed to play their reserve team in the league of their own country, so ManYoo and Chelsea reserves might be in English Division 2 and Rangers and Celtic Reserves would be in Scottish Division 1. Ignoring Wales for the time being, this would work by promoting the top two teams from English and Scottish Division 1 each year and relegating the bottom four teams in the BPL to whichever country they come from. Also ignore the problem that each division 1 could have a different number of teams in it from one year to the next.

What are you thinking at this point? That this is a stupid idea, it’s seriously flawed, and would never work? Yep, thought so. Bear with me and assume this league exists.

Now consider the very plausible scenario that Rangers reserves and Celtic reserves finish in the top two places in Scotland. But they can’t be promoted because then they’d be in the same league as their first team. So, the BPL decides to give promotion to the next two teams, which are, say, Dundee United and Hibernian.

Now imagine how well Dundee United and Hibs would fare in the BPL, with Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea... Stoke...

Yeah...

Obituary:

2010-01-22T17:09:00.002Z

Bill McLaren, “the voice of rugby”, died on Tuesday. His commentary will always be inextricably linked to all my happy moments watching rugby: the 20-0 win against Wales in 1993, the first game I can remember, when I was young and foolish and thought that was what supporting Scotland would be like; Gavin Hastings scoring that try against France in 1995; and Duncan Hodge’s try in the last minute of the 2000 Six Nations to deny England a Grand Slam. All three of those. Rugby on TV has never been the same since he retired.

If there was one thing that everyone recognised about Bill McLaren’s commentary it was that it was completely without bias, despite him being a passionate Scotland fan. Not like the tubes we have to put up with nowadays. Luckily, Bill McLaren also provided the commentary for EA Sports’ Rugby 2001 (yes, I have a computer game that’s almost a decade old) so when Brian Moore gets too much for me – generally by the first ruck of a match – I’ll just fire up a game and listen to Bill intoning such gems as “He takes off like a supercharged motorboat!”, “That score will make his mother proud as punch!” and my own personal favourite “Ho ho! Lots of swash and plenty of buckle in that cracking try!”

Picture Special (3)

2010-01-19T11:27:00.001Z

In light of the accusations levelled at my home town in my last post, I thought I’d redress the balance with a Glaswegian special: Pictures of places in Glasgow that I think are not all that rubbish.

Rottenrow gardens

I did not hang out here much in uni. To be fair, when have I ever “hung out” anywhere? It’s funny to think that this is where my sister was born...

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and the Glasgow Tower

Buildings that are more or less omnipresent on the Glasgow skyline include the main building of the University of Glasgow, the science centre tower, and possibly my favourite building in the city, the tower (all that remains) of Park Church. Thanks, Glasgow bus tour. Here we see the science centre tower looking over the shoulder of Kelvingrove. It is a nice architectural contrast from the most modern to the not-exactly-traditional mish-mash of styles that make up the art gallery yadayadayada.

Glasgow Cathedral

Usually things look better in the sunshine, but I quite like the dark cloud hanging over the cathedral here. It looks somewhat ominous.

Catch-22

2010-01-12T20:06:00.003Z

Another of my pet hates is when people use the term “Catch-22” who have either not read the book or not understood the book, and don’t really know what it means. I am therefore in dangerous water here. To attempt to walk home from town you would have to be so drunk that you are incapable of walking home. To successfully walk home you would need to be sober enough not to even think of trying it. Catch-22? Anyway, I’m far too tight to pay £15 for a taxi back from the Merchant City, even if it means a one-and-a-half hour walk in sub-zero temperatures.

Every time I hear Glasgow derided as a crap town I feel compelled to defend it. I don’t know why. I don’t feel any real connection with the place; it just so happens I was born there. Walking through town in the early hours of a Saturday morning can be quite surreal. Overhearing bizarre snippets of conversations: “Has one of you two got the gun?” and “I don’t want to be a spare leek”, seeing a man relieving himself onto the bonnet of a car, and another while withdrawing cash from an ATM, a half full glass of wine randomly on the pavement beside the wheels of a car...

All these and the general carnage of a Friday night just make me think, “isn’t Glasgow a lovely place?”

Scherzando

2010-01-08T16:13:00.014Z

scherzo: a sprightly movement, light and humorous in nature; a musical joke

- Knock knock.
- Who’s there?
- Knock knock.
- Who’s there?
- Knock knock.
- Who’s there?
- Knock knock.
- Who’s there?
- Philip Glass.

I am rather a fan of minimalism, for the moment at least, such that Philip Glass’ Violin Concerto (Number 1) has now dislodged that of Samuel Barber as my favourite.

Driving is quite boring. In the car I prefer to listen to classical music so I can pretend I’m in a film. Am I a mental? Possibly. I often like to imagine I’m flying a plane across the desert in The English Patient, but that is not so easy at 55°N in January, so instead I listen to Philip Glass and pretend the car is inside a massive snow globe.

December

2010-01-02T10:09:00.001Z

Aren’t all these parties just brilliant?

Party

Watching your face
that makes an emptiness of this crowded place,
I stand, not speaking, terrified to see
you grown more lovely, and still lost to me.

Snow: The Obligatory and Disjointed Christmas Post

2009-12-23T21:24:00.009Z

Why is everyone so excited and amazed by the snow? It’s as if they’ve never seen snow in Scotland before. One of my favourite and weirdest poems, by Louis MacNeice:

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

The trying to be half serious part, from Evelyn Underhill:

I do hope your Christmas has had a little touch of Eternity in among the rush and pitter patter and all. It always seems such a mixing of this world and the next - but that after all is the idea!

The music part:

Captain Corelli’s Christmas Concerto is not programme music, but it could be. It has the word “Christmas” in the title and I like it, so that’s good enough for me.

In Amsterdam

2009-12-17T22:11:00.007Z

During the train journey to our final destination I was plagued by terrible visions of the others enjoying themselves in the coffee shops and “other” shops while I hid in Anne Frank’s attic. And that is pretty much what happened.

Having been told that Amsterdam would be the one place on the trip I would definitely love, I found that I did not like it at all until the last morning. For the first day and a half I did not at any point feel like I was in Holland, and to be fair the centre of Amsterdam might as well not be in Holland.

It’s not all that bad. Canals can make any city seem nice, as long as they’re not the kind that are full of beer cans, cider cans, Ford Fiestas, shopping trolleys and dead bodies. If taking drugs and having sex with prostitutes isn’t exactly your thing, there’s still plenty to do in Amsterdam. The aforementioned secret annex is interesting, the van Gogh museum is excellent, but I can say no more about it without sounding like a ponce, and the Heineken brewery tour is pretty good for a brewery tour.

In general though I felt a bit happier when we haphazardly found ourselves in quiet streets away from the centre, where the narrow houses lean right over the canals and there’s no one handing you flyers for the world’s best pub crawl. I think I could like Amsterdam, but only if I lived there and knew where not to go.

Oh well, two more countries filled in on the map. Not very impressive, is it? I think I’ll try to visit countries with easy flags first. Libya next summer, anyone?

In Rotterdam

2009-12-14T22:10:00.004Z

As our tour of the Benelux union except Luxembourg hit its second country, we hit the town Amsterdamers visit when they want a “fun” weekend. I feared this would have a similar effect on my liver as the effect on one’s heart of visiting wherever it is Scottish people go when they fancy a chippy.

Scene missing.

Of course, the reason Amsterdamers go there is probably to get away from British tourist (like us) twats (not like us) on stag dos (not like us). As I dream of a Glasgow without neds, so they must dream of an Amsterdam without Brits, but they, like me, should by now have accepted that this dream can never be realised.

Anyway, for a piece about Rotterdam, this has mentioned Amsterdam a lot of times so far. In fact, the two cities could hardly be more different. For all Amsterdam is cultural, historical, refined and touristic, Rotterdam is industrial, modern and a little rough round the edges, which is not to say that it’s not remarkable in its own way.

Rotterdam’s main feature is its totally futuristic architecture, which will make it an incredible underwater theme park when it finally succumbs to rising sea levels and is renamed New Atlantis, with many buildings that make you go “What?” and then “Why?” and then “Wow,” like a block of flats designed to look as if it’s been built upside down or an office block built on stilts then rolled into position on top of another building to save space. Some of it is mental, but as Shayan says, “Pictures speak louder than writings”, so here are a few:

In Brussels

2009-12-11T16:04:00.005Z

You may have noticed I’m writing these out of chronological order. This is so that I can persist with my unfunny titling sequence.

It started with an idea. That idea was to go on holiday by Eurostar to somewhere that wasn’t Paris. Then I invited other people, some of whom are not happy to pay twice as much to take three times as long to get somewhere and ended up flying instead, despite having promised myself that once I had actual money I would not give a penny of it to Michael O’Leary’s legion of flying slot machines.

Anyway, ranting over, the first thing I remarked upon in Brussels was the diversity of its buildings. Within 50 yards you can see a medieval cathedral, traditional Belgian townhouses and an office building that looks as if it was built ten years from now. You can be on what seems to be a major shopping street one minute, then turn the corner and find yourself in any nice, typical, small European town with market stalls and an old church. Walking around the city you can pass through districts that seem to be anything in between, but all somehow merged together.

The first evening was mainly spent debating if Stella tastes better in Belgium. As well as beer, Belgium is known for chocolates and mussels, and with good reason. In a chocolatier near Grand’ Place we were offered samples of the most amazing chocolate I have ever tasted, as if I wasn’t already going to buy as much as my hand luggage could take. If awesome was a noun the way some people seem to think it is, I would describe moules frites as “a bucket of awesome”.

Since Belgium has nothing famous of its own, Brussels likes to make a big deal of its position as (one of) the capital(s) of the EU, and they have hence constructed Mini-Europe, celebrating all the major landmarks of the other countries in the form of scale models. Typically, for the UK they actually meant “South of England” and featured the Houses of Parliament and the Channel Tunnel, which are fair enough, Portsmouth harbour, Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath. I thought the Forth Bridge or Giant’s Causeway might have been worth modelling, but what do you expect? Otherwise this was an excellent visit which wore out my camera completely.

After visiting Mini-Europe we felt there was no need to see the European Parliament building or many of Brussels’ other sights, but we did stop by Grand’ Place or Grote Markt, leaving just time on the way to the station for the Manneken Pis or “Man who can piss”. This was the most overhyped thing I have ever seen, and it’s not even that hyped.

Despite this minor disappointment, I think Brussels was the place on the tour I felt most at home, probably because it was hilly and raining.

In Bruges

2009-12-09T07:02:00.002Z

It might be my favourite film, it might not. It’s definitely in the top five. What’s more, it’s the only film on that list which has ever inspired me to visit its setting. (I’ve already been to Paris and Edinburgh, and have no real desire to visit Cumbernauld or Berck-sur-mer.) Yes, brace yourselves for another blow-by-blow (or pint-by-pint) account of my holiday in mock guidebook style.

In much the same way that the real star of In Bruges is Bruges itself, the main attraction of the town is the town itself. If that doesn’t make sense, what I mean is that there aren’t hundreds of great things to do there, in fact I’d struggle to name five, but rather Bruges should be talked about in terms of loosely-defined, abstract attributes like character, ambience or personality.

Having said that, a canal trip is a must, to see why Bruges is known as “the Venice of the north”, climbing the extremely steep and narrow steps to the top of the Belfort (belfry) gives pretty views of the town, and we completely walked past the ice sculpture exhibition twice without even noticing, but the real Bruges only comes out of its shell after dark.

If there is one thing you absolutely must do in Bruges, it is to wander the streets at night (after 4pm will suffice at this time of year) gazing at the eerily lit buildings and their reflections in the canals, all the time dodging the horse drawn carriages that appear without warning out of the fog if it had been foggy. And if that gets too cold for you then dive into a pub and try some of the many, many types of Belgian beer it is possible to try. You can have normal beer, wheat beer, white beer, blonde beer, brown beer, super-strong beer, fruit beer, chocolate beer... a gamut of flavours that will make the train journey back interesting to say the least.

Brendan Gleeson not pictured

Maybe that’s what Hell is: the entire rest of eternity spent in fucking Bruges.

I can't honestly say I share Colin Farrell's cynicism.