Bimbling Along

Today I’ve done nothing, by which I mean I have been switching my body clock from working days like normal people to working nights on the London Underground. I say working, but due to the nature of the London Underground (ie – trains finish late, start early) it means we won’t actually start until 1am and have to be off the track at 4am!! That’ll be a three hour day (night) but a full day’s (night) pay. Very nice indeed!!

Of course, you can’t just start working on the Underground without doing a course and this we did last week. It was most enjoyable as basically all I needed to do was sit there for three hours and then fill in a very easy multiple choice test paper. Drink some tea and chat with some of the guys I shall be working with.

But first a nap is in order I think…

… is everything. While watching over the house while the parents are away there are some things that are important. Making sure the house doesn’t burn down, keeping the plants alive, not destroying things… that sort of thing. So you can imagine my joy when about 11.30pm Wenesday night while I’m watching tv the power suddenly goes off… and the main trip switch doesn’t stay on.

After a visit from the electrician the one thing that had been decided was that there was an internal problem with the electrics and that only partial power had been restored to the house. Turning off everything that was on the problem circuit and turning them on one-by-one I was finally able to restore power to everything apart from the chest freezer, which just kept blowing the fuse.

Alas my mum’s freezer policy is to keep all freezers fully stocked at all times which means I have no-where to put anything that is in the chest freezer. What I’m hoping is that the fact that most of the stuff in there has been frozen solid for the last decade and that the freezer has enough thermal insulation to keep everything in it if not frozen, at least good. It only has to last until the end of the weekend…

I have been fairly tired this week. This has been due to a total inability to fall asleep when I go to bed. There is a point around 4am when you start to wonder if it’s no longer worth laying in bed and that you might as well get up and start the day afresh. After a couple of days of that though and a general type of exhausion, that only parents of newly borns should feel, descends and everything just becomes far too much of an effort.

On the other hand I suppose it’s good practice for the future…

As a self-confessed Trekker (yes, I even own uniforms) I realise the irony of the statement above… expecially considering how much I complained over the reworking of general back-story in the latest Star Trek movie and indeed in the newish Hitch-Hikers Guide the the Galaxy book, but when I can across this video on youtube showing a slight, ever so tiny corruption of one of Britain’s best loved authors I thought that I just had to share.

May I present, Jane Austin’s Fight Club.

There is little finer than when channel hopping in the hope of finding something worth watching during dinner to stumble across an episode of Star Trek (The Original Series). What more, when it’s an episode that I’ve not seen very often and therefore don’t know it off by heart (the penultimate episode ‘All Our Yesterdays‘).

And it seems that from next week they are working their way through DS9…. ahhh, joy!!

For the last few weeks I’ve been working in the Imperial War Museum in London and on the whole it’s pretty cool. For those of you who have never been the IWM covers the conflicts that British and Commonwealth armies have been involved in since the First World War. This means that there are loads of tanks, guns, planes, memorabilia and most importantly stories.

There is also an exhibit on the Holocaust. Indeed the Holocaust exhibit is probably the largest single exhibit in the IWM taking up two floors. Now while I certainly do think that something on the scale of the Holocaust should be mentioned it was rather surprising to see just how much space was given over to this one event. And when I say surprising, that is because I’m then comparing it to the dinning room sized room that contains five touch-screen computers and a video documentary that then covers all other examples of genocide from the 20th Century. And that covers nearly 20 million people.

As a collegue said, you very much got the feeling that they had been told that they had to cover the Holocaust in a big enough manner that it was worth having the Queen open it.

And you consider that the museum is there to cover the wars that the British and Commonwealth armies have fought and when you take something like the Falklands War that gets a single display case that doesn’t even contain a map of the islands to show what happened where. Indeed, the wikipedia page has more information about the war than the display!!

about the fact that I have posted in a while I decided I better get back in the swing of things. Being a bit rusty I’ve decided to fall back on a favourite… I’ve been on a journey recently, so where’s this cathedral??

And because I’m not nasty I’m even going to give you some clues!! For instance, that bridge you can see on the right…?? That’s fully intergrated into the at cathedral which was founded all the way back in 1030AD. For the historians in you, Henry II took communion here at the Christmas service in 1171, the first time he’d taken Holy Communion since the murder of Thomas Beckett.

I promise to better from now on!!

Well, to say that I ache would be a lie. With the exceptions of my hands and head my entire body hurts, but that’s what you get when you run a marathon with very little training. It is an important lesson that I really, really must learn for next time. If there is a next time… God I hope there isn’t!!

For those of you that are interested I finished in 6 hours, 54 minutes and 51 seconds, which is not only nearly an hour faster than last time, it is also (more importantly) faster than the time that Katie Price set last year.

This year I took my camera with me, but not to take photos but to take little clips of what I was feeling as I was going around, so the following video is my video blog of the London Marathon.

For those who like the technical stuff, here’s the breakdown of my split times:
10K 01:30:01
15K 02:17:09
20K 03:04:44
HALF 03:15:09
25K 03:53:59
30K 04:44:24
35K 05:38:07
40K 06:34:18
END 06:54:51

Continuing a theme of saying, ‘yes, sure, sounds great’ before thinking, next Sunday I’m gonig to be pounding the streets of London town, running my second marathon. Those of you who have good memories may remember that I did the same thing back in the year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Seven, on what turned out to be a horribly hot April day, finishing in a time of 7hrs, 50min, 23sec. You may also remember that I mentioned that I was able to count the blisters on my feet without having to remove my socks.

I, on the other hand, have totally forgotten all of that and so when asked if I fancied doing it again jumped at the chance… what was I thinking…???

Now my first marathon was for me, just to see if I could do it… I didn’t want to take money for sponsorship because there was the small chance that I might just fail… This year is different. Because I have done the marathon before my sheer subbon nature will not allow me not to cross the finish line, however I’m not really into the whole collecting money off of people so here’s the deal. If you want to sponser me to run the London Marathon my favoured charity is YOUR favourite charity. Next time you see one of their collectors pop a couple of quid in the tin and say it’s cause I ran the marathon for them.

I am also putting together a playlist of motovational tracks to have on my ipod for when the going gets tough (round about mile 16 and most of the Isle of Dogs) and I’m looking for suggestions. What would you have playing to keep you going??

Wish me luck…. I tihnk I’ll need it!!

There are many great episodes of The West Wing and I will admit that my favourite charactor is that of Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff. There are many great and wonderful episode with some truely great Josh lines, however episode that came to mind last night was that of “The U.S. Poet Laureate”. Not because of the main plot… I can’t really remember what that was, but the Josh subplot involved him discovering that there was a website (the lemon-lyman.com that’s this post’s title) where people praise and critize him. At this point he makes the tragic mistake of correcting someone who accused him of misspeaking… In the words of CJ, “The people on these sites: they’re the cast of ‘One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest.’ . . . I’m telling you to open the ward room window and climb on out before they give you a pre-frontal lobotomy and I have to smother you with a pillow. . . ”

I happen to mention this as I happened to come across ‘The Malcolm Hood Apreciation Group’ on Facebook last night. Yes, a group who enjoyed my appearance on Total Wipeout enough they started an appreciation group… well, apreciation!!

And no, I’m not going to join…. I’ve learn Josh’s lesson!!