The all singing, all dancing blog of Alex Guite

New blog...

2008-10-10T17:44:00.001+01:00

... because wordpress is prettier.

I'm over at alexguite.wordpress.com now.

Top 50 Labour achievements since 1997

2008-02-25T22:31:00.008Z

You get to have your say on what should and shouldn't be make it on a list of the top 50 Labour achievements since 1997.

Whether it's the big things like the longest period of sustained low inflation since the sixties, or the things that just make life a little easier like NHS Direct, it's hard to imagine a Britain without many of these achievements. The minimum wage. Power devolved to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The New Deal. Gift aid (worth £828 million to charities last year). A right to at least 24 days holiday for full time workers. Free museum entry. Civil partnerships. The debt of the world's poorest countries written off. Sure Start.

No doubt that there is a lot more to do, but I reckon Sir Alex Ferguson said it best just before the 2005 general election: "This Labour government has led this country into a period of unparalleled prosperity. Britain's a fairer, more prosperous, tolerant and caring country that it ever was under the Tories."

HOWTO cycle Land's End to John o'Groats

2008-02-24T22:26:00.014Z

How I, a racer with no experience of touring, cycled Land's End to John o'Groats in ten days solo and unsupported in August 2007 for charity.

How I planned it

I decided early in 2007 that it would be the year I would cycle LEJoG and the first thing I did was set a date so I would have something to aim for. I decided to ride it in late August through to early September in the hope of finding a meteorological sweet spot between too much sun and too much rain.

I didn't start route planning and finding accommodation till about two months beforehand, although in retrospect I should have started earlier because hostels and B&Bs were already getting booked up. In choosing my dates I inadvertently chose to ride over the August bank holiday weekend so finding accommodation was even more difficult. Avoid doing this.

A typical LEJoG route is around 1600km, although it is possible to plan a shorter one. I chose to do it in ten days because it sounded like a good number, I knew I could comfortably do 160km in a day (although I'd never tried getting up the next day and doing it again) and would represent a reasonably speedy LEJoG. That said, after planning this, a guy I sometimes cycle with told me he'd done it in six and a half days. Wow.

I planned the details of my route in several steps. First I decided the broad plan: stick to the North coast of Devon and Cornwall, cut across into Wales via the Severn Bridge, head straight North to pass between Liverpool and Manchester, stay West of the Pennines, cycle Carlisle to Glasgow, then to Fort William so that I could cycle up the Great Glen, past Loch Ness, to join the East coast of Scotland up to John O'Groats. This isn't the most efficient LEJoG route and totalled to 1700km.

Then I bought a whole bunch of maps. I recommend the series of OS maps designed for regional route planning (scale: 1:250,000, anything more detailed and you'd constantly be changing maps whilst cycling). They've also got contour lines rather than shading to indicate elevation which is very useful for a cyclist. With these I planned the specific roads I would take. Rather than use a piece of string and a ruler, I transferred my route as I was making it to Gmaps Pedometer to calculate the distance.

I mostly chose to ride along single carriage A-roads rather than B-roads. For a start they are generally more efficient (and at least in Devon and Cornwall, flatter as well). Although cars are typically faster, they also have much more room to overtake you than on smaller roads. I avoided dual carriageways as much as possible, although sometimes I opted to ride five or so kilometres on them to avoid ridiculous detours on minor roads. Up in Scotland I took a B-road dual carrigeway and it was desseted. Probably because it was one of the most poorly maintained surfaces I rode on in the entire journey.

I mostly stayed in Youth Hostels and booked these in advance. There was only once, on the East coast of Scotland, that I couldn't find one along my route, so I stayed in a Bed & Breakfast. By that point, not sharing my room with five or so other people was extremely welcome. I also stayed one night at the parent's house of a friend of my girlfriend. I'd never met them, but they made me very welcome and gave me some excellent food, good conversation and I had really good bed. That, as with the night in a B&B, was something to look forward to. Therefore, my top tip is to either stay with people you know along the way as much possible; or if you're mostly staying in hostels, occasionally plan a night in a B&B. The extra cost will be worth it!

The other school of thought is to plan your route and accommodation a couple of nights beforehand as you ride or even on the day. It would certainly give you more freedom and you won't wake up with the uneasy feeling of knowing that you need to ride over 100 miles to a certain location to get to your bed that evening. But really, the last thing I wanted to be worrying about whilst cycling was finding and booking accommodation. I reckon the even more uneasy feeling of not knowing if you'd find a bed after 100 miles would surely outweigh any extra freedom you'd have.

Training

Even without the plan of cycling LEJoG, I do a lot of cycling anyway. So I can't say I had a training plan other than aiming to be out on my bike every weekend, some weeknights as well as commuting. I made sure I did some long-ish (~120km) fast-ish rides by going out with the Central London CTC, doing my own thing (fast laps of Richmond Park, cycling Reading to Bath) and incorporating some events such as the Dunwhich Dynamo and the Isle of Wight Randonnee for some more variety.

I also did a LEJoG in real ales at the Great British Beer Festival. As I said, you gotta have variety in your training.

My bike and what I took

My bike plus panniers.

I rode LEJoG on an entry-level racing bike. It really is nothing fancy (although it is yellow). In fact I got it from Halfords when I was still an undergraduate. The moral is this: an awesome racing bike would be cool, but an entry-level one is more than enough.

I kept with the fairly narrow racing tyres (700x25) I'd been using for commuting and although I considered swapping for sturdier, but slower, touring tyres, I'm glad I didn't. The back tyre was more than able to carry the weight of everything in my panniers and I only got two punctures over the 1700km.

My panniers, full of everything I would need for the next ten days.

To carry my stuff I got two back panniers (a pair of Ortliebs- thoroughly waterproof and worth every penny). Into them I stuffed everything I would need:

Tools and spares: four or so inner tubes, a spare tyre, spare spokes, puncture repair kit, a little oil, allen keys (only the ones needed for my bike), a screw driver, a spoke key, a lock ring, a spanner, a chain whip (the last three so that I could replace a damaged spoke on the back wheel).
Gaffa tape. Always useful.
Minimal toiletries, including three-in-one shower gel, shampoo and conditioner as well as a Lifeventure rapid dry towel (you really should take one of these, to avoid lugging around a heavy damp towel).
Basic first aid kit: stuff like bandages and disinfectant wipes (I find I always end up with some unexplained cut after a long ride), a foil thermal blanket just in case, some pain killers, some midge insect repellent for Scotland, etc... If you're travelling in a group you probably won't need to be so worried about carrying all of this.
Sun tan lotion. Well, I am a ginger.
Evening wear: one pair of shorts, two t-shirts (in case one got wet (I did drop one in a shower so was a good move)) and (to save weight) flip-flops.
Two 500g bottles of electrolyte powder. About enough for two bottles of the stuff per day.
Waterproof cycling trousers, windproof jacket (which I would end up wearing most of the time North of Ross-on-Wye).
Pen and a log book. Telephone numbers and adressed for everywhere I was staying at.
A bike lock (not as hefty as the one I would usually use in London).
Probably some other stuff I've forgotten. More coming soon.

Doing it solo

I chose to do the ride solo for a couple of reasons. Primarily I wanted to be able to set my own pace and although I knew of people interested in riding LEJoG, I didn't know anyone who was keen to do it in less than about fourteen days. But more than that, navigating solo from one end of the country to the other appealed to me as an adventure.

It hadn't occurred to me that it might also have considerable downsides until a couple of weeks before I set off. A friend commented to me that whilst he thought I could manage the distance he thought the biggest challenge would be staying sane on my own for ten days. And he wasn't the only one. The idea that doing it alone would be a bigger challenge than the ride itself seemed to be a common theme amongst people wishing me luck. In truth, I know part of me enjoys having an audience, and even if that's just an audience of one other cyclist, it would be sufficient for my purposes. And so I set off by train to Penzance just as worried about the distance, as I was about not having anyone to share it with.

But, I really enjoyed the ride and cycling it solo wasn't a problem. Ten days on your own really isn't very long and it wasn't as if I was sailing solo across a sea. There were loads of other people around (~60 million in fact). No doubt that my spirits would have been higher at times if I could have shared setbacks with a cycling buddy and perhaps I could have even enjoyed day 7 if I'd shared the barren roads with a mate. But I met plenty of people along the way, in hostels, other cyclists and even the guy on the bunk below me in the sleeper train back to London was excellent (he had whisky).

Battling headwinds on my own was the physical downside of doing it solo, but for the extra adventure it was worth it. However, if (or rather when) I do LEJoG again it won't be on my own. Next time I think a bigger challenge will be to do it faster.

Doing it for charity

I read a lot of other people's experiences of LEJoG whilst I was planning the ride. A good number did it for charity, but there was also a view that by raising money for a cause you remove the option to give up and go home if it the ride seems too much after a couple of days.

Nonetheless, I figured the oppurtunity to raise some cash was too good to miss, so I chose to do ride it for Afasic, the chairty for children and young people with speech problems. It probably helps if you feel some connection to the charity, but I found it to be a good motivator (particularly, when I was cycling downhill and spinning out of my saddle, but still only managing 20kph into the wind).

I could be wrong, but I got the impression that some people were donating more than they normally might have, if say I was doing a fun run. There is no doubt that cycling Land's End to John o'Groats captures the imagination, so if you're planning to do, its a great oppurtunity to raise some money.

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who donated. I really appreciate it. Also, thanks go to Mark at Afasic.

On the ride

Coming soon.

A kick in the Nad(er)s

2008-02-24T18:20:00.008Z

Photo: www.flickr.com/photos/wickenden

Ralph Nader has just announced he's running for US President. Hey, the year 2000 just called and they want their third party candidate back.

The thing is, when you read about Nader it's hard not to get inspired. He fought for safer cars when he was just out of Law School despite General Motors hiring private detectives to tap his phone and dig up dirt about him. He made car safety the responsibility of the manufacturer, not just the driver, and so we got seat belts and tougher windscreens. Amongst a whole bunch of achievements, his activism bought the USA a government agency responsible for ensuring safety at work and another one to protect the environment.

But the inspiration starts to run dry in 1996 when he became a serial candidate for the US Presidency. Of course it's his right to stand, but as the Guardian's Richard Adams points out, when Nader stood as a Green Party candidate in 2000 he took the handful of votes that denied victory to "the world's most famous environmentalist", Al Gore. (The figures make a compelling case that Gore could have won without a Nader candidacy. Even though many of Nader's supporters would have stayed at home in 2000 if he hadn't run, polling shows that almost half would have switched to Gore whilst only one in five would have voted Bush. In Florida, where Nader polled 97,421 votes, that would have been enough for Gore to take the state with a comfortable margin of over 25,000. In the event, Bush won in Florida by 537 votes and with it, the presidency.)

Nader's claim, made in 2000, that Democrats and Republicans are essentially the same, or "Tweedledee and Tweedledum" as he put it, looks disastrously wide of the mark after eight years of Bush. It's hard to see how he advances his many causes by becoming a perenial presidential candidate and I thought that this time, when Democrats have a real chance to take the White House, Nader wouldn't risk jeopardising that prospect by standing.

On that note, this video makes some good points:

Hilarious comedian apologises for joke

2008-01-03T16:21:00.001Z

Here's a great joke for the Christmas season from Britain's top comedian, Matthew Parris:

Q: What’s smug and deserves to be decapitated?
A: Cyclists.

It's taken me almost a week to stop laughing at this joke since Parris wrote in his Times column that "a festive custom we could do worse than foster would be stringing piano wire across country lanes to decapitate cyclists." My sides literally split with laughter when I read his humdinger of a punchline: "the lynching of a cyclist by a mob of mothers with pushchairs would be a joy to witness". Oh, how we laughed.

Sadly it seems that Parris doesn't just want to split my sides, but also my throat. So, why is Parris going so literally for the jugular on this? It seems that some cyclists have been throwing cans of high-energy drinks into the hedgerow of his local lane (although he provides no evidence for this). My first reaction was that his claim seemed suspect: typically cyclists drink from re-useable frame mounted water bottles and not cans. But then, fair play, let's say Parris is right and there are littering cyclists around his way. Certainly amongst any group of people you're going to get some twats whose behaviour you can't excuse (same goes for Times columnist, Matthew). Does inconsiderate littering justify an incitement to murder. And if so, where does this justification end? The other day I saw a motorist throw litter out of his window. Also I'm pretty sure that fridge I saw dumped down the country lane wasn't thrown off a bike. So can I now leave nails in the road to teach these litter louts a leasson? Of course I can't.

I can already hear the cries from throngs of motorists telling me to get a sense of humour. After all, what says Christmas and goodwill more than a good angry, bigoted rant? And man, that bit where he describes cycle helmets as "ludicrous". The guy's a genius! But what really gets me is that stringing piano wire across lanes to decapitate cyclists isn't just the product of Parris' mind: its already happening and its already injuring cyclists. Blogger Treadly and me has compiled a list of recent wire traps left for cyclists which made the news because of, er, the gruesome results.

Today, Parris has apologised. Thanks, Matthew, good to know that you're no longer planning to string traps across my path and that of thousands of others whilst we're just trying to keep fit and save some time on the morning commute.

So it turns out that on this one Alastair Campbell hasn't sexed anything up: Matthew Parris is indeed a "little shit".

Worrying lack of humour in Conservative Future

2007-10-26T17:04:00.000+01:00

I sometimes head over to Omar's Blog for a dose of young Labour blogging. In between politiking, there's some interesting stuff, like this run down of how Labour MPs voted in the Deputy Leadership ballot. Recently he's turned his attention to Mark Clarke's blog, who is the Chair of Conservative Future and hoping replace the excellent Sadiq Khan as MP for Tooting.

I had a read through Mark Clarke's blog and there is some troubling stuff there. His praise for Tory cuts in Hammersmith and Fulham is shocking, especially as Omar points out when it's contrasted to the situation on the ground.

But most troublesome of all, is what passes for an "amusing anecdote" in Conservative Future. This tale finds Mark in the midst of an "extremely confidential discussion" when in walked an "elderly gentleman". Two people with very similar titles, the Chairman of the 1922 Committee and the Chairman of the Board ask each other if they know this man. Apparently not, which Mark tells us caused some bemusement around the table. I can well imagine! The Chairman of the 1922 Committee (turns out you can tell the two Chairmen apart) asked him if he was lost, which he wasn't. In fact he was meeting Frank Dobson in the room later.

Mark takes up the tale:
"Would he mind leaving?" we asked [it is not clear weather or not Tories always use the third person to talk to people].
"What is the problem?" he said, "is this meeting so confidential that I have to leave?"
"Yes!"

If you're still looking for the punchline, I might be able to help. I think the hilarity here was that the "elderly gentleman" was not a Tory voter.

The route

2007-09-07T14:28:00.000+01:00

Just made a full clickable google map of the route here.

Includes reviews of all the youth hostels and bed and breakfasts I stayed at, warnings about dangerous roads or poor surfaces and comments about the route. Will add more as I remember.

Day 10: Tain to John o'Groats

2007-09-04T13:53:00.000+01:00

Distance: 154.1km
Total: 1690.4km
Time: 7hrs 11mins
Average: 21.4kph
Maximum: 60.6kph

I guess it was right that the final day should be tough: a reminder that getting from end to end shouldn't be as easy as yesterday's ride. I had the wind in my face again today and some tough climbs along the coast road. Ken P texted me in the morning to warn me about the hills out of Berriedale and it turned out rightly so: it was a steep climb.

As I pushed further north the gradients decreased but the wind increased and I found it harder and harder against the 25mph gusts. I can't complain much about rain since somehow I didn't get a full day of rain in one of the wettest summers on record, but the sharp showers today were very heavy.

I stopped in Wick and seriously considered just getting a B&B and cycling the final 25km tommorrow instead of continuing in the wind and the rain. For some reason I persuaded myself to carry on: the rain eased up although somehow the wind got even stronger.

Those last kilometres seemed incredibly long. This isn't some abstract comment about the last part of a long journey always feeling like the longest: it was simply exceptionally difficult to make progress against the wind. Out of my saddle and in the lowest gear I was able to creep up to around 15kph.

My arrival into John o'Groats was a bit of an anti-climax. I wasn't expecting cheering crowds, but really, there is nothing there. I got my log book stampted in the hotel, took a picture in front of the sign and then headed the final five kilometres to the hostel. To be honest I was more relieved to get into the warmth than I was to have finished.

With no pubs near the hostel and not fancying venturing back out into the cold night I celebrated with several plates of pasta and no beer.

Day 9: Fort William to Tain

2007-09-04T11:41:00.001+01:00

Distance: 170.1km
Total: 1536.3km
Time: 6hrs 44mins
Average: 25.2kph
Maximum: 64.9kph

This was an awesome day of riding: after two days with the wind against me I finally had it pushing me along today. Sped out of Fort William up along the Great Glen to Loch Ness. I made some monster checks but all I saw were rocks sticking out of the water. I cut away from Loch Ness at Drumnadrochit to take a short cut past Inverness. There was a steep climb out of Milton, but once up in the glen it was fine and I continued with good pace down to Muir of Ord.

I joined the A9 for the final 30km up to Tain, where I saw the first sign to John o'Groats: 104 miles to go. The last hour was fantastic with what had become a very strong wind behind me I cruised into Tain at well over 35kph, regularly pushing 45kph on the flat.

As there were no youth hostels around I had booked a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of town (not that Tain is a particularly big place anyway, so outskirt is probably not the best word).It was so good to sleep in my own room, without anyone else snoring around me or coming into the dorm at three in the morning. I stayed at the Morangie B&B, found the place to be very plush and although expensive compared to a hostel, excellent value I felt at £35 for what I got.

In contrast to my accomodation, I found the local pub food to be pretty lacking and the service even worse. Oh well, can't have everything.

Nonetheless a great ride and a good setup for the final day.

Day 8: Glasgow to Fort William

2007-08-31T21:13:00.000+01:00

Distance: 180.7km
Total: 1366.2km
Time: 7hrs 39mins
Average: 23.5kph
Maximum: 47.2kph

With a strong wind against me for the second day and some rain this had the potential to be another poor day. As it turned out I really enjoyed it, thanks mostly to a chance meeting on the A82 out of Glasgow.

I got cycling with a group of five firefighters on a sponsored 90 miles ride, the first 50 miles or so happened to be the route I was planning to take. So they let me join their group and with each of us taking turns cutting into the wind we made excellent pace up Loch Lomond. At the 80km mark I'd recorded an average speed of 26.5kph, which I was ecstatic with given the wind, my cummulative distance so far and the poor sleep I had in the hostel last night (noisy arrivals in the dorm at 01:00 then 03:00; not impressed).

The firefighters had two minibuses supporting them, so I was able to share their pasta lunch shortly before we split off our seperate ways. Riding together had raised both my average speed and my spirits.

Without the help of the group I found the wind tougher going as I climbed into the Grampians, but continued to make steady progress. The wind got worse as I approached the stunning Glencoe and sometimes I was out of my saddle in a low gear going downhill and barely doing much more than 20kph.

I've never been this far North before and I was impressed by the scenery. I just wish I could spend some more time to appreciate it all. Camera stopped working this afternoon so not many photos.

I'm staying in the Glen Nevis hostel about three miles out of Fort William. Very easy to find and in a very picturesque area. It has just started raining hard whilst I've been eating which doesn't look great for tommorrow.

[Just updated ride stats for Day 6]

Day 7: Carlisle to Glasgow

2007-08-30T19:49:00.000+01:00

Distance: 175.2km
Total: 1185.5km
Time: 8hrs 27mins
Average: 20.7kph
Maximum: 42.0kph

In contrast to yesterday, this really wasn't a great ride. Day started well by crossing into Scotland, but soon became clear that I'd be fighting a strong wind against me.

This was the most isolated of rides so far and the constant threat of rain probably didn't help my mood either. I cycled mostly along B roads running alongside the A74 (M) motorway. The first 80km or so were a gradual up hill to the head of the Clyde. Nothing too sharp, but constant climbing does get tiresome after a while.

I didn't really stop much for food, just ate and carried on as quickly as possible in case the weather turned on me. The roads were pretty rough with lots of potholes which didn't help my pace either.

Nonetheless, by pushing on I got within 40km of Glasgow by four o'clock, but it took almost another three hours to get to the hostel! Got lost several times, although could have been worse as was greatly helped by a Glasgow A-Z lent to me by Ken P.

Oh well, one good thing about today was that it didn't rain, despite the dark clouds.

I'm just relaxing now with food and a cheeky beer. Thanks for all your comments, has really helped me cheer up after this less than excellent day!

Day 6: Leylands to Carlisle

2007-08-30T19:32:00.000+01:00

Update 31/08/07
Stats are
Distance: 167.4km
Total: 1010.3km
Time: 7hrs 35mins
Average: 22.0kph
Maximum: 54.6

No stats right now for this leg of the ride (they are in my room and I'm down in the internet cafe right now). Distance wise it was about 165km, certainly enough to take me over the magic 1000km mark.

This was an excellent ride. Gentle sun and although the wind was against me it wasn't too strong. From Preston into Lancaster the roads were very flat and I was able to spin along at a decent 25kph or so thanks to the generous food and rest the night before.

Tim texted me in the morning to tell me to look forward to the scenery beyond Lancaster and he was right. Cycling into Kendal for lunch was an awesome ride and although there was now a distinct upwards gradient I was still pushing a good pace.

After lunch I climbed the 18km up to the 1400 feet Shap fell. This was a climb I'd been looking forward to all day. It had been described to me by a cyclist in Warrington as a "long, steady climb". Was much more satisfying to climb than the relentless hill-ettes in Devon and Cornwall. Some good photos when I get back. Wish I could have spent a bit longer in that part of the country, but I had to push on.

The ride down to Penrith was good and almost all down hill. I cycled with another tourer, Mel, for a while who I met there. It turned out she was a professional demonstrator, which I should have guessed by the "No Oil" sign on the back of her bike. She was cycling back to Glasgow after doing "some environmental stuff" down South, including as it turned out the Climate Change Camp at Heathrow. Made for interesting conversation.

I made a stop for tea before Carlisle with some past neighbours of my Grandparents. It turns out I'd never met them before; the last time they'd seen my Dad was 1978 but they are still in touch with the Grandparents. They very kindly offered accomodation for the night, but with the aim of getting to Glasgow tommorrow I felt I should push on.

Hostel was pretty easy to find and I even had my own room. Overall a great ride

Day 5: Dimmingsdale to Leylands

2007-08-28T21:56:00.000+01:00

Distance: 137.5km
Total: 842.9km
Time: 6hrs 21mins
Average: 21.6kph
Maximum: 55.2kph

I'd billed this day as my rest day, assuming without using google pedometer, that this would be a 100km maximum ride. As it turned out it was almost 140km, but was certainly more of a rest than yesterday. I got up later (08:00) and arrived earlier.

Pace was slower today, feeling tired and had a strong wind against me to start with. Bought my average speed up in the afternoon as conditions improved and I made up for a small breakfast with a foot long sandwich from Subway.

Not optimal cylce route today, lots of cycling through urban areas and got caught in the rush hour around Wigan. Don't think I spend more than 15km on a single road, thus adding to the overall time with lots of navigation stops.

Staying at "Donna's Mum's" in Leylands. Excellent to have a good meal, a bath and a decent bed to sleep in. Which is where I'm going now.

Day 4: Welsh Bricknor (near Ross on Wye) to Dimmingsdale (near Cheadle)

2007-08-28T21:38:00.000+01:00

Distance: 189.8km
Total: 705.5km
Time: 8hrs 35mins
Average: 22.0kph
Maximum: 54.3kph

I knew this was going to be a long ride, but sitting in the hostel afterwards, still with oil on my face (not really sure how it got there, but I'm finding I'm getting bike oil everywhere) I felt pretty good. It was very satisfying to make some good progress northwards (after several days of essentially cycling towards the north east) and was pretty flat. Couldn't have done the ride without that steak last night though.

Was awesome to see, and feel in my legs, the change in scenery along the route, from the flat roads around Ross up to the hillier Peak District. I took a route that avoided the Malverns and was averaging a decent 23.5kph until the last two hours when the wind turned towards me and I got into the hills around the Peaks. My attempt at a short cut to the hostel back fired, adding a good half hour to my overall time. Distance wise it was probably shorter, but I should have looked at the countour lines in more detail to see I'd be taking a particularly hilly route.

With about eight hours a day on the bike, you need some ways to pass the time somehow. One of the ways I've been doing this is by waving at other cyclists en route. A lot of racers and tourers wave at you anyway as a form of greeting between cyclists, but I've extended this to commuter cyclists as well. Most of them just seem plain baffled but I got a friendly salutation of some of them.

Legs are aching a bit and I can defintley feel when climbing that I don't have quite the pace I had at the start. More than anything my back and neck are aching at the end of the day, despite spending a far ammount of time on warming them up before the ride. Arms are also aching surprisingly, I think from compensating in turns for all the weight in my panniers.

Hostel was easy to find this time and very friendly. Met another cyclist who was on a tour up from Bath across to Nottingham, doing about 60 miles a day. Certainly a more sensible approach to touring.

Day 3: Quantock Hills to Welsh Bricknor

2007-08-28T19:55:00.000+01:00

Distance: 174.5km
Total: 515.6km
Time: 7hrs 43mins
Average: 22.5kph
Maximum: 59.7kph

So much flatter today riding into Somerset, leaving the hills of Devon and Cornwall behind me. I won't be returning around there by bike for a while! The flatter ground is reflected in the higher average speed but lower maximum speed I recorded today.

Distance was longer than I expected and my legs are starting to feel tired, but once I get into a good rhythm am still able to cover some good ground.

Grateful to a racer I met on the way into Bristol ("Steve the cyclist") for his route advice and for showing me the way to the Clifton suspension bridge. His assertion that the Wye valley was as "flat as a pan" turned out to be excellently true.

Was supposed to meet my sister in Bristol for lunch, but surprisingly my parents turned up as well with a picnic. Although three days on your own isn't long, when you're cycling solo you're always greatful for some company. And some good food.

After lunch I used some more of Steve's advice to take me over the old Severn bridge, thus cycling over two iconic bridges in one day.

The youth hostel was difficult to find and required quite a bit of climbing out of the Wye valley. Again, this hostel is not great for anyone on a racer as both routes to it are along mud and gravel tracks.

Met Ben in the evening, who drove down to the hostel. We headed in to Monmouth and after finding somewhere still serving food at half eight on a Sunday evening, I sat down to a huge plate of steak and chips. Some drama later as Ben almost ran out of petrol. Many thanks to Ben for popping by to visit me!

(Ben made it home OK by the way).

Day 2: Titagel to Quantock Hills

2007-08-28T19:46:00.000+01:00

Distance: 183.8km
Total: 341.1km
Time: 8hrs 14mins
Average: 22.2kph
Maximum: 70.6kph

Changed from my planned to route to take the A49 for most of the day to try and avoid the worst of the hills. Gradients were kinder in the most compared to yesterday, but the hills were still relentless and included a 1:4 hill to climb. In fact I even climbed above the clouds. Photographic evidence when I get back.

Roads in Devon were pretty messy and I got two punctures before lunch. Made a mistake and tried to press on too far before lunch. Ended up without water and very hungry down some country lane. Eventually got a pizza at half three in the afternoon after 110km of riding.

Youth hostel was pretty basic but with friendly staff at the top of a long track, not good for riding along with a race bike!

Recorded my top speed on this bike as well today. Got to 67kph and decided it would be silly not to try and pass the 70kph mark. Overall a satisfying ride, one of the longest single rides I've done.

Day 1: Land's End to Titagel

2007-08-28T19:40:00.000+01:00

Distance: 157.3km
Total: 157.3km
Time: 7hrs 37mins
Average: 20.6kph
Maximum: 63.8kph

Very hilly day and no direct route. Tough going with the hills and quite disheartening to find progress so slow. Wasn't helped by the 30km round trip to Land's End this morning. Cheered up by the evening and the arrival at the hostel. Big meal of cous cous, sausages, tomatoes and eggs overlooking the setting sun.

Day 0: Train to Penzance

2007-08-23T20:31:00.000+01:00

Just got back to the Youth Hostel after some pub food and a walk around Penzance harbour.

The five hour train journey from London was impressive: you don't need an anorak to see why its worth taking at least once. On several ocassions the track lies right next to the sea and a glance out of the window makes you think you're on a boat rather than a train. The scenery was stricking and as a sign of things to come, very hilly.

Good weather here; in fact from a rainy London it was sunny just beyond Reading. Not sure how long it'll last but choosing the wettest summer since 1927 [I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere, limited internet access means no diligent fact checking on, er, Wikipedia] means I'll probably get wet at some point.

Had an excellent send off from College today, a somewhat slower version of the Tour de France's Grand Depart. Thanks to Zoe, Ben, Tim, Pete, Iain, Simon, Andy, Adele and Matty for seeing me off. The balloons are still attached to my bike. Let's see if they make it up to Titagel.

I'm going to do my best to blog my way to John o'Groats as well as cycle there, with updates every evening provided I can on to the interweb. So check back to see how I'm getting on.

Total distance today was 17.5km, which included riding into College, on to the station and then finally up to the hostel.

I'm off!

2007-08-23T09:18:00.001+01:00

It's twenty past nine and I'm about to leave to catch my train down to Penzance to start my Land's End to John o'Groats mega ride. Both nervous and excited. I've probably forgotten something, but my panniers are sufficiently heavy that I've probably got some things I won't need as well.

Updates will apear here in the evenings if I can get on the internet (a further requirement will be my ability to stay awake after a day of cycling).

Thanks to everyone who has sponsored me, already raised more than I hoped I ever could. Your support to Afasic really reminds me why I'm doing this.

160 hours to go

2007-08-16T16:34:00.000+01:00

One week to go before I set off by train for Land's End. I finished planning the Scottish part of the route last night, although I use the word planning in the loosest possible sense since there really isn't much choice of routes. Out of Glasgow along the A82, following it up to Fort William where I'll stay the night. Then another day on the A82 along Loch Ness and up to Tain for another night's sleep. And finally a day cycling up the A9 to John o'Groats. At least navigation will be easier as I spend two days on the A82.

I'll link to my route as soon as I've transfered it to a Google map. For the distance planning I exchanged the traditional length of string for gmaps-pedometer. I would link to the maps I created on there, but the only downside is there is no option to share as a read-only map. I'd recomend it to anyone planning along cycle ride and I suspect more accurate the trying to curve a piece of string around hairpin bends on a three-miles-to-the-inch map.

Back in February, when I pencilled the last week of August in to do this ride, I didn't realise that this would mean stradling the busiest bank holiday weekend of the year. I've booked a lot of my accomodation now (mostly youth hostels), but I just couldn't find anything available on the bank holiday Saturday. The best I was offered was £70 for a bed, breakfast not included. So I've decided to take a tent and jetison it on to my sister when I meet her on Sunday. It's extra weight, but much better than cycling through the night.

Zoe and I cycled 125km from Reading to Bath at the weekend, mostly along the A4. We averaged 24.5kph. Was pleasantly surprised, the road was wide enough that traffic was able to overtake fast but not close. May work some more A roads into my earlier routes as a result. The plan was to cycle back on Sunday, but still suffering from a bad throat at the tail end of a cold we decided to catch the train back instead.

Land's End to John O'Groats: trial run

2007-08-10T13:39:00.000+01:00

Not much bloggage recently because there hasn't been much cycling to write about.

Replacing the broken spoke I got on the Dunwich Dynamo turned into replacing the entire wheel when more spokes broke whilst I was removing the gears. Rather than just replace all the broken spokes and worry that more might go on LEJoG, I figured it would be best just to replace the whole thing. It's done about 5000km, although I have to say I'm not very sure what a good wheel lifetime is.

Replacing replacing my rear wheel in turn meant changing my rear cassette since Shimano have adopted a new system in the last two years and I couldnt' simply swap my gears over. With new rear cogs on it seemed prudent to replace the chain in case it had streched. Whilst doing this and re-adjusting my gear cables I noticed that my bottom bracket was a bit loose. In the spirit of repairing stuff I got a new one and for good measure some new gear cables as well.

So one hundred and fifty quid down and a week and a bit of cycling lost, but my bike does feel a whole lot smoother now.

To make up for the lack of training I did a Land's End to John O'Groats in ales at "the biggest pub in the world" yesterday, the Great British Beer Festival. Starting in Southwest England I had a Blindman's Golden Spring, which wasn't as good as the name suggested. Forging up in to Wales I had probably one of the best ales I've had for a while, a Grog-y-Vog from the Vale of Glamorgan. After that I'm not very sure what I had, although I do remember the Scotish ale was particularly good. Photo evidence below. (It was hat day, hence, er, the hats).

Surprisingly only two people tried to "press" my hat.

Dunwich Dynamo: I'm not a spokesman

2007-07-31T09:31:00.000+01:00

Full moon in July means cycling 200km on the "turn-up-and-go challenging slightly-scary free-entry overnight on-road" Dunwich Dynamo ride. I completed it last year, despite moderate rain, two broken spokes and a ripped tyre. For good measure I did an extra 50km to a train station at the end.

I'd been looking forward to this year's ride pretty much since I recovered from the last one, the achievement of pulling into Dunwich as the sun rises in the morning is awesome. I headed over to London Fields on Saturday evening to start this year's ride looking for a good training cycle and a bit of adventure.

Learning from last year's ride when I ran out of food at four in the morning, I over compensated this year. But four bacon sandwiches, two packets of fig rolls, five bananas, one energy bar, two electrolyte sachets and a tray's worth of flatjacks, alongside all of my mechanical stuff (basic tools, inner tubes and spare tyre) not to mention maps and a change of clothes in case it rained were all be too much for my courier bag. So with the even greater baggage needs of LEJoG in mind I figured the time was right to get a pair of panniers.

Along with cycling over 100 miles a day for ten days, one thing I'm dreading about LEJoG is that I'll have to de-pimp my bike down to a tourer. Hello panniers, goodbye racer. I guess I could put some go-faster stripes down the side to make it look a bit cooler.

Weather forecasts for the ride were pretty poor, but having survived rain last year I didn't think much of it. Didn't look like the hundreds of others in London Fields on Saturday evening thought much of it either. I bumped into some riders from the Central London CTC who I'd cycled with before so joined them to set off. There's no official start to the Dynamo, at around 8pm people start setting off and then a kind of momentum develops and the streets fill with bikes.

An hour in and the drizzle started. But with a good tailwind and plenty of energy we plunged on into the darkening night, following a trail of red LEDs through into the countryside. Many of us were cycling along two a breast along the wider roads, sharing cycling anecdotes with complete stangers or pushing on in silence with cycling buddies. However, for reasons I can't adequatley explain I was chosen as the spokesman for all cyclists when a boy racer pulled along side me and shouted across his girlfriend "Oi, you ride single file. Single file". I started back at him by begining to explain that the highway code allows cycling up to two abreast on wide roads, but before I could get more than "Nah mate, we're fine like this-" he swerved his car towards me. Sometimes it might be best to keep quiet. I wonder how many other breaches of the highway code he's made whilst compensating for his presumably small genetalia.

Only 40km in I heard a noise I'd been dreading since last year's ride: the twang of a broken spoke. Fortunatley we'd just past a village so I turned back into the light to inspect the damage. With one spoke down my back wheel was wobbling around, all I could think was "man, this is untrue!". In the slight panic which gripped me with the realisation that if one spoke was gone, another might be about to go, that it was raining harder and harder, that if I couldn't continue I was in the middle of nowhere and that it was too late to find a bed & breakfast, I couldn't remember how to true my wheel. After almost an hour of uber-faffing, spending over five quid on a pay phone (no mobile reception) to get someone to look up which way to turn a spoke key to tighten spokes and trying to get the number of the nearest travel lodge, the good sense of an old cyclist prevailed: "loosen your rear brakes and don't worry about it, you've got lots of other spokes".

So once more I plunged roughly back into that good night. The next 70km to the food station were pretty unremarkable along dark country lanes: my waterproof became saturated and I got wetter and wetter, but with a good tailwind and a plentiful supply of fig roles things didn't seem too bad. Pulling into the warmth of the food station at just past two in the morning made me realised just how cold I was. Completley drenched and shivering I huddled around one of the radiators to dry out whilst shoving down bacon sandwiches, flapjacks and bananas.

I found some of the CTCers who I'd become seperated from earlier and discovered that I wasn't the only one who wasn't looking forward to going back out into the worsening rain. They'd even found out that there was a train back to London in five hours and so, along with many others, my Dynamo finished in a village hall on the outskirts of Sudbury.

Along with the rides to the start and the station back I clocked up 160km. No Dunwich, but I did discover that my Ortlieb panniers really are totally waterproof, even in torrential rain.

A weekend of cycling and peddaling poor puns

2007-07-22T21:12:00.000+01:00

True story: I'd planned to do a 50km ride yesterday, but too much drinking and not enough eating on Friday night meant that, er, I spent most of the day in bed. I eventually managed to get out to buy a spoke key to true my back wheel. It was surprisingly satisfying to finally deal with the slight lateral bulge in my wheel. It made me wheely truly happy. (Aside: if you're thinking of truing your wheel but like me just couldn't be bothered, it's well worth it. Bike feels a lot smoother. Good instructions here.)

Made up for yesterday's laziness by joining another excellent Central London CTC ride around Hertfordshire. Including cycling to and from train stations I clocked up 125km, averaging a little over 24km/h. Pace was a bit slower than normal, but that sometimes happens on group rides. Physics joke: surprisingly the group velocity was slower than the phase velocity.

I got a puncture just before lunch, but I didn't allow myself to get too deflated by this. Even if I had, I would have been uplifted by our afternoon tea stop at Panshanger Aerodrome (if you enjoy full stops between sentences don't visit their site).

Bitten by the cycling bug

2007-07-16T17:26:00.000+01:00

I seem to have got a fly in the ointment whilst out training at the weekend. When I got back from doing laps of Richmond Park (average 29.5kph) I discovered that my left leg was unusually swollen, seems that I've got a possibly infected bite, much like this one which started my blog in the first place. A good reminder to buy some insect repellent to fend off midges in Scotland.

On my bike

2007-07-13T16:18:00.000+01:00

At the end of August I've decided that I'm going to go to the most southerly point in Britain (Land's End down in Cornwall), aim my bike towards the North and start cycling. Hopefully 1600km and about 350,000 turns of my pedals later I'll arrive at John O'Groats right at the top of Scotland. Those with an eye for these sort of things will have noticed that what I will be doing the so called Land's End to John O'Groats.

So I'm starting a new section of my blog so you can keep up to date with my training and the ride itself (subject to me being able to get onto the interweb).

This will be the longest ride I've ever done and to make it more of a challenge I'm going to do it solo in the shortest time I can manage, averaging at least 100 miles per day. Although I can't wait to travel across the country, cycle through Cheddar (I understand I should be able to get some cheese there) and inspect Loch Ness for signs of life along the way, I'm also hoping to raise some money for Afasic.

I chose Afasic because across the UK there are over one million children and young people affected by speech and language impairments. In fact research shows that six in 100 children will at some stage have a speech, language or communication difficulty... that's about two children in every classroom.

Afasic helps these children, working for their inclusion in society and supporting their parents and carers. They provide a telephone helpline, publications, organise training workshops, run activities and events for the children and young people and have a network of local parent support groups across the UK.

Having needed speech therapy when I was younger I know what a difference a bit of support can make!

You can sponsor me at www.justgiving.com/alexguite!

Island Cycle

2007-05-07T16:39:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I cycled around the Isle of Wight in four and a bit hours on the Isle of Wight Randonnee 2007. In doing so I learnt a few things: firstly, despite what Google Earth might suggest, the Isle of Wight is hilly.

Secondly, some totally ironic student was responsible for naming places on the island. They're probably wearing a Transformers t-shirt right now. About the only place on the island without cows was, er, called Cowes. I saw plenty of people walking and driving about in Ryde. In Newtown, which was easily one of the oldest places I cycled through, you could pay to visit the Newtown Old Town hall. For a thirsty cyclist, the name Freshwater was particularly cruel in a place with no naturally potable water.

Geography lessons aside, the ride was excellent. The route was well marked and the cars were pretty well behaved, perhaps helped by some "Cycle race in progress - Please drive carefully" signs. If you're thinking of doing the ride next year my top tip is to take a touring bike, or at least stick some decent tyres on your racer. Some parts of the ride are pretty rough, with plenty of potholes and some really messy roads. I still can't adequatley explain how I didn't get a puncture.

When you do a lot of cycling, you end up thinking a lot about what you eat. For instance, the night before a big ride I like to carbo load, which translated literally from sports science speak means "eating a bucket load of pasta". After a bit of trial and much error, I've also found the kind of foods which work best for me during a ride and afterwards for recovery. But I'm still trying to find a breakfast food which can give me a whole load of energy and fill me up without making me feel bloated for early morning cycle starts.

I recently remembered that Shreddies claim to keep "hunger locked up untill lunch". According to the science part, this is because they are made from whole grain wheat. So, igonoring natural justice questions about whether hunger deserves to be locked up without trial (personally I think jail is a bit harsh, I'd suggest an ASBO for being a nuisance), I bought some of the malted square cereals.

I duly tried some Shreddies last weekend before a London to Cambridge ride in the hope that these whole grain vigalantes of the digestive system would keep hunger under lock and key. Or at least throw some bricks through its windows. But despite all the hype, it turns out that Shreddies are about as tough on hunger as the Lib Dems are on crime (not very).

The search continues.

A token gesture

2007-04-11T15:38:00.000+01:00

Important backstory: I won a bunch of book tokens a few months ago. Today I decided to spend them. In fact I promised to bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend and oppose any foe to get a decent biography of JFK, one of my political heroes.

But despite my pledges in the previous paragraph, it really didn't go to plan. There wasn't a single book on JFK in Waterstones which didn't claim to offer "explosive new evidence" or "sensational new revelations".

Perhaps the authors of these books live very exciting lives and consequently have a low boredom threshold, but I find that I don't need shaky scoops to be captivated by JFK. The nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis on it's own should be enough to intrigue anyone. I guess it is possible that these authors routinely challenge countries to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the earth before this decade is out, because they appear to rank a tabloid obsession with JFK's love life above the theatre of this improbable challenge.

I bought Letter to a Christian Nation instead. Dogmatic atheism: better than shrill sensationalism any day of the week.

Ge-ekpress

2007-04-04T08:05:00.000+01:00

Haven't had time to blog for a while, partly because last week I was away at NUS Conference. More on that later when I write my blog for Live!, but moments of note include Ben and I jamming a minibus between the floor and ceiling in a multi story car park. The most important thing to bear in mind is that the height restriction barrier was set way too high, otherwise we wouldn't have attempted such an audacious parking feat. I guess it was appropriate that in Blackpool, the home of the humble stick of rock, that we got stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Big news yesterday when a modified French TGV train broke the world speed record for a train on conventional rails and was only within 6km/h of the overall record set by a Japanese Maglev train (which doesn't have to deal with pesky friction). It's times like this when I realise that I really am a bit of a geek. I've been avidly consuming the wikipedia entries about the TGV, high speed trains and even finer details about the construction of high speed tracks.

Geek or no geek though, this stuff is really cool. Check out this footage of the world record attempt. It's in French, but it's not too difficult to get the gist of what is going on. For instance when the guy shouts that it is "extrêmement spectaculaire" he is saying that it is "totally sweet" (literal translation). Best stuff is about two minutes thirty from the end.

The speed in km/h is displayed in the top left.

Suckers

2007-03-18T23:02:00.000Z

I rate myself as a pretty logical kinda guy and try not to let adverts or celebrity endorsements influence my purchasing decisions. Even if an advert could somehow construct a link in my mind between drinking cranberry juice and romantic success, I'd like to think I'd be able to see through this and reach for the trusted orange juice.

On Sunday evening I was just going about my normal business, watching Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand Up Comedians, so I ended up seeing a lot of adverts. A compelling case was presented in favour of buying Lynx body spray but I resisted it and despite captivating cinematography wasn't moved to order a Jaguar S-type. Then somewhere in the commercial break between Bill Hicks and Robin Williams, an advert for fruit pastels came on. It wasn't about how fruity they are or how, er, pastely they are, but that apparently it's impossible to put one in your mouth without chewing it.

Clearly this needed to be tested. Immediatley. My housemate Iain quite literally put his running shoes on and returned five minutes later with three packets from the corner shop.

And it turned out that it is exceptionally, almost indescribably, difficult not to chew them: many attemps failed after even the most momentary of concentration lapses. Eventually, with concerted efforts we eventually achieved the impossible and sucked through entire pastels. So as good scientists we concluded that it is almost impossible not to chew them and thus settled the matter to everyone's satisfaction.

Then I realised what had happened: we had just spent money on a product we didn't need. More than that: the advert didn't just make us buy it, it made us want it as soon as possible and feel like it was our own decision. It wasn't as if the advert had made us switch pastel brands, we just didn't need pastels in the first place!

So because of a simple advert we'd spent the evening sucking fruit pastels we didn't need like, well, suckers.

Carbon cheating

2007-03-06T21:59:00.000Z

Have you ever cheated on your loved one or hired partner? If so, it turns out that help is at hand to clear your conscience over at cheatneutral.com.

According to the site: "When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere. Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and not cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience."

Even if it's not a new approach to relationships, it's definitely an insightful contribution to the debate on carbon offsetting.

Painting the moon red

2007-03-04T12:26:00.000Z

One of the things about working in a physics department is that if anything cool and scientific is about to go down, someone is bound to put up a poster drawing your attention to it. Yesterday evening's lunar eclipse was mercilessly promoted in lifts, common rooms and other public places, using footage from previous eclipses as teaser material. In case I wasn't excited enough , the BBC got in on the act yesterday, reporting that the was eclipse set to be the "best in years".

Clearly there was no way I could miss this. As you can imagine, I was over the moon that last night was cloudless.

I can see why lunar eclipses freaked people out back in the day - the moon appears to disappear then returns stained blood red. But thanks to modern science I was able to watch it from my observatory (er, spare room with open window) without any fear. I'd like to think though that even if I wasn't sure what was going on that my first instinct wouldn't have been to sacrifice something.

Particualry at a time when some people on the internet are howling that the moon is getting too predictable and you can download episodes before the moon even rises, I was pretty impressed with the moon's performance last night. The red hue it chose is very now yet its determination not to be rushed through the act (it took over an hour in totality) was frankly timeless (actually, about an hour I guess).

Finally, it seems that no one this week can write a blog without linking to this.

This blog post was written in front of a live studio audience.

Shooting yourself in the foot

2007-02-24T11:52:00.000Z

This morning I enjoyed a rare luxury: a Saturday morning lie in, listening to The Today Programme (this is the link to click if you don't listen to Radio 4). There was some fascinating coverage of this afternoon's big match, Ireland vs. England. If you're a rugby fan who has stumbled across this blog by searching "six nations" I'm afraid I'm not going to start offering my armchair opinions on Wilkinson's injury problems or whether or not the Mark Phillips pay deal will spark wage inflation (check it out: I mentioned some topical issues in rugby). Rather what caught my attention was that this will be the first time an England team has played at Dublin's Corke Park stadium. The reason for this is not as I initially theorised because it had been the centre of a delayed building project and only recently opened (more topical rugby references). In fact it opened in 1913. It turns out that it is significant that England will play there today because in 1920 British Police Auxiliaries entered the ground during a football match and shot indiscriminately into the crowd, killing 13, in retaliation for the assassination of British intelligence officers.

Understandably everyone is treading pretty carefully and there has even been debate about whether to play the national anthem. In fact, the England team were given a presentation about the stadium's history and the shooting. England coach Brian Ashton had this to say on this morning on the radio: "We're well aware of the significance, well aware of the honour it is to play somewhere like this".

So far, so good. Then this:
"We'll just go out there and give it our best shot in this game of international rugby."

There are literally lists of sport cliches he could have used instead. He could have said "We'll just go out there and bring our A-game." That would have been fine. There is no way that could be taken out of context. Or this would have worked instead: "We'll just go out there and give it 110 percent." That also would have worked.

Of course it doesn't really matter, sport cliches are pretty meaningless. Or at least I hope so as otherwise theoretical physicists would probably want to examine footage of the recent England vs Italy match because according to Ashton "[England] got caught in a one-dimensional game". I'm not sure how to even begin visualising that.

Hot off the press: Albert Hall Mansions Fire

2007-02-20T00:23:00.000Z

Apparently one of the reasons why you, I and everyone were chosen as 2006 Time Person of the Year is because of the power of citizen journalism through blogging. I don't know about you, but although I was honoured to receive this title, I felt kind of awkward at the awards ceremony.

The thing is that I can't really adequately explain what this blog is all about since it started one evening when I had an infected insect bite. It probably wasn't about citizen journalism though. That sounds way too web 2.0 for me. I guess for me it's more to do with publishing hilarious anecdotes about housemates. In fact the closest I've ever got to citizen journalism was by hanging around near my house in Battersea with a whale.

Until today that is, when one of the Albert Hall Mansions caught fire. Armed only with my mobile phone and an observation tower high up in the middle of South Kensington I did total citizen journalism. It felt so 2005.

I'm not going to try and make puns about this combustion because Charlie was on fire today with his scorching post about the incident.

So in the humble spirit of citizen journalism, here are some photos:

Leftfield caption

2007-01-25T23:35:00.000Z

Excellent caption in this BBC News article about the second racism row to engulf Channel 4 in a week. Shipwrecked contestant Lucy Buchanan, who has described black people as "really bad", lesbians as "sinister" and called for the return of slavery has been the subject of over 500 complaints to Ofcom. Fortunatley for Channel 4 it's apparently fine to broadcast these views (and hence make money as a commercial channel) since "when [she] airs her opinions they are immediately criticised, so viewers are instantly aware that her peers find them offensive and unacceptable". That's OK then.

Anyway, it turns out that her position in the photo accompanying the article probably also accurately describes her political stand point.

A bit of a grunt

2007-01-12T19:41:00.000Z

Disclaimer: this blog post contains strong language, situations of peril and if I can work them in somehow, sexual references. You should wait until after the nine o'clock watershed to read it.

As I was cycling into work on Wednesday I got badly cut up by a yellow van driver. There is nothing particularly news worthy about this, this sort of piss poor driving happens daily across the Capital. I often get cut up by cars and vans when cycling, but because by cutting me up he'd pushed me into the side of a stationary lorry I was sufficiently pissed off to give him the finger. This wikipedia article will explain the meaning of this slang if you are unfamiliar with what I did (it even lists some famous examples of this hand gesture).

I merely hoped that by flipping him off that he would pause to reflect on the error of his ways and that perhaps in future he'd give cyclists a bit more space. Instead he screeched to a halt in the middle of the carriage way. I reversed out of the side of the lorry and began to cycle around the driver's side of the van to continue my journey. No such luck: he opened the door in front of me and jumped into the road, with an almost impressive amount of arm gesticulation.

"Oi! Have you got something to say to me? Do you want to say something?" he shouted as I came to a stop in front of him.

Fortuitously the answer to his questions was "yes", I did indeed have something to say. So I told him that he hadn't given me enough room and that he had dangerously cut me up.

"Of course I didn't give you any room" he shouted back. I noted that he was still doing the arm gesticulation thing, but this time he was almost in my face. "You don't pay road tax and I do. You don't deserve to get space on the road".

Seriously, what the fuck? I'm rarely speechless, but this really threw me. I should have asked him about pedestrians, does he try to mow them down because they don't pay road tax? I should have asked him does he give cars who pay less road tax less room? I should have asked him whether he thinks children who have never made national insurance contributions should get treated on this NHS. And really, would he ever explain to a parent that they lost their child in a road traffic accident because they were quite legally cycling along, but didn't deserve space on the road because they didn't pay road tax? Seriously, what the fuck?

"Next time, keep your fingers to yourself, otherwise I'll break the little fuckers off" he told me. [Note to readers: by "fuckers", he in fact meant my fingers. I guess he was just conscious to avoid repeating the same noun in the same sentence.] By now an impressive queue of traffic had formed behind us and some of them had even started beeping. I wasn't sure if this was out of appreciation for the impromptu vignette of human drama playing out in front of them, or whether they thought that using their horn would get this guy out of my face.

He concluded by calling me something I didn't quite catch. I know it started with c, but maybe his enunciation wasn't up to scratch because it just sounded like a bit of a grunt. Don't worry, I think the same of you mate.

Patron Saints: awesome

2007-01-01T16:39:00.000Z

Yesterday evening my sister and her friends celebrated the new year by going to a "Saints and Sinners" party in the Millenium Stadium. I had other highly exciting plans and didn't feel at all jealous that they had paid twenty quid for a ticket.

But then I thought it through: how excellent would it be to go as an actual saint, with flowing robes, sandals and everything? I reached for my copy of "The Wordsworth Dictionary of Saints" to select a patron saint (seriously this book exists, the publishers describe it as "a cornucopia of the righteous, pious, holy and divine").

There were some obvious candidates to dress up as: what with being in Wales and everything, St David was a natural choice. Also as I'm a physicist, the patron saint of "all the natural sciences", St Albertus Magnus, stood out. But as cool as these saints are, my attention quickly turned to others.

If someone was going to make Patron Saint Top Trumps (someone, please do), there are three core properties of saints: the date of their feast day, the things they are the patron saint of (some are even patron saints of many different things) and under what circumstances they can be invoked, which is often not related to what they are patron of (for instance you should pray to St Fiacre, the patron saint of taxi-drivers, if you are troubled by haemorhoids).

There are some pretty hard core patron saints out there who deal with some big issues, like St Genovefa who in addition to being patron saint of Paris also has the entire "disasters" topic to deal with. St Gregory Thaumaturguas is the patron saint of "those in desperate situations" and gets called in during floods and earthquakes. St Jude really has his work cut out as the patron saint of "desperate causes".

Other patron saints are a bit more specialist with some pretty well defined portfolios. St Vincent de Paul's field is finding lost articles whilst St Cornelius can help you deal with earache. Jesus' foster father, St Joseph, can be invoked when house hunting which I guess isn't too surprising as he has some experience finding places to stay. Meanwhile, if St Hilary of Poitiers didn't help you against snakes, you can always fall back on St Vitus for problems with snake bites. One of my favourite movies of 2006, Snakes on Plane, would probably have turned out a whole lot differently if those guys had been on board. They would have probably called the film Saints on a Plane instead.

There are also some saints who are patron saint of some pretty cool things. St Ambrose, for instance, is patron saint of Milan, bee keepers, wax refiners, domestic animals and most braggable: the French Commissariat. He does a job share with St Cornelius on domestic animals, presumably so he can spend more time on Gallic bureaucracy.

I was trying to find the patron saint with the biggest work load. I thought St Barbara was in with a shot at this title, who is patron saint of architects, builders, arillerymen, firemen, military engineers and miners and can be invoked against sudden death (not sure how this one works), lightning, fire and impenitence. But I think the title has to go to the Virgin Mary, who probably has to work weekends as patron saint of the entire human race.

Finally in this post about saints, I'm going to mention Carlos. Even though I dedicated a whole post to him back in August in 2005 (making him one of only two people to have a post dedicated entirely to them, Gav being the other) he complained to me last night that I hadn't blogged about him enough. If Carlos ever gets canonized my guess is that he'll be the patron saint of tax officers and could be invoked in case of lack of vodka doubles.

Atheism in a Christmas Stocking

2006-12-31T12:27:00.000Z

Quite excellently and without a hint of irony I got a copy of The God Delusion by the famous atheist Richard Dawkins for Christmas. It was the top seller on amazon.co.uk in the run up to the festive season and is even running as the number ten Christmas bestseller in the USA. Also up there in the US top sellers, currently sitting comfortably at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, is Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama's recipie for a new America, The Audacity of Hope. It would be too easy to read too much into these lists, so I will a bit. At the very least, there has got be to some hope when people are finding books like these at the bottom of their Christmas stockings.

In other news, I'm back in Cardiff for the holidays and am stuck on my parent's 56K dial-up internet connection. Sometimes I disconnect and reconnect just to hear the dial-up. I'm making the most of this because stories about dial-up are our generation's equivalent of the "In my day computers took up entire rooms and birds sometimes nested in them" type stories or the "Man was sent to the moon on less processing power than your mobile phone" genre of tales that my parents tell me. Duing some future Christmas, I intend to bore my grand children with anecdotes about how I used to be able to make a cup of tea whilst a webpage loaded. If I get bored of being the token old guy in the corner, I might even scare them with tales about how some websites even used to use frames.

News flash: flash mobbing comes to Imperial

2006-12-16T11:27:00.000Z

Yesterday I had a pillow fight with people I'd never met before. And it was this: excellent. When I first heard about the plan to bring flash mobbing to Imperial on facebook my first reaction was "2005 just called, they want their popular internet phenomenon back". But a cursory glance over my blog reveals that this time last year I was too busy geeking out over my computational physics project for any acts of organised spontaneity, so I figured I'd give it a chance. Maybe it was just a slow news week, but even members of the student media also decided to give it a chance. Perhaps the most unexpected thing was that whilst it only lasted about five minutes, it was surprisingly tiring hitting people with pillows. As luck would have it though, I had a pillow with me for a cheeky rest.

Little known fact: according to Wikipedia, "pillow fights have existed for as long as there have been pillows". Fascinating.

I came across a tall tale on the BBC this week. When I was younger I was almost always the tallest kid in the class and this naturally gave me ideas above my station: at one point I thought I might actually become the tallest person in the world. What I hadn't realised was that if I had achieved this ambition it would have opened up a whole new line of work in animal rescue. Just this week for instance the world's tallest man was called in to save dolphins by extending his 1.06 metre arms in to their stomachs to remove dangerous plastic shards they had swallowed.

erythromycin diaries

2006-12-02T18:35:00.000Z

I'm pretty ill right now and in a bid for sympathy you should note that according to the doctor it's worse than man flu. I've got tonsillitis so bad I can barely even speak or eat, although I suspect it could be bird flu from the NUS penguins. I guess there must be some payback for leading Imperial back into the NUS...

Anyway, there's a limit to how much you can do when you can't speak (e.g. diplomacy) and can't eat (e.g. professional restaurant criticism). So in a break from lounging about in bed I decided to fill in an online questionnaire Oxfam had been bugging me about. Apparently it was my chance to help Oxfam get closer to its supporters to make a bigger impact in overcoming poverty and suffering. Not bad for twenty minutes online.

After some standard questions about demographics and my overall views of the charity sector it started to get down to the issues which concern me and my family(?). Are animal rights more important to me than the war in Iraq? How about global warming? Then some more questions about where I get information about these issues. And then this:

Huh? Have I seen any advertising for terrorism recently? WTF?
I guess that's what all those adverts with tag lines like "Terrorism... it's ace!" are all about...
It must be a legal mindfield for advertisers making these ads. Is advertising terrorism regulated in the same way as cigarettes? In that you can't make an advert to make people take up terrorism, only to change their brand of terrorism?

Back where I belong: on a blog

2006-11-28T17:50:00.000Z

What can I say? No internet, no time, no blog. In fairness, most of the last two months have been taken up by the NUS referendum at Imperial and I try to avoid blogging during elections (hence the lengthy "retrospective" posts after the sabbatical and RCSU elections earlier in the year).

Meanwhile, a whole bunch of stuff has happened.

I finished my quite excellent summer job, a somewhat leftfield job in the construction industry in which amongst other stuff I was introduced to the independent magazine of the crane industry, Cranes Today. Did you know, for instance, that Hitachi-Sumitomo is launching a 70 ton capacity lattice-boom truck crane with carrier from Link-Belt next April? Well, I'm excited anyway. Since then I've started a PhD in Experimental Solid State Physics, but sadly have yet to come across what I imagine would be the equivalent specialist magazine, Electrons Today.

In politics, the Tories made a pitch to youth voters such as myself last week, by launching a website which labels people with personal debt as 'tossers'. Beyond the somewhat bizarre political calculation of calling a sizeable proportion of the electorate 'tossers', it turns out today that out of all the political parties, ironically enough it is the Tories who have the highest level of debt.

Easily though, it has been the NUS referendum which has dominated my life, from the last few months of preparations to the last few weeks of campaigning. I led the yes to the NUS campaign, or the joiN US campaign as I liked to call it (the excellent name came from time well spent in a pub over the summer with word-smith Martin Smith). As with any Imperial election I've been involved with in recent times, the campaign featured animals. This time it was partisan penguins appealing to voters to let them come in from the cold, to huddle up with other student unions and join the NUS. After a week of hustings in bars, lecture theatres and to frankly confused diners in the Junior Common Room, I also had a chance to get back to my debating roots in the formal NUS debate (I'm the last but one speaker right at the end).

I lost count of how many thousands of students we spoke to over the course of the campaign, but in the end it came down to a margin of just over 200 students out of over 4000 voters. With 53% voting yes (a swing of 30% from no to yes), the result put me into sound bite overdrive. So I've also lost count of the number of times I've remarked that "we're back where we belong: leaders not followers in the national student movement". Thanks to all those who campaigned for a yes vote, but in particular to Ben Harris and John Collins. Somewhat surprisingly, the Imperial College press office chose to mark the result by putting a picture of me and some bird on the College homepage. I guess it was a better picture than the one which the Imperial College Union used to illustrate the results.

In recent news, I've got ~~toncilitus~~ tonsillitis. The only positive spin I can put on this is that at least I've learnt how to spell the bacterial inflammation.

Investigative Journalism

2006-09-17T22:51:00.000+01:00

Only days after revealing in an exclusive survey that "the London workplace is fizzling with sexual tension", thelondonpaper continue their public service journalism by asking the question "office flings: fun or folly?". Apparently a series of "surprisingly frank video interviews" with young members of the public helps to answer this troubling question. Just so that readers can get a better handle on this complex issue, they commissioned yet another survey, this time by YouGov, to reveal that "one in five has had an office fling". Naturally, they want to hear your views about this.

Oh well, at least thelondonpaper allows me to read some frankly excellent tabloid headlines without the bother of being seen with a copy of The Sun.

Goats on a blog

2006-09-10T09:45:00.000+01:00

Here's another story about goats which I spotted on the BBC News last week.

Yesterday I finally saw Snakes on a Plane. It was excellent. When I go to the cinema I'm generally looking for a few things from a film, this one ticked all my boxes:

Comedy stereotypes
Gratuitous swearing
Excellently quotable one liners (I almost clapped when Samuel L. Jackson delivered his famous catch phrase. This is a family blog so I'm not reproducing it here.)
Cliched love interests
Snakes on plane
Central protagonist faced with difficult decision, makes right choice
Two unlikely friends bought together by circumstances

Finally, whilst researching a goat image to accompany this post I came across the website of the British Goat Society, allgoats.com. The URL isn't lying, their website is all about goats. Apparently one of their aims is to "circulate knowledge and general information upon goats". Personally I find the printing press and the internet pretty efficient ways to disseminate information, but perhaps we do need to fall back on other tried and tested methods. Such as goats. So look out for goats carrying encyclopedias and current affairs magazines.

Goats

2006-09-07T22:55:00.000+01:00

This week has been an excellent week for London young professionals aged 18-35: when they leave work they are currently the key demographic in a battle of media titans.

Two free evening papers have just been launched: the London Lite, allegedly as a spoiler to the Monday launch of thelondonpaper. If you're into this sort of thing, the BBC News magazine had a good article explaining the media politik behind this. They even found space on their webpage to mention that many young people already get much of their news from the Internet and therefore are accustomed to free news.

On Monday I picked up both papers, first sampling the London Lite and then reading thelondonpaper in St James Park. How London am I?

Neither of them are challenging to read and both present the news in such small bite-size chunks that it sometimes feels like eating dust. Without water. thelondonpaper has an interesting 'interactive' element in which readers are invited to vote on whether to keep or ditch a columnist. How very empowering for us readers.

Overall I'm preferring thelondonpaper, although I think this may be because it's more colourful and I'm easily swayed by these sort of marketing tricks. Certainly I wouldn't normally admit to reading or even liking a Murdoch publication, so something about it must be working for me. It seems to be even more trendy and hip than the London Lite. This all makes quite a change from reading The Guardian (which I have to pay actual money for, how 2005). For instance I don't think The Guardian would ever have commissioned, or even classed as news, the "exclusive survey" which thelondonpaper did this week, which apparently "confirmed that the London workplace is fizzling with sexual tension".

What will be interesting is how the politics of these papers play out, although perhaps it's too much to hope for that in a city which returns a majority of Labour MPs that at least one of these newspapers which Londoners will take home from work might at least take a centre left slant.

Finally, here is a story about goats from what is still my favourite source of free news.

No time, no blog

2006-08-21T21:40:00.000+01:00

OK, OK, woah.
Woah.
It's been almost two months since I last updated. I'd like to claim that I took my customary July blog break, but I've almost missed August as well so that excuse would be bogus.
It's not as if nothing has happened either.

I started July in the London suburb of Harrow. Incidentally I also started life in the London suburb of Harrow, but soon persuaded my parents to move out. I'd call that a good move. Besides enjoying some of Harrow's tourist attractions I was mainly there to attend the Common Purpose Frontrunner course. If you check out the link you can see a picture of me 'graduating' from the programme (I'm the one in yellow looking cool with my eyes closed). I'd been pretty worried that getting 30 young leaders together in one room was a recipe for disaster (too many cooks spoiling the broth and what not), but it was in fact an awesome, and more importantly inspiring, four days. I don't think I'll ever forget the great oratory I witnessed on the night bus at four in the morning on the way back from central London.

On the July Saturday closest to the full moon I decided not to go to sleep and head out in to the countryside at night. However instead of getting involved in some ritualistic chanting ceremony (the invitations were tempting and their proposed chants were excellent), I cycled 195km overnight on the Dunwich Dynamo. It's a completely unsupported turn-up-and-go ride. It is a cycling rite of passage. Although getting drenched at half two in the morning was pretty sweet, the best part of the ride was the collective support. I need to thank the cyclists who helped me when two of my spokes broke somewhere in the middle of rural England, and the other cyclists who later rescued me when my rear tyre ripped. I also took some moral support at one o'clock in the morning from a guy with a crazy-awesome beard. He had a refreshing perspective on the challenge of cycling 200km without sleep. The next day, whenever I closed my eyes, all I could see was the sight of a train of flashing red LEDs stretching into the distance (note: this was subject to me not immediately falling asleep).

Red trail lights

Another significant event which has occurred to me recently is that I got food poisoning of some sort. Unfortunately there is no back story here, I didn't eat any cool foods or try any dangerous fish (I'll have herring thank you very much). I was simply going about my normal business and started asking people "Is it cold in here, or is it just me?". It was just me. So I spent the next five days hanging out with my toilet. You notice a lot of things when you have food poisoning. Had you ever noticed how the number 49 bus doesn't have toilets on board? The five days were quite miserable and pretty shitty. There, I think that sticks it to all those nay-sayers who said I couldn't blog about this subject sensitively.

9 out of 10 examiners prefer Alex Guite over other leading brands

2006-06-25T15:15:00.000+01:00

As you might expect given that this is June, all sorts of crazy stuff has been 'going down' recently (note to perverts: this is not innuendo).
One event I really didn't give much attention to is the one year anniversary of my blog, which occurred back on the 11th of June. I'll be honest: I really didn't think I would still be doing this blog thing a year later. I only started it as a way to take my mind off the fact that I had a single insect bite which had swelled up to cover the entire length of my forearm. Turns out, it was infected. It seems that the experience also infected me with the blogging bug.
This opens the door to a whole range of cool new features, such as the "What was I doing one year ago?" feature. Turns out that this time last year I was in Cardiff watching Muppet videos and sleeping in hammocks. There's a strange symmetry to all of this because Rosie gave me an Executive hammock for my Birthday yesterday (note to Editors: my Birthday is next week, but I've been celebrating it since last Thursday; note to Rosie: thanks for the hammock!). I'm going to try it out in Battersea Park soon.
Other cool stuff which occurred recently included the Summer Ball, which easily won the award of being the Best Summer Ball ever.
I changed my travel plans so I could get back to the Union Colours awards ceremony in order to drink more free pseudo-champagne than I could shake a glass at. TBR's Martin Archer got half colours, I believe for "services to playing out all the latest urban tunes".
Finally of course, there was the end of term Carnival and the announcement of degree classes. Well done to everybody on your results!

Iran vs. USA

2006-06-20T07:53:00.000+01:00

Pretty much like everyone else, I'm really getting into the Official FIFA World Cup. Given that I'm not into the whole 'football' thing, my approach is to quip endlessly about waiting for an Iran vs. USA match if anyone tries to talk to me about any of the 'big matches' which are coming up. One aspect of the World Cup which delights me the most is all the cash-in football anthems. I've currently got Infernal's from London to Berlin stuck in my head. You should also check out Neil and Christine Hamilton's world cup tune. It is really, really, really good. I can't stress this last point enough.

eating my keyboard

2006-06-18T15:04:00.000+01:00

Recently I've been working really hard on takin' it easy after the exams. I think I'm doing a pretty good job of it as well.

Last week I popped up to Oxford to help Becky celebrate the end of her exams. I assited in the only way I know: by drinking a number of cocktails which were on fire.

On my return to London I entertained and hosted Ev and Hutch (of going to school with me fame) and Jat for the weekend. Notable events included Hutch loosing a bet to Jat which resulted in him wearing a stylish hat for the entire weekend as forefeit (read on for more interesting anecdotes connected with the hat).

I've also spent some time in Cardiff, during which time I was chiefly concerned with the production of smoothies and the drinking thereof. I also achieved a life ambition: to get stuck in a motorway traffic jam so bad that I could get out of my car and sit on the central reservation. In addition to exchanging frustrated grimaces with my fellow drivers, I spent most of the hour and a half I was stuck there wondering whether it would be a social faux-part to piss on the embankment (conclusion: yes it would have been even though I desperatley needed to go; I passed the time by phoning people such as Gav to explain the nature of my predicament).

Back in the days of web 1.0 I ran thefinephotosite where I exhibited all of my photography pictures. It turns out that shortly before my A-levels finished I promised to update the site and I even went so far as to pledge that if I didn't, "I would eat my keyboard". You can probably guess just how confident I was that I would update the site. But my young optimism was misplaced: I haven't touched the site for four years. Hutch was having none of this and challenged me to follow through on my promise on a confectionary keyboard which he himself undertook to create. The only snag: should I fail to eat the keyboard in under twenty minutes I would have to wear Hutch's hat to Cardiff Union's end of term event, 'Drink the Bar Dry' (I must say, I was impressed by the Union's commitment to encouraging responsible drinking). I was well up for the challenge, and after we set out some basic ground rules (such as the 'no peanut rule') I was feeling pretty confident. Eight packets of Munchies, two sponge cakes, a Twix and one Flake later Hutch and his crack team of cake artisans had crafted a genuine keyboard.

The moment I realised that this could well be a Sisyphean task was when Ev mentioned that they had used fondant icing. Fondant icing! Forsoothe! Is it possible to find a sweeter, stogier or more sickly icing? The answer is that it is as impossible as finding more words which begin with 's' to continue alliterating about fondant icing. Nonetheless I refused to shrink from the challenge. I gave it my best shot but when I started shivering from the ridiculous sugar consumption at the three quarters mark I knew it was time to give in.

Exams, degree, smoking in the Union: all finished

2006-06-02T09:46:00.000+01:00

I suffered the unedifying experience of being woken up by David Cameron's record choices on Desert Island Discs this morning. I guess I should have been prepared for this as his appearance has been mercilessly plugged all week under the banner of 'news' on the BBC. Who would have guessed that Dave is in to trendy music like Radiohead?
In real news this week I finished my degree on Tuesday, which we celebrated with a champagne fight on the Queen's Lawn. It's important to note that I'm using the term champagne in the loosest possible sense, but for £3.50 per bottle it tasted surprisingly good. In fact it tasted strikingly similar to the sweet taste of finished exams.
Yesterday's Physics Leavers Party was pretty entertaining. I think Jake got involved in a scuffle concerning the Copenhagen versus the Many-Worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics. I headed over to the Union afterwards to celebrate with Dan and others the first day of a smoking ban in the Union. Although I know this isn't conclusive evidence after one night, it was still quite crowded in there. So even though the bars weren't clogged with second hand smoke (which a recent campus survey revealed to be offputting), the Union's atmosphere is still smokin' hot.
For reasons I can't adequately explain, I then went to a "sexual fantasies" fancy dress themed party. Naturally, I went dressed as myself.

Imperial College: Purveyors of Higher Education to His Majesty the King

2006-05-19T14:57:00.000+01:00

Just received my alumni registration form.
Quite possibly the best list of titles to choose from ever!

However, despite being able to choose from a list including 'Senator', 'Dr Group Captain', and 'Dott' (wtf?), there is no option to choose 'TBR' for Imperial's very own TBR's Martin Archer.

Super-investigative-exposé: the man behind the comments

2006-05-16T23:03:00.000+01:00

In between all the marriage proposals and signed knickers I've been receiving in my fanmail, I've recently been getting a lot of requests from readers who want to know more about prolific blog comment artist, Gavin.
Operating under various nom de plume, but mostly under his classic tag 'Gav', he has bought us some of the greatest insights of the 21st century. Who could forget the masterly:

London people wear scarves whatever the weather. Fact. Richard Bacon is not cool. Fact. The Sultan is not me. Fact. Alex Guites needs to be done with this. Fact.

Or how about the tear jerking:

Al - update your blog for fizzle's sake. I'm bored of searching the motherfizzling internet for things to read about people I don't fizzling know!

So what motivates Gavin? Why has he chosen to share his sageness and perception through the medium of this blog and not peer reviewed journals? Why does he never wear a shirt in photos?
I decided the best way to investigate this living legend would be to spend a day with him at a fashionable auction house as he expanded his germinating collection of objet d'art.
During a pause in the breathless bidding, I sneaked in the first question. Some people with a penetrating eye for rhyme, have started referring to Gav as 'Gav the Chav'. I wanted to know what he thought about this label.
"You know, Alex", he started, using his endearing method of repeating a person's name as he began his answer, "in my line of work you have to be ready for this sort of reaction. They're probably just jealous that they've never mistaken a large rock for a lilo."
The lilo incident reminded me of another question I'd wanted to ask the Llanishen High School graduate. "You once drank sixteen shots of sambuca in just one club as part of a night out-". He cut me short. "It was eighteen; eighteen shots of sambuca" he corrected me. It led me to wonder whether given the choice he would rather drink pepsi or coke. His answer, as with so many aspects of the interview such as the Jack Russel Terrier which was still humping my leg, surprised me. He raged that I'd offered him a false choice, that I'd tried to trick him with the question and even threatened to end the interview.
I took the interview back on to territory I knew he'd feel comfortable discussing: his much publicised love of Skittles. I asked him about the Skittles advert he'd just finished filming which premiers this summer, a photomontage of his record breaking Skittle consumption feat.
"At the 14kg mark I wasn't sure if I was going to make it, but I knew that thanks to all my training I could get through it. The 17th kilogram was the most lonely kilogram of my life. But once I got to the 20kg benchmark I knew the record was in sight. But I didn't just want to limp past the record weight. I wanted to completely destroy the previous record. I'm not the sort of person who wants to just set stupid records. I want to be the person who sets unbeatably ludricous records."
"So that's why you ate 31.4kg of Skittles?" I prompted.
"Yes." His answer said it all.
As Gavin returned to bidding, this time on a set of art deco gym mats, I left realising that although there is much still to discover about 'Gav' or the 'Big G' or 'anonymous', his answers did shed some light on the mystery that lies within the man behind the comments. But maybe it's not about the questions he answers, but about the comments he makes.
Let's see.

Stuff I ate and didn't eat today

2006-05-15T00:20:00.000+01:00

I'm always turning down offers from publishing houses to write the latest fad diet. But as a special treat, I thought I'd give you a quick gastronomic tour of my day.
It's revision period and everyone knows that a healthy and well balanced diet is key to good work. That's why today I selected to eat a four person strawberry trifle for lunch. It's got all the major food groups: whipping cream, custard, sponge layer and jelly. I can't claim to have eaten it all myself, after about three servings I had to enlist a little help from my friends. You could say, it was a trifle too much for me. Thanks go to Pete, Tim and Charlie, who showed great panache and choreography whilst eating trifle with a knife.
All popular diets include some forbidden food and my diet is no exception. The big no-no is food with blue plastic in it. Today was a great case in point. Imagine the scene: me, going about my normal business, ready for a quick snack. So I reached into my bag and pulled out a ham and mustard-flavour-sauce sandwich. I'd had such sandwiches before, so as I tore back the plastic sheath to reveal the cheeky snack, I was already salivating in anticipation. But imagine my surprise as I discovered two bits of blue plastic in my food (see diagram for further details)! As Tim sagely pointed out "Dude, that's probably a piece of a catering plaster. I found one in my Mc Donalds once". Basically, the blue plastic indicates that it is a forbidden food.
OK, so for those people reading this who I have already told that I found a plaster in my sandwich, the picture probably looks a little disappointing. You'd probably tell me to eat around it. Initially I agreed with you, "Be a man and eat it" I told myself. Literally nanoseconds later (yes, that's how fast I think on food related matters) I performed a complete u-turn. "How about not eating this and not getting a disease" I decided instead.
So I took it back to Tescos to get my £1.14 back. You would have thought they might have been slightly apologetic after a loyal customer found a plaster in their sandwich. Quite the reverse in fact: I left feeling like it was my fault that some dude had left part of their plaster in my snack food. I guess you could call it finger food. At least I got my money back in the end. I declined the offer of a replacement sandwich.

In other breaking news this evening, TBR's Martin Archer is using facebook as a college networking and dating service. Speaking exclusively to thedudenextdoor, Martin Archer revealed "I've just been poked back by the hottest girl at Imperial. Now I've sent her a cheeky message and added her as my friend". An independent eye witness, Andy Smith, corroborated the story, and added "phwoar" when shown the profile of the 'hottest girl at Imperial'.

Always first with the lastest trends

2006-05-13T23:01:00.000+01:00

As I've probably mentioned to you if I've met you in the last few days, internet phenomena are up there in my top ten methods for distracting myself during revision periods.
As if the arrival of facebook at Imperial wasn't enough, there is actually a double whammy in the shape of Google Trends. Apparently "with Google Trends, [I] can compare the world's interest in [my] favorite topics". Which is great, as I've always wondered whether the world prefers the infrared region or the ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. It turns out that people generally prefer their light with wavelengths between 10μm and 1000μm, except for a brief period in early 2006 when the world showed considerable interest in the ultraviolet region. You know, infrared is so 2005.
An imaginary person, conceived entirely as a method for starting this paragraph, recently complained to me that there is just too much hustling and bustling nowadays. I decided to check this out. I can't deny that there is a significant and growing amount of 'hustle' about, but their claim that there is an equal amount of 'bustle' simply doesn't stand up to rigorous scrutiny.
One of the great claims of the internet is that it connects people. So are people principally 'here' or 'there'? During most of the year in the United Kingdom, people are chiefly 'there', except for a number of brief periods in which a large proportion of the citizenry suddenly migrate to 'here'. Subsequently, they return to 'there'. Interestingly, the majority of Bradford's population claim to be 'here', whilst denizens of other British cities predominantly assert that they are in fact as expected 'there'.
I was pretty disappointed to discover that a search for Alex Guite doesn't yield enough search volume to produce graphs. I'd been really looking forward to comparing incidences of my name with searches for "most compelling blog description of the events following the disappearance of a flatmate's toothbrush".
I always like to thing that my blog posts have a strong moral dimension to them. Recent morals have included: always eat your greens; don't kill cute cartoon animals; and so forth. It looks like it's paying off: there is a whole lot of love out there.
Unfortunately, people don't seem to share my passion for the Taylor series so much and only have one thing on their mind.

facebook @ the IC

2006-05-11T00:28:00.000+01:00

Popular internet phenomena facebook has finally arrived at Imperial.
This is great news during the exam season as other Imperial revision avoidance techniques, such as heatedly discussing the relative merits of the Maclaurin and Taylor expansions, were starting to get a bit old. (Hint: it's the Taylor expansion which is the most elegant).
So if you're at the Imperial College, you should go ahead and register.
Then add me as your "friend".
If you're into this sort of thing, I'm afraid my "wall virginity" has already been taken.
We truly live in disturbing times.

This flat says 'no' to poor dental hygiene

2006-05-06T23:44:00.000+01:00

About a month ago I wrote one of my favorite blog posts to date. It told the story of what happened when my housemate's toothbrush got blown out of our apartment's window. The post had everything: great character development and a plot so gripping I should probably have reminded readers to return from the edges of their seats after reading it.
Avid followers will recall that the drama began when my housemate, TBR's Martin Archer, invited answers from Andy and myself to the following question: "Guys, where's my toothbrush?". Neither of us knew the answer to that question, but we did know the location of our own toothbrushes. They were in our own bedrooms charging up, ready for the kind of top class dental scrubbing that leads nine out of ten dentists to recommend electric toothbrushes over their manual counterparts (note: statistics may be fabricated).
Concerned that Martin may loose yet another toothbrush to the soft breath of a gusting wind, Andy and I took the opportunity of Martin's 22nd birthday last Monday to buy him a top of the range, dual head electric toothbrush. In addition to cleaning action so virile that Martin's winning smile will soon be featured on a billboard poster near you, a strange symmetry has descended on the flat. In every bedroom, an electric toothbrush stands tall and proud on it's inductive charger, impervious to the strong hand of the wind, each one an affirmation of humanity's dominance over dental plaque.
Quite by coincidence, last Tuesday all three of us found ourselves in the bathroom together cleaning our teeth, as Martin tried his new electric toothbrush. For the first time the three of us were able to nonchalantly stand around and allow our motorised toothbrushes do the hard work. Always quick on the observational humour, Andy quipped "Alex, I bet you're going to blog about this".

MSci Report: now with complimentary CD-ROM!

2006-05-02T23:09:00.000+01:00

About seven hours ago I handed in my MSci report, concluding almost a year's work in the organic solid state.
As you can see, it's an attractively bound document with some sweet formatting on the front cover. Apparently it even looks like LaTeX. In reality it's just faux-LaTeX done in Word.
Not shown is my first attempt at binding my copy of the report, in which I punched the spine into the wrong side. I'm keeping that one to entertain future interviewers with my novel approach to document presentation.
In other report related news, I had an excellent trip to the library yesterday with Alon to get some stuff for our project. As is his want, he got out yet another book on neo-conservatism (unrelated to our project) which led me to a surprising find: the number of non-science books in the Imperial College Library. Being the stereotypical scientist that I am, with no interest in metaphors, analogies and alliteration, I automatically head straight to the Physical Sciences section to pick up the latest learned article. What I'm missing is literally tens of shelves of non scientific texts. I was somewhat surprised to find some Steinbeck listed under 'humour'. Most excellently I found an 'Encyclopedia of Rhetoric'; make no mistake, I'll be reading it.

An alarming situation!

2006-04-30T18:25:00.000+01:00

With only 46.5 hours to go before the deadline for handing my Masters project in, absolute, true and mathematical time continues to march on (with the certainty of clockwork, ironically enough). I've noted that it appears from its own nature to flow equably without relation to anything external.
The project is coming along, I'm just putting the finishing touches to it, so I'm not overly worried right now. I'm more worried about the fact that my alarm clock has run out of batteries, so I am left completely unable to measure the onward march of time which I alluded to in my opening remarks.
Anyone who has picked up a copy of my latest briefing, "Alex Guite: what's his current deal? (as of April 30th)" will probably be aware that my alarm clock batteries have been flat for several months without causing me undue alarm. In truth, I'm blogging about this because I spotted an opportunity for a pun. Sorry.
In fact the real hilarity occurred when the batteries were almost flat, but still just about able to turn the motor, but only very slowly. Imagine my surprise at waking up, thanks to my trusty bodyclock which I carry around with me everywhere, at what I thought was my usual wake up time only to be informed by my alarm clock that it was sometime in the early morning. Immediately the most plausible explanation came to mind: I was in a space-time warp, much like the ones you read about when you're 8 (well I did, anyway) in which people disappear only to reappear sometime later with their watch running late by exactly the amount of time they disappeared for. In retrospect, I'm not sure that book constituted a very reliable source. Except a reliable source of nonsense. Du dum! (That's a drumroll, although I have just realised I don't really know how to write a drumroll, mostly because I never thought I would sink to the low of signposting a 'joke' with a musical signature).
Anyway, I'm going to return to work. The graph shows the electroabsorption response of a yellow polymer light emitting diode which I've been working on. The 3D plot pretty much encompasses the last two terms worth of work. Personally, I think it looks sweet as.

Nichtlineare optik und lichtmodulation

2006-04-20T22:15:00.000+01:00

Back in early April, I read on BoingBoing about the effects of adding Mentos to Diet Coke, which allegedly resulted in a carbonic geyser. I was somewhat sceptical and couldn't work out why the effect would only apply to Diet Coke. It looked cool, but as I don't have a garden in London I figured I wouldn't be able to try it out. Just in case it did actually work I decided not to try it out in the kitchen.
So anyway, I carried on about my normal business and tried not to think about this curious candy and cola conjecture. But last week I found myself back in Cardiff with not one but two gardens at my disposition (front and back gardens in the jargon). So last Saturday afternoon I went ahead and bought two bottles of Diet Coke and engaged in a wild goose chase to find some Mentos in North Cardiff (it wasn't that wild, I ended up finding some packets in local newsagents as opposed to a branch of a national supermarket).
As you can see from the freeze frames, it worked very well. You can see my surprise at this fact by the fancy footwork I had to use in order to get away from the soda jet as it threatened to erupt in my face.
Generally each eruption released about 1.5L of Diet Coke over my parents lawn. When I go back in the summer I'll let you know what effect this has had. When I tried to seed a further shower by adding more Mentos, it only had the effect of causing a slow and disappointingly undramatic bubbling. I tasted some of the left over Coke; it tasted like that new lime coke. I wasn't impressed.
I'm guessing that the Mentos provide bucket loads of nucleation sites for bubbles and fall fast enough through the coke that they form bubbles quickly enough at the bottom of the bottle that it pushes the rest of the liquid out the top. Still doesn't explain why it allegedly only works with Diet Coke.
I would have bought some regular coke to check this out, but after spending £3.04 on the diet coke and mentos, I was already 4 pence over my budget for cola related experiments this financial year.

I took some revision back to Cardiff, but in the end I didn't do any. Really needed the rest. Apart from adding mentos to diet coke in Cardiff, I spent some evenings in the Club Metropolitan catching up with friends, read some books, did some cycling and slept. Alot.

One of the books I picked up from the bookshelves at home was Clochemerle. As soon as I read the description on the jacket I knew that I would regret not reading this book:
"It is a candid, uninhibited comedy of the goings-on in a small provincial town, and of the fantastic feuds which developed from the decision to erect a public convenience near the parish church"
Just in case I wasn't convinced, the publishers noted that it was "one of the most amusing" books they had ever published. Sure, that was in 1951 and this last half century hasn't been bad for comedy, but to be honest they already had me. Those 1950s marketers sure knew a thing or two about making someone buy a book.
It hasn't disappointed, although after reading just a few chapters you just want to kick back with a glass of French wine, shrug your shoulders and adopt an altogether more Gallic attitude to life.

Finally, a number of readers (namely, zero) have contacted me outlining their suspicion that my blog was turning into a TBR's Martin Archer fan blog. It is true that I have prided myself on being first with all the latest gossip about this Imperial College celebrity from the people in the know (basically my housemate Andy and myself). But it turns out that this is no longer the place to turn for the inside scoop on TBR's Martin Archer because there is a new Martin Archer Fan Blog on the interweb, written by none other than Martin Archer himself! If I were you, I would go ahead and subscribe to the RSS feed post haste.

Should probably be working...

2006-04-09T13:23:00.000+01:00

Caught up in the emotion of seeing a perfectly good toothbrush blown out of an open window to an untimely end, I may have allowed myself to exaggerate some details of this incident in my last post.
One assertion on which I would like to put the record straight is my claim that I was "pondering over many quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore". I was doing no such thing. I was in fact reading Moondust, allegedly written by housemate my Andrew Smith, although I'm suspicious of this claim. I think it was just a marketing technique to make Andrew buy it.
Questions of authorship aside, whoever wrote it certainly penned an engaging read. Although the occasionally conversational tone and fluid references to popular culture sometimes tricked me into thinking that I was reading a 350 page magazine article which would have been well at home in G2, it was nonetheless insightful. The book's central thesis is that of the twelve men who have walked on the moon, nine of whom are still alive, soon there will be no living person who has had the experience of standing on the moon, looking back a quarter of a million miles to Earth.
With the aim of meeting and interviewing those surviving nine men, Smith explores the effect the lunar landings had on them (namely, how can you top walking on the moon with most of the world watching?) and, most interestingly, offers fascinating insights about what exactly drove humans to the moon. Ultimately for Smith, the lunar landings are as much about what they told us about the moon, as what they told us about ourselves.

In other news, there has been alot of hilarity this week with UKIP, after Cameron described them as "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists mostly". They certainly seem bafflingly proud that they have a Hitler quote as part of a random selection which greets visitors to their website (alongside the obligatory Churchill quotes, a perplexing quote from TV personality and well known political commentator Carol Vordeman and a whole bunch of quotes by that inspirational speaker, Jeffrey Titford MEP). Meanwhile Tory MP Bob Spink made an inexplicable contribution to the debate when he suggested that "UKIP supporters are no more racist than Tories were in the last election". Sorry, what? Well if there was any doubt about the fruitcake and loony charge it must have been crushed by the weight of Nigel Farage's amoured personnel carrier as he pulled up outside the Tory party conference, punning about parking UKIP's tanks on Cameron's lawn and delivering an 'impromptu' speech to about 30 UKIP supporters wearing Union Jack hats. How Churchillian of him.

Inside the conference hall, Cameron continued his new strategy of down playing his party's electoral chances, insisting that they have 'a mountain to climb'. Am I the only one thinking that in fact what he's saying is "oh, go on, vote for us, it'll be OK, because we won't win"?

I should get back to work now: I have a lot to do before the apparently secular Imperial College closes for Easter.

"Guys, where's my toothbrush?"

2006-04-02T23:26:00.000+01:00

Just as I was lamenting that I hadn't posted anything up here for a full week, my housemate and Liquid Lunch front man TBR's Martin Archer came to the rescue.
Imaging the scene: me, taking advantage of the holidays to relax, reading (pondering over many quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, no less), when there came a rapping, as of someone gently tapping at my chamber door.
"Guys, where's my toothbrush?" demanded Martin Archer. "I can't find it".
All I heard was "Dude, something mundane yet strangely messed up has occurred, it'll make great blog material".
Neither Andy nor I had an adequate answer to this question, the truth is that not one of us knew where Martin Archer's toothbrush was. I quickly realised the urgency of the situation: in less than four hours Martin Archer would wish to clean his teeth, but stripped of that most crucial of teeth brushing tools, the humble toothbrush, this would be a Sisyphean task. Clearly, this was no laughing matter.
The three of us adjourned to the bathroom, the last known location of the toothbrush, to consider the situation in more detail.
It was at this moment that this drama, playing out within my very own flat, developed a disquieting twist. It was not merely Martin Archer's toothbrush which had disappeared, but also the bespoke tupperware cup used to house his trusted dental broom.
Andy hypothesised with characteristic swift thinking that the toothbrush-cup combination may have been knocked off the open window sill by a gust of wind conspiring with the curtain to buffet it on to the floor. But even accounting for the possibility that the cylindrical geometry of the cup may have allowed it to roll across the bathroom, it could not be found.
Simultaneously, the unthinkable dawned on the three of us: the ethereal hand of the wind had not knocked Martin Archer's toothbrush into the accommodating safety of our flat, but had nothing short of grabbed it and thrust it out of the barely open window. The cheek of it and on a Sunday afternoon of all times.
A brief inspection of the ground below confirmed our worst suspicions: literally meters below our window Martin Archer's toothbrush lay recumbent and wretched on a mossy paving stone. Worse still: the plastic cup was strewn across the ground in two pieces. Martin Archer refused to show emotion, but I know that on the inside he was crying. We all were. In that moment we all grew older. The best laid plans of leaving a toothbrush on the window sill had gone awry.
The next part of the story basically features Martin Archer going outside and retrieving his toothbrush and plastic cup. Andy and I thought this was hilarious, but I'm not sure I actually understand why. Instead, I'll recount a more exciting version of this tale.
In order to avoid detection during the recovery operation I suggested to Martin Archer that he dons all black clothing so as to better blend into the April evening. He selected a black leather jacket and a stout pair of shoes, appropriate for the conditions underfoot and for abseiling off the side of our building to directly retrieve his dental hygiene products. He doesn't mess about.
But halfway into the mission disaster threatens to strike as Martin Archer almost misses the toothbrush, potentially compromising the whole operation and jeopardising years of meticulous planning. "Goddamit!" I shout over the radio. He gets the message.
Based on the dual benchmarks of firstly recovering Martin Archer's toothbrush and secondly recovering and mending his toothbrush cup, the operation was a success. To celebrate, we reconvened in the kitchen for debriefing and banter.

(Readers will be relieved to know that after recovering his toothbrush, Martin Archer threw it away and did not use it).

"The problem with climate models is that we don't understand the effect of clouds"

2006-03-25T15:27:00.000Z

Long time, no blogging.
Recently, the fulcrum about which my life has turned has been lab and a desperate attempt to collect as much data as possible and analyse it before my project viva. Maybe as a physicist I should have got used to this by now, but whole days spent in a dark lab alone really do mess with your mind.
In amongst all of this I found time to help Jad's campaign for the RCSU Presidency, which in part involved me dressing up as an elephant. I didn't really mind as previous experiences as a monkey had been pretty fun. This picture illustrates a regular occurrence when dressed up as a partisan pachyderm on campus. My prediction is that this effect extends beyond merely monkeys and elephants. Indeed, this was experimentally proved last night at the end of term Easter carnival by some guys dressed as rabbits.
Anyway, during the campaign and what must have been a very busy news week, Felix were kind enough to run an article alerting its avid readers to the fact that I was out and about campaigning again, but that there was no need for alarm as this was in no way scandalous. By the way, the real scandal is that the workload of Faculty Union Presidents is so high that it's starting to put off even the most dedicated of volunteers in Engineering.
Even so, five students were prepared to answer the call of service and stand for RCSU President, and almost another 30 stood for other Executive positions. It was a fun and entertaining campaign, made all the more pleasing by Jad's convincing victory. A whole bunch of campaign photos are here and photos of the results being announced are here. Congratulations Jad.
In other news, I had my last lecture yesterday. So what did I learn in my last lecture? If you want to get through cheap champagne fast, the best thing to do is to attend an atmospheric physics lecture and drink every time the lecturer says 'clouds', 'climate' or 'problem'.

Elections, hiking and so on

2006-03-07T21:38:00.000Z

With the exception of staining the blogsphere with a possibly immature post about the number 69, and a description of what happened when I, yes I, shared a pavement with the former leader of her majesty's Opposition, I haven't blogged much recently. Fear not, for I am back and I am sure you will be happy to know that I have "learnt some valuable lessons" in the last two weeks or so.

Chief amongst them is that some of the symptoms of hypothermia (erratic behavior, offensive language and uncontrollable shivering) are the very same symptoms as those of running a sabbatical campaign.

I know this because for the last three weeks I was Chief of Staff to Ben Harris in his bid to become Deputy President for Education & Welfare at Imperial. I also know about hypothermia because I read a helpful pamphlet before setting out on the RCC Night Hike last Saturday evening. I'm not sure that hiking across the North Downs for five and a half hours at night was the best way to rest after a busy campaign but it was a good laugh. I teamed up with Ben and Mariko to enter the 'novice' category (despite competently walking to the base hut). Our clever Dylan Thomas referencing team name ("Do not go gentle into that good night") was appropriately abbreviated to go "Don't go gently" by the organizers as we romped home a full 14 minutes ahead of our nearest novice competitors. So if you're looking for someone with a track record in walking at a novice level, I'm your man. (Other lessons learnt on the hike: do trust the earth's natural magnetic field, it is generally correct).

In addition to helping Ben's campaign, I also advised John Collins in his bid for the Imperial College Union Presidency. But it didn't just stop there, I even dressed up as a monkey to campaign for the guy. I'm not sure where this leaves my claim to have some dignity. Anyway, the valuable lesson I learnt whilst dressed up as one of our cheeky animal cousins is that girls can't get enough of a human sized monkey carrying a partisan placard. Is it actually possible that in just two hours inside the monkey suit I got more attention from Imperial girls than in four years of going about my normal business dressed as myself? I'd rather not answer, but I keep on telling myself that it was what was on the inside that attracted them...

Last Thursday all this monkeying about came to an end with the election count. Before I get to the results (I once attended a lesson where I was taught about 'suspense', can you tell?) I want to thank Ben for buying me some Innocent smoothies as a thank you present/the result of a bet we had. If a Socialist Worker candidate mentioned Iraq in hustings, Ben owed me a smoothie. If they didn't mention Iraq, then I owed Ben a smoothie. Unsurprisingly I made a smoothie profit.

Anyway, despite my predictions that it would so close between John and Joe Eldridge that you wouldn't be able to see the light between them, I was blinded by the 600 vote margin by which John won. It was one of those moments to be very happy that I was wrong.

Meanwhile, Ben won very convincingly in the first round of STV, and now the Welsh guy I met three years ago when I was organising the first PSU Freshers Ball is going to be Deputy President Education & Welfare. I'm pretty chuffed and still have a grin on my face 5 days later.

Well done guys, but don't forget that I've got my eye on you...

giggles

2006-03-05T17:55:00.000Z

How adolescent of me to find it amusing that '69' MPs signed a petition calling for tax to be cut on condoms...
There is a serious point to it all of course: it's crazy that the tax code classes contraceptives as a luxury item and charges VAT at the highest rate. I'm glad to see that Gordon Brown is likely to change this in his next budget.
BBC News story

Things: update

2006-03-01T23:29:00.000Z

I blogged earlier today about the threat of St David's Day passing me by unless I could find a daffodil in London. Indeed, I was happy to go on the record as saying "you can't get a daffodil in London for love nor money".
I was wrong. I got one for money.
Conclusion: it's a good thing that the Imperial College has a putative Welsh society.

Further update: things which have passed me on the Fulham Road this evening.

Former Conservative Party leader Micheal Howard.

I don't think he was thinking what I was thinking as in response to the large grin which I failed to mask across my face he looked, frankly, startled. It was pretty dark this evening. This is the only time I have ever seen him. There was something of the night about him.

Things...

2006-03-01T10:46:00.000Z

Things which have passed me by:

The Turin Winter Olympics
Pancake day

Things threatening to pass me by:

St David's Day, unless I can find a spring daffodil in London somewhere...

Private Eye, huh? Say no more, say no more, sir

2006-02-18T15:31:00.000Z

What with RAG week, lab and everything else this week, I didn't have a chance to buy a copy of Private Eye on campus when it came out. So I figured I'd head to my local neighborhoodly newsagent to pick one up after campaigning.
I couldn't see a copy on the shelves, so I asked the shopkeeper.
Me: "Do you have any copies of Private Eye?"
Shopkeeper: "Private Eye?"
Me: "Yeah, Private Eye."
Shopkeeper: "Private Eye... hmmm... I don't know that magazine" [Gestures to top shelf] "I do have a range of other titles you might be interested in Sir"
Me: "Er... Private Eye is a political satire magazine"
Shopkeeper: "Oh"
Me: "I think I'll try elsewhere"
Fortunately not far away in a second newsagents, the shopkeep was far more helpful when I explained that I couldn't see the popular political satire magazine. Ironically, it was hidden behind a copy of The Spectator, an unpopular political magazine.

As I mentioned, the reason behind these Private Eye shenanigans with local newsagents was RAG week, which went really well. I was leading Tours of the Queen's Tower, and I think we've had the most successful year since I re-started the tours three years ago. We showed over 300 people up the Imperial College landmark and even had to extend tours on Friday to cope with demand. Thanks to all the volunteers who helped give tours. Apologies to any budding sight seers who we had to turn away. I'll let you know how much we raised once it's all counted.
Those who were lucky enought to get a space on Thursday's tours were witness to a range of meterological phenomeon all within only half an hour: from blinding sun to hailstones. On the final tour of the day, I had another Queen's Tower first: the first time I'd seen a rainbow from 100 metres up in the skyline. Apparently rooted in the Albert Memorial, there really was gold at the foot of this rainbow (I guess gold plating counts, right?). The other end appears to be rooted in the city, where there certainly is gold.

Update (18/02/06): I've just found some more pictures from Thursday's tours, no rainbows here, but better lighting than the ones I posted on Wednesday.

Some great views South towards Battersea Power Station.

Stunning clouds over the Albert Hall. The Albert Memorial appears to stick out of the top of the Albert Hall, because both of them and the Queen's Tower were built in a quasi perfect straight line. Something about the superiority of the monarchy and ability to draw straight lines.

Great lighting looking to the East towards Westminster and the City. There are no end of landmarks to pick out!

One hundred metres up in the London skyline

2006-02-15T21:47:00.000Z

In what has become an annual tradition for me now, I'm leading tours up the Queen's Tower for RAG week again this week. If you're around on campus tomorrow or Friday swing by for a tour from myself or one of my crack team of tour guides (tours leave at 12:00, 12:30, 13:00 and 13:30 and cost £3, proceeds to Barnardo's). Get there early, Tuesday's tours were all over subcribed! Don't forget that this is a once a year opportunity: the rest of the year the tower is under lock and key.
For only three quid you get humour, historical insight, 324 steps, very little headroom and great views. Even after factoring in recent trends in the 'low headroom' market, each of those elements are worth more than £3 on their own.
Indeed, the views are particulary fine this year: the recent batch of cold but crisp weather lends itself well to uninterupted views across London.

So the moral is this: grab a camera, head to the Queen's Lawn, go ahead and give more than three pounds, enjoy the tour, get some great views.

24.25 hours of Cardiff

2006-01-28T02:15:00.000Z

So far I've avoided falling into the dull trap of complaining about whether or not I'm tired, sad or otherwise emotional on this blog. Too many blogs read "I'm so tired and sad right now" post after post. I aim to keep this blog as a brief flash of humour in the pan of the blogsphere, even if occasionally it could be confused for a whale watching journal.
Nonetheless I am going to say that this week has been a busy, tiring and all in all a very testing week.
One of the issues that came up this week was in that hot bed of student radicalism, Imperial College Union. Since my term as President of the Physical Sciences Union ended, I've been careful to keep out of internal PSU matters unless my advice was sought, but I got caught up in the resignation of the Broadsheet editor this week. I think Martin Smith (former Broadsheet Editor) sums it up well when he says, "Matthew will be sorely missed. It is a mistake for the committee to abuse and undermine such a talented and dedicated volunteer to the point of resignation. Editorial independence is a delicate flower that has been thoroughly stamped on in this case."
Yeah, there was other stuff this week as well, but what do you care?
Besides, in 9 hours I'm heading off for twenty four and a quarter hours of partying in Cardiff to celebrate 22 glorious years of Evans.

Yellow jacket

2006-01-22T23:15:00.000Z

Thanks to my yellow jacket, you can make me out on the bank of the Thames in this BBC whale watching photo taken from the Battersea Bridge.

TBR's Martin Archer

2006-01-22T13:59:00.000Z

Avid readers may recall that the dude next door to me, Andrew, has started a blog where he shares with us views on a myriad of subjects.
So, what then of my other flatmate, TBR's Martin Archer?
When he has a candid opinion or an insightful comment, how does he share them with the world?
Quite simply he shares them with the whole of the Imperial College London community on IC Radio every lunchtime on his radio show, Liquid Lunch.
By the way, if you followed that link to the ICL website, the news that scientists have found a strong link between cat faeces and schizophrenia is worth a read.
Martin Archer just gave me his demo CD. As you can see from the ~~photo~~ (update: TBR's Martin Archer asked me to remove the personal details visible on his demo CD so I have censored them out, despite these self same details being available elsewhere on the interweb, I have also given TBR's Martin Archer a little disguise so that he is unrecognisble to all but the most sophisticated face recoginition software), it gets my personal Alex Guite thumbs up of approval. It's hard to get better than that, unless you get a double thumbs up of approval (superseded only by the incredibly rare triple thumbs up of approval).
So, if you're a radio producer looking for a new DJ, then Martin Archer is your man. Check his CV here.
And for the ladies, don't forget that Martin Archer is a firm believer in keeping fit and healthy and visits the fitness suite before morning lectures.

More Whale Watching

2006-01-22T09:19:00.000Z

I met up with Ben yesterday afternoon on the Chelsea side of the very crowded Albert Bridge to watch the Thames Whale being winched on to a barge to take it downstream. As the barge moved off downstream the crowd broke out into a round of applause. I think this BBC News piece describes the day pretty well.
When I got back from the cinema last night I read the news that the Thames Whale had died during the evening. I hope that the legacy of this whale is to renew interest in whale conservation, especially at a time when some countries are pushing to resume whale hunting, under the sham of 'scientific' whaling.

Until yesterday, it had been awhile since I had last blogged. In that time alot has happened in the blogsphere.
The dude next door to me, Andrew, has re-launched his blog, Andrew's Blog. If you're thinking of wathcing a movie or some US TV, the likley hood is that Andy has seen it and has a trenchant opinion on it. Else, just go there for some entertaining and very drole writing.

Richard "Mullet" Warburton began his blog, True Contradictions, in the new year. The name comes from an aspect of paraconsistent logic and is well worth reading about, if like me you don't know what this is all about. Richard uses his blog to share his candid opinions about religion and politics.

Very exciting news is that famous knolwedge man Simon Simpson has got a blogger account. But it doesn't just stop there: he's working on a communual blog, Extravagance and Indulgence, with Andy and myself. It's a blog aimed at the 20 something man about town, intelligent but trendy, single but dating; who savours pleasing wines, has a descriminating pallette for fine cheeses, appreciates gracious cuisine and enjoys all of this with good conversation. Read the statement of intent for more details.

The Battersea Bottlenose

2006-01-21T13:33:00.000Z

Just got back from watching the Thames Whale around Battersea Bridge. I thought it had headed back out to sea after it had been spotted at Greenwich last night, but when I read on BBC News this morning that it was swimming around Chelsea Bridge I figured this could be my first chance to see a whale, and almost certainly my only chance to see a whale in the Thames outside my house! You can see the floating crane platform in the background from the last Battersea Bridge story, when it got hit by a gravel barge.
The whale was swimming slowly upstream up from Albert Bridge, under Battersea Bridge and down towards Chelsea marina where rescuers managed to persuade it to turn around and finally start heading downstream. The relief amongst the crowd lining the banks of the Thames was palpable, but short-lived.
The whale breached just below Battersea Bridge. When I got down on to the shore line, I got a far better feeling for the scale of the whale.
Rescuers quickly moved in to help the whale, and from what I was told by a Times journalist also on the bank with me, they also took the opportunity to examine and take samples from the whale to assess its health.
Shortly after the rescuers had managed to secure inflatables around the whale, we were asked by Police to moved up from the banks as the tide had turned. When I got back up on to Battersea Bridge Road I was amazed by how the crowd had swelled: the road was closed, camera crews had moved in, children had climbed trees to get a better view and police were trying to keep order.

I've pretty much recharged my camera battery now so am going to head out again when Ben makes it down to Battersea.

The solitary wave is no longer lonely

2005-12-13T07:28:00.000Z

Keen to end the solitude of solitons, I've been simulating what happens when two or more are collided. Its pretty awesome and have even managed to make a few animations- although Charlie and I are still debating about exactly what happens when you collide these guys.
The image shows the collision of two solitons, notice how they interact non-linearly. The small oscillation waves on the surface are instabilities in the program which I've since fixed by using a sweet RK4 method for time discretisation.
The last two weeks have been a complete geek-out working on this project, but frankly I'm enjoying it. Deadline Friday.
So why have I updated my blog mid-project when I'm spending most of my time in the computing suite or drinking coffee on Level 8? Gav has promised to update his blog twice daily which is highly exciting, but also means I really should raise my game. Although he hasn't today, so maybe I don't need that much more game.

Surfing the Soliton Wave

2005-12-03T16:47:00.000Z

Another day, another day attempting to model solitons for my computational physics project. This course really is becoming a way of life.
Incidentally, in a humiliating u-turn I've changed the comment settings to allow anonymous posting so that the well known Simon Simpson can share his views. Even with anonymous posting I'm sure it won't be difficult to pick out Simon's characteristic comments.

Simpson Comments

2005-11-21T21:42:00.000Z

I was privelged to receive the following comment by e-mail from the famous Simon Simpson which I think also doubles as a public service announcement:

Hi Alex,

Out of boredom and a desperate desire to procrastinate, I wandered on to you blog. Having scanned though a few of your postings I felt like commenting on one of them, only to discover that only people with a blog account on blogger.com can comment. How, stupid is that... Now obviously if you don't want people commenting that's fine, but then I fail to see the point of anyone being able to read what you have to say.

Any way I won't let that stop me.

In reference to your post on 29 Oct.

Finding your funny bone isn't too challenging. Simply bend your arm, and feel you elbow. You should notice that in addition to the main point at the end of the elbow there is also a smaller extrusion on the side pointing away from you. The ulna nerve which as I'm sure you know is responsible for the curious sensation, can be found at the end of the humerus, the medical term for the funnybone. This is rather an ironic name since most people don't find it very funny to strike thier funny bone. More precisely the ulna nerve is runs in the channel that is formed by the two aforementioned extrusions on you elbow. So in order to strike your funny bone simple bend you elbow and knock it gently into something like the edge of a table such that the edge contacts with the nerve. Although it is certainly an interesting sensation to experience I'm not sure I'd recommend doing it deliberately, as this nerve carries some of the signals for motor control and sensations for your lower arm and hands. The consequences of damage to this nerve are therefore not to be taken lightly.

The moral of this story is this: get a blogger.com account.

Breaking News: Evans Shuns Guite Over Hair

2005-11-17T06:22:00.000Z

Cardiff- In a statement this evening Evans announced draconian action against Guite in a scathing indictment of the recent hair cutting controversy.

The brief statement made by short message service at approximately 20:30 Wednesday, outlined Evans' grievance: "dude, you cut your hair".

Evans continued his statement to disclose the details of the punitive measures he plans to enact against Guite. In a direct address to Guite he explained "you are no longer welcome in my house".

The statement is the first formal reaction to Thursday's hair cutting event, in which over 6 months of hair growth was cut short.

Guite was unavailable for comment at time of press.

Dude, where's my hair?

2005-11-12T20:49:00.000Z

Hair cutting industry analysts will probably already be aware of what happened on Thursday: over six glorious months of unrestrained hair growth were bought to an end when I had my hair cut.
I know I'd been planning to let it grow until Christmas so I could have another shot at getting a ginger afro (or a g-fro as I like to call it), but it was all just getting too much (especially drying my hair after a shower).
The biggest changes thus far: my ears are cold and my bike helmet needed in depth readjustment to fit tightly onto my head.

Last Wednesday, finally managed to get over to cheapskates at the Moonlighting Club. It was as good as the rumours suggested, although they were abit stingy with their mixers. I also managed the impressive feat of setting a meeting point in a pub, only to wait in a pub around the corner wondering where everyone was. The pub I'd suggested we meet in perhaps?

In other news, I've just realised that I haven't yet linked to gavagavagava.co.uk, a site which I have found to be fairly educational.

Angry music: leads to bad programming habits

2005-11-07T07:24:00.000Z

Had a fairly busy time last week: mostly working on my computational physics project until 16:50 on Friday (deadline Friday at 17:00). For some reason Pete and I decided that the best way to rest after getting about 4 hours sleep between us on Thursday night was to go to Kings Union. I think Martin might have had something to do with it by suggesting the idea to us. Anyway, it was awesome. Thank you Red Bull.

I managed to catch Battersea Park Fireworks last night from Battersea Bridge after coming back from Jazz Aid at Imperial. The Big Band played some new stuff and although playing in the Great Hall was more formal than in the Union it was quality stuff.

I had an article in Felix this week in response to a column the week before. Neither of the articles are online as the website hasn't been updated since the start of term. Absolute disgrace. Mine is pasted below. Enjoy.

There are worst things than missing Neighbourghs

‘Foreigners should be sent back to their own countries for their own governments to deal with them as they fit’ urged Iain Heaton on these pages last week as he took a break from his characteristic whinge that he had not been able to watch Neighbours since graduating. His column started innocently and inanely enough by offering us his candid opinions on the latest Darkness album, before taking an inexplicable right turn into a full on collision with the rights of asylum seekers.

Heaton highlighted the case of two Albanians and a Lithuanian convicted of trafficking Eastern European girls into Britain and forcing them to work as prostitutes. Expressing more outrage that previously two of the men had been granted asylum from persecution than at the crime itself, he went on to outline his solution to crime in Britain: deport all asylum seekers who have committed a crime.

Never mind that only a tiny fraction of crime is committed by asylum seekers, a fact that even Heaton grudgingly admitted later in his column, his remedy is dangerous and prejudiced. The right to asylum from torture, unjust imprisonment and execution is an inalienable human right common to all people. It should never just be abused in a crass attempt to fill up column inches. As with every other nation, we have an international responsibility to welcome asylum seekers, not greet them with Heaton’s contempt. The choice they had to make was between staying in their own country, facing persecution and possibly even death, or leaving everything they had to seek asylum.

Disturbingly, Heaton swapped loosely between writing about asylum seekers, immigrants and foreigners as if the terms were interchangeable. The reality is that they refer to very different things: there is a huge difference between the political activist seeking asylum from persecution and someone seeking to immigrate for economic reasons. Whether Heaton would deport ‘foreign’ tourists he didn’t make clear.

When Heaton argued that asylum seekers should be sent back to their own governments to be dealt with as they see fit he conveniently glossed over any consequences. In countries from which asylum has been granted, being dealt with as the ‘government sees fit’ means being sent back to torture, persecution, unexplained disappearances and death.

Glibly repeating that old calling card of hysterical journalism, that Britain is somehow ‘at bursting point’ unable to accept anymore asylum seekers, Heaton demonstrated a remarkably loose grip on facts. In Britain we take fewer asylum seekers per head of population than our European neighbours; and although we cannot hope to welcome unlimited numbers, the reality is that we are not being swamped or inundated. In truth it is developing countries, close to the world’s flashpoints, which host the greatest share of asylum seekers; 8 million alone in Africa with uncounted numbers internally displaced.

Asylum seekers do not come to Britain out of choice, indeed many desperately want to be repatriated to their country as soon as it is safe to do so. South Africans and Chileans who fled to Britain during the 1970s left to return home as soon as they were able, more recently Iraqis and Zimbabweans have been heading back to their countries.

For Heaton a bad day might be missing Neighbours, but Iain out there around the world things can be a lot worse than not getting your daily fix of the classic Australian soap.

Changing Clocks: Temporal Sleight of Hand

2005-10-31T19:13:00.000Z

Although I'd seen news stories last week whose central thesis was that the clocks were going to change on Sunday, it was one of those things which I just ignored and assumed wouldn't affect me.
How wrong was I. Currently I have no idea what the time is.
I think Radio 4 have changed their clocks, because they're usually pretty diligent about these sort of things, but even that's no guarentee. My mobile seems to have automatically updated, but I don't think every clock in college has changed. I thought I'd got this whole thing sorted, but then I cycled into Battersea Post Office this morning, expecting their time pieces to agree with mine, but I found myself thrown back into the Sargasso Sea of temporal confusion.
Oh dear.

The Funny Bone

2005-10-29T19:20:00.000+01:00

It occured to me today that I haven't hit my funny bone for some time, which I think is a shame. I'm not sure I could locate it on purpose though which is even more frustrating.
When was the last time you hit your funny bone and what was you reaction?

Happy 100th Birthday Cardiff!

2005-10-28T09:09:00.000+01:00

Cardiff today celebrates 100 glorious years since it was awarded city status back in 1905. I was back in Cardiff as recently as last weekend and my on the spot research confirmed that Europe's youngest capital city is still awesome. Keep up the good work Cardiff.

BBC News Wales story

On the subject of BBC News Wales, I had a pleasing surprise on Wednesday morning: one of my photos was included in this week's gallery of 'Wales in Pictures'. Check it out here (picture number 6).

Smiling

2005-08-19T02:40:00.000+01:00

Started the day with a smile on my face today: my sister got 3A's and a B in her A-levels. Best of all, this means she's coming to London next year to study Geography at UCL.
Well done!

"LASER" vision

2005-08-19T02:34:00.000+01:00

If you're of a weak constitution, you might want to look away now.
Pete and I had "LASER" eye tests today, so that we can do sweet physics with Class 4 "LASERs".
The first part of the test was just your run of the mill eye test. You read a series of letters off a wall to the obvious delight of the optometrist. They say, "Well done, you've got the vision thing", and then you just go home and carry on about your normal business.
But in the "LASER" eye test, the optometrist goes ahead and puts some drops in your eyes to widen the pupils. Twenty minutes later everything is unbearably bright and you can't focus on anything closer than a metre.
I can't have had an even dose between the eyes: my right pupil was far bigger than my left, lending me a special deranged look. Need to get some for Halloween.
The end game of all of this was to get some quality images of my retinas. Check it out...

So now I can use Class 4 "LASERs". Sweet.

What If...

2005-08-15T19:25:00.000+01:00

After the success of the popular BBC series If, in which real issues are explored through drama documentaries, I've been asking questions which they didn't have time to cover.
Whilst I was away at the weekend I gave some thought to what would happen if I was given the following commission:

"Go ahead and produce pretty much the sweetest two volume pocket reference book ever"

Probably the first thing I would do would be to get a subject. When thinking about this I realised that I would almost certainly write about Craig Carlos. I mean, I've pretty much got all the info I need since I was honored enough to walk to school with him from 1999 to 2002 (inclusive).
I would start the first volume off with a Forward by Martyn Evans, who would set the book in its historical context. The rest of the volume would basically be essays and dissertations about Carlos. In the margins I would probably put little bits of information and Carlos trivia, such as:
"Did you know that... Carlos is awesome?"
The second volume would be set aside to a photo-documentary about Carlos, which I would probably ask Hutch to do. I'd pretty much give him a wide brief in order to give him a good amount of artistic headroom, but I would ask him to make sure he gets some pictures of Carlos in the following locations:

-Strolling around in Llanishen or Thornhill
-Down the allotment, tending to his vegetable patch
-In his bathroom, or as Carlos insists on calling it, his Salle de Bain

So that would be pretty much the sweetest two volume pocket reference book ever.
The only problem I would guess is that it would be so sweet, regular paper might not be able to handle it. In which case it would probably have to be spread over a few more volumes, until technology cathes up and develops a sweet enough paper.

Now that I've got that off my chest, I can get back to my normal business.

A ginger maverick writes...

2005-08-15T07:29:00.000+01:00

Hello chums.
According to Technorati, one blog is created every second. Moreover, 55% of new bloggers still post three months after they started. I don't want to let the side down, so I've decided to post some more stuff. That and Hutch told me to.
I've just got back from Cardiff where I celebrated 21 magnificent years of Carlos.
In order to get ready for the celebrations, I managed to get in a cheeky 40km cycle in on Saturday which took me around to Castell Coch, which was pretty sweet.
Whilst I'm on the subject of cheekiness, Gav and I failed to meet for a cheeky pint on Friday evening, despite me arriving back in Cardiff in time for last orders. Next time we'll have to synchronise our time pieces.
I predicted that during the celebrations we would probably at some juncture start dancing, so I took the precaution of preparing for this by getting some tips from Napoleon Dynamite. This theoretical prediction was confirmed when we did indeed start dancing.
Was a quality night back in Cardiff. Carlos gave me 'full marks' for buying him a pint, which I appreciated.
Other interesting events of the night was the taxi ride back with a frankly curious driver. I also saw another example of the Moire effect, something which keeps on happening to me now.

Back in Caerdydd

2005-06-26T05:22:00.000+01:00

Got back to Cardiff on Thursday by Megabus slightly hungover from Birthday drinks the night before.
This is basically my holiday for this year so I'm making the most of it. In exciting sleep related news, I slept in a hammock over at Richard Mullet's place on Thursday night. I'm currently considering replacing my bed.
I don't know about you, but I've never had porridge. I find the idea by turns revolting, by turns deeply exciting. So I went ahead and tried to make some in the microwave for breakfast. Still don't know what it tastes like: I turned my back and it exploded.
This morning I had a quality cycle along the Taff Trail. Did slightly under 70km through Wales' verdant and pleasant countryside. Can't beat it. In exciting canine related news, a dog ran out in front of me. Good job I stayed up until 12:30 replacing my brake pads last night. Even so, the dog had the temerity to look at me as if it was all my fault. Bitch.
Dial-up Internet is so painfully slow I might not update for a few more days. Besides, I've just rediscovered my collection of The Muppet videos.

Summer Ball: Totally Sweet

2005-06-20T05:31:00.000+01:00

My cognitive processes are slowly returning to ‘operational’ this evening after what was frankly the best ball I’ve ever been to at Imperial.
The scope of the event and attention to details was hugely impressive. After the free drinks reception, Martin, Andy and myself headed down the red carpet into the funfair. We started the evening with a delightfully laissez-faire approach to personal safety by taking part in a number of head on collisions in dodgems. Great fun. As the queue got longer and our bruises took on a more worrying hue, we headed off to the casino. After loosing some of my fictional £250 on Blackjack, I decided to follow Andy’s lead and pooled my remaining money with Martin, in order for him to make some sage and considered investments on the roulette table. Martin oversaw a huge growth in our combined fortune and we seemed to be in with a shot at top prize. But past performance wasn’t necessarily a guide to future performance when we lost it all in a single bet. I think there might be a moral in there somewhere.
The rest of the evening passed in a delicious haze of dancing, conversation and drinking. This was the most well attended Imperial ball of recent times and there was always a familiar face around.
As you can see in these photos, even at half four in the morning the cut of our jib was particularly stunning.
As the sun started to rise above the skyline we assembled beneath the Queen’s Tower for our survivors photo. I grabbed a free breakfast of bacon, sausage and eggs. Just what was needed.
We slowly made our way back to Battersea, stopping off in Tescos to grab some croissants and a chat with the sociable cashier. He was so happy when we wished him a Happy Fathers Day that he said nothing at all and avoided eye contact.We watched Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life over breakfast, before retiring to bed at seven o’clock this morning. Awesome.

Mocking the Week

2005-06-17T07:31:00.000+01:00

Terribly exciting news today. I just added a link to Pete's blog. He doesn't seem to have named his blog, so I have given it a wicked awesome name: "Pete's Total Blog". Go ahead, take a look. You're gonna have to sign in with an MSN passport. Gone are the days when a British passport would get you anywhere.
Jamie kindly furnished Andy, Martin and myself with spare tickets for this evening's recording of Mock the Week, a new topical satire show. Featuring amongst others Rory Bremner, the comedy was so incisive I cut myself on some of the sharp satirical shrapnel.
Right now, I'm going to get back to the giant suduko in this week's Felix.

The 60 second quick vignette

2005-06-15T07:29:00.000+01:00

I just thought I would share with you a quick sketch I wrote.

So this penguin is walking down this road, when it comes across a fire hydrant.
The penguin is all like "WTF, man?", because there are no fires where the penguin comes from, on the poles.
But then along blows this helium balloon, who is all like "Don't worry about that stuff, man".
So the penguin whips out a national newspaper and totally solves the suduko puzzle, without even having a pen.
The helium balloon is so impressed that it rises up into the mountains (which is where the eagles fly).
The climax is when Martyn Evans walks in. Everyone is so happy, they have a trance party in his honour.
The end.

I hope you liked the sketch. I thought it was awesome.

Insect Bite Update: Day 6.

2005-06-15T07:12:00.000+01:00

Feeling a great deal better today. The swelling has really gone down and I'm able to walk with nether a care. I'll be in skipping around in meadows just as soon as I can buy some insect repellent.
Good news from Imperial College Union Council: Martin got half colours for all his work on Broadsheet, the student newspaper of the Physical Sciences Union. You can take a look at all of the issues here. Well done Martin.
Yesterday I chaired what should hopefully be the last PSU executive of my presidency, barring anything crazy happening. Next year's Exec are already planning the Freshers' Ball and have alot of great ideas. Good luck guys.
I've been taking it fairly easy today. The melange of antibiotics and antihistamine tablets means I'm constantly hungry, yet have no appetite. I went to a lecture this evening given by Prof Michael Duff, the new principal of Physical Sciences at Imperial, entitled "The 10 big questions in Physics". He wanted to know whether M-theory is the full M-onty. It all got too much for me.

Insect bite update: Day 4. Not so awesome.

2005-06-13T07:37:00.000+01:00

Recent blog posts such as "Yesterday I got bitten by an insect. Awesome" may have given some readers the mistaken impression that I enjoyed being bitten by insects. In light of the last 24 hours I can confirm that there is little fun in having ankles so swollen that even walking small distances is gruelling.
The last 24 hours haven't all been bad. In a bumper week of birthdays, yesterday evening I joined 27 others in celebration of 21 sprightly years of my friend Martin. Given what happened last time I celebrated a birthday, I took particular attention not to sit around in any long grass for too long.
I think Martin enjoyed the celebration. I'm glad I went out, really cheered me up.
Today I've been lounging around in the house, partly due to drowsiness, partly because getting outside would require too much walking. Andy and I watched the entire Karate Kid trilogy. There were so bad, they were totally awesome.
Wax on, wax off.

Insect Bite Update: Day 3

2005-06-11T21:36:00.000+01:00

I woke up early, hoping to travel across London to do some campaigning in Barking where there are two close by-elections.
However, a small insect had already thwarted my plans on Thursday night. My insect bite had swelled up even more over night, now it almost covers the full extent of my forearm. In the photo, the terracotta line indicates the dimensions of a regular arm. I was torn between thinking that this was awesome and worrying. So I called NHS Direct to seek a professional opinion. Sadly, they decided it was worrying and suggested that I see a doctor. I was so impressed: despite it being 'out of hours' I got an appointment with a doctor at the Chelsea and Westminster within an hour.
Apparently it's infected and I'm now on a course of antibiotics. Which means no drinking for a week, not even at the Summer Ball! Ho hum.

Yesterday I got biten by an insect. Awesome.

2005-06-11T05:29:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, whilst playing frisbee in Hyde Park to celebrate 22 glorious years of my flatmate Jamie, I got bitten by an insect.
No big deal I figured. But when I undertook my routine 'looking around' as I awoke this morning, I noticed that my left arm was uncharacteristically large. Initially I hypothesised that I had put in some extra time at the gym and buffed up. I soon realised that this was a bogus theory, as I hadn't been to the gym since April. Turns out that I've reacted badly to this insect bite.
Take a look at this photographic evidence. The aquamarine line is an artist's impression of the normal outline of my arm.

Hoping that a piriton tablet would ease the swelling, I set out about my normal business. Two tablets later and still no change, I decided to consult my local friendly neighbourhoodly pharmacist. Agreeing with my suggestion that this was 'quite a large bite', she sold me a bunch of tablets and a curiously pink cream. Following the cream's instructions and taking great care not to accidentally apply it vaginally, I smeared the bite with it.
I'll let you know how it works out. In the meantime, I'm off to speak with more people, using this bite as a conversation piece.