bikes and things

I’m a bit of a Strava addict at the moment. I even record my Brompton journeys to add a little more to my mileage each week. It’s been fascinating to see how far you actually ride in a week once you record all journeys. It doesn’t take much to knock the miles right down and you can quickly see where you need a make a little more effort. The whole idea of competing against lots of others online doesn’t interest me as much though, especially in terms of speed. I don’t mind seeing how many miles someone has chalked up as that’s always impressive, but it feels like some of the KOMs are just ridiculous. Maybe it’s because I’m riding fixed at the moment and can’t chase them down but most do seem un-achievable.

I generally prefer to race against myself and get those little cups saying you’ve got a PR (personal record). Now when I say race, I don’t mean going flat out like an idiot at all costs. I mean cycling home from the office, getting a good rhythm going and getting a decent speed out of the bike. It makes it all the more satisfying when you realise that you were doing a decent pace and weren’t hammering away at it, just a nice sense of rapid movement.

So to make Strava more personal I found a little Chrome extension to show your results on each segment instead of your placing against others. You can switch to personal each time you click on a segment but this defaults to it which is pretty nice, therefore making Strava infinitely more personal.

So you can now see quickly when you had your best form on a certain segment. I’m far keener on racing against myself than others at the moment. It shows how much you have improved and got fitter which is the most satisfying part of cycling, apart from cake and chatting of course.

Dogs are great but they just don’t have any sense of when they should stay out of the picture. I was crying with laughter at the end of this Buzzfeed style list of ’16 photos hilariously ruined by dogs pooping in the background’.

This one almost sent me over the edge though.

Via Emma

Last Sunday Emma and I went for a bit of a wander in town, poked our heads in a few shops, grabbed a coffee and headed up to the Photographers Gallery. I took my camera with me but due to it being cold the battery died. So this is the only shot I got all day which was pretty annoying.

I was a little disappointed with the Photographers Gallery overall. The entrance sequence is very strange and you end up piling on top of people as you enter due to the tiny area to buy tickets. Then you have to turn around and cross back over those same people to get to the stair which is very cramped.

The first floor exhibition was the Warhol images. Some were interesting but most had very little meaning to me. Nothing of any real value in my mind. It was rammed too and you felt like you were on a badly design conveyor belt.

Next up was the Burroughs floor. Nope, sorry, he may have been a wonderful writer but these were just snaps and a series on a filing cabinet. Even worse was the text that went with the images that aimed to overlay an implied sense of meaning to something ordinary over 40 years later. Not at all engaging at all to my mind.

Just when I thought all was lost we got to the top floor to see the David Lynch exhibition. For some reason it felt more spacious which was probably helped by less people cramming in to see it. There was less of a conveyor belt feeling too and the prints were bigger and had more impact which also helped. Lynch also chose a soundtrack for his images which further enhanced the impact of his work although its very subtle. It’s dark and brooding but somehow avoids the ruin porn cliche. Well worth seeing, just avoid the first two floors. Your mileage may vary obviously. The four quid price of entry is a bargain for the Lynch exhibition.

Here’s a couple of the Lynch Photos. The exhibition is on until the 30th March.

Last night, during the storms that were taking place, this tweet found it’s way into my timeline by Hackney MPS.

Something awful had happened in Holborn where a section of building, presumably a parapet, fell down on a parked car and killed the poor woman sitting in the drivers seat.

The tweet from the Hackney section of the MPS was the first out there and included two emoji characters the hand together praying and the head in hands smiley. My first reaction to that was it was a bit weird to include those. My use of smileys and emoji is usually on Instagram or Twitter and used in a slightly comedic or playful way, especially the last character, the head in hands. This is usually used as a sign of shame or embarrassment usually posted on a compromising or silly picture.

I still think it’s kind of odd as I’d like to think of a police twitter account as being purely factual and professional and devoid of smileys. I guess the test would be, in my mind at least, whether you would message your boss with a smiley or emoji character.

But then as I’ve learnt before people use social media in different ways than you might expect and what is deemed acceptable is constantly changing. Maybe I’m being too old, miserable and over sensitive but it still doesn’t seem quite right or terribly respectful in this instance. I’m sure other people won’t see it as a problem though.

Writing this post I also discovered a WordPress bug in that it really doesn’t like emoji characters!

I’ve tried to use this place as a reason to write slightly longer form discussions or ‘articles’ about things that interest me recently. My view of what this place is changes often but for the large part it’s a journal of sorts and a place to record thoughts and images. It seems like a good exercise to flex your brain slightly and construct a longer discussion, or series of thoughts, as opposed to the notes form I often create at work for the purposes of communicating information in a succinct way.

Thinking back to how I got better at photography, I only got better by doing more of it. Writing is clearly the same and MG Siegler has started writing 500 words a day for this very reason. The reason I’m blathering on about all of this is that I found a great article on Technovia this morning on the bus which spurred me into writing about it. Especially this quote from the article.

But there’s another reason to write, and I think for most people it’s the most important reason of all. Writing helps you understand yourself. It forces you to focus your thoughts and move them from the massively-parallel way that your mind works into a kind of linear order. The process of writing something down turns it from a fleeting thought into something much more concrete.

When you write for this reason, it doesn’t really matter if anyone else reads. What matters is that you have written something that’s more than a single thought.

It’s great to find articles like this and it’s the whole reason I still am a heavy user of RSS. I find things like this all the time when I’m in an idle moment. I’ve added the Technovia feed to my list of essentials in Reeder.

It’s so sad to see my favourite pub, after The Gowlett, close at the end of last year. I feel like I should record it’s passing in some way so popped out with my tripod and camera at lunch yesterday. I kind of missed my weather window a bit but I think I’ll record a few more shots as they take it down.

Had some really good evenings in there after work. It was a pretty special place with a great crowd of people, staff and also a decent kitchen. I guess good things don’t always last forever. We were fortunate enough to have our Christmas do in there this year as a fond farewell to the place. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in there for quick drink after work at 6.30 / 7 and left at 1am in a worse for wear state after getting carried away chatting with colleagues friends.

I wish I’d got a few of the interior just after they closed too. RIP Crown and Goose. Now we just have to find a replacement pub to adopt.

A few weekends back I went back to the West Country to see my Mum, some friends, ride a bike and go to the dentist – the same one I’ve been going to for the last 25 years. On Sat I headed down the M5 to see my Aunty who lives in Brent Knoll near West-Super-Mare. My mum and my Dad are both from that area.

One of the things we used to do when we were younger was go and explore the now derelict fort on Brean Down. Brean Down is a rocky outcrop poking out into the Bristol Channel just west of Weston and overlooked by Uphill. It’s had various incarnations of a fort on the outer reaches of the land mass over time with the latter being of second world war origin.

The site has a long history, because of its prominent position. The earliest recorded settlement is from the Early to Middle Bronze Age.

The current buildings were constructed in the 1860s as one of the Palmerston Forts to provide protection to the ports of the Bristol Channel, and was decommissioned in 1901. During World War II it was rearmed and used for experimental weapons testing.

But what interested me so much about it is that I had memories of the fort and walks around it as a child. When I thought back to it they seemed completely vivid and still strong in my mind. Yet when we walked up the stairs to the top of the hill it all seemed entirely new to me.

The idea of memory is a fascinating idea to me and I think about it a lot, especially in relation to photography and imagery. I was somehow shocked that something could be so utterly different. I don’t seem to remember the long walk in or the compact nature of the site or the general form or arrangement of it. I also think that certain areas had been closed off and made safe since the National Trust had taken it over but even so I was till confused and at points not sure I had referenced the right place in my mind. This further makes you question what memory is and how the mind overlays its own additions in later years.

Regardless of relation back to childhood memory I was really blown away, quite literally in places, by the area. The sense of exposure, the wind, the height and the views over Weston, Burnham-on-Se and the Bristol Channel were incredible. It was sunny just long enough for us to get to the Fort and back before it closed in and started raining.

We had a look around the end and I clambered over some rocks at which point I realised how exposed I was and how rough the sea looked beneath me.

We also had a poke around the old gun emplacement which had a strong stench of sheep poo. Looking down we could see why, it was everywhere.

The mixture of the weathered concrete against the colours of the sea and the rocky outcrop made for a few nice snaps. I’d love to spend a few days there with a tripod though. So many photo opportunities! After that we made our way back along the lower path which was far less exposed and back to the van.

It really is a stunning place and well worth a visit if you’re ever in that part of the world. The Guardian even lists it as one of the best 10 walks in the UK.

I did a lot of driving a few weekends ago and had the phone on the handsfree kit in the van. I thought I’d give Siri a go to play some music, unfortunately it didn’t work out so well.

I got a tweet last night from Petra van der Ree letting me know that Architizer had featured the Architecture Pastebook as one of their 20 best Tumblr blogs to follow.

It’s great to be featured although the way they described my posts is ever so slightly odd. But I don’t really mind as they push a lot of traffic around. It’s also worth saying why I started it and I wrote a post about that when I started.

Architect and photographer Andy Matthews from Peckham, England, fills this Tumblr with images that he finds in his research or on design sites. It is a high-quality batch of fairly straightforward building documentation.

I guess they could have said something about my love of brutalism and concrete but it’s still nice to be featured. I woke this morning with a lot more followers on Tumblr which no doubt means I’d better make a bit more effort with it and post some original content (with attribution) and up the quality a bit.

Thanks for all the followers Architizer!

We didn’t call it a dry-athalon or try and go on about it too much hopefully, but we did somehow end up not drinking during January. We didn’t start immediately as it seemed a little odd to not have a glass of wine with our food on New Years day but since then we avoided all contact with the stuff.

I’ve never really considered giving up booze but over the years beer, and drink in general, has crept further and further into my life. Whether working late at work, relaxing in the evening, meeting people, weekends, dinners etc, booze has very much been a part of it. A pint of Guinness there, a can of Red Stripe there, a glass of wine with dinner, a G+T after a stressful day etc, it all adds up. The worst part being that your liver needs a break I guess and it’s just not getting it. I’m not suggesting that I’ve ever had a problem with the stuff, as I’m too much of a control freak, but booze pervades almost every part of my life at times. I’ve been weak too and it’s just easy to grab a drink as a habit.

We tentatively floated the idea and both agreed to do it for at least a month, or try. So we took all the booze that was in the house and moved it to the top shelf in the kitchen. Out of sight, out of mind so they say. At least it wasn’t looking at you in the face each time you were in the kitchen.

And yes it’s a fairly random selection of drink. The Bells is for hot drinks with lemon and not to drink with coke or anything, and the Desperados – what can I say… I quite like one every now and then.

I guess booze is like any drug. It’s bloody hard to give up and we found the first few days painful, oh so painful. Trying to break out of the habit was really difficult, especially at the weekends where we might grab a few drinks and watch a film together. It’s hard breaking those ties or links to activities that usually involve a wee drink. Aleks likened my Twitter posts about not drinking to the five stages of grief which she seemed to find amusing. Those stages being, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance.

So what do you replace it with? Well chocolate seemed to be a suitable substitute but it’s not quite right to replace it with another vice. But your body seems to want something else. We both ended up drinking a lot more water and have both lost a bit of weight as a result. It seems to have been a good thing to re-visit and reassess your relationship with alcohol, not as a detox* but just because you should probably have a break. I’ve also slept better, felt far fitter on the bike, had better sense of well being and not been such a grumpy arse. The latter has come back as the stress levels have risen again. It’s also a lot better for the bank balance, not shelling out all that cash at the corner shop on Red Stripe each evening.

And the strangest thing.. well we could have started drinking on Sat, but we didn’t. There seems to be a slight sense of fear of going back to the old ways, or maybe it’s just that we’ve broken that bond and we’re more able to say no? It would be nice to have a drink again but to keep it as a treat, just at weekends or something perhaps. Regardless it has been a fascinating experience to see how you react when something like this is taken away or you try to limit yourself in some way. I even had a crazy idea of trying to give up booze, chocolate and coffee but that really was scary. It does make you think that it could be quite achievable with enough will power. There’s something quite liberating about taking control of all that again. Perhaps we’re at the final stage of our grief, acceptance.

* I read Bad Science this year so avoid the term Detox at all costs now.