Where is Everybody?

I’m mildly concerned to note that the last ten posts I’ve put up here have garnered (excluding my own and trackbacks) 0,0,1,2,1,1,1,1,3 and 0 comments (although one did get 12 ‘likes’ – tagging a post with ‘photography’ never fails) – even news of the ford couldn’t stir much interest amongst you. Blogging is feeling increasingly like talking to myself these days, especially when you’ve got the constant conversation of twitter going on elsewhere (including a few people tweeting responses to my blog posts). By comparison, looking back a year, the last ten posts in October 2011 got 8,7,3,2,7,5,11,5,11 and 16 comments (some of which was you lot talking to each other as much as commenting) and the year before that the still respectable 5,6,2,8,7,4,3,11,3,5 and 9. It’s not that I’m not getting the same numbers of visitors, as my stats are mainly up, but whoever they are, they’re not saying much. I can’t help feeling (as I sadly check my email for news of any activity on the blog) that once more I’ve written something worthy of nothing more than ‘meh’.

But then again I’m also noticing I’m commenting less myself – partly because Blogger has made commenting on someone else’s blog a right royal pain in the arse, if not downright impossible – but also maybe because I, too, occasionally just respond via twitter or retweet rather than adding something of my own. Which is a shame. Looking back at the older posts just now, I was reminded that half the value lies in the comments, particularly on some of the more abstruse topics. In the past you’ve told me how to fit a dynamo light, re-proof my apocalypse proof jacket (which, indeed, was also named by a commenter), and given more potato recipes than I could shake a stick at. All there, neatly archived. Twitter’s great for having a natter – even for answering questions – but it’s like an ever-rolling stream. Once a week, day, even an hour has passed that informative tweet or question has passed into history, never to be found again. On the blog, information on such obscure topics as mallet finger, the use of coffee grounds in horticulture or even cartoons about cats is still all there, long after the commenters who left it have moved on.

And yes, I realised that writing a blog post about how few comments you’re getting sounds a somewhat desperate, but then again, maybe I am. I liked having a bunch of friendly and informative strangers popping by and topping my jokes with even better ones – in fact some no longer feel like strangers any more. Now I’ve got much less idea who’s reading, let alone what they think. It’s like going from sitting in the local pub to sitting on a crowded tube. Just as many people, but somehow not the same.

Anyway, if you’re there – hello?! – drop a line in the comments and let me know. Tell me what you think. Tell me if commenting’s dropped off around your way as well. Tell me I’ve gotten awfully dull and repetitive these last few months if you like – I can take it.* Just don’t do it in a tweet …

*actually I can’t, I’ll lie awake obsessing about it all night, but I know you won’t let that stop you.

Ooops!

Hmmm. The slight problem with my exhilarating ride last night? I failed to notice my shiny new phone falling out of my pocket. Or rather I did notice it – I heard the unmistakable (and to me quite familiar) sound of a piece of technology encased in plastic hitting the tarmac – but for some reason I thought ‘oh, my lights must have come off the bike’ and then when I had checked and found both lights still there, I just shrugged, reasoning I’d hit a plastic bottle or something and pedalled on. It was only this morning that I realised I’d no idea where my phone was that I put two and two together.

Regular readers of this blog will know phones and I have a difficult relationship. I bought my first ever mobile phone in 2003 and I kept it for 5 years by which time its casing was a bit cracked from being repeatedly dropped but it was otherwise still working. A friend then gave me an old one of hers, which I dropped in a puddle and had returned, although it was never quite the same since. Another phone got dropped in a car park, picked up by a gang of scrotes and used to make prank calls to people in my address book which was annoying, and then threatening calls to someone else which ended up with me in the police station explaining why I’d never bothered reporting it at the time. The only bright side of that little episode was that there wasn’t much credit on the phone (I always get pay as you go for obvious reasons) and they were having so much fun with it they actually topped it up so when I got the number cut off I ended up about five pounds better off. Shortly after that my sister lent me a supposedly indestructable Nokia in a little rubber suit which I managed to destroy in short order, and then I got a new phone which got either nicked or dropped in London in January.

For those of you wondering why after all that I’d buy a smart phone, however basic, my reasoning was that if it was something I was using regularly I’d be better about not losing it. And for five months that actually seemed to work. Once I’d got over the whole new interface thing, I was quite pleased with my phone and I was regularly using it to check emails, tweet on the go, take pictures and generally become one of those annoying people who spends all the time poking their phones. Which meant I tended to keep track of it and better still look after it. It was only when I came on holiday and – needing to unwind – decided to spend a bit less time tweeting and emailing and generally staring at a screen that I started forgetting where my phone was. Ah, the relief of not always having to keep in touch with the world 24 hours a day! Who cared if a few tweets escaped me? What did it matter if that email went unanswered for an hour or two? I could simply admire the view without photographing it and then sharing it on instagram. My phone? Oh, well it’s around somewhere.

Where it was, was in my pocket which was not zipped… and then not in my pocket but lying in a puddle overnight. This morning I did the familiar pedal back retracing my steps the night before to where I’d heard it fall, where I found it lying in three bits in the road. The phone bit seems reasonably okay. The back is a bit battered but can be forced back onto the phone with a bit of work. The battery, though, flew out and seems to have been run over several times from the look of it. I’ve no idea if it will work again. I’ve seen plenty of iPhones with cracked screens that seem to work fine but I’m not sure Samsung build their phones to the same spec. It might be back to the broken Nokia for me…

Meanwhile, handy hints for becomming less of a scatterbrain when it comes to my nice things gratefully welcomed. And suggestions for new phones, preferably with some sort of a homing feature built in…

And Breathe…

It’s been a hectic few days weeks – make that months. Even my holidays have been a bit hectic, to be honest. I have had too many places to be, things to do, emails to read, and documents to write. Not an unusual problem, I admit, although if any of you are thinking about quitting your jobs and moving to the country in order to have time to smell the roses and watch the grass grow, I would caution you to only get involved in, say, two cycling campaigns at once if you want to have time to actually cut the grass and prune the roses.

As it is my poor old garden will have to remain neglected a bit longer as we have finally dug ourselves out from under a pile of work to get away for a week in Northern Ireland (the South West of Scotland is probably the only place in the world whose inhabitants go to Ireland to enjoy the drier weather). I still have a few things to do, but the busyness appears to be returning to background levels at last. Hopefully it means a chance to unwind, relax, and sit on the sea front watching the rain head its way across the Irish sea to fall on Dumfries and Galloway. Even better, we have brought the Brompton and the other half’s bike, so there will be cycling done. And, no doubt, the odd tale or two to tell for the blog…

Round Scotland with my Godson (and his mum, of course)

There are holidays where taking a pre-breakfast dip in the sea just yards from your accommodation to free dive for treasure in sparkling clear waters would signal the sort of luxury break most of us can never ever actually afford but often dream about. Unfortunately, those holidays don’t normally involve a stay at Tobermory youth hostel where the sparkling clear waters are also freezing cold and the treasure in question is my friend’s iPod, chucked over the harbour wall by her fifteen year old son, my godson.

It’s only as I look at this picture now that I realise we could just have waited for the tide to go out…

My godson is autistic, and if you’re thinking ‘Rain Man’ or that chap at work who’s a bit odd sometimes, then think again – he’s not just on the spectrum, he’s slap bang in the middle of it: a mixture of a ginormous toddler and a teenage boy – which of course he is – who talks constantly but rarely makes any sense (echolalia) and who is obsessive, liable to frustration, distressingly fond of cheesy 80s Christmas pop music* and only really truly happy when he is on a train. Or at a pinch a bus or a ferry or a coach, but only if there’s no train available as we found out to our cost in Oban when we attempted to fob him off with a city link bus taking two hours to Fort William when there was a perfectly good train going to Crianlarich and changing there and taking several more hours to do the same journey. If the paralympics ever introduced the sport of ‘finding the nearest transport hub in any town or city’ he’d be a shoo-in for a gold medal. We had a minor meltdown on the very last day when he discovered the Glasgow underground (I mean, who even knew Glasgow had an underground?) and was disgusted we weren’t willing to use it. So, instead of the normal approach you might take when planning a break in the Western Highlands and Islands – keeping the travel simple and to a minimum, allowing plenty of time to take in the beautiful scenery or have a leisurely lunch on arrival – got turned on its head. Fortunately the trains, ferries and buses in the region all go through spectacular scenery because we spent the trip maximising the amount of travel we did each day. That way, my friend and I could chat, godson was happy, and the lochs and mountains and moors unrolled past outside the windows for our delight.

As well as scenery, the trip made a good viewpoint for observing human behaviour. I’m sure there were plenty of people who wished we weren’t sharing their train, bus, youth hostel or ferry but there was very little tutting done on the whole; the British habit of simply ignoring anything that doesn’t fit in to the normal run of things stands you in good stead when travelling everywhere with a teenager who shouts ‘Get OFF me! What are you DOING? Naughty boy. Bye bye elephant …’ more or less on a loop. And the kindness of strangers came out in force too. A low point came early on in the trip in Mull when we missed the bus to take us to the ferry. My friend had gone to retrieve something from the hostel, not realising her watch had stopped and the bus driver wouldn’t wait and left without us. With the next bus two hours away we were looking at an expensive taxi ride if we weren’t to be stranded on the island. And then, miraculously, the bus came back to get us after all, a grumpy knight in chugging diesel armour, but a knight all the same.

I won’t give you a blow by blow account of all six days, you’ll be relieved to hear, but here are some points should you be planning something similar, with our without an autistic teenager of your own:

• The Highland Rover is incredible value. Just over £78 gives you four days travel over 8 days on all the Highland trains including the ridiculously scenic Fort William to Mallaig line and the only slightly less scenic Kyle of Lochalsh to Inverness line, ferries to Mull and Skye, and the city link coach between Inverness and Fort William and Oban. I think we’ve probably squeezed every penny out of it too. I’d recommend not trying to cram the whole thing into four days though…

it wasn’t always raining …

… honest

• Smidge is the business. You see why they recommend testing it by only coating one arm and leaving the other arm bare because it’s so effective at deterring midgies that you start to wonder (at dusk, on the shores of Loch Ness) whether maybe there just weren’t any midgies out. It’s only when you leave a patch uncovered that you realise that yep, the wee biting beasties are still around.

Loch Ness at dusk. That isn’t blur from a cameraphone, that’s midgies…

• Fort William has the most incredible setting – right at the foot of Ben Nevis, on the shores of a loch, with the highlands looming all around. It’s quite an acheivement, then, that it still manages to muster all the character of Slough, only with a bit less charm. What we saw of Oban and Mull and Kyle of Lochalsh were all pretty lovely but we didn’t see much of them unless they were on the route march from one transport terminal to another. We’ve vowed to go back and see them properly, although we’ll probably give Fort William a miss.

Sky reflected in the Skye coast

• You can get to some really remote spots by public transport, particularly by bus, but you have to plan ahead (Traveline Scotland’s journey planner is pretty brilliant at this) and you have to be prepared to wait – rural buses are pretty infrequent and apart from on Mull just don’t seem to join up with other forms of transport. The only bus from the Skye ferry terminal at Armadale left an hour and a half after the ferry arrived – and ten minutes before the next ferry got in. It was the last bus too. If I did the trip again, I’d definitely take my bike for the last leg. And I wouldn’t be persuaded off the bus at Drumnadrochit for an emergency cup of tea, however parched my friend was. There’s a two hour wait between buses there and there’s approximately half an hour’s worth of enjoyment to be had in Drumnadrochit, once you’ve exhausted the amusement to be gained from Nessie-related tat. It wasnt just my godson who wanted to shout ‘what are you DOING?’ as she dragged us off the bus.

• I believe – but have not tested the theory – that you could probably survive the whole trip cooking only the ‘free food’ left behind by other travellers in youth hostels. Although you’d have to be pretty inventive and fond of pasta and reasonably resistant to scurvy. Still, I offer it up as a challenge to anyone who wishes to try.

So that’s it. I hope my next holiday will involve going nowhere, and doing nothing, in perfect peace and quiet. Fortunately that more or less describes the rest of my life, so I expect I shall recover, given time. And my friend and I – having done some growing up in the last 20-odd years – are still speaking to each other to boot. Although that cup of tea in Drumnadrochit still rankles a little…

coming into Mull on the ferry

And what did you do in your summer holidays?

*in retrospect, my failure to retrieve the iPod might have been the making of the trip

An Awfully Small Adventure, Comparatively Speaking

Many moons ago – many, many, many, many moons – a friend and I set off on a huge adventure, travelling round the United States on an unlimited Amtrak pass. Over the summer of 1988 we more or less circumnavigated the country on glorious double decker trains, through awesome scenery, gathering memories (but not apparently taking many photos), including a train which was more than 24 hours late (take that, Silverlink), a tour of every two-story building in a town in New Mexico (we made the local paper too) and a poker school which started up as the train pulled out of San Francisco and was cashing up as we pulled into Chicago around two days later. We were young enough to sleep where we could (oh to have a neck that forgiving) and foolish enough to think it would all work out fine and just savvy enough that it did, although we had to dodge the attentions of the creepy guy in the hostel at the Grand Canyon who let us share his room when everywhere else was booked solid. This was before the internet and mobile phones and everything was arranged by letter or ringing up, and astoundingly we made every connection and caught every train and made it home safely albeit not technically talking to each other for about a year and a half afterwards. If you’ve ever travelled with me, you’ll understand why.

Compared with that, five days by train, bus, ferry, and coach around the West Highlands and islands with each other and her son, my godson, who is, to complicate matters a tiny bit, autistic, should be a doddle, right? I mean, what – apart from everything – could possibly go wrong?

I’ll let you know next week, on my return.

Schroedinger’s Cat

Half way out the window is the place where I sit

There isn’t really any spot quite like it

It isn’t really outside

It isn’t really in

And that’s the way I like it, cos I’m a cat, innit?

With apologies to AA Milne, and the entire physics community

Shiny New Toy

Regular readers will be aware that my relationship with mobile phones has been somewhat complicated. Phones get bought for some ridiculously cheap price, and last a few months before deciding being regularly dropped out of my pocket from my bike and doused in a puddle overnight is not for them and they run away, disappear, get stolen or simply give up the ghost. Since January, my phone has been the last survivor of this sorry crew, an ancient nokia with a partially non-functioning keypad (I could basically only send one text message – ‘OK, thx’ – which actually covers a surprisingly large number of eventualities) which meant I could only ring numbers which had rung me or if I got someone else to text them to me.

All this was marvellous for my call credit but was getting a tiny bit impractical given I was about to go up to Edinburgh to help organise a giant mass rally of cyclists. So yesterday, being in Bigtown, I nipped into the phone shop to pick up another doomed cheapie. Unfortunately, the one I’d bought the last time (which at least had a radio so I could listen to something on the bike) was no longer there, but on the pay as you go racks I noticed that I could get a touch screen Android phone for – well, not all that much money, although not quite dropping-in-puddles money either. I had a vision. I could tweet on it! I could check my email! I could blog on it and take fancy pictures and be just like one of the cool kids. And maybe, if it was useful enough, I might just hang on to it and not leave it behind somewhere random, or drop it, or generally mistreat it long enough for it to be worth it.

So I bought it. I even got ten quid off because I was ‘upgrading’ my mobile – although the salesman’s face when I explained to him how he needed to go about making a call from my old phone to activate the upgrade offer was a picture. He very kindly set up the date and time for me and I took it off to a cafe to try and work out how to use it. I discovered that a tiny little touchscreen keyboard is no good for anyone with fingers bigger than a five year old, and that I suffer from age-related gadget-learning degeneration. I’m still not entirely sure what my phone is actually doing half the time – it’s taken to wolf whistling at me at random intervals – and I’m fairly sure that I’m going to need a different tarrif if I’m actually going to use the thing for tweet. After spending more time backspacing than typing I gave up on the keyboard and went back to the texting numberpad instead (there is a voice entry module but given the amount of swearing involved when a piece of technology doesn’t do what I want, I think I’ll pass on that one). I’d love to claim that this blog post was written on the phone but that would be a lie as you can tell because it’s more than three words long and is spelt more or less correctly. However I have managed to send a couple of tweets from it with only a minimum of swearing. And I count that as being hip or hop or whatever the word is with the modern young people of today.

Pas Devant les Enfants

Another exciting package arrived today from Amazon* – yes, I’ve finally got myself a new l*****. Well, when I say ‘I’, what I mean is that the other half lost patience with my procrastination and just went ahead and ordered it for me (I am after all the person who waited six weeks to buy a dynamo because – actually, no, I’m not really sure why it took me so long myself and I was the one doing the putting off. It made sense at the time). Now that the l***** has arrived, it has been whisked off to be set up and have its rescue disks created which now apparently takes 4 DVDs** and the better part of an afternoon. So I’m still using the old one. Which is why I’m being a little coy about what it is that’s in that package.

You see, it’s a well known fact that computers know when they’re about to be replaced and get a little antsy about it. The other half’s Netbook started playing as soon as we ordered the new l***** until we reassured it that it was not the one for the chop. Since then we’ve been being a little discreet around the computers – just to be on the safe side, you know. Perhaps going down for a walk to the ford (three inches, bridge still damaged, ‘ford closed to pedestrians’ sign still in place) to discuss the matter was a tad cautious – but you never know. I’m in the middle of a big editing job and I can’t affort a cantankerous computer. Although, I think it’s guessed. The other day it suddenly decided to repaginate my 100-page Word document to 18,000 pages and nearly ate a day’s work. I’m not sure, but I think the Netbook might have been telling tales out of school.

I’m a little sad about it because the new l***** – while being new and shiny and everything – isn’t quite as sleek and strokable as the old one was when it was the  new and shiny one. These days, to quote a participant at the Cycling Embassy policy bash, it looks as if I’ve been playing hockey with it, but it still retains a faded remnant of its former glamour. The new one just looks sort of brutally efficient. And I’m going to have to knit it a new cover and everything.

* before you point out my obvious schoolgirl mistake – I am aware that this is not an Apple product. Looks like I’m a loyal Sony girl after all.

** ahem. Looking back at this post, I notice that I rather blithely implied that I’d made rescue disks for the last one and lost them as opposed to meaning to do it and then putting it off until, well, frankly I dropped the damn thing. Fortunately the other half sees through my schtick

Better by Bike?

Ice yesterday morning prevented me from enjoying my usual ride down to the papershop (what can I say, I’m a wimp and my front teeth were very expensively straightened by my parents so I like to keep them intact) but we made up for it in the afternoon by both cycling down to one of Bigtown’s big box electronics shops to do a little light laptop shopping. I’d meant to go down on Monday but it was just too bloody nice and I spent the afternoon gardening instead but yesterday the ground was frozen and I decided that if there was at least a bike ride thrown in I could handle the strain.*

Now, I would love this to be one of those posts where I prove that cyclists contribute just as much to the economy as car drivers but sad to say we were mainly going down to the big box shop to try out the laptop we’d chosen prior to actually ordering the thing on Amazon. There’s a lot of things you can find out about a laptop online but you can’t find out if it’s got an annoyingly clicky keyboard or an over-sensitive pad that mistakes you reaching for the shift key for you wanting it to highlight acres of carefully crafted prose and then overwriting it in an instant. It’s also hard to tell whether that nice shiny thing in the picture actually translates into something sleek and strokeable or whether you’re going to end up with something that looks like it was designed by a barrel full of drunk monkeys who’d spent too long watching Strictly Come Dancing. I’d never do such a thing to a small independent retailer and I don’t exactly feel that good about doing it to a big one, even if it is one who employs all the monkeys that were rejected from the inebriated laptop design squad on the grounds of taste and decency. I do feel sorry for them though. It must be soul destroying working for a retailer whose business model is fundamentally broken, like realising you’ve signed up for a carriage-building apprenticeship in around 1907, but I simply can’t bring myself to spend £300 more on an identical model laptop just because they’ve employed someone to ‘help’ me do so, especially when by ‘help’ I mean ‘get all the facts wrong and try and sell me an extended warranty’ so we go on with our keyboard testing and stroking while fending off the sales staff and then we pedalled home.

It struck me on the ride back (I have plenty of time to think while the other half disappears over the horizon ahead of me) that we’ll be sorry when the big box is gone and we’ll have to put up with whatever the drunk monkey design teams throw at us. There’s got to be a role somewhere for a showroom for expensive items like laptops where the physical object still counts as much as the specification (see also, trousers). Maybe staffed with actual helpful knowledgeable people who aren’t hampered by the need to flog a useless insurance policy to make up for the fact that the internet has stolen their employer’s business. And maybe (C*met take note) with actual bike racks outside it rather than acres of car parking space.

Oh all right, I’m fantasising now.

*Am I the only female on the planet who considers ‘retail therapy’ to be ‘therapy needed to recover from an afternoon spent shopping’?

De-Malleted

Slightly over a year ago, I tore a tendon in my finger, and naturally I wrote about it at the time. Since then, I’ve been aware that I never updated you all about how effective the treatment had been. When I got the splint taken off, the finger was too stiff to bend much at all and it was hard to tell how straight it was going to end up. I know that most of you lot couldn’t care less but I get quite a few hits on that post even now, probably from people who’ve also got a mallet finger, so I thought I’d do a quick update, by way of a public service.

One of the nice things about having the blog is that you’re reminded of all sorts of things you’d forgotten. When the splint came off and the stiffness had subsided, I didn’t really think the results were all that impressive. The finger was still pretty bent and although I could straighten it with a bit of effort, it never really matched the rest of the hand. For a while I found I was still pretty clumsy with it (even more clumsy than normal, that is). I felt that by stupidly leaving it for so long before I got it treated that I’d really left it too late. All the discomfort of wearing the splint was in vain and I would be left with a permanently disfigured hand. The fact that it was my dominant hand was just the cherry on the cake.

Then, a few weeks ago, I happened across the original posting and realised why some of my readers had found the picture so disturbing. Eek! That looked awful! Looking at my damaged hand, I realised that actually it wasn’t quite so damaged after all. In fact it’s pretty good, considering. I don’t know if it gradually got better, or if I just had too high expectations. Sure it’s never going to win any prizes in any ‘straightest finger’ competition. But on the other hand (no, wait, on the original … oh, you know what I mean) I was demonstrating it to my brother in law last weekend while we were having one of those competitive ‘who’s got the most pointless sporting injuries’ conversations and he couldn’t even work out which finger had been hurt. It turns out that time really does heal all wounds, eventually.*

But I’ll let you be the judge. Ye of squeamish dispositions, perhaps you shouldn’t look below the jump. The rest of you, compare and contrast away. And if you’ve come here because you tore your finger and you’re wondering if it’s worth getting it fixed a month after the event – be reassured