Run

I was never much of an athlete. Growing up in Yorkshire in the seventies it was virtually compulsory to play football in the winter and cricket in the summer which I did, enthusiastically at first, but with a growing realisation that I wasn’t much good at either it became more of a chore and eventually I gave up. At secondary school we tried out different sports but I wasn’t much good at those either. I did manage to represent the school in the triple jump but that was basically down to the fact that I was just about the only person in my year that could string together the hop, skip and jump in the right order. I didn’t win any medals though and my athletic career quickly fizzled out. Just about the worst sport we did at school was the cross country run. This was the nightmare of heading out along roads, across fields and through snickets in the pissing rain with the cold wind blowing right up the Pennines. I’ve no idea how far they made us run, it was probably just a couple of miles, but it seemed like an eternity. Needless to say I was pretty hopeless at it and it put me off running for many, many years.

This lack of athletic prowess meant that through my twenties and into the thirties I never really did much exercise. Eventually, after dire and almost certainly accurate warnings from Elaine about the premature fatality rate amongst couch potatoes, I joined a gym. It wasn’t much fun but in theory it got the heart pumping three times a week. I was hardly getting myself well ripped but it was better than nothing. By my late forties, however, I was getting extremely bored of the gym. Then, some nine years ago the Sport Relief charity was encouraging people to ‘Run a Mile’. I’d done a bit of running on the gym treadmill though not much. However, I thought that I could possibly manage it and one evening I asked Elaine to drop me off a mile from the gym and I would see her there. I did it and a very reluctant seed was sown.

Every year in May Troon hosts a 10k run that is very well patronised. I decided to enter. I had about three months to build myself up from that one mile jog to six and a bit miles of running. That distance seemed huge but I got there and ran the race in a time I’ve failed to match in the subsequent two or three Troon 10k races I’ve competed in. I could hardly call myself a ‘good’ runner but I was happy with what I’d achieved in a short space of time. In a fit of optimism, probably misplaced, I entered the Edinburgh Half Marathon for the following year, 2011. It was a spring event but during the preceding winter as I tried to build up the distance I did my groin some mischief and had to pull out due injury. I did, however, grab a charity place in the Royal Parks Half Marathon in London the following October. Once recovered from the injury I built up the distances I was running and come the day, just nine days before my fiftieth birthday, I felt in good nick. I completed the race in 2 hours, 4 minutes and 7 seconds. This was much better than I’d expected. I do all my training runs solo and found that being in a race situation gives extra encouragement. I put it down to the fact there’s always a lady’s shapely Lycra clad bottom in front of me to try, usually unsuccessfully, and catch up with. Either way, I thank those unsuspecting pacemakers.

The end of the Royal Park Half Marathon. Apologies for the vest, it’s a charity thing.

That race was a rarity in that I actually enjoyed the run. It seemed to go on for ever but being part of a large event like that and passing some iconic sites in London meant it was fun. Although running was now my primary source of fitness, my gym membership ultimately lapsing, it was nearly always a chore. I persisted with it though. I was sure the Grim Reaper awaited me if I didn’t. I competed in two other half marathons. In September 2012 I ran the Great Scottish Run in Glasgow. It didn’t go well. I hadn’t prepared well for it at all and only decided to run at the last minute. I completed it in a rather pathetic time of 2 hours, 20 minutes 30 seconds but at least I did it. I hated every second. By 2015 my daughter Rebecca had taken up running, and living in Edinburgh at the time had entered the Edinburgh Marathon Festival half marathon. I thought I’d give it a go too. Thanks to a better build up I finished in a time of 2 hours 10 minutes 44 second which I was quite pleased with. It wasn’t a particularly enjoyable run though. Starting in the middle of Edinburgh the route quickly passed the foot of Arthur’s Seat and then failed to pass anywhere of interest on its way out to Musselburgh where you had to run a mile up a road to nowhere before heading back down it to the finish in a nondescript park.

The face belies the fact that I utterly hated the Great Scottish Run

Finishing the Edinburgh Half Marathon, thank God.

Since then, however, I’ve avoided races. Partially through injury – I did my ankle on holiday three years ago and couldn’t run for eight months – and partially through laziness. It was stupid as there is nothing quite like a race to encourage you to don the trainers and get out on the road. Well, in theory anyway. Last September Rebecca moved out to Victoria in Canada and promptly entered the Vancouver Marathon, to be run on May 5th this year. She had done her first full marathon in Paris a couple of years ago and this was to be her second. As a newly retired gentleman with some time in my hands I decided to go out to support her and promptly booked a flight. A few weeks later I had the idea that maybe I could do the marathon too. I quickly scotched that idea as I didn’t want to steal her thunder (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it) but I did feel I had the time to build up to the half marathon which took place on the same day. I filled out the online application form, paid quite a few Canadian Dollars and hey presto, I was a runner in my fourth half marathon.

I had six months to get into shape. Less when you consider I spent much of my first few months of retirement travelling and forgetting to take my running shoes. In fact training started in earnest at the turn of the year. My kids had cleverly got me a Garmin GPS watch for Christmas which recorded my runs and allowed me to see just how badly I was doing. There are many websites, books, magazines and pamphlets that inform a potential runner just how to plan his of her training in the run up to a big event. I read precisely none of these and just made it up on the spot. I could run five miles, I knew that. By the end of January I was to have run six. By the time February was over I’d have run eight at least once. March would see me top ten whilst in April I would do a twelve miler at some stage. All these targets were achieved and I’d run every two or three days, never on consecutive days though. The more I did it the better my pace was which is just as well as had I run the race at the pace I had been achieving in those early days I’d probably would have been caught up by the race’s paddy wagon and get disqualified. My run strategy was not exactly the approved way either. Conventional wisdom is that you run ten miles for pace then three miles to race. Sounds good doesn’t it? No, for me it was to run five miles like a winner, eight miles like a wanker. Fast miles at the start were seconds in the bank as far as I was concerned as I was definitely going to slow up towards the end no matter what. The first time I’d do the full distance, 13.1 miles or 21.1 km, was on the day of the race itself.

The Garmin watch was a revelation. As well as recoding time and distance, it beeps every 1km to give you ‘lap’ times. Not only was I improving my times. I could see where I was improving. This was certainly encouraging and meant I could set myself targets for the race itself. The first was to simply complete the distance without stopping or walking. The next target was 2 hrs 11 mins. That meant an average pace of 10 mins/mile and early on was a realistic target. More challenging was 2 hrs 6 mins 30 secs which would take the pace to under 6 mins/km. As my training progressed keeping 1 km lap times under 6 mins became important and I was achieving it for the first eight miles (13kms) or so, not so much for any distance beyond that. Still, seconds in the bank and all that. In my sights was the 2 hrs 4 mins and 7 secs, the time I’d achieved in the first half marathon and of course a personal best. The next target was two hours. Highly unlikely but a man can dream can’t he?

I flew out to Victoria on the Wednesday before the race. A long journey and an eight hour time difference is hardly the greatest preparation but I did my best to use it to my advantage. The half marathon was due to start at 7am on the Sunday so it was early to bed and early to rise on the preceding days. I did one five mile run on the Friday as final preparation which went well enough and we set out for Vancouver that evening. On the Saturday we went to collect our race numbers in the middle of town. We then checked in to our Airbnbs near the start line in the suburban south of the city. An old fashioned diner provided us with our pre race meal and we retired for an early night.

6am, fresh as a daisy, an hour before the start.

It was a 5am alarm. A bowl of granola was consumed and, in a bit of a change to my pre-run routine, I had a shower. As a solo runner there’s not much need for showering until the run is over but in a race there’s a fair bit of hanging around with loads of other folk. I’d been informed to arrive at the start an hour before the race. I had to check in a bag of post race essentials (iPhone, wallet, spare shirt, just about my whole life at that point in time) which would be available for collection at the finish line. Having done that there was indeed a whole load of hanging around but at least I smelled nice. Fifteen minutes prior to the start I was stationed in my starting coral. On applying to participate in the race you have to give an expected finish time. I’d given a conservative 2 hrs 15 mins and was corralled with others in the 2:05-2:15 group. There was someone bellowing warm up exercises over the tannoy, duly ignored, some psycho babble, duly ignored, the Canadian National Anthem, duly ignored and not just by me, by most competitors. At 7am on the dot the starter’s gun went bang. Off went the elite runners. We went nowhere. A couple of minutes later the first coral was sent on their way, then the next coral after that. My coral was the third and it wasn’t until ten past seven that we were allowed to start. Across the line I went, starting the Garmin as I did.

The route. It won’t mean much to those who have never been to Vancouver.

The half marathon course in Vancouver starts in Queen Elizabeth Park. After a minute you leave the park and head down Cambie Street towards downtown. This is a long, straight and above all downhill road. Running downhill can be a bit if a strain on the knees but the gradient was just right for a rapid start and having fought my way to the front of our coral I fairly flew the first three or four kilometres recording ‘lap’ times ten or twenty seconds less than I’d ever managed before. On crossing the bridge into the downtown area the course flattened out and all gravitational assistance ended. There was an up and down section in Chinatown, which of course could be any part of Vancouver but is the area north of that big stadium thingy. I nearly came to grief at the bottom of the down bit where the ground fell away a bit further than I’d anticipated but I managed to stay upright by swearing quite loudly. It doesn’t always work but I feel it helps. Continuing along Beach Ave and past English Bay we entered Stanley Park at the 12km marker. Here, a couple of other up and down sections awaited us, nothing too serious but a bit painful by then, as we snaked our way around the park. Eventually, the course emerged from the tree lined boulevards of Stanley Park where they had somehow crammed in 8 km which left 1 km (1.0975 km to be precise) to go. The finish was on the straight West Pender St in the middle of town and could be seen from 700 m away which I felt was a little cruel. My regular time checks had revealed that I was going a lot faster than I had anticipated by that point. Surely that couldn’t be right? It was hardly a sprint finish but I crossed the finish line and stopped the watch. I had beaten all the targets I had set myself including the fantasy two hour one. In fact I had smashed it by over three minutes. The official time was 1 hour 56 minutes 41 seconds.

I had planned my celebration should I achieve a good time. It was to involve jumping up and down, waving my arms around and shouting exaltations with no little amount of profanity. What actually happened was I stopped running, checked my watch and thought thank goodness it’s over. It wasn’t an anti-climax, far from it, I was shocked yet delighted with time. I was just needed to collect the medal and other handouts, retrieve my goody bag and go somewhere reasonably quiet to reflect on what had just happened. And of course tell people via social media, I wasn’t going to keep it to myself for very long, this is 2019 after all. So it was that the tourists wandering round Coal Harbour by the cruise ship terminal and the seaplane base got to see me remove my sodden shirt and replace it with a dry one, then sit on the wall in the glorious sunshine (and slightly chilly breeze) informing the world via the miracle of the mobile interwebs what had just happened.

Half an hour after the end. Not quite as fresh as a daisy.

Thanks to the early start the day was still young and it soon became a case of watching Rebecca in the full marathon. She duly completed it but not without going through a lot of pain – she had picked up a virus a week previously which she hadn’t completely shaken off and suffered badly form the effects of the continuous sunshine. It was quite upsetting to see her hurting like that. By the time I flew home four days later she was only just getting over it.

What of the future? I’ll almost certainly continue running. Not because I get a kick out of it other than setting new personal bests in races, but because it is an ‘easy’ form of exercise. Easy in that you just need some kit, a decent pair of running shoes and a stopwatch and you can set off from your front door. No need to go to a specific facility, arrange an opponent or become a member of a team. I will need to set myself further challenges though as without them it is easy to think I’ll give it a miss today. I’ve done a couple of runs since returning home. Both five miles, both very slowly. It seems the body is feels it needs a bit of a rest.

Pacer

A week or so ago I found myself riding a number of trains in Northern England. Two of these were Pacers. What possibly can be interesting about a boring old commuter train I hear you ask. Nothing much as it turns out other than the fact they are truly abysmal trains. They were introduced in the mid eighties and were abysmal trains back then too. So abysmal in fact that they’ve never seen service in the fashionable southeast region and most of them have spent their lives plying the highly unglamorous routes in Wales, the South West and above all, in Northern England. Initially with British Rail, they have long since worn the colours of the Northern Trains franchise, the poor a’poth of train operating companies. They truly are so bad that I actually enjoyed the journeys I took in them in the same way one might enjoy a trip from Mumbai to Delhi in third class.

Upgraded seats, ideal for folk with no legs.

A quick history lesson courtesy of Wikipedia: The Class 140, 141, 142, 143 and 144 diesel multiple units were given the generic name “Pacer’. Built between 1980 and 1987, Pacers were basically Leyland buses plonked on top of a four wheel freight wagon under frame. They were deliberately designed on the cheap as a stopgap measure to replace ageing rolling stock and were only supposed to last twenty years at the most. Each carriage runs on four wheels set on two axels rather than the usual two sets of four wheel bogies which means the 165 Pacer trains built suffer from excessive squeal when cornering. They also suffer from a bumpy ride and earned the nickname ‘nodding donkeys’ and having now ridden a couple, I can state it is not a name that is unwarranted. The bus theme was carried through to the fittings. Bi-fold doors are still the portal of choice for the Pacer passenger and even the bench seating was the same as what you would have found on the Number 42 bus to Kirkburton. Whilst most sets have had a bit of an upgrade, bench seating still exists on some trains though luckily not the ones I sampled.

An adjacent Pacer complete with original bus seats.

My first journey was from Manchester to Huddersfield. To be fair I could have taken the more usual Transpennine Express service and enjoyed their newer, if frequently overcrowded, trains but being a tight fisted Yorkshireman returning to God’s Own County I was particularly taken with Northern’s dirt cheap (£4.50, thanks for asking) advance fare. The journey was just five minutes longer thanks to the Pacer’s 75mph speed limit, a speed it only managed to reach after it had passed through the Standedge Tunnel high in the Pennines and started to go downhill, and the fact it had to stop at places like Mossley and Greenside. These are the sort of places the Pacer was made for. On boarding through the infamous bi-fold door I was greeted with an aroma that seemed familiar. Then I remembered – the 45 year old Antonov I’d flown on in Ukraine six months and many blogs ago smelled similar, that musty scent you often find in museum pieces. The seats that had replaced the original bus benches provided enough knee room for a dwarf with a growth defect but I got a couple to myself so spent a pleasant three quarters of an hour sitting sideways whilst being bounced around and deafened by the occasional squeal from the wheels. The second journey was a couple of days later from Huddersfield to Wakefield Kirkgate. Different seating made it a touch more comfortable and it was definitely less smelly but the rest of the Pacer experience was much the same.

Having said all that, being the geek I am I’m glad I took the journeys. Having passed their sell by dates some ten to fifteen years ago, the Pacers’ days are finally numbered. They will fall foul of the latest accessibility rules by the end of the year and be withdrawn from service. Northern have some brand new Spanish built trains joining the fleet which won’t replace the Pacers directly. Instead they will displace Sprinters, themselves a mere 30 years old, which will be cascaded down the company’s network to the services so unloved that they are currently operated by a 35 year old bus on rails. I hope the National Railway Museum preserves a working example, just so future generations can have a good laugh.

Another Class 142 Pacer with driver filling in his Eurostar Driver application form

A Season of Three Halves

Glasgow Clan 2018-19 Season Review

By Neil Hughes

Hockey is a serious business. There are only two officially sanctioned jokes that you can use when it comest to the British game. The first is I went to a boxing match last night and an ice hockey game broke out. Oh how we laughed at that one. It is becoming less relevant nowadays as fighting has become something of a rarity in recent years but hey, we honour the game’s traditions and all that. The second joke is hockey is a game of three halves. For those of you that don’t get it a game of hockey is played over three twenty minute periods. Glasgow Clan’s 2018-19 season can also be split up into three distinct ‘halves’ of approximately twenty league games each and can be described thus: Average, Fantastic and Disappointing. The story of the season is, however, a tad more complicated than that including as it does the Challenge Cup campaign and the briefest of stints in the Play Offs. Compared with the horror show that was the 2017-18 season it was a huge improvement and for a while promised to be something special. That it all rather fizzled out should not take away from the fact that the club finished fourth in the league, a credible result, regained the conference trophy, a rather pointless piece of silverware following changes to the league structure but better Clan having it than Fife, and played a much more entertaining brand of hockey.

In the summer of 2018 there were many changes for the Clan fans to ponder. A new coach was appointed, Pete Russell. Having enjoyed success as the coach the GB team, Russell joined from Milton Keynes. Joining him would be a whole new set of players with only Brits Matt Haywood, Gary Russell and Zach Sullivan and import Michael Gutwald returning from the squad that had so miserably underperformed the previous season. Three of the new arrivals were well known to the Clan faithful. Scott Pitt and Matt Beca returned after a year in Manchester. Both were points machines during their previous stint at Braehead and had carried that form with them down to Manchester so getting them back was something of a coup. The other was Zack Fitzgerald, returning after a couple of years in Sheffield and being appointed the captain’s ‘C’. As the rest of the squad was recruited the fans could only hope that they would click together and give them something to cheer about. Cheers had been thin on the ground for several seasons. Another change was that Braehead Clan was now Glasgow Clan. This change in moniker was long overdue and with it was a new logo, not to this observer’s taste unfortunately, and hopefully a new direction.

The other big change was the league format. Edinburgh’s exclusion from the league meant an eleven team competition. The existing three conferences of four became two of four and one of three but were competitions in name only and held little significance. There would be no conference bias in the fixtures – each team in the league would meet the others six times for a sixty game season. This makes direct comparisons with previous season tricky as Clan played the wealthy ‘good’ sides more and the poor ‘bad’ less or not at all but improvement is obvious – 4th place in the league as opposed to 9th, 67 points from 60 games compared with 54 from 56 (16 of which came in eight games against the hapless Edinburgh). It could have been even better had it not been for the ending but more of that later. Four pre-season games took place at Braehead towards the end of August against foreign opposition as a warm up to the season proper which as usual saw Clan play the month of September on the road as Disney took up residence on the hallowed ice. That month and the following saw a mixture of league and Challenge Cup group games.

The Challenge Cup campaign saw Clan in a group with Fife, Dundee and Belfast. The first competitive game of the season took place in Fife where a controversial ending saw the hosts take the game into overtime and claim the victory. Defeats in Dundee and Belfast followed before Fife pitched up at Braehead on 5th October for Clan’s first competitive home game of the season. A 2-1 victory finally got the cup campaign underway though a defeat at home to Belfast meant that qualification for the quarter final looked unlikely. The last group game saw Clan take a 5-4 penalty shot victory over Dundee and after several days wait for other clubs to finish their group games, Clan had sneaked into the quarter final by the skin of their teeth as eighth seeds. That two legged affair saw them face Cardiff as the top seeded Belfast elected to face Dundee in the competition’s pick your opponent rules. The game took place at the end of November and beginning December, Clan coming back from a 3-0 deficit after just one period of the home first leg but losing the game 4-3. In the return leg and completely out of the blue Clan outplayed the highly fancied Cardiff and after sixty minutes the score was 5-4 on their favour, 8-8 on aggregate. The game went to overtime and Matt Haywood scored the winning goal to put Clan in the semi final. Another two legged affair, Clan faced Belfast initially at Braehead at the end of January. A 2-1 victory gave them a slender advantage going into the second leg two weeks later. Alas, the impressive Belfast were too strong and ran out 6-3 winners on the night taking the tie 7-5 on aggregate. Belfast would go on and lift the trophy beating Guildford in the final. Clan could reflect on getting further in the competition than they had done in all bar one other season of their existence.

The Challenge Cup is all well and good but for most fans the league provided the games that mattered. Comparing Clan’s record against each of their opponents shows improvement in just about every case. Whilst the Gardiner Conference was still there its significance was much reduced but Clan’s record against the other two conference members meant that they claimed the trophy with several weeks to go.

Belfast and Cardiff dominated the league and proved to be difficult opponents to all the clubs, not just Clan. Not obtaining a single point against Cardiff was tempered a little by the Challenge Cup Quarter Final victory. Clan had more success against the eventual champions Belfast with two victories, one a particularly pleasing 5-0 thumping in the middle of February when the club were at the height of their powers. Of the other wealthy clubs, the spoils were equally shared with Nottingham whilst Clan completely dominated Sheffield including 6-0 and 6-1 victories in South Yorkshire. Although Sheffield were having a particularly grim season Clan’s record against the big four was as good as it has ever been. The four opponents from the Patten Conference proved to be a mixed bag with 50% records against Coventry and Manchester, both an improvement from last season and a healthy record against league wooden spoonist Milton Keynes. Again, Guildford proved to be something of a bogey club, a point emphasised when it came to the Play Offs. Despite Guildford’s dominance, Clan finished the regular season on the same points as their Southern England foes and one place higher in the standings due to a higher number of regulation victories. Against the two Scottish clubs Clan proved particularly effective, dominating Dundee and posting a record against Fife that expunged the nightmare of the previous season where a 1-7 league record against the hated Flyers was for many fans just about the worst aspect of that season.

So what of those three halves? Clan’s first twenty or so league games were a so-so mixture of reasonable results and some horrors. The record wasn’t much of an improvement on the previous season and the fans that had initially been willing to let the team and coach settle in were beginning to get a little restless. In early December a poor performance in a home defeat to Manchester drew much criticism but a few days later Clan won that Challenge Cup Quarter Final in Cardiff and the season changed right there. Over the course of the next two months Clan became the form team in the league. Of 22 games played Clan lost just six, only three of which were in regulation time. They flew up the standings into third place and whilst Belfast and Cardiff were never threatened, Clan’s best finish for four years looked likely. Elimination from the Challenge Cup in mid February is seen as the second turning point in the season though Clan did win two of their next three league games which included that 5-0 victory against the Giants and a 6-1 win in Sheffield. It was after this game that the form book was thrown away and the season went into a steep decline. Of the next eleven games Clan won just one, ironically their sole victory against bogey club Guildford, as the regular season wore down and Nottingham claimed third place in the league. The final game of the regular season was away in Fife who had won in Braehead the previous evening. A temporary reprieve from what had been going on in the previous few weeks, Clan claimed a 4-2 win, their first in eight games, and by the narrowest margins took fourth place in the league table.

As a result Clan would meet Guildford in the Play Off Quarter Final. The two legged affair commenced in Guildford and Clan returned home with a slender advantage after a 3-2 win. Could it be that their luck was changing and the form had returned? Alas, no. At Braehead Guildford soon cancelled out Clan’s advantage, and were 3-0 up. 5-3 on aggregate, as time ran out. With the last throw of the dice Clan pulled the netminder and inevitably Guildford scored into the empty net. Rubbing salt into the wound they went and added another in the last few seconds to win 5-0 on the night, a fully deserved victory even if the final scoreline was extremely flattering. Whilst two legged, aggregate score games are not a very hockey way of deciding play off match ups, they are what they are and Clan’s abysmal record in six period hockey games continues. Clan’s absence from the postseason party was extended by another year.

It’s quite hard trying to analyse a season like that. The first part can perhaps be explained by the fact the team was basically built from scratch and whilst it took longer than it might have done, players took their time to get settled with their linemates and Russell’s systems. Around the time of the dramatic improvement in form, Clan released headline signing Josh Gratton. Whilst his reputation as a tough man had been barely tested in the early part of the season his points production had been surprisingly good but for whatever reason he was deemed surplus to requirements. Without him the team performance immediately improved and whilst that might be something of a coincidence, the decision to release him certainly appeared to pay dividends. Two or three games later he was replaced by Guillaume Doucet, a known goal scorer from his time in the league and what seemed to be a perfect fit in the gap left by Gratton. The ‘new’ Clan played with joy and freedom and scored goals, plenty of them. It was a great time to be watching hockey. As to why that form changed again no one seems to know. Yes, the club had a difficult run-in with multiple games against Belfast, Cardiff, an improving Nottingham and a mysteriously troublesome Guildford but the goals just dried up, especially at home. Defensively Clan were prone to lapses in concentration but had been all season – you just tend to notice them less when the forwards are smacking in loads of goals at the other end. Goaltending never really hit the heights. Joel Rumpel didn’t have the greatest of starts to the season but bucked up during the club’s good run. However, the season ended modestly for him. Whilst Rumpel was by no means a donkey like a couple of the previous minders of the Clan net, a more assured netminder could have earned the club the three or four more points that would have meant a third place finish.

Whatever the reason for the loss in form, the season was a qualified success. The dreadful slide down the standings over the previous couple of seasons was arrested and for a time we were treated to some of the best hockey and run of results as we have ever witnessed at Braehead. Pete Russell has cut a popular figure over the course of the season and everyone was delighted when he committed to the club for another twelve months immediately after this season ended. It may well have been a season of three halves but overall it was one where being a Clan fan became fun again.

Postscript: I saw one of the four preseason games but those aside I missed twelve home games this season. Coventry 20/10 (Retirement do), Belfast 3/11 (Huddersfield), Sheffield 16/11 (USA), MK 17/11 (USA), Guildford 24/11 (Czech), Cardiff (CC) 28/11 (Personal), Coventry 30/11 (Personal), Sheffield 23/12 (Finger operation), Manchester 27/12 (Finger), Belfast 29/1 (Antigua), Fife 1/1 (Antigua), Manchester 9/2 (Personal). Five were victories, seven were defeats. I got to no road games but watched three webcasts. I missed the live TV game in MK which was just as well.

Nobby Stiles

Nobby Stiles was a no-nonsense midfielder in Matt Busby’s Manchester United side of the 1960. He is fondly remembered for many things but two in particular stand out. Firstly, his dancing a little jig with the Jules Rimet Trophy in one hand and his false teeth in the other during the lap of honour that followed England’s victory in the 1966 World Cup Final. The other is that he lends his name to an insidious human ailment that is literally a pain in the arse. Haemorrhoids are more commonly known as piles, probably because it is easier to spell. Through rhyming slang those unfortunate enough to suffer from the problem can now be said to be complaining about their Nobby Stiles or, as rhyming slang so often progresses, a bad case of Nobbys. There are many other names for piles, presumably for humorous reasons as in Britain at least all things pertaining to bottoms are fair game for a laugh. Unless you happen to be suffering from them. Believe me, your chuckle quotient goes down by quite a large factor when you got the dreaded Nobbys.

So what exactly are Haemorrhoids/piles/Nobbys/bum grapes/Chalfont St Giles/Emma Freuds/anal speedbumps etc, etc? According to the NHS website they are defined thus: Haemorrhoids, also known as piles, are swellings containing enlarged blood vessels found inside or around the bottom (the rectum and anus). Most of the time these remain hidden and asymptomatic, in fact many of you reading this will have the little blighters and be completely unaware. For some people, however, the damn things pop out of the warmth and safety of their admittedly rather grim home and make a bid for freedom that is only going to end in tears. For some sufferers it will result in an intense itch, others will find it quite painful. The blood vessels can also burst and one can become acutely aware that blood is seeping out and making a mess of one’s undergarments. It is said that in most cases they will go away of their own accord but you just know at sometime in the future, maybe next month, maybe next year, the little buggers will be back to provide you with supreme discomfort and others with something to laugh at you about.

Emma Freud. Not the subject of this blog.

As you may have gathered by the fact I’m writing this, I’m suffering from a case of Nobbys, ora to be precise a single huge Nobby, right now. No bleeding has occurred yet but the pain is all too real. Everyday tasks suddenly become a bit more complicated. Even sitting at the computer is not the easiest of jobs as you constantly have to think about weight distribution. If you find a comfortable position you just know that at some stage you will have to move and the Nobby is going to get angry about it. Lying in bed is no better and sleep gets disturbed as another twinge of botty pain reminds you of your predicament. There are a number of over the counter treatments that are supposed to help. Creams and ointments are the most common. Rub these on the offending object, not a task to be taken likely, should give pain relief and reduce the swelling. You can also get suppositories. I don’t know about you but I’m not so keen on things going up my arse. I feel that particular part of my anatomy is a one way street and flinch at the idea of anything not obeying the no entry sign. Apparently the French are particularly fond of this method of taking medicines and not just for ailments of that particular region of the body. Silly sods. Ointment it is then, applied liberally if a little gingerly. It helps the pain a little bit though not much. If it has shrunken the Nobby I have no idea. I’ll await the next application to assess the situation and see if it is anything less than the bloody enormous thing that got covered in the active ingredients of zinc oxide and lidocaine hydrochloride.

Chalfont St Giles. Not the subject of this blog.

Ok, it is now tomorrow. The formerly cricket ball sized Nobby is now the size of a golf ball. I might be exaggerating there but it has definitely shrunk. The pain hasn’t gone away but is not as intense and I appear to be able to sit down without too much thought being put into the operation. Whether this is down to the ointment or not I’ve no idea. I think perhaps that the fact the bloody thing exploded whilst I was, erm, at stool this morning might have something to do with it. Much cleaning of the bathroom was required to prevent it from looking like a murder scene. This did not improve my mood much but hopefully it’s a sign of the thing giving up the ghost and retreating to whence it had come. I know you shouldn’t kick a man whilst he’s down but the retreating Nobby got another coating of ointment just to make sure it has learnt its lesson.

Haemorrhoids alone are proof that we evolved and were not created by an intelligent designer. Genesis 1-27 states that God created man in his own image which suggests to me that if He did indeed do that He must have been suffering from a bad case of piles at the time. “If I’ve got ’em, sure as hell they are going to get ’em” must have been his line of thought. No, evolution wins, as it always does, by not caring whether humans have a sore arse or not as long as the DNA gets passed on. There’s no evolutionary advantage to not having them apparently, so a thing they remain. It might be retreating this time I’ve no doubt the Nobby will be back, bigger and angrier than ever. Maybe he will bring some of his friends with him next time…

Kintyre

The Kintyre peninsula in the southwest of Scotland is famous for two things. Firstly, the song Mull of Kintyre by Paul McCartney and Wings which was the UK Christmas Number One in 1977 and seemingly for many months afterwards too. McCartney owned a farm in the Mull of Kintyre, the very end of the peninsula, and the song suggested he was rather fond of the place. The other thing is that it is shaped like a penis. True, it is a penis with a rather nasty gash near the top caused by West Loch Tarbert but it looks like a penis nevertheless. To add to the rather juvenile humour the island of Arran lies adjacent to Kintyre and together they give the impression of a giant cock and bollock. This may well be unique in the limited world of phallic-shaped geographic promontories though please feel free to suggest others. The land around that area was shaped by glaciers in the last ice age and despite being within sight of the shapely Paps of Jura, Kintyre has remained resolutely flaccid ever since. Indeed, it is said the British Board of Film Classification utilised the Mull of Kintyre Test whenever nudity appeared in movies to gauge an acceptable level of tumescence for the male genitalia. If the angle from the vertical was higher than that made by Kintyre on a standard Mercator projection map then that penis had to be cut. Ouch!

I really must apologise for the childish toilet humour in that first paragraph. I should really have higher standards than that. Three quarters of the way down Kintyre, just before the, erm, bell end (aargh, sorry, I can’t help myself) lies the town of Campbeltown. It is in fact the only town on Kintyre and as such is the centre of all things Kintyrish. It lies just 58 miles from the centre of Glasgow as the crow flies yet driving there would put 140 miles on your car’s odometer. Initially you head northwest before winding round a number of mountains and sea lochs before finally heading southwest in the vague direction of Campbeltown. The roads are by and large decent but certainly not motorways. Allow yourself three and a half hours to get there. Alas, the rail building boom of the Victorian era never got as far as Kintyre so getting there has always been a challenge. Apart from a seasonal weekend ferry service from Ardrossan, an extension of the regular Arran crossing, you’ve got just two choices of public transport: bus or plane. Being the sort of chap I am I thought it would be quite a good idea to compare them. Perhaps March wasn’t the best time to undertake this task as severe weather can affect both forms of transport but I was in luck. The day I chose was a brief respite from wind, snow and rain. So it was that I found myself at Glasgow’s Buchanan Bus Station on a bright Monday morning awaiting the 09:15 Citylink service number 926 to Campbeltown.

This is not Buchanan Bust Station in Glasgow.

Ah yes, buses. With the exception of London buses for some reason, I can’t say the thought of bus travel really appeals to me. Once, in the dim and distant past, Elaine and I did one of those holidays where you travel for a day on a coach to your destination, in our case it was the Austrian Tyrol, had a week’s holiday, and then have a 24 hour journey back. The experience of the first journey meant the thought of the second put a severe dampener on the intervening week. Whilst not every bus journey involves overnight travel of course, the experience rather put us off coach travel for life. Add to that the stories of the strange people that traverse the country by National Express and long distance bus travel has become a definite no-no. Of course those stories are almost certainly apocryphal and I should stop being snobbish but old prejudices die hard. As it happens my fellow passengers on the bus were perfectly normal people who just had the need to get from A to B. Well, apart from the bloke who got on in Clydebank and sat in front of me. He had a subtle, yet slightly concerning odour which got stronger whenever he scratched his scalp. I wasn’t too displeased when he got off at Tarbet. The tedium of over four hours on a bus would have been overwhelming had we been travelling down the M6 but this particular long haul had a redeeming feature. About fifty minutes into the journey we escaped the clutches of urbanisation and entered the scenic bit which would last all the way to Campbeltown. Tracking north along Lomond’s bonnie banks, Ben Lomond on the other side of the loch looked superb, its snow covering somehow magnifying its magnificence. At Tarbet we cut through the hills to Arrochar and Loch Long before heading west over the stretch of road called the Rest and Be Thankful. There we briefly climbed above the snow line before descending again to round the tip of Loch Fyne. In Inveraray we had a brief stop allowing us to utilise the facilities – there was a toilet on the bus but no one appeared to get so desperate that they had to use it – then we continued southwards to Lochgilphead. Here, many passengers got off whilst many others replaced them, that’s what happens on buses apparently, and we continued south to finally enter the Kintyre peninsula. At Kennacraig there was another mass exodus from the bus, those travellers heading for the awaiting ferry to Islay in a desire to get home before the forecast storms hit later that day. The road then took us down the western side of Kintyre before cutting across the peninsula into Campbletown and journey’s end bang on schedule. As spectacular as the scenery had been I was happy to get off the bus.

I had four hours to kill. I’m going out on a limb here but I strongly suspect that Campbeltown on a March Monday morning isn’t the best place to kill them. It seemed a nice enough place, a bit bigger than I’d expected, but there was really not much going on. The cafe I thought I might lunch in was closed on a Monday and there didn’t seem to be many other options. I found another one though, a small, basic place but the proprietor was friendly and did and decent jacket potato with tuna so that was good. Cash only though, none of this Apple Pay nonsense. There was a marked absence of big high street names on the not so big high street and the independent shoe and clothes shops, hardware stores and so on gave the town a feeling of a bygone age. It didn’t take long for the novelty to wear off, however, and I set off out of town westwards. My destination was three miles away and followed the main road and then a single track road to Campbeltown’s other transport link to civilisation.

Campbeltown Airport serves around 9000 passengers a year. You would think an airport with that limited amount of throughput would be tiny and indeed the terminal is rather bijou. The airfield is, however, huge. Its sole runway is over 10,000ft long, the longest in Scotland. Or rather it was. Formerly known as Macrihanish after the nearby village, an airfield has occupied the site since 1918. In the Second World War it was a naval air station and remained so until 1963 when it became RAF Macrihanish. Despite the RAF prefix, the station was used by the US Navy as a weapons store and a base for the special operations Navy SEALs. Throughout this time there were many conspiracy theories about what exactly took place there. It was claimed that the top secret spy plane, the Aurora, was based there. This was denied of course as is the existence of the Aurora itself, but the airfield’s location many miles away from a major population centre just seemed to fuel the theories of covert operations. Whether there’s any truth in the rumours or not I’ve no idea.The US Navy left in 1995 and the following year Highlands and Islands Airports Ltd (HIAL), the government owned company that operates a number of small airports in Scotland, received a licence to operate the airfield as a commercial airport. It was still owned by the MOD until 2012 when the western half was sold to the Macrihanish Airbase Community Company for a nominal £1 to be developed for commercial use. The eastern half still has over 5000ft of runway at its disposal, more than enough for the Loganair Twin Otter that operates its only scheduled service.

Twin Otters are not faster than many things but they certainly beat the bus.

Loganair connects Campbeltown with Glasgow twice a day. The service is operated under a public service obligation (PSO) with Scottish Government subsidises. Barra and Tiree are also served by PSO flights and two Twin Otter aircraft are owned by HIAL specifically for Loganair to operate these services. It was one of these, appropriately registered G-HIAL, that would transport me back to Glasgow. I was the first of the eight passengers on the flight to arrive. A good old fashioned cardboard boarding pass was issued and I was informed that they don’t do security checks at the airport. We would, however, be met by security at Glasgow and escorted into the building. This seemed a little odd but I was more than happy to go with it. The inbound flight duly arrived and eight passengers got off and within a couple of minutes we were escorted on to the aircraft to take their places. A briefing by the First Officer was given and with that the engines were started and off we went. Despite the runway being half the size it used to be the backtrack of runway 11 seemed to take a long time but once we’d turned, lined up and the throttles were opened we were airborne in a few seconds. The flight to Glasgow took 30 minutes from take off to touchdown. Due to cloud the views on the way back were not quite as spectacular as those going but with more than three and a half hours saved it would be churlish to complain. We’d departed early and arrived 25 minutes ahead of schedule.

What then to make of it all? To get to Campbeltown without driving you can take the bus or the plane. The bus cost me £22, though had I left it for two and a half years it would have been free with my wrinklies bus pass. For that you get a nice trip through the some of the finest scenery Scotland has to offer. It is still over four hours on a bus though. The plane cost me £33 and would still cost me that if I was over 60. For that you get the journey over and done with in a jiffy. Also, flying in a small aircraft like a Twin Otter is rather good fun. True, the bus takes you from city centre to town centre but not everyone needs that convenience so for me the plane wins. Will I ever feel the need to go to Campbeltown again though? Probably not. The most spectacular scenery I passed was further north. Kintyre, whilst pleasant enough, wasn’t really any better than the countryside around where I live. Paul McCartney may like the isolation he finds in the Kintyre, but for me it remains no more than an amusingly shaped geographic feature on the map of Scotland.

Better than the bus and indeed the Airbus behind.

Inter City

Back in the seventies the promotional department of British Rail, the nationalised rail company, commissioned an advert that ran on the one commercial television station, ITV. In those days there was no chance of recording a programme and whizzing the playback on during the commercial breaks so this type of advertising was very effective, especially if it utilised a catchy tune. Despite it being aired over forty years ago I can remember the advert and the beginning of the song quite clearly. A woman on a train starts singing:

We’ll travel InterCity like the men do

Inter City Sitting Pretty all the way…

The camera pans out to reveal a carriage load of ladies who all join in with the song which mentions getting away from the kitchen sink and suchlike. It ends with the line:

Away from it all and home again

The advert finishes with a view of a train crossing a viaduct in the sunset. It is hard to imagine an advert like that being aired today. Surely there would be a Twitterstorm of outrage at such blatant misogyny even though the advertisers of the day would claim it was a small step on the road to women’s rights. Women were allowed to travel Inter City before of course, it was just something that maybe they hadn’t thought of, being weak and feeble women and all that. Whatever, if the advert increased the amount of ladies taking the train to London, for that is where most Inter City routes went, I have no idea. Cringeworthy though the advert was, British Rail’s later attempts to curry favour with the British public involved hiring Jimmy Saville as the frontman and that didn’t turn out well, did it?

Class 43? No, it will always be an InterCity 125 to me.

It was a train journey I made last week that brought that advert to mind. It wasn’t because I found myself in a carriage of singing ladies, no, it was because the train I was on was some forty years old and of a similar vintage. The train in question was had a Class 43 diesel power car on each end and four Mark 3 coaches between them. Those rather dull designations hide the fact that this was one of a type of train that used to be called InterCity 125. Back in the mid seventies British Rail was in a bit of a mess. Passenger numbers were falling, hence the attempt to entice women on board, and the service was lousy. Running on a Victorian infrastructure, ageing rolling stock was coming to the end of its life and needed replacing. To halt the slide the BR engineers came up with a two new trains, one to run on the electrified West Coast Line and the other on the non-electrified East Coast and Western Region lines. The former was the original tilting train, the Inter City APT, and was something of a disaster. The latter was the Inter City 125 and was a big success. It is said it saved the railways in Britain, a bold claim perhaps but it certainly was a rare bit of good news for a failing service.

At the time it was a big deal. High speed trains had been running in Japan for ten years but no other country had any claim to speed. The French would go on to develop the TGV network and other countries have followed suit but the Inter City 125 in the mid to late seventies was cutting edge. In testing one of the prototypes reached 143.2MPH, a world speed record for a diesel train that stands to this day. Its maximum operational speed, limited by the ancient rail infrastructure, was 125MPH (hence the Inter City 125 name), a speed that shaved an hour off the journey from Edinburgh to London. Prior to their entry into service, the speed limit on Britain’s railways was 100MPH. The trains entered service in 1976 on Western Region and the East Coast Mainline a couple of year later. Living to the east of the Pennines a trip to London suddenly became rather appealing. Catching the train from Wakefield Westgate, the metropolis was just two hours away and the journey was remarkably smooth and quiet. Yes, the British Rail sandwich was just as bad as it always was but who cares when you are travelling at 125MPH through Newark North Gate? The trains did sterling service on the ECML until the line was electrified in 1989. On the line to Bristol, South Wales and the West Country, however, they provided continual service until a year or so ago when they were finally replaced with dual powered Hitachi Class 800 sets. In other words, shiny new trains. I’ve been on one. It was very nice.

All of which is very nostalgic but probably of little interest to most of you. Bringing the story up to the present, Scotrail, the company that provides nearly all the rail services within Scotland, connects the country’s major cities with a fleet of Class 170s, diesel multiple units that date from the early 2000s. Perfectly adequate, if a little dull, these trains were showing their age and consisting of just three carriages got full very quickly. It was time for a change. The solution was to replace them with trains more than twice their age. Twenty six of the retiring Inter City 125s that had served the Western Region/GWR for forty years were to be acquired, refurbished and put to work linking Glasgow and Edinburgh with Inverness, Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth and Stirling in what was to be branded Inter7City. As the speed limit on those lines is 100MPH, utilising the ‘125’ suffix might have been seen as taking the piss so it is not used. The refurbishment of the power cars has gone well; that of the carriages has not. As a consequence a number of non-upgraded units have been pressed into service. It was one of those I found myself on last week, travelling from Dundee to Glasgow. As a geeky sort of chap I was delighted.

All important door opening instructions.

These trains remain as they were when they ended their days with GWR, minus the branding but retaining GWR seat moquette. They had been upgraded from the original specification in the nineties but still seemed a bit tired, even compared with the Class 170 that had delivered me to Dundee earlier that day. Once upgraded they will have electric doors, new seats properly aligned with the windows and toilets that flush into tanks and no longer onto the tracks. This last point is quite a sore one with those employees of Network Rail who now have to maintain those human ordure covered tracks. You can’t really blame them for that. The old slam doors on the unmodified trains have given Scotrail a bit of a headache as they are having to teach passengers how to use them. Announcements are made and leaflets are available as it is a long time since Scotland’s rail passengers have had to open the window, lean out and open the door using the external handle. Despite all this it was really very pleasant to travel on one of these groundbreaking trains, still as smooth and quiet as they were back in 1978. The sandwiches are better too.

Some might say that Scotland is being a bit short changed when it comes to the railways. I say poppycock! Recycling is all the rage nowadays and the Inter City 125s are too good a train to be broken up. Refurbishment (whenever it is complete) isn’t a cheap option but it has to be better value than buying a whole new fleet of trains. I don’t suppose many people actually give a monkey’s about the story behind the train they are travelling on but the extra capacity, slightly shorter journey times and a smooth ride might just make them decide to ‘let the train take the strain’. Oh, that was a Jimmy Saville tagline, sorry.

Travelling Inter7City like the students do.

Dupuytren’s – Update

Scarfinger. Not quite as hard a nickname as Scarface but there you go.

Oiginal article: https://gladtobegrey.blog/2018/12/19/dupuytrens/

I had quite a lot of interest in the blog about my finger operation before Christmas. It would appear people are much more interested in my discomfort than my views on Laurel and Hardy, a fact I hardly find surprising. I mentioned the healing process might take a while so here’s an update. I spent a week over Christmas permanently wearing the splint that the physio had produce for me. The only time it came off was to do the finger exercises which could be quite painful though seemingly not quite painful enough as I was to find out. Shortly after Christmas I returned to the hospital to have the stitches removed. The nurse said that the wound was looking quite good though I had to disagree – it looked utterly horrible to me. Miss Gibson was away presumably having a well earned Christmas break so one of the registrars was on hand to give me the news that I could take the splint off and start wiggling the finger as much as I could. The splint still had to be worn overnight, however, but the best news of all was that I could drive again, carefully.

The offending digit felt really quite weird. It was understandably swollen at the base where the incision had been made and it didn’t quite fit between the little and middle fingers either side of it. Added to that the whole of the side next to the pinkie was numb with no sensation whatsoever along its length. Though the stitches had been removed the wound still oozed blood from time to time and I still had to exercise the bloody thing. Eventually the wound cleared up leaving behind an impressive scar that would improve my reputation on the mean streets of the city, should I ever decide to frequent those areas. I had another visit to the physio a couple of weeks into the new year. It was the same one who had seen me and fitted the splint and she was quick and to the point: it’s recovering well but keep bending it. Like this… Owwwwwwwwww!!!! It would appear I had not been flexing it enough. Keep the splint on in bed until six weeks post op she told me then it can be ditched for good. It turned out that was the day I set off for Antigua so that was advice I gladly took when the time came.

So what of it now? Despite it being wiggled this way and that way with regularity the finger is still not quite straight. It has about a ten percent bend when I straighten it out as much as I can. It seems as though the knuckle deformed slightly as the Dupuytrens took hold so it is the bone structure rather than the now removed palma fascia that is causing the finger to flex. It isn’t much though so I’m not unduly concerned about it. The swelling has gone down a lot but that knuckle and the scar tissue still means the finger feels fatter than it should. I’ll get used to it no doubt. The numbness has all but disappeared which I’m really pleased about as it felt very weird before. What I’m most unhappy about is the ability to clench. It seems I’ve gone from a finger I couldn’t fully unclench to one I can’t fully clench. I’m not sure that is a good trade off. It might improve; indeed it already has from the days after the stitches were removed. I was, however, hoping that by now the digit would be operating like its Dupuytrens-free sibling on my right hand. That might have been an unrealistic aim. It might not be the most important finger of the ten I’ve got but you tend to miss it when it can’t do the things it used to do.

I can clench the middle finger fully but that’s as far as the dodgy digit behind will go.

Science

It’s a mid-February Tuesday evening in Glasgow. The doors open at the city’s premier concert venue, The Hydro. The audience wait patiently as the necessary searches of handbags are made and their tickets are scanned before entering the foyer. There, the food and drink concessions appear to be doing a decent trade. Programme sellers wave the tour brochure aloft whilst tour merchandise can be obtained from one of the retail units. It’s going to be a busy night with 9,000 seats sold but the crowd is ordered and well mannered. Armed with their tee shirts, programmes, hot dogs and beer, those folk who have shelled out forty quid each for a ticket make their way to their seats. Some find themselves on the floor of the auditorium looking up at the stage. Most will be situated on the huge crescent shaped banking that surrounds three quarters of the main floorspace. The clock strikes 20:00 and the lights are dimmed…

This situation will be familiar to millions of people around the country. Venues like the Hydro are made for events like big rock concerts and other popular forms of entertainment such as the Strictly Come Dancing tour or Disney on Ice. Tonight is different though. Tonight, 9,000 people have come to see a talk by the Professor of Particle Physics at Manchester University. This may seem like a highly unlikely scenario until you realise that that man is Professor Brian Cox. Cox is one of the very few scientists who have made it into the conscious of the general public. He has achieved that through his work presenting many BBC science programmes, particularly the three ‘Wonders’ series. The popularity of science seems to go through peaks and troughs; Cox’s programmes have seemingly helped propel it to a peak the likes of which we have not seen for some time. It helps he’s a good looking guy but his enthusiasm for the subject is something I, and it would appear many other people, find entertaining. As a bit of a science geek I am naturally delighted by all this and I was one of those 9,000 folk who took their seat in The Hydro that evening. I really didn’t know what to expect but I was willing to, for one evening only, be blinded by science.

As it turned out I wasn’t. Science is such a huge subject it couldn’t possibly be crammed into a couple of hours. Even Cox’s branch of science, physics, would not have had its surface scratched by an evening’s chat. Instead, Cox talked about cosmology. Very broadly speaking, physics can be split into the very small – fundamental particles such as quarks and leptons (having been born in a village called Lepton, I approve of this name) – and the very large, cosmology. To keep a large crowd entertained by talking about quantum mechanics, the theory of fundamental particles and the forces that affect them, would be a very big ask, even though this is Cox’s area of research. The science of the very big relies on the theory of relativity, itself something that is very difficult to get your head around, but it is much easier to relate to the general public, especially if you have access to some beautiful imagery that can be projected onto a screen at the back of the stage. Cosmology it was then and it was a perfect choice. I’m not a scientist but I’ve read numerous popular science books including a couple co-authored by Cox himself. What was covered in the show wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before and not overly taxing but that was not a problem. I, along with everyone else was there to be entertained. For me the imagery and Cox’s enthusiastic explanations were enough to keep me agog throughout the evening. Cox had a helping hand from Robin Ince, his sidekick on the science based radio show The Infinite Monkey Cage. Ince was the more natural stage performer having a pedigree in stand up and the two played off each other well. Whilst there was no dancing in the aisles, no demands for an encore and nothing to singalong to, the crowd seemed to be happy as they were filing out of the building.

Light Cone. It made sense when the Prof explained it.

As mentioned, I’m a bit of a fan of science, especially physics. That’s not to say I’m any good at it. I did get an A Level in the subject but there was no way I could have taken it any further than that. What is the universe made of and where did it come from? It’s fascinating to me. The concepts are mind blowing. 13.8 billion years ago the immensity that is the universe today, trillions of galaxies each consisting of trillions of stars, was all crammed into an infinitesimally small space when the Big Bang happened. How are we supposed to get our heads round that? Cox and his fellow physicists will describe it with a fair degree of precision through mathematics but to we mere mortals it is something we have to visualise and can’t. Similarly, relativity which describes the effects of gravity on spacetime is something which is definitely there but has such weird effects it does not sit easily in our brains. Black holes with their event horizons and singularities make a great plot for sci-fi movies but if we were ever to visit one the effects would defy our misplaced logic. We are trapped in our own tiny localised area of the universe and have evolved to survive in it. Relativistic effects are so tiny we have no need to deal with them. Whatever happens at the atomic level is of no real concern as long as those atoms behave in the way they have done since the beginning of time. We have, however, evolved to be curious and science is the process we use to attempt to answer the questions of how and why. It’s not easy and the more we find out, the harder it gets to understand. Professor Brian Cox and others are attempting to make it more accessible to the general population and for that I’m rather glad.

Brian and Robin. Two performers in this one man show.

Calypso Collapso

Day One, Morning Session. It went downhill from here.

For many years the epitome of exotic holidays for a British citizen was a trip to the Caribbean. Whilst the accessibility of other far flung places has perhaps meant the Caribbean is no longer the exotic destination of choice for many lillywhite sunshine deprived Brits, it is still a popular lure for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is only an eight or nine hour flight away. Secondly, many of the islands are former British colonies and retain an air of Britishness about them. The locals are more than happy to converse with you in flawless English whilst using the local almost indecipherable creole language between themselves. Lying in the tropical zone, the area is no stranger to rain and the threat of hurricanes but most of the time it is seemingly a paradise of sun-kissed golden sandy beaches where one can escape the drudgery of real life for a couple of weeks. Of course, paradise does not appeal to everyone. I’d been to the Caribbean once before. In 2001 we spent a fortnight in St Lucia on a family holiday at an all-inclusive resort. By day three both Elaine and I were ready to come home. The resort was nice enough, the sun shone and there was a non-stop supply of food and drink but we were bored. We are not beach people. Whilst we can appreciate the scenic nature of a nice beach, the thought of spending all day lying on one did not appeal. Getting horribly sunburnt whilst constantly getting sand in all your nooks and crannies is a bit of an anathema to us so quite why we decided to go on such a holiday I’ve no idea. We stuck it out though. The kids had made some new friends which kept them occupied, we took a couple of excursions out of the resort and even tried snorkelling, which went well, and water skiing, which was a disaster. After two weeks, however, we were delighted to board the Virgin 747 for the flight home.

I like sunshine but it doesn’t like me. Apologies for the scary picture.

That one trip sealed the fact that beach holidays are not really for us. By extension, the rest of the Caribbean, which offers little but sunny beaches, would remain undiscovered. There was just one reason why I might break that self imposed tropical moratorium – cricket. With many of the islands having been part of the British Empire, cricket is a popular pastime and whilst the heyday of the 1980s may be something of a distant memory, cricket is still well loved by many. Internationally, the individual sovereign islands combine to play as the West Indies and every four years or so the England cricket team will tour there, playing a number of Test Matches, T20 games and One Day Internationals. This year the Test Matches were being held in Barbados, Antigua and St Lucia. Whilst the thought of watching five days of cricket in the Caribbean was most certainly appealing to me, it wasn’t to Elaine. In nearly 33 years of marriage, I have not managed to persuade her of the delights of spending five days watching a cricket match which might not even finish with a result. I can’t understand why not. I needed to find another travelling companion. My ex-colleagues, for whom I frequently arrange a day at the cricket in places as far flung as Manchester and Southampton made what were, quite frankly, pathetic excuses. My sister Jill is made of sterner stuff though and so it was with her I made plans. Barbados was out of the running as it overlapped with Jill’s return from six weeks with her daughter in Australia. I didn’t fancy St Lucia again so that left Antigua. A few enquires led me to Howzat Travel, a company who you might have guessed by the title specialises in tours for the travelling cricket fan. Deals were struck, monies were paid, flights were booked and factor 30 was purchased.

The 30th of January dawned with a blanket of snow covering the ground outside jill’s house in Stockport. Excellent! It will be great to get away from it to the sunshine. Or it would have been had that snow made the journey to the airport a nightmare, followed by a subsequent flight delay of four to five hours, such is the havoc just three inches of the white stuff can cause in the UK. Still, eventually Thomas Cook Airlines delivered us to VC Bird International Airport in Antigua where our pick up was waiting to whisk us off to our accommodation, the Starfish Jolly Beach Resort on the island’s west coast. The cricket commenced the following morning and I’m going to talk about that experience right now. If you have no interest in the noble game then I suggest you skip a couple of paragraphs and rejoin me when I revert to a travel blog.

We did sit in the sun for an hour or so. The result for me was that sunburn picture above.

Howzat Travel had everything arranged. A fleet of minibuses pitched up at 08:15 to ferry us to the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium. Funded by the Chinese, this stadium was built in 2006 and is, on the surface, rather impressive. Two large stands at opposite ends of the ground and the floodlights dominate the skyline for much of the east of the island. Side on to the wicket is grass terracing, one of which proved popular with the Barmy Army, England’s band of noisy supporters, though this being cricket the word ‘noisy’ is a relative term. These guys were seemingly immune to sunstroke though definitely not to sunburn. Our tickets gave us seats in the South Stand, or Andy Roberts End if you prefer it. This afforded us shade all day which suited us fine. The plastic seating would probably suffice for a T20 game; for a Test Match it proved less than bottom friendly. Many food and drink stalls were set up behind the grass banking where the pink torsos of the Barmy Army had congregated. These started emitting extremely tempting barbecue aromas as soon as the umpires had called play. 330ml cans of Heineken were the beer of choice at the equivalent of £2.50 or you could treat yourself to a rather strong rum punch for five quid. Lunch break saw us try delicious kebabs for not much money though on one day I went to a different stall, got one with rice and was right royally ripped off in the process. It’s a good idea to ask about the price first as they rarely displayed them, such a good idea in fact that I didn’t. All in all it was a fabulous place to watch a Test Match, numb bums notwithstanding. For quite a lot of extra dollars you could treat yourself to the ‘party stand’ which was opposite the side where the Barmy Army’s glowing flesh was situated. Here you could if you wanted watch the cricket in a pool whilst helping yourself to drinks and enjoying the occasional visit of Sir Viv Richards himself. There were dancing girls and possibly quite a lot of other bits and pieces too. The downside was that there was a DJ with his big sound system that blasted out music of Caribbean origin at the end of each over. This could of course be heard all over the ground but it must have been deafening close up. We didn’t indulge, though the pool might have proven more comfy than our seat. We must remember to take a cushion next time. The stadium was nowhere near full. On days one and two there was very few local supporters though more turned up on day three, a Saturday. Visiting England fans dominated. It seems the longer form of the game has limited appeal to local cricket fans.

Our usual shaded perch, complete with surprisingly strong rum punch

So what about the cricket? I’ve been putting off having to talk about it for a reason. It didn’t go well. England had been well beaten in Barbados and needed to win here to keep the series alive. The first day they struggled to a modest total thanks to some hostile West Indian bowling and bad English shot selection. Day two saw the Windies build a first innings lead. England bowled well enough but unlike their opponents, the Windies batsmen were patient and did not throw their wickets away. It was good Test cricket. Day three saw England eventually dismiss the Windies and commenced their second innings with a 119 run deficit. We could do nothing but hope for a change in fortunes. Some patient batting and perhaps a bit of luck was all that was required for England to wipe out that deficit and just maybe set the Windies a challenging total. After all, there was still two and a half days of the game left. Not a bit of it. England were rattled out for 132 in just 42 overs. Yes, the Windies bowled very well on a helpful pitch but England seemed determined to surrender their wickets as if they were in a one day international run chase. They only just avoided the indignity of an innings defeat and the Windies were set a total of just fourteen runs to claim both match and series. It took them just thirteen balls, John Campbell nonchalantly hitting Jimmy Anderson for six to end the game with more than two days to spare. This was of course a big disappointment. My first overseas Test Match had ended prematurely with my team on the end of a drubbing. It is, however, a sporting contest and experiencing defeat is all part and parcel of being a sports fan. The result aside we really enjoyed the experience and it is one we would most definitely like to repeat.

The Barmy Army have a slightly more relaxed attitude to the possibility of melanoma

The original plan was to arrive on the Wednesday, go to the cricket on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and, if required, Monday too. That would give us Tuesday as a lazy day before flying home on the Wednesday. However, with the cricket finishing prematurely we had three whole days to fill. This gave us a chance to try and get to know the island which is a definite plus when it comes to writing some sort of travel blog. Firstly, some background information. Antigua, along with the neighbouring island of Barbuda, is a sovereign state that gained full independence from the UK in 1982. It is part of the Commonwealth and retains the Queen as its head of state. It is a small island of 108 sq miles and is home to over 80,000 people. Most of those live in the northwest corner where the capital St John’s is situated with English Harbour in the south the only other major population centre. Formed of limestone and volcanic rock, Antigua was colonised by the British in the 1600s. The native flora made way for first tobacco, and then sugar plantations with slave labour imported from Africa brought in to work the fields. Whilst Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, the Antiguan slaves were not emancipated until 1834 with conditions improving at a very slow pace thereafter. During the twentieth century the sugar industry declined with the last refinery closing in the early seventies. Antigua now survives largely on tourism. It claims to have 365 beaches, one for every day of the year and many of those are homes to hotels and resorts. Its British heritage mean it is popular with British holidaymakers but the USA and Canada is, perhaps, the largest market. All this information can be gleaned from Wikipedia of course but you can only get the true flavour of the place by going and having a look.

Our first impressions of Antigua came from the drive from the airport in the dark and the drive to the cricket stadium the following morning. Those impressions were not good. The roads were in a dreadful state of repair and we passed through a number of villages on the outskirts of St John’s. In these there were many homes also in a dreadful state of repair and the place was littered with abandoned cars. It all reeked of poverty to me. These impressions were wrong, however. Whilst many Antiguans do lead a modest lifestyle by western standards it seems that all the tumbledown shacks are simply abandoned when their owners die. It’s just as easy to build a new one next door. Whilst this adds nothing to the attractiveness of a settlement at least most people are living in reasonable houses. As for the cars, there appears to be an awful lot of them and the roads got very busy at times. The majority of these cars are imported second hand from Japan and can be picked up relatively cheaply. It would be better if old cars were properly scrapped rather than left to rot but at society with that level of car ownership suggests a level of affluence above what you might initially have suspected. On two of the three free days we decided to take excursions. The first was a trip on a catamaran round the island’s 54 mile circumference. This necessitated a drive into St John’s. The town is a low rise maze of busy streets and does not appear to have much going for it for the tourist other than the port. There, a cruise liner was docked, its passengers sent off on excursions to sun kissed beaches or on island tours. Others remained on board, lapping up the sun with views of the local container port. Our catamaran, motorised rather than sail propelled, departed from the adjacent dock, a handful of the passengers making the short walk from the cruise ship to join us and a couple of dozen other tourists from nearby resorts.

The good Cat Excellence on the Green Island Beach

The trip was a good one. We stopped part of the way round to visit a small island with an even smaller beach for a couple of hours. There you could go for a snorkel or just sit in the sun and take the occasional dip in the warm sea. Drinks were included, as was a reasonable lunch before we set off again to complete the circuit. The trip showed us Antigua’s coastline (obviously) and presumably all 365 beaches, though no one was counting. We sailed past Long Island, an exclusive place for the rich and wealthy as demonstrated by the fact that Oprah has a house there. You can’t get more exclusive than that apparently. On the mainland many resorts and hotels were pointed out but in between whiles there was some interesting geology to see. Most of the time though it was just nice to zip along through the water feeling the breeze in your hair or, in the case of the bald blokes on board, on your shiny napper. On the drive back to the hotel the Liverpudlian couple who had accompanied us on the drive to the port earlier were now an extremely pissed Liverpudlian couple having taken full advantage of the free booze on board. I’d have taken my hat off to them in admiration had it not been for the fact that I feared it would have been use as a vomit receptacle.

Betty’s Hope windmills, used for pressing sugar cane

Whilst that was a splendid trip it did not really give us a flavour of Antigua other than the tourist paradise bit and we kind of took that as read. Our last chance was to book a jeep tour for the following day. This we duly did and at the appointed hour our jeep, which wasn’t a jeep, turned up to whisk us and one other person around the island to see all the sights. There weren’t very many of them as it turned out, though the running commentary was quite informative. The driver/tour guide was Shelley Jay. The first place he took us was the cricket stadium which, quite frankly, we’d seen enough of but the other passenger was happy just to give it a glance and we headed down to the sparsely populated southeast corner. There we had one or two scenic stops before visiting Betty’s Hope. This was an old sugar plantation and there is very little left of it other than a couple of windmills. A building houses an informative display and that is about it but it was still worth seeing, even if there is no more sugar cane swaying in the breeze. An interesting geological feature was next on the itinerary, a natural bridge formed in the limestone rock by costal erosion. Called Devil’s Bridge for reasons of superstition, it will probably collapse soon now in the same way that the Azure Window on Gozo did shortly after my visit a few years ago. The highlight of the tour was English Harbour and Shirley Heights. The latter looks down on the former and is very scenic view. English Harbour contains Nelson’s Dockyard where colonial building still stand next to the huge floating gin palaces of the wealthy. There was a museum. We didn’t go in. A ‘genuine Caribbean’ lunch was included at a small roadside restaurant. I had curried goat as it would be rude not to when you go to the Caribbean whilst Jill had salted cod which I don’t believe went down too well. The drive back took us past Boggy Peak, recently renamed Mount Obama after a certain US president, the highest point on the island at 1,319 ft. Whilst not quite as enjoyable as the catamaran trip, the tour certainly gave us a flavour of the island and put right my negative first impressions.

Where’s English Harbour? It’s over there, mate.

Our billet for the week was the all inclusive Starfish Jolly Beach Resort. This got its name from Jolly Beach on which it is situated, a mile of golden sands where spectacular sunsets can be observed. It is a delightful setting and whilst hardly deserted, was never too busy whilst we were there. The resort is, let’s just say, a ‘value’ destination. As well as our group, two other cricket tours utilised it and it served them all well. It was also popular with Canadians and Americans escaping a harsh winter and, unusually, Italians who seemed to occupy the northern end of the resort. The buffet meals, whilst hardly haute cuisine, were fine and the one speciality restaurant we tried was very nice. This was Mexican; there was Italian and Seafood restaurants too. You can drink as many cocktails as you like, rum punch and pina colada were our favourites though they also did a mean tequila sunrise, and beer proved to be a fine cure for dehydration. There were more that enough sun loungers, though that didn’t stop people reserving theirs with towels at 6am in the morning, a big pool, a small pool and entertainment with a Caribbean theme each evening. Everyone who worked there was lovely, as indeed were all the locals we met, the bloke that sold me a rip off lunch at the cricket aside. We had paid the single supplement and were rewarded with ‘Super Saver’ rooms. This had us a little worried and our concerns were not allayed by reading reviews on Trip Advisor. We needn’t have worried. The rooms were small and rather dated – the resort was built in the late seventies and has hardly been updated since – but the bed was comfy, the shower worked and the air conditioning wasn’t needed as the temperatures were rather pleasant rather than oppressively hot. This was perhaps just as well as Jill’s unit simply circulated the ambient air whilst mine did cool it first but at the cost of a huge din. For somewhere to sleep the rooms were perfectly adequate. There will be far classier resorts on the island but for what we needed the Jolly Beach Resort suited us down to the ground.

Sunrise at the Jolly Beach. Sunbeds already reserved, though not by us.

So, Antigua? Did I like it? I wasn’t really expecting much but I was pleasantly surprised. Whilst there are many nice beaches it offers little in the way of scenery though karst and vulcanology do their best to keep it interesting. English Harbour aside, the towns and villages are not picture postcard pretty but they are living spaces rather than places to look at. You can eat well there for (usually) not much cost and enjoy plenty locally produced rum, sadly now made from imported molasses. You can watch cricket there which is of course a major plus. It is the national sport even if the locals don’t turn up for Test Matches. Its best feature has to be the friendliness of the people though. A more welcoming bunch you can’t imagine. Both Jill and I had a memorable week despite the cricket. Would I go back? Unless it was on another cricket tour, and I’d definitely do that, then I doubt it. I’m still not a beach holiday person and I think I’ve seen all the bits of Antigua that deserve to be seen that don’t involve getting sand up the crevice.

Footnote: Maybe we should have gone to St Lucia…

Stan and Ollie

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were comedy superstars in the 1930s, long before I was born. By the late sixties both were dead yet a whole new generation were being exposed to their unique style of slapstick comedy. Television in Britain had only recently gained a third channel with BBC2 commencing broadcasts in 1968, joining BBC1 and the commercial ITV in providing some choice to the British viewing public. Laurel and Hardy short movies were an ideal filler for the schedules, especially on the BBC who thanks to having no commercial breaks, ended up broadcasting programmes starting at odd times line 7:10pm. Consequently, I saw quite a lot of Laurel and Hardy when I was a lad. More time has elapsed between me first watching their material and now than there had since the movies were made but even as a kid they felt archaic. I found them funny though. Really very funny. It is now many years since I saw a Laurel and Hardy movie.

Last week the film Stan and Ollie was released in the UK. As you may have gathered this is a biopic of Laurel and Hardy and follows them as they embark on a theatre tour of the UK and Ireland in 1953. I went to see the film with my mum who actually witnessed the duo perform at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford during that tour. We were both looking forward to it. We were not disappointed. The movie commences in 1937 on the set of Way Out West, at Hal Roach Studios. Prior to the iconic dance sequence being filmed, Stan Laurel has an argument with Roach which is the beginning of the end of Laurel and Hardy’s heyday. Forward to 1953 and the duo arrive at a dive of a hotel in Newcastle where they are to commence a tour of Britain in an attempt to revive their flagging careers. Without giving too much away they play small, half empty theatres before extra publicity results in more and more people coming to see them and they ending up staying at the Savoy on London whilst performing sellout dates at the Lyceum. Frustrations surface between the two of them, compounded by their respective wives contrasting personalities and Hardy’s failing health. This part of the film is very poignient as it is obvious to everyone that despite the increasing popularity of the tour, the old movie days will never be repeated. The rift between the two doesn’t last long and they complete the tour in Ireland despite Hardy’s weak heart. This was the last time they performed together. Hardy died in 1957 after suffering a number of strokes linked to his heart and weight problems. According to the movie Laurel never stopped writing Laurel and Hardy sketches even after the death of his partner. Some eight years later he too succumbed to heart disease.

Whilst the storyline was a moving account of a difficult period in their lives, what made this film excellent was the performances of the two leading actors. American actor John C Reilly played Hardy whilst Laurel was played by Steve Coogan, famous for portraying fictional local radio disc jockey Alan Partridge. It might have been a while since I last saw an actual Laurel and Hardy movie but I watching these two portrayals took me right back. Physically they looked the part, they had the mannerisms down to a tee and their accents were spot on. Reilly’s Ollie is a half full character, happy to sweep any problems under the carpet in the belief that tomorrow will be rosy. His health problems and gambling problems suggest otherwise to everyone else including his overly fussy wife. Coogan’s Stan on the other hand is the brains of the operation, spending endless hours perfecting the material both will perform, a worrier for both himself and his partner. The pair’s relationship comes to a head in the film, briefly, an argument that probably didn’t happen in real life. However, it served to highlight just how much the two were dedicated to each other and this genuine affection came through in the film, particularly when Stan visits Ollie on his sick bed. It was on stage performing together when they thrived though and it was really quite sad watching this knowing that their careers were coming to an end.

Coogan has been nominated for a BAFTA award for his performance and rightly so. I was never a fan of Alan Partridge. I’m aware that that character received a huge amount of critical acclaim but I just didn’t find him remotely funny. As Stan Laurel, however, Coogan has displayed his undoubted talent in a way I found both amusing and moving, so much so l can almost forgive his overt support for Jeremy Corbyn. Almost, but not quite. It was a marvellous performance, as was Reilly’s. I genuinely had a lump in my throat watching it but I smiled a lot too. The comedy Laurel and Hardy produced may well be from another age but they were the masters of it. This film brings them back to life for ninety minutes or so and as far as both my mum and I are concerned that is something to treasure.