Bicycles

I like bicycles. If it were possible, I'd like to live without a car. Over the last few days I have enjoyed life with a bike in several different ways, appealing to different aspects of my personality.

So, on Tuesday evening I went out for a ride in the dark with some mates, appealing to my team spirit, my desire to belong to a group and by racing them, also appealing to my competitive urge. And cycling fast is scary, driving up my adrenalin levels and producing a sensation of fun.

On Wednesday, I bought some new bits for one of the bikes, appealing to the nerdish collector within me. I suppose that's the "gatherer" component of humanity's hunter-gatherer instinct.

On Friday I ran a couple of errands and did some shopping in town, suing the bike as a utilitarian means of transport: faster and easier than a car over short distances.

On Saturday, I did some tweaking and fitting and fettling of bits on three bikes. I find that mechanical work produces a deep focussed calm, a wonderful concentration upon the matter in hand which is difficult to obtain by other means. It's relaxing, like yoga.

On Sunday I went for a ride in the woods by myself, keeping me fit and resulting a satisfying sense of physical exhaustion. En route, I scared myself again, was able to think clearly about a number of issues currently occupying my mind and gave myself a complete break from home.

Not bad, for a cheap hobby, although it could become expensive if I let it. It appeals to nearly all sides of my personality.

Tranquillity

Sunday evening perfection:

Lying on the huge settee in the back room, curtains drawn, a single spotlight focussed on the book of Simon Armitage's poetry I was reading, Massive Attack on the stereo, red wine at hand, weekend newspapers close by. Bliss.

Mmmm, nice.

Well, that was the weekend.
Bristol's a good place to live, if you like music.

Moonface & I went to the Fleece to see The Selecter on Friday night; bopping & oi-oi ing to the speedy reggae of Ska & 2-Tone. We walked home, just a mile and a half, but we passed so many venues for live sounds. The Bierkeller, the Full Moon, the Junction, the Bank, the Croft, the Music Box, Jesters, the Cat & Wheel, the Prom. All of those were on our direct route.

On Saturday night we just walked down to the Prom to see a soul covers band. My back was running & my eyes stang with sweat from the dancing. Oh yes, I like it here.

Today, Sunday, we had some culture. Of sorts. The Arnolfini was hosting some posy Becks' beer -sponsored modern art exhibition, which was one of the most pointless shows that I've seen. The only piece that I enjoyed was a short film of some slo-mo Northern Soul dancers in an empty church. In light of the above paragraphs, I guess that figures. But I usually enjoy art: the Brunel exhibition which we skimmed last week was marvellous so we will return to that another week. Following the disappointing art we headed to the Coronation for some cider with Neil & Debs, and cycled home in time to cook for Tom before packing him off for his last term in Fareham. And I haven't mentioned the walk through the Berkeley Deer Park on Saturday afternoon.

History

In the southern Alpes Maritime on the border between France and Italy, 1100m up, it's peaceful.
Walking there last week, we saw no-one, heard no-one. There were few birds, no noises except the wind. We expected to see no trace of man except a few deserted and ruined cottages on the neglected terraces below where cultivation had stopped a hundred years ago.

But 60 years ago the border here was (literally) a minefield, the edge of France and guarded against the Fascist forces in Italy. In the valley below were Maginot forts made of reinforced concrete and up here there were coils of barbed wire to keep out Italian invaders.

Today, there are still fragments of barbed wire on the crest of the hills, rusting away. Most have been removed but some remain to remind us that peace is fragile and history is capricious.

New & Old

On Saturday, we cycled on the footpath beside the Avon bridge which takes the 8-lane M5 motorway past Avonmouth. The noise and vibration were intense & unpleasant; the environment quite inhuman.

Three days earlier, we had walked along the medieval equivalent: the mule-track from Nice towards Torino which was Piedmont's route to the sea. We could hear nothing except the wind, the river below us, and birds. It was only a hundred years ago that this mule-track was the only route through the mountains. We walked there for a day without meeting anyone. Peace, perfect peace.

Decisions

The trouble with looking back at decisions is that you only see the negative sides of the choice that you actually took.

So it appears that we always make the wrong choice: the bad aspects of the routes not taken remain hidden.

All you can do is make the best choice at the time, and hope that it's the best one. And you have to have faith & be brave.

Wanting stuff

Wanting stuff.

I'm not a particularly materialistic bloke. I don't think that I am overly concerned with possessions as indicators of status, nor do I collect things (apart from too many cheap bicycles).

I've only once bought a new car, and I'm happy buying clothes from charity shops. As I write this, I'm listening to music from a 30-year old stereo.

As a result, and partly because I have generally held decent jobs, I have never before felt that there is anything material that I want, but can't have. Even as a student I didn't feel poor, in spite of living in a dump and drinking halves.

But now, for the first time, I do want things that I cannot afford. It doesn't help that I'm unemployed at present. Nor that my past employers are witholding monies that I'm due. But really, that's irrelevant because my major wants are total luxuries. One is just out of my price range; to afford it, I would have needed to be career-minded and money-oriented for most of my life. And the other "want" would require time as well as money. Since I need to be here to look for work, that's out of the question anyway.

But - wanting stuff I can't have is a new and rather unpleasant sensation. The realisation that for the first time I can't have the luxuries that I want is worse, a sort of second-level deprivation. Even if there is no real deprivation at all.

And what are these luxuries I crave? A swimming pond - a semi-natural swimming pool, that would require an appropriately huge house and garden to contain it. And a holiday with a particular friend. To be honest, I will get the first in early May when the Lake opens for swimming, so forget that one. Which leaves the latter. In turn, as a household we could afford that financially, but whether I would live for long afterwards is a totally different matter. Time to find a job and to do some negotiation

Mountains

Moonface and I have recently returned from a holiday in the low southern Alps.

On our first morning, we knew we were in the mountains. The air had a cool crisp quality with a promise of heat later in the day. The last time we felt that air was in Nepal, where we remember havinf to look high above our natural sight-line to see the horizon, to see the snows white against a deep blue sky.

We had the same Himalayan flashbacks again. On a visit to Tende, a mountain village close to the Franco-Italian border we both independently thought we could be in Simla. The towns have the same steep narrow streets, the same terraced fit to the mountainside, the same type of high, narrow buildings. And the same chiilling cold that comes with altitude.

Sugar Loaf

We walked up the Sugar Loaf today: Moonface, Tom, Biggsy, Susan & I.

Although Bristol had rain first thing, by the time we arrived at Abergavenny the weather was clear and bright, albeit cold and windy. Rather than walk straight up to the summit and down again, we first walked halfway around its circumference, taking five hours or so for the complete circuit.

It was one of my favourite types of walk: not too much climbing, few stiles, open countryside with wide skies and terrific views. From the summit of Sugar Loaf we could see the Malverns to the north-east, the Mendips across the sea in England, and Pen-y-Fan to the west. The air was clear and bright. The turf underfoot was perfect: the sheep crop it close to the soil, like a carpet. Our feet bounced along, the turf's resilience making walking a pleasure. And the larks sang above us. It was perfect.

This time last year, we enjoyed a similar walk just across the valley from Sugar Loaf and I remember thinking that if I were to be struck down by lightning that instant, I wouldn't mind. The combination of springy turf, warm sun, cool wind, grass extending like a green ribbon before us with larks singing all around, was pure bliss. If death should come, it should come at a time of pleasure like this.

Bamboo

Ever since I lived in Belize, decades ago, I have liked bamboo in all its various forms. I like the short and skinny types which are most common in British gardens, only a centimeter or so wide and a few feet high. I like the stave-widthed varieties often grown in the mediterranean countries, & I love the giants of the tropics, with stems as thick as a fat girl's thigh and higher than a house. I like the simplicity of bamboo's single-stalked structure, the grace of their spear-shaped leaves, their movement on the wind and the noises they create. Bamboo is musical. When the wind is gentle, it rustles softly. When the wind is strong, it can roar. And when bent by a gale, bamboo creaks and groans in agony - but it never breaks. It's resilient, as well.

A few years ago, Moonface gave me a small pot-plant with a small hardy variety of bamboo. It started as only half a dozen stems each less than a fot high. After a couple of years, it was a thick bush that was outgrowing the pot, so I planted it at the top or the garden, where it flourished. I watched as it spread and flourished,sending out suckers and new stems a foot or so away from the parent clump. The stems which finally struggled to grow a couple of feet high in the pot, suddenly managed to grow to four or five feet in a thick clump at the top of the garden.


And then, one spring, it turned into an enemy. One of my pleasures is walking barefoot in the garden. I like wriggling my toes in the grass, feeling the resistance of the soil and the freshness of dew; the way it dampens and cools my feet. But when bamboo sends its suckers out underground to start new stands, those suckers poke up from the grass like spikes. They hurt ! Each new stem starts like a sharpened pencil, sticking half-an-inch or so out of the soil. When you walk on them, they can draw blood. And they hurt! The spikes can be up to six feet from the parent clump, and thus they turn a large area of garden into a no-go area.

So, in spite of the aesthetic qualities of the plant, I reluctantly decided that it had to go.

Uprooting the clump of bamboo took a long time. The roots and suckers were both deep and extensive. And it didn't die easily. Even after three or four years, we still find the odd stem of bamboo, sliding carefully up amongst other plants, disguising itself within a different bush. It knows that it's not wanted any more, so it's hiding. But we will eradicate it all eventually. I will miss it. I still like bamboo's appearance and sound, but not at the expense of holes in my feet.

St Dalmas de Tende SNCF

St Dalmas de Tende is a tiny, tiny village slowly ebbing its life away in the French Alps. Its population, about 1000. Yet its station is hugely magnificent, as impressive as London's Victoria or Paris' Gare de Lyon. Once, this tiny settlement was the terminus for an Empire.



We waited there for nearly two hours, for a train that never came. We admired the views, the redundant architecture, the engineering optimism that created the station. And we also suffered the cold biting wind and the lack of toilets.

Nice Ville SNCF, 16:00

A tall rangy man, scruffy, oddly dressed, strode across the station concourse to a small group of trees on the opposite side of the station approach road from where we were sitting.

He had wild hair, a yellow sports jacket, a red keffiyeh around his neck, with a pink handkerchief visible hanging from his belt and protruding beneath the jacket. He stood next to one of the trees, facing away from us and proceeded to piss. At least, that is what we assumed. He started talking to an arab-looking teenage boy near him. The boy said something curt, and called two friends over. They shouted at the man. The rangy man stopped pissing or whatever and skulked back to the station building, avoiding the boys and facing away from them. His walk was fast and furtive. The boys watched him go, talked amongst themselves, wandered away.

********

After 16:30, there was a rush of vehicles collecting travellers from the station. There were not enough spaces for all the arriving vehicles, so there was competition for the few temporary parking slots.

One woman arrived, stopped her car just after a newly-vacated space, and started to reverse into it. She failed. A second car had come just after her, and it drove neatly forwards into the space. The first woman stopped her car and got out. She left her car blocking the road, and explained the second driver's errors to her, loudly and forcefully. We watched. The situation was soon resolved when a traveller left the station and greeted the second driver. They loaded and left, and the first woman at last had her parking space. We were somehow disappointed that this drama was cut so short.

Nice Ville SNCF, 15:00

Waiting on the steps outside Nice station, we watched the world go by.
Fresh from England, our eyes saw the French as slim, small, dark and neat. There were few fat people. We were tourists, foreigners, just sitting in the sun. No-one noticed us.

A young man, in his late teens, waited near us. He had a small rucksack and a plastic cage with a young kitten in it. He took the kitten out, attached a short lead to it, and let it play beneath the palm-tree above them. An old lady nearby chatted to him, disarmed by the aura of gentleness that the kitten gave the lad. She left to catch her train or to meet someone.

After a while, two more men arrived to meet him, zinging in on a shared moped. They greeted each other, talked, joked. Then two more young men arrived to sit on the station steps, between the first group and ourselves. These men were darker-skinned, also with small carriers or rucksacks. They were unknown to the first three, but had just chosen that place to sit and wait. Suddenly, a single innocuous youth waiting for friends had turned into a group of five young men just hanging around, and the police arrived. There were two booted uniformed officers from the PAF, standing aggressively close to the five men, demanding papers, searching their bags, emptying their pockets, phoning for confirmation of their identities. And still we were ignored, as we sat there, three meters from the action.

The police finished their searches, they sauntered off. The second pair of young men looked at each other, avoided the eyes of the first group, then also walked away. The two boys on the moped zipped away with the first lad's luggage, then after an interval one of them returned on his own to collect him and the kitten. We sat there, undisturbed.

Mowing the Lawn

After just one week of warm, wetter weather, our lawn has turned from a parched brown frizz into a soggy green spread. Then , in one day of dry winds it miraculously dried. So I risked making the first cut of the year and tidied it up with the lawnmower. I am ridiculously fastidious about our lawn: I have turned into the type of petit-bourgois that I despised so much in my youth. But I don't mind. Instead of international capitalism, my enemy is moss. It encroaches upon the grass in the shadier damper areas of lawn, and is a source of frustration when it appears from nowhere. Even when it is scratched up moss remains a problem, as it hugs the surface so much without rooting, it leaves bare earth beneath the scratched areas, and it kills the grass roots.

The other enemy on the lawn, of course, is cat-crap. Maisie (the more disgusting of our two cats) is incapable of using soil or leaves as her toilet, and insists upon shitting in the midle of the lawn, leaving little stinking piles of brown eggs just where we don't want them. One day, I will take her to visit the great vet in the sky.

Anyway: summer is on the way. The lawn is mown. The sun is shining. The garden looks tidy, temporarily, and all is right with the world.

Another coincidence?

Leominster, where I spent most of the weekend, is in the back of beyond: one of the most rural areas of England.

I'm looking for work at present, and on Friday afternoon I was offered an immediate interview with a software company. As the agent said: "You'll have to get there on Sunday- yes, it'll wreck your weekend- and it'll be near Ludlow in Herefordshire in the middle of nowhere. Is that OK?"

It was definitely OK. The interview was only 20km from where I was staying, so I was saved a long drive during the week and the meeting didn't interrupt the weekend by more than a couple of hours. This is weird. Rural Herefordshire just doesn't HAVE software companies, they are nearly all based in the commercial south-east. Perhaps one in a thousand is based out in the Marches. But it was definitely convenient for me.

As for the job: we agreed upon a second interview, but it's not going to be an easy sale.
Wish me luck.

Leominster

We spent the weekend in Leominster with a couple of dozen friends and their children. Our group took over the Youth Hostel next to the old Priory Church, and spent out time walking, talking, eating & drinking. Leominster's pretty, with lots of half-timbered old buildings such as the Grange above.
The walking was mixed, with lots of stiles and muddy untrodden fields to traverse so our 10-mile round took over five hours. It was beautifully varied, however, with woods, fields, black-and-white villages and some terrific views from the iron-age fort at Croft Ambrey.

The teenagers were well behaved this time, and what smoking & drinking they did, was well hidden. Perhaps N+J will book for the next weekend away without throwing a hissy-fit.