Sometimes life smiles unexpectedly.

I went out this evening to cycle home from the office and found that I’d locked Pedro — except that I hadn’t looped the Abus chain around the stand, so in effect he’d been lean-locked all day. Idiocy. Especially as I took the time to think “shall I lock the frame and front wheel or frame and rear wheel today”.

Thank you, God.

I think the London I live in is the London of my past. I live in my memory of a place, rather than the place itself. My London has wharves and docks in the east of the river, no Westfield, plans for something called the Fleet Line, buses you can jump in and out of and trains with doors you operate yourself. I certainly don’t mean that I see the past through rose-tints, only that London has out-run me. Underneath it all, it’s still London though. I can still navigate the streets pretty much the way I used to. There are still places the money hasn’t reached.

from Robert Brook.

I was looking to see if there’s any fly-fishing in the remote part of Slovakia containing the High Tatras.

This website tells me that

It is forbidden in the trout water * only fishing with one fishing rod
* use living fish like decoy
* use another like artificial flies not more like three by fishing
* use all above one hook by fishing on dead fish
* fish for swimming and laid
* use only one decoy except fishing at artificial flies
* use like decoy worms and insect in all their development phase
* fish more like three – times a week

OK. I’m pretty sure they don’t really mean that it’s forbidden to use ONLY one rod — probably the very opposite, in fact.

And “fish for swimming and laid” sounds, well, interesting.

Just a note to the future self to keep an eye out for:

– Clash of the Titans - swords and monsters, with Sam Worthington

– A Prophet. Don’t even know what this is about, but the mag reviews say one of the greatest crime films ever.

– Food, Inc. Documentary by Robert Kenner exposing US food industry nightmare. Similar to Omnivore’s Dilemma. Due out 12 Feb 2010.

see also film mag Little White Lies. Good.

What an odd bunch the Swiss are. 59% have voted in favour of banning minarets. I can’t quite see why banning minarets is deemed the same as cracking down on “Islamisation” (whatever the hell that is) and it seems that the SVP’s agenda is one of more-or-less overt racism under the guise of preserving the Swiss identity. Hello? Canton system?

It’s even odder considering the size and apparent impact of the Muslim community: “Switzerland has about 300,000-400,000 Muslims in a population of about 7.5m. Most are from the Balkans and few are practising” (per the FT today).

A petty and mean-spirited decision. Is this one of the reasons why they are ‘gnomes’?

Wanting something a little different yesterday morning, this is what I did:

3-4 minutes walk then 5 mins jog (to Regents Park)

3 sets of:

• 12 inverted push-ups (feet on bench)
• 2 reverse pull-ups from branch
• 2 x 100 metre sprints, there and back again

1 set of Tabata body-weight squats (keeping at around 11-12 for all 8 rounds of 20 seconds).

Walk home (about 15 mins)

If you’re wondering about the weediness of the pull-ups (’reverse’ ones mean “start at the top and then gradually lower yourself down”) it’s because I just don’t have enough upper-body strength yet to manage anything else! But I’m given hope by this great article from the BBC, and these bits in particular:

At first, you will be a helpless dangler. Go ahead — dangle. Dangling and straining to pull yourself upward is more of a workout than it appears to be. (Note: if you get embarrassed easily, don’t do this at a public gym.) Eventually, you will get to the point where you can flex your muscles while you dangle, though it won’t change the angle of your arms a jot. Then you’ll be able to flex an oh-so-difficult five degrees… and finally, you’ll be able to drag yourself up to a 30° angle.

and

It isn’t just the physical act of doing pull-ups that is difficult — mentally getting up the nerve to train for them is even harder. Beginning a workout is like diving into a cold swimming pool before breakfast. It means attempting again and again to do something you know you will fail to accomplish, over and over again, for weeks. Most people like to succeed, which is why most people don’t do pull-ups. It is daunting. You will doubt yourself. You will doubt your goals and priorities. You will doubt your physical ability. Everyone does, so get used to it.

But here’s what may happen, with a little grit and luck:

Unless you already work out, it will probably take you a month or two (depending on gender, workout intensity, genetics…) before you can do that first pull-up. There will be little or no advanced warning - no drumroll or dramatic music - leading up to it. One day you won’t be able to do a pull-up. The next day you will. Feel free to test your disbelief by repeating it several times throughout the day. And congratulations! You have joined a fairly exclusive club. The drive and determination that saw you to this milestone will doubtless aid you in many future goals.

The article also makes the point that it gets easier (sort of) as you lose weight, so the fact that I’ve gone from 81.2kg in about June to 75.2kg today should help a little.

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Yesterday, at liberty, I went to the Grand Canyon.

With the Cadillac Escalade, the 4 hour drive there was reasonably easy and comfortable, with some decent stuff on the radio and the really excellent satnav (though basically it’s just Up a bit, Left a bit, Up a bit…Fire! on the map).

The scenery changes were beautiful, too, from desert at Phoenix, gradually ascending to rolling plateau-land south of Sedona, then ponderosa pines and volcanoes at Flagstaff, to flat, endless landscapes north of Williams, before more forest at the Canyon itself.

Then, you get to the Rim and words and pictures fail you. Here is the mandatory ’standing at the edge’ shot, taken by a nice Canadian couple, with whom I then hopped onto the Hermit’s Rest bus. I stayed on all the way until Pima Point, then walked back along the rim, about 6 miles to Powell Point. At times, the path is paved, but at others it becomes unofficial and scarily close to the huge (3,000 ft) drop. Beautiful little birds abound, and to my enormous delight, so do ravens — real, proper, wild, croaking and playing ravens, that hang in the air about 20ft off the rim just having a look and then crarrrking off to points above and beyond. There are tiny flowers here and there in odd places, and I spotted a bluejay zipping across the scrubby woods. It was quiet walking along, with only the occasional roaring of the wind to disturb the massive silence. Few people, too, as most stick to one spot then move to another on the bus — not many walk.

I succumbed to the bus at the end, as I’d reached the end of my energy, what with the jet lag, long drive and the altitude (about 7,000ft). I had an interesting burrito in the Maswik Lodge, one of the saddest, most decrepit places I’ve ever been in, before a quick but necessary nap in the comfy Escalade, and then the long drive back to Phoenix.

An excellent day.

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As I progress with the C25K program, I am using different iPhone apps to help me along the way.

Today was Week 6 Run 3, a solid 25 minutes of running with 5 minutes warm-up and cool-down at each end. Since I figured that I didn’t need the Voices in my Head so much, I switched to RunKeeper Pro to help me through this one, breaking the run down into 5 minute sections so that I could have some encouragement along the way — to just run 25 minutes straight without some form of mental stimulus (”nearly there, only 2 mins to go!”) would at this stage be beyond me.

RunKeeper tracks all sorts of stats about your run, and here it is in graphic form:

Note the early start time (yes, it was still dark!), and the speeds and distance include the 10 mins warm up and cool down, when I was ambling pretty gently.

RK also gives you a graphic of speed and elevation over distance, which is quite fun:

though I am not entirely persuaded by the height gain at the end — it may have been me going up in the lift!

If you’d told me 3 months ago that I could do this, I’d have been staggered. I still am really!

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Run with uplifting music. That’s important.

Today, I’ve just completed the slightly infamous Week 5 Session 3 of C25K, where after a 5 minute walk to warm up you run uninterrupted for 20 minutes. Now that’s nothing for you seasoned runners, but for the tyro the prospect is slightly daunting.

Anyway, with the help of the excellent Get Running (website) app (iTunes app link) (the best of the C25K iPhone apps I’ve tried, though there’s not that much wrong with the others — this one has an English voice for the prompts, which is good for us Britskis), and my new @Running African playlist, I breezed it though it’s fair to say that I was not running fast or very far. Really. This is quite staggering to me, who have always been pretty rubbish at running.

And my listening while I was doing this was the following (song/artist):

Allah Mungode-Roadmaster & Agyemang
Odo Akosomo-Koo Nimo
Yaa Amponsah-Koo Nimo
Dagomba-Koo Nimo
Shauri Yako-Orchestra Super Mazembe
Sore Saol-T.O. Jazz
Sukuma Songa-Sukuma bin Ongaro

All except Super Mazembe and Sukuma are Ghanaian, and Koo Nimo in particular is just a phenomenal guitarist. There’s a lovely flow and life to all this music, and it’s lovely to listen to at any time, when running or even when preparing a long and complex talk on political risk insurance in the financial crisis (guess what I’m up to now…)

Super Mazembe are wonderful, too, and I’d lost the song for years — I used to have the “Guitar Paradise of East Africa” album, which is how I grew to know the music, but lost it and then found it on iTunes.

Oh yes–why palmwine?

Palm-wine music (known as maringa in Sierra Leone) is a West African musical genre. It evolved among the Kru people of Sierra Leone and Liberia, who used Portuguese guitars brought by sailors, combining local melodies and rhythms with Trinidadian calypso. Palm-wine music was named after a drink, palm wine, made from the naturally fermented sap of the oil palm, which was drunk at gatherings where early African guitarists played.

My interest was re-kindled when I took a cab the other day and asked the driver, a large West Indian guy, what it was. He said that he was married to a Ghanaian woman and that he was slowly the language (or one of them), and that the song was a famous one in Ghana all about a man who was walking through the bush when he met a leopard, to whom he gave schnapps (huh?). The refrain seemed to be about giving schnapps to leopards if you meet them in the bush. Which seemed strange, and it did cross my mind that the guy had maybe not learned quite enough Ghanaian people, but then maybe he had and it was just an unusual song. I prefer the latter.

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