Icewind Dale

Sadly, this post isn't about an ancient PC role playing game, so if you came here after googling that title - I apologise. That's apologise, with an 's' - not a 'z.' Fuck off auto-correct. I went back up to Manchester at the weekend on the motorbike. I set off on Friday afternoon hoping to avoid the traffic on the motorway (it's always, always congested around Birmingham. Without fail. I bet it's congested right now, actually), but on the way to the M5 I discovered that my back tire was flat. It didn't look particularly 'down,' but when I was riding, the back end just felt 'funny.' Not Joe Pesci 'funny,' just a bit unstable. I stopped a few times and looked at it and pressed it with my thumb, and it looked and felt OK to my novice eyes/thumbs...but I called in to a garage before my junction and asked if a mechanic could have a quick look at it. Turns out it was completely void of any air whatsoever. Completely flat. He pumped it up with his little hand held squirty-gas thing (technical terminology, right there) and it went rock solid...and the ride quality improved dramatically. Leads me to wonder whether it's been flat the whole time I've had it, as truth be told, it's felt a little bit unstable the whole time. With the CBF, you could instantly see if you had a puncture because the tires were quite thin, but with this bike's big fat tires, it's hard to tell. Unless you get a bloke with a pressure gauge to check for you. So – note to relatively new motorcyclists: check your tires. If I hadn't just happened to pass that garage, I probably would've continued on to the motorway and then cranked the bike up to 70 – 80mph with a flat tire...and who knows how badly that little scenario could've ended.

The weekend passed with little incident – saw my myriad nephews and nieces and brother and sisters, saw some friends on Saturday night and then came back. The ride back was particularly horrible, though it had nothing to do with traffic jams or a flat tire – it was down to the fucking gale-force winds that threatened to blow me sideways off the road almost continuously. Seriously, the trees at the sides of the motorway were bending over with the force of the fucking wind and at one point just past Stafford, the back wheel actually shifted from under me and I thought I was dead. I managed to keep control and get the bike straight again, but fuck me – what is it with the damned weather this year? It feels like mother nature is throwing everything at me: January – February, when I first started riding, the weather was stupidly cold – to the point where I was wearing 3 pairs of gloves to keep feeling in my hands. March – September it rained almost constantly, with a little bit of wind and sleet thrown in for good measure, and now we've hit October, the wind seems to be wanting to get in on the act. The kind of wind I've only ever seen in news reports. And it's always blowing against me – never behind me, making the ride actually bearable. So, not only is riding a motorbike loud and cold and (to be honest) a little bit uncomfortable, now I've got to hold on for grim death because the wind doesn't want me to stay upright. Makes me wonder why I fucking bother to be honest. Oh, wait – petrol is still £1.40 a litre. That's why.

Went back to that shopping centre in Bristol this week to try to use some more of my vouchers. I'm probably in an enviable position in that there's not really anything I want or need. I've got a fuck load of gadgets, and enough clothes...so I bought a travel towel for my planned Thailand trip in early 2013, and an iTunes voucher. Never used an iTunes voucher before, but it's pretty straight forward really – you just scrape the silver strip off the back and input the code that's revealed. So what did I get from the store? Bit of a mixed bag really. Got the new Muse album, The 2^nd Law. And it's a bit cack. Several of the tunes are complete rip-offs of Queen songs, and the rest are, in the main, floaty high pitched dross with a few guitar riffs thrown in. There are one or two semi-decent tracks, but this is a world away from their last good album, Black Holes and Revelations. Their previous effort was underwhelming too... so might give Muse a miss from now on. The others I got were the new Motion City Soundtrack offering, Simple Plan's latest, an album from a band most people have never heard of but actually write some of the best punk/pop I've ever heard – The Click Five, and the latest album from Nas. I'm not a massive fan of the rap genre, but Nas' stuff is quite good in my opinion. Hence the purchase. So there you are. A few near-death experiences and some iTunes purchases. An action-packed weekend I'm sure you'll agree.

Weekend Endevours

Went down to Bristol on Friday to collect my prize from the Heart FM competition I won after last week’s half marathon. The prize was £1000 in shopping vouchers for anywhere in Bristol city centre, and they could be split across five different stores. I did a little bit of research into which shops I might want to get vouchers for, but as I’m an indecisive twat at the best of times, I opted to get Cabot Circus vouchers. For those who don’t know, Cabot Circus is a new(ish) shopping mall in Bristol that is kind of like the Bristolian version of the Manchester Arndale, and is named after the famous Italian explorer Giovanni ‘John’ Cabot. He set sail from Bristol in the 1400s and is widely reputed to be one of the first Europeans to set foot on the American mainland. How thrilled his spirit must be to have a shopping centre named after him. So yeah, I got the vouchers as gift cards that could be used in any of the shops in the Cabot Circus complex. Before I could go off in search of 'stuff' though, I took part in a photo shoot for the local newspaper (The Bristol Post) and also for the Heart FM website where I had to hold a load of shopping bags stuffed with towels to simulate, er, shopping. Twas all very amicable, and I would like to thank the staff from Heart for the prize...even if the chance of any of them actually reading this dirge is miniscule. Off I popped then, to Cabot Circus. 

The first place I went to was H & M. I looked at the garishly hued men’s clothing department and quickly decided that I’d rather be tried as a 12^th Century heretic than wear any of their clobber, although I did need some new socks so I picked up a pack of 12 and headed to the cash desk. I handed over my gift card and the girl behind the counter just stared blankly at it. She tried to process it as a normal debit card and it wouldn’t work, so she went off to speak to a manager. After about 5 minutes, she came back and declared that the shop didn’t accept Cabot Circus gift cards. A little confused, I left H & M and went into Next, which was next door, funnily enough. I tried to purchase a pair of jeans...only to be told that they didn’t accept gift cards. Onwards I went, to the Apple Store, where I found a rather nice iPod armband running thingy. Tried to buy it...couldn’t because the little mobile chip and pin things that the Apple ‘geniuses’ carry around with them don’t accept gift cards. 3 shops...3 times I’m told that my prize is useless. I almost fucking exploded with rage at the guy. 

With that, I marched off to the customer information desk within Cabot Circus and told them that no matter where I went, none of the shops were accepting my gift card. The staff there were actually pretty helpful and explained that every store within the mall had signed up to the scheme and that they should all take the cards. With that, one of them went back to H & M with me, verbally bitch-slapped the staff behind the counter and made them ring the socks through (that were still on the counter where I’d left them 20 minutes earlier). Lo and behold, the card suddenly worked! I had some new socks! I thanked the woman who had accompanied me and she assured me that if I had any further problems using the gift card, that she’d be back to help. I had more problems with staff who didn’t know how to process the gift card, but they were generally overcome after several calls for management staff etc. In the end, I managed to get a few useful items including a new rucksack (for next year’s expedition to Thailand), a Lonely Planet guide to Thailand, a few T-Shirts and a few birthday presents for my niece. I didn’t spend the lot – how could anyone spend £1000 in a day?! I just got a few things I actually needed and bought a few presents for people. I still didn’t manage to get anything from the goddamned Apple Store though, as they insisted that their payment machines weren’t compatible with the gift card. Which kind of figures really – Apple and ‘incompatible with the mainstream’ go hand in hand. The thing that struck me was how many of the stores in Cabot Circus gave me crap and treated me like some kind of criminal just because I was using a gift card. They really need to sort that shit out as I’ve no doubt I’ll be the first or last shopper who comes into contact with untrained shop staff only to be told that particular stores don’t accept them...when in fact, they do. 

Saturday I was kind of dreading slightly, as it heralded the first proper long-distance journey on the Suzuki Goose. As documented here, the previous times I have taken it onto the motorway, it’s died on me. Granted, both times it was down to either having the fuel tap on ‘reserve’ or simply having no fuel, but like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I had become accustomed to associating the M5 with the spluttering and eventual packing up of the bike’s engine. I needn’t have worried though, as Saturday’s early morning trip down to Dorset went without any hitches at all. In fact, it flew by with alarming rapidity, thanks to the extra 100cc I now have at my disposal. The only things that were slightly unwelcome were the extremely cold wind and the mildly uncomfortable riding position of the Goose – it’s not really the kind of bike you want to be doing 200 mile journeys on unless you’ve got a well-padded arse. I don’t, so I was walking like John Wayne on arrival at my destination. Apart from that though – no problems at all. The bike itself is fairly tatty (what can you expect from a 20 year old machine?), but when it’s got enough petrol in, it runs like a dream and goes like greased lightning. Here are a few pictures I took of the Goose over the weekend: 

Saturday night involved a wedding party during which I discovered a taste for Gin and Tonic and Sunday was spent recovering from the G&T tsunami from the night before. Also saw the new Liam Neeson film Taken 2 on Saturday afternoon – next up: my rambling thoughts.

Happenings

It’s been a week since my last post. Thought I should update...so here I am. Competed in the Bristol Half Marathon on Sunday. It went as well as expected, in that due to the amount of running I do generally, it was a piece of piss. My time was around 1hr 28mins, which isn’t a pb (that’s 1hr 26mins which I attained at Sturminster Newton a few months ago), but to be honest, Bristol isn’t really the kind of ½ marathon you can realistically expect to get a personal best time at, simply because of the massive number of people taking part. There were about 14,000 competitors this year, and even though I started in the first wave, the mass of people all trying to run down relatively narrow roads lead to a lot of congestion. The crowd thins out about halfway round the course as people begin to tire, but by then the impact from the slow pace of the first half of the race has taken a good bite out of your overall time. It was a good event though, and just as well run (no pun intended) as last year, so maximum kudos to the organisers, the marshalls, and the army cadets manning the water/energy gel stations. Not that I used them – the last thing I wanted was water after suddenly needing a massive piss about a quarter of the way into the race. I held it for the remainder of the course and just made a beeline for the portable bogs after I crossed the finish line. I think my overall placing was 417^th, which when you consider that there were over 14,000 runners taking part, isn’t a bad result.

After the race, I took a stroll around Bristol city centre with my significant other. I do really like Bristol, actually. It’s not as big as Manchester or Birmingham, but it still has a proper ‘big city’ atmosphere. There are various districts with a distinct feel, there are loads of shops, bars, impressive historical buildings...it’s just a great city to visit and I’m a bit annoyed that I didn’t explore it more thoroughly when I lived there for a few weeks at the beginning of this year. I say ‘a few weeks,’ but it was more like two months, and during that time, I lived in possibly the grottiest house share I have ever had. It was in a district called Brentry on the outskirts of Bristol, right near the Cribbs Causeway M5 junction, so it was handy for shopping and getting on the motorway...but pretty dire for everything else. The house was this big old mansion type place that had been converted into flats, I and I rented a tiny room on the ground floor. I knew it was only temporary, but the meagre amount of time I spent there was pretty shit for two reasons – the house itself, and the housemates. 

The room, as I mentioned, was fucking tiny. There was mold on the wall below a window that wouldn’t shut properly, so there was a constant cold breeze blowing in to accompany the incessant noise of a dog barking in a nearby garden. There was one toilet/bathroom that was shared by the four of us, but it was a game of chance actually being able to get in there seeing as one of the housemates insisted on taking hour-long baths (how fucking inconsiderate), whilst another had her lesbian partner staying over almost constantly. I had no problem with this, but it kind of grated when I wanted a shower or needed to take a shit and couldn't because a person who wasn’t even paying rent was using the toilet. indeed, I often had to use mother natures own water closet for a piss...but never dropped the kids off outside - that would've been a little too uncouth, even for a morally redundant urchin like me. On the subject of bodily functions, though, on one occasion there were drips of blood all over the bathroom floor. I was a little confused by this...until I saw the tampon packets in the bin and clicked. I almost gagged – and that happened on several occasions (the dripping of period blood all over the communal bathroom floor - not the gagging).

There was constant noise from the flat above (seriously, it sounded like they were moving a safe around...every night of the week) and the kitchen was a mess constantly, no matter how much I attempted to clean it. I even cleaned out the disgusting fridge...only to find it filthy again a week later. So in sum, it was a shit place to live, and the area itself was pretty crap – I had the petrol stolen out of my newly acquired CBF 250 after about two weeks of ownership. That isn’t to say I dislike Bristol – I fucking love the place. Clifton in particular holds a place in my heart as it’s just a cool area...but Brentry? No. 

But back to the point – I was walking around Bristol city centre and I spotted this red carpet with velvet barrier things around it, you know – like what they have at film premieres and shit. I went up to the girl manning it and she said it was a competition to win £50,000. All you had to do was approach the safe at the end of the red carpet and put in a random 6 digit number. Guess correct and walk away with the cash. I slowly punched in my date of birth with baited breath...and was confronted with the message that my combination was wrong. Dammit! On leaving the red carpet, another promoter asked if I’d like to enter some other competition and thrust an entry card under my nose. To be honest, I wasn’t even listening to her as I filled out the form – I was paying more attention to my girlfriend’s attempt to open the safe (which also ended in failure). I completed the card, and went on my way, not even knowing what I’d just entered.

Fast forward to yesterday. I get a phone call from somebody at ‘Heart’ (which I later discover is the local radio station running the competition I entered at the weekend), who excitedly tells me that I won! “Won what?!” I ask. £1000 in shopping vouchers to spend in Bristol City Centre! So tomorrow I’m going down to Bristol in order to collect my prize and have a publicity photograph taken. Weird how random shit just happens, eh?