London to Brighton Bike Ride Pt 2 : The Start

The combination of the evening's festivities, a bit too much expresso and the thought of the ride itself helped me wake early.

04:30 early. The building works at Battersea power station were temporarily the source of the greatest light.

This was even earlier than my strategically placed iPhone alarm, which was set for 04:50 (OK, and 05:00).

I decided to make a start. First priority was to check for early rain.

None. So far so good.

Now to get ready, including an optimistic application of SPF30. Light breakfast (okay, with the instant porridge and a banana) and I'm ready to go. Acquire bike and backpack and begin my cycle to the start on Clapham Common.

Except.

I've left the water bottles in the fridge! I usually cycle around with a small Camelback backpack, so this normal water bottle process was something of a variation. I hadn't gone far, time to turn around.

Cycle back to pickup the water bottles.

Second attempt to reach the start. I'm all labelled up with my number so basically ready for my 06:00 start.

The Sunday morning roads at 05:30 were surprisingly busy. I realised that much of the traffic was on its way to do drop-offs at the Common. I also noticed the increasing number of converging riders, including a whole team in proper kit who tagged along at the same gentle pace as me to the start.

I'd been told that there might be some very enthusiastic riders at the 06:00 start, because this was the time least likely to be troubled by bottlenecks.

This was Lycra city with vibrant colours cutting through the early light, as well as every other variation from fancy dress (lightweight obviously), serious looking teams and every type of bike from single speed fixie, basket bikes, mountain bikes and racers.

Sure enough, 05:45 and I'm in a good position near the start of the funnel.

"Are you losing your bottle?" asked a fellow rider.

She looked towards my bike. One of my originally missing water-bottles was hanging sideways at a jaunty angle.

I suddenly remembered.

I'd only put the water bottle cages back on Friday. I'd hand tightened them until I could get the right spanner.

I wheeled my bike to the side, rummaged in the saddlebag and found the Crank Brothers all-in-one tool. A few minutes of twiddling things and I'm ready to rejoin the line.

But what a difference a moment makes. I look up and there's suddenly another 3,000 people in front of me. I can't even see the people I was standing with any longer. Everyone has bunched forward to get into the funnel ready for the start.

I'm now in what is probably the third batch to get away. It's all good natured as we thread our way to the start, walk the first grassy 200 metres until we can get to the road surface and gingerly start pedalling through the already quite dense throng.

I know that this early start will be less busy than later and that the density will thin out as we get onto the main road systems leaving London.

But hey, we are on our way! ...(tbc)

London to Brighton Bike Ride Pt 1 : Before

I was sitting in the coach, smiling. It had been a good day.

"Mind if I sit here?" asked a fellow cyclist.

She sat down next to me.

"What did you think?" I asked.

"It was brilliant..."

I agreed, "Yes, and with a real sense of achievement at the end..."

We carried on chatting, but I must rewind to the start.

It hardly seems possible to have packed so much into a single day, but it was the longest one, after all.

INTERNAL SCENE: ROOM - EARLY SATURDAY EVENING

Yes, I've assembled all of my materials for a kind of Wallace and Gromit 'New Trousers' start the following morning. Sports gear, breakfast, spanners. The water bottles are in the fridge chilled and ready.

There are bananas.

I'm ready to go to the pub to meet the others.

EXTERNAL SCENE: FRONT DOOR - SURPRISE RAIN
I'm standing looking up at the sky. It is what I call 'car wash rain'. I decide to retrieve a better waterproof from the boot of my car. Then walk along the road to The Mason's Arms. I've taken my stripped down wallet, which I'd prepared for tomorrow's bike ride. Folding cash and one debit card. No Oyster Card.

So I have no choice but to walk the ten minutes or so to the pub. Using a 137/452/44 wouldn't normally enter my head for such a short trip, but the rain, which was on - let's say - setting 8 has just moved to a 9 - Fire Hose.

I notice that I'm now the only person walking - everyone else is sheltered in doorways, the petrol station, under railway bridges. I'm glad I picked up my waterproof with the hood with the wire in it. I'm now a little walking rainproof canopy on the way to the pub.

INT. SCENE: THE MASON'S ARMS
I spot David straight away, drinking something Balham-hip which starts with the name Sierra Nevada. I'm thinking beer with a story, gold rush, Lake Tahoe?

David is mildly amused at my appearance. I notice the pub mainly contains people in shorts who look as if they have been, or are on their way, to barbecues.

There is that moment of pub silence as they register my bedraggled appearance. I make for the bar. Two separate people ask me:

"Raining outside, is it?"

They know the answer.

I get my beer and we chatter whilst waiting for the others. Eventually John arrives in an understated version of my wet appearance. He'd managed to get a cab for the last part of the journey.

We all look at the menu. We are still waiting for three more to arrive at seven o'clock.

"They'll be late" we hazard.

David is the expert on cycling and says we should eat something pasta or pizza based. The menu looks delicious, but is more skewed towards Ash goat's cheese, salmon with wilted garlic spinach, samphire, Chalcroft farm burgers with Cholla buns that kind of thing. Normally it would be perfect, but this evening we decide to cross to the nearby Italian.

Our remaining group still haven't arrived. We get the text explaining they have only just left. They are an hour away. The rain, don't ya know?

INT. SCENE - LIVELY ITALIAN RESTAURANT
So we move to the Italian. Get a lovely window table. Order starters. Eat them. Order pizza and pasta. Still no sign of them. A phone call. Complicated.

INT. TUBE STATION AT GREEN PARK - CUTAWAY TO THE OTHERS
They are bringing their bikes on the train. Into London worked fine. They are now in the deep tube network. On the Victoria Line. Bikes are not allowed on Victoria Line Trains. The first driver notices them board.

"Will the person with the blue bicycle please leave the train"

The driver refuses to move the train until they leave. Passengers glower quietly. The scene of eviction has probably made their early evening. Especially as one of the bikes has mudguards and panniers.

Another train. Same story. Rule of thumb is inside the Circle Line permits folding bikes only. Back in the Italian restaurant we muse how they got their bikes down the very long escalators.

They renegotiate their way to the surface. Two of them are Londoners. The other is from Norfolk.

The two Londoners lead the way. They get lost/separated.

That's when they phone.

We decide to tell the restaurant waiters that they are cycling in from Essex. The entire restaurant is impressed.

INT. SCENE - LIVELY AND ANIMATED ITALIAN RESTAURANT

We ask for our main courses. They arrive.

Just as...

The others finally arrive. They are all very bright. Orange. Yellow. Bicycle-y. We go outside to greet them. Hugs all around.

The staff and people in the restaurant cheer them. Everyone knows about this epic journey from Essex.

They are only one-and-a-half hours behind schedule. It's great though - they've arrived and we diners are all feeling well established. The three latecomers decide to go on to their hotel before joining us for something to eat.

We order pudding/coffee.

But enough. This is still the build up to the ride.

There's another event in their travails when they order a minicab from their hotel (1.4 miles from the restaurant) and it shows a starting price of £12.

But lets's skip over all of that and move to the now rapidly approaching dawn of the ride...(tbc)

test loading of bike into car boot in prep for @TheBHF #L2B

I thought I'd try a test loading of the bike into the car boot. It doesn't really need to be there until Saturday afternoon, ahead of the British Heart Foundation London to Brighton cycle ride on Sunday.

However, it is surprising how many small things pop up that are better handled in advance, with this test.

I've fixed most things now and got everything down to a low operating weight, although I will take my small backpack this time.

It drove me nuts last year carrying random loose items in damaged carrier bags once the bike had been loaded onto the articulated lorry for the return trip to Clapham Common.

#mixtape @ukmixtape wristband particles for #edfringe already sighted

A shower of wristband particles for Mixtape arrived at rashbre central. There's already a few tweets and Facebook pictures of people trying them out.

I'll also take these limited editions to the #BHF #L2B bike ride on Sunday, or at least as far as the Mason's Arms on Saturday to distribute around Team Nemo.

They'll also be available at the upcoming Mixtape Edinburgh Fringe Preview at Live Theatre, on 24 July, although if that is too long to wait, they'll soon show up on the Mixtape website.

The main Mixtape shows run all the way through Edinburgh Fringe at Underbelly (@FollowTheCow). Check P.141 of the #edfringe programme, or link here to get tickets.

And for the wristbands, what's the phrase...

Hurry, stocks are limited!

engineering the veil

The various political parties are banging on about purdah with regard to the eventual EU Yes/No vote.

Isn't it great to wheel out such an arcane term as purdah for the European Union decision? One that probably helps create a divide in the electorate based upon its very use? Oh, yes, and these same politicians are now referring to the electorate as 'The Public'.

Purdah in the current 'pre-election' meaning is an Edwardian term repurposed from its middle eastern meaning. There's multiple ironies in its use when discussing the European Union, not least that Edward VII was nicknamed the 'Uncle of Europe'.

The British public schoolboy corridors of power moved the word away from its use about the veil of female seclusion to instead being about government silence pre-election on matters of political controversy.

When I worked in Saudi Arabia a few years ago, purdah was ubiquitous. The woman all wore the black veils, there were separate zenana womens' areas in houses.

The local (Shwarmah) McDonalds had separate lines for men and women queuing. All the women or families had to sit behind a curtained or walled-off area in restaurants. The Starbucks logo was rebranded from the mermaid to the crown (I think this sinking mermaid logo is to becoming the new global branding) and famously the IKEA catalogues were reconstructed without showing women.

My nearby huge shopping mall (Saks of Fifth Avenue, Debenhams, M&S etc.) had its own separate floor for women - no men allowed. Religious police ensured that prayer times were upheld and the stores closed. In my experience, often these mutaween were accompanied two steps back by a soldier in a khaki uniform, just to ensure the message was understood.

Women couldn't drive cars, they had to sit in the back seats behind darkened windows. I still recognise the type of cars when I see them being used in London.

With an accustomed eye, one could spot that women would find ways to subtly accessorise the burqas they wore at all times in public. Then, for a while the rules slightly relaxed with even examples of non-black abayas being worn.

Since the change of monarch in the Kingdom this year, seen here in February with Prince Charles, the religious police have stepped it up again to reinforce the black abaya, nikab and gloves in public.

So when I hear purdah, I can't get my mind away from the Saudi version.

And here in Britain, why can't we just say 'pre-election period' or 'pre-referendum period'? Surely it can only be to confuse 'The Public'?

locating my number for #BHF London to Brighton, this Sunday

I had an email from another of our Team Nemo cyclists who is also doing the London to Brighton this weekend. It contained all kinds of helpful tips about things to take (sunblock AND waterproofs) and things to leave behind (large things)

I'll take some water and some snacks. I may treat myself to a banana before the start. I'm number 000145, which will be lost somewhere amongst the other 29999 or so riders.

I've put the wider flat pedals on to the carbon bike now. Removing the old pedals was harder than I expected because they had seized into place.

I had to get out the serious hex spanner set, and then additionally use an old seat post to get extra leverage to shift them.

I still get confused about the one on the left which has to be unscrewed backwards, but it also depends where you are standing! The Park Tools descriptions come in handy for this.

And I've only had enough time for a meagre 7 miles today. It'll be 54 miles at the weekend, plus the bits to and from the event.

real humans

It was probably to do with licensing, but the original Scandic-Noir version of Humans didn't get screened here in the UK.

I happened to watch it when I picked up a Canadian set of the DVD some time ago. The Canadian version is the original Swedish dialogue (or French) and English subtitles.

For a British audience the Swedish + subtitles would usually work well and grab a mid-evening audience on, say, BBC2 or Channel 4.

Instead, they are screening a UK-remake which I suspect is also destined for America. It is a well-filmed very similar storyline so far although the scene orders have been switched around.

I gather writers Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley from Spooks handled the adaptation, which keeps the parallel present day, but with robots. We also get known faces as some of the main roles.

The Scandinavian original starts with a woodland twisty road, a Volvo, lots of dark fir trees and a rainy, dark, dramatic incident. It's a quicker setup for one of the main early plot-lines.

The UK version starts with a scene similar to something from I, Robot, with lines of partially-clad pristine robots in a warehouse, but with a recognisable type of DIY shopping trolley.

The premise of these stories is no secret, with machines overtaking human processing speed and then being capable of human emulation.

'The singularity is near', is the premise, which goes back to the thoughts of von Neumann, Minsky and others in the 1950s, when the possibilities of clever artificial intelligence were first debated.

Ray Kurzweil attempted to plot the increase in AI ten years ago, predicting AI insect brain by around now, a mouse brain by 2020 and the human brain by around 2030.

I look back to the 'neats vs scruffies' arguments of artificial intelligence, where neat logic is all mathematically pure and scruffy is pragmatic.

Anything that starts with a human builder is going to have both neat and scruffy it (note the Swedish machine sports a 2012 USB socket), so we'll have to see how this version plays out in this 2.0 upgrade path of these hubots.

cloudy thoughts

I was reading a post a few days ago about what and where to save things into the Cloud. This idea that all of our data can be secured in a vast database in the sky.

Like many, I do use the Cloud in its various forms for some things. Much of my music collection is stashed away in it and some of my videos, too.

But it's all stuff that is commercially available and relocatable.

I still back up my own stuff to my own system. Now I realise I'm probably extreme compared with many who might just take an occasional hard drive copy of their work in progress.

Here at rashbre central we've got spinning RAID arrays with redundant disk drives, so that if one fails then everything still works. On the backup system if two disks fail then it still works.

My first disk drives many years ago were when two hard drives might have held 30 Megabytes of data. That's less than a CD's worth of MP3 music nowadays. I seem to remember it seemed vast at the time, on TRS80 LDOS.

I'm told that the 26 million books of the US Library of Congress are about 10 Terabytes of data, so we've come a long way.

Today, as I replace a defective drive in one of the rashbre central RAIDs, I notice that it is designated as capable of holding around 6 Terabytes of data. That'd be over half the Library of Congress then?

But not really, of course.

This particular RAID has 5 of these 6 Terabyte units which could be a theoretical 30 Terabytes. With the safety duplication etc, I get about 16 Terabytes of storage from it and currently use about 40%. Forget about world libraries, that's just rashbre central.

True that this is just a backup unit and there's another one like it with the Active data on it.

Rebuilding the 30 Terabyte RAID whilst it was still running took about 25 hours. It was still fully usable, although the various flashing lights on it could be a little unsettling.

It's why I still prefer to keep my own data on my own systems.

Putting it out to the cloud and then needing to do some sort of recovery could be interesting.

I've no idea how long it would take or whether there would be some distant help desk telling me that I've used the wrong software or something. A bit like they attempt to do sometimes when I say I'm using a Mac.

So yes I'll use cloud, but somewhat carefully.

living life at ease, with bicycle

I was checking the bike with its revised gears and temporary flat pedals today (Cranks Mallets).

I always keep close to base when I first take a bike out that I've adjusted.

Today I had the camera switched on, so come join this extract from my journey around the country lanes and some dedicated cycle track. I've added lightly edited Moody Blues soundtrack, which mysteriously came into my head and seemed to fit the relaxed sunshine.

puzzling traffic

I used to notice them frequently in Moscow, but now we seem to have a few on the London streets as well. Large black SUV cars with blue flashing lights.

I'm not talking about routine plain clothed police cars, which some how still give off an 'official' look, rather more the kind that have American style rectangular flashing lights and are from manufacturers less associated with police business in the UK. SUVs with names like Nissan Navara, for example, which was the one that passed me today.

In Moscow, there was a whole secondary market in fake police car lights to get through the maddening traffic. These so-called migalka were supposed to be for official purposes. I think the going rate to be backhander 'upgraded' to a VIP was about $10,000. The cars with these lights would then also use the wrong side of the road to charge down ongoing traffic in an attempt to get through jams.

Here, in London, I assume that the ones I've seen are official, although there's something that doesn't seem quite right. If it was embassy cars, you'd expect them to have diplomatic plates or at least CD stickers. If it's the Americans, the cars would be Chevrolets or something similar.

I know the police drive a wide variety of incognito vehicles, but there's usually a consistency to their extra lights. It makes these black vehicles stand out as different. I guess they are probably armed response or similar, but it is somehow puzzling.

Speaking of which:

Amanda Palmer at Union Chapel

Tuesday evening and along to Union Chapel, for an Amanda Palmer gig. Despite some attempt at pre-planning, I was late, missing the pre-gig build up and heading upstairs to the often less crowded part of the Chapel.

The show was just underway, although Amanda hadn't yet arrived on stage. This was to turn out to be a well-constructed three hour set, with Amanda and various friends on stage during different parts of the show. It opened with Perhaps Contraption as a riotous band filling the stage, rocking it to the rafters.

When the six-month pregnant Amanda appeared, she started unaccompanied with an Irish folk ballad, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, one that I don't remember hearing her sing before.

Then to work with the grand piano, mixing familiar songs from across her extremely varied catalogue. The show was also being beamed out live to patreon viewers and so there was a strange kind of twitter background as people offered song suggestions from far and wide.

About half way through, Caitlin Moran appeared for a reading and some banter with Amanda. Well-known writer Caitlin chatted humorously and with edge about their combined experiences.

Then more from Amanda, joined later on stage by Whitney Moses who dramatically noticed that Amanda was pregnant before joining her to cover Garfunkel and Oates song 'Pregnant women are smug'.

Three hours blasted past, with a warm and appreciative audience, including a finale with 'Leeds United', and creating the perfect excuse for the rest of her accomplices to rejoin the stage. A fun, raucous and entertaining evening.

in which my cycling creates a spotty dog walk

The realisation that the London to Brighton bike ride is only a couple of weeks away has prompted me to further pedalling action. Tonight, I've slightly creaky legs from cycling. I describe it as the 'Spotty Dog walk' but get mainly mystified stares.

To explain, I decided to find a copy of an ancient episode of The Woodentops, which features Spotty Dog (the biggest spotty dog you ever did see) doing this walk. It's about six minutes into the video, which is like a strange soothing balm from another planet.

Relax with a cup of tea and a Hobnob marine of a biscuit to dunk whilst marvelling at this excerpt from slow television.