I cannot handle money

Having been out and about doing something socialable every evening this week (highly unusual for me, which is why I failed to budget for it), I woke up this morning with only £24 in my bank account which must last me untill I get 'paid'* (hopefully Tuesday of next week).

Regardless of the perilous state of my finances, today I have already wasted money in the following ways:

• Purchasing the Weekend Guardian (I could have read it for free on the internet or in the public library but I needed the free wonders of the world stickers to complete my wallchart)
• Purchased the Big Issue (there's never anything to read inside it but I made the mistake of maintaining eyecontact with the vendor a little too long, so she assumed I wanted to buy it, and I hate letting people down if I can help it)
• Purchased felefal from the extortianatelly priced veggie cafe in the Old Town (I could have made some myself but last night was a big work gathering and I felt I needed to restore my body salt balances urgently)
  

I hate the way that the consumer society makes fools of people like me that I spend money on stuff I don't need without even realising it. Maybe I should just stay inside for the duration.

* by this I mean 'receive the next grant installment from the research council' but everyone else refers to it as 'being paid' so whatever

Update: further unnecessary spending -

• a half of coca-cola (necessary 'entry fee' to watch the second half of the England match in a sky sports bar full of scottish people cheering on their team in blue - Israel, who also played very poorly). This was a listless experience, and easily the biggest waste of money of the day.
  

Open 5 race report

Mountain 5 Open5 Series - Sutton Bank (somewhere in Yorkshire), 11th March 2007

Finishing position: 21st of 53 (male solo category)
Finishing-position-if-everything-had-gone-to-plan: ooh, I'd say about 9th

Things that went right:

• My bike didn't fall to bits half way round. Given the condition of my bike, that is worth celebrating in itself!
• It was a nice bright, dry day, hence at no point did my brake pads become clogged up with mud and dirt (as is the norm)
• My route choice was relatively sensible. Lots of high scoring check points dotted together deftly avoiding all the densely packed contour lines on the map.
• Looking at the route analysis site, several of the other competitors seemed to head straight up the densely packed contour lines and so lost a lot of points in penalties, to my benefit.
• I decided to bike first. Frankly this was so that I wouldn't lose all my points in penalties if the bike did fall to bits (which, as ever, I was half expecting). However an advantage of this approach was my transition consisted of dumping my bike and beginning my run. No time wasted re-adjusting the brake pads (for the 14th time...), tucking into a three course picnic lunch (as others do) or similar annoying distractions.
• I suffered from a bad cold earlier in the week, and so was probably snoring in the local YHA. This would have ensured that several of the other competitors would not have had a restful night
  

Things that didn't go right:

• Typically, I left my fancy technical £65 running shoes at work. These are the same fancy technical running shoes that I have previously abandoned on a bus to Leith (but were recovered thanks to Lothian buses). I had to run in my 'dossing around the house' £19.99 trainers instead. I blame this for my slow running speed.
  
• The forest trails on the map were a very poor match for the forest trails in reality. Either that or I was just plain lost. Looking at the route analysis I lost about 40 minutes or so on the leading competitors whilst biking around the forest trails section of the course trying to find the checkpoints there. I could have made good use of those 40 minutes in the running section collecting the extra 50 points that had originally been on my route - then I would have been 9th!
• Looking at the most successful route decisions - my running route could have been more creative. In particular, the guy who came first was clearly 'thinking outside the box' by spurning the circular run that most of us chose.

Interesting landmarks:

• do not walk on the Kilburn White Horse
• dramatic sutton bank cliff - possibly the location for an ancient hill fort
• the B6270 , winding its way gradually cross country along the path of the river Swale. Sheep and rabbits from the surrounding hilly countryside carelessly amble across the road although the abundant roadkill corpses indicate that this carefree trust in the motorist is misplaced. My quote: 'Maybe this is like the road to hell... or Yorkshire". No really, it's a very picturesque road, and my anti-yorkshire prejudice is bred purely from a mixture of automatic suspicion and ignorance.
  

Generally I was fairly happy about how it went, although if I was actually organised enough to train for these events now and again I might be up there with the, like, real contenders in the top ten. But I'm lazy... still maybe for the Keswick event in May I will make a special effort.

Democracy in action

Fantastic! It looks like communicating with your MP is effective after all - serves me right for being cynical.

At the start of the year I decided to open up the channels of democracy and get in touch with my MP more often, starting with a letter on the upcoming Trident vote. Several weeks later I was becoming slightly miffed that he had not replied to my letter. I even contemplated the possibility that he had just thrown my missive in the bin. But it turns out that my sceptism was entirely misplaced since yesterday he resigned from the Government over the issue. Thanks, Nigel!

ugly rumours, indeed...

Now that records can make the chart purely by digital sales alone (saving the likes of me the embarrassment of actually walking into shops and revealing my poor taste in music), I'd love this to make number one! So much that I've purchased it once and may do so again. Problem is it needs more media coverage to reach beyond the demographic of peeps like me who check the stop the war website regularly.

hmmm peace marches

Well I didn't go to the peace march in Glasgow yesterday, but the BBC's reporting is curious - 'Unlikely allies unite on Trident'.

Anarcho-syndicalists. Communists. Scottish Nationalists. Anti-racism campaigners. Trades unionists.

It was an eclectic mix which wound its merry way from Cowcaddens to Glasgow's George Square.

Why are they 'unlikely allies'? It sounds like just the sort of random left-of-centre groups that normally attend marches of this kind. If the Guild of City Bankers or the Countryside Alliance had been there too, then one might say that unlikely allies would have been uniting. As it is, it is just typical slapdash BBC reporting. But then I'm bitter that the beeb never gave me a job!

I have written to my local MP about the Trident, and have now been waiting nearly two months for my response. I'm sure it's in the post, but I wonder how much longer I should wait.

Wet weekend

Well, it continues to rain so I have resorted to my wet sunday routine of booting up a computer model of the troposphere is SE Asia and setting it running (on a remote server). Every 90 minutes, I download the results and issue fresh instructions. I only feel safe running it for 90 minutes unsupervised because there is a good chance my connection will crash after this time. Each 90 minute window gives me just enough time to do the other type of running, outside (should the rain stops, which it might do later on), visit Sainsbury's or make some phone calls. Yes - a sheltered life, but my own...

Arthur's Seat Watch

... and yes, it's a very wet, overcast Sunday in prospect. Maybe I should rename this website SeatCam.com and be down with it. There must be a tidy demographic of people who would like to see regularly updated pictures of dormant volcanoes from the same viewpoint, but under different climatic conditions.

A milestone

Yesterday, I experienced my first ever Salsa lesson.

I don't think I'm sure yet what this act represents.

Big in China

Well, well... according to my webstats most visits to this blog originate from China. I'm flattered, and I'm glad there is one corner of the world where my ersatz brand of humour strikes gold! This week I have abandoned my usual mainstay of the Guardian newspaper and have been trying to learn Mandarin in The Times. Unfortunately 'the US State Department estimates that it will take an Englishspeaker 2200 hours to reach anything resembling proficiency in Mandarin'. Since I was never any good at languages, that'll be more like 4400 hours for me. Nevertheless, if it turns out I really am more popular in China than anywhere else, I shall move there.

In the meantime, I will try and stay on the right side of the Chinese internet censors and not talk about anything too controversial. I certainly don't want to lose all my readers!

red sky at morning

someday I will leave the house to take pictures... when I have a less bulky camera maybe. Shame the sun doesn't rise behind arthur's seat though.