Crawley. Rainy, not creepy.

I spent most of last week in Crawley. It rained the whole time.

This means I am in no place to judge how the place is, no where looks good in the rain, and Crawley was not good in the rain



But the course was good, and in a boring worky way I feel more confident in what I am doing. Sadly the food in the hotel was awful, was a great relief to get back home for my taste buds sake!

Friday I'm in Crawley

Two photos today, Sun over High Wycombe (with small pink UFO, and small blue UFO) and then a picture across town.

I will be back from training tomorrow. Of imagine the tales I will have to tell of Crawley.

Thursday Photo

This photo was taken one evening a few weeks ago from our balcony. I thought the contrails on the left hand side of the picture looked a little like a shuttle launch!

 

Wednesday

Today I am away starting my training in Crawley, but here is a picture of me being silly with Ivonnes knitting.

Tuesday Photo

Swan on the Rye...

A Week of Photos

Most of this week will be taken up with training at work. They are sending me to Crawley, how exotic.

So this week I will just set my blog to post a picture each day, as I am not up to date enough to have a smart phone or anything, so I am effectively off line all week.

Here is todays picture, which is a coot sat on the football pitch at the Rye in Wycombe!

Protest

Last weekends protesting swimmer at the Varsity Boat Race, this weekends Grand National, and next weekends controversial Bahrain Grand Prix have got me thinking about protesters using sport to make their point.

There is a long history of protest in sport, Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison throwing herself under the Kings horse at the 1913 Grand National must be the most famous, and perhaps most tragic of all incidents, but there have been many more recently.

The 1993 Grand National was not actually disrupted by protesters, but after 2 false starts officials failed to stop the race because some jockeys thought the red flags were being waved by protesters trying to stop the race. The race was voided. Only a few years later a phoned in warning from an Irish terrorist group meant that the Grand National was cancelled again, but this time was re-run on the Monday.

The Olympics are an obvious target for protests, but I can only actually think of two specific incidents, the events of Munich in 1972 where 17 people died, and the Atlanta bombing in 1996 where 2 people died. I vividly remember hearing the incident on the radio, and staying up well into the night listening to the events.

There are just 2 incidents I can think of in my chosen sport of Formula 1 (let me know if you can think of more!)

There was this crazy man at the German Grand Prix in 2000, I love Brundles comments in this clip...



And then there is the crazy priest who ran on track during the British Grand Prix in 2003. Sadly this idiot has become a mini celebrity in some circles, it should be the brave marshal who is the hero!



Lets hope that, if it does go ahead, next weekend Grand Prix is without incident, and that we can move on with the rest of the season and put the whole situation behind us.

To quote Joe Saward...
When it comes to propaganda, there is no question that both sides have been very busy in recent weeks, with the authorities finding people to say all the right things and the opposition trying to show that all is not good. The FIA, which is supposed not to involve itself in politics of any kind, has embraced the government argument, but as no-one inside the federation has questioned the activity (at least not openly), nothing has been done.

There is no doubt that there are people in Bahrain who honestly do believe that the race is what the country needs. Others (myself included) think that F1 is unwise to get involved at a time when things are unstable. 

Changing nature of friendship

Yesterday I mentioned my wet day in Brighton.



Our friends from Exeter moved there last year, and have settled in brilliantly, it is a town that is very 'them', and although I am not sure I would live there it is a lovely place.

It was a great day catching up, Dave (a mutual friend from Exeter, and the other half of Words Fail Me podcast) visited as well, and we all chatted a lot about what we had been up to the last few months.

But it made me think about how friendship has changed. When in Exeter we used to hang around together for hours and just played silly games (Pass the Pigs, Poker, Uno) or just sat talking about random things for hours.

But when you have not seen each other for months, and have the time pressure of just a few hours before the train home then every bit of conversation seems to carry more weight, and it seems more important to find out what has been happening, and less time to explore the strange and random interiors of each others minds and thoughts. The conversation seems more important, but somehow you get less out of it.

I don't know what the solution is, other than spending more prolonged time together (and hopefully this will happen in the summer), but it seems sad to have largely lost this art of conversation in my life.

Bank Holiday in Brighton

I love the seaside. I lived most of my life just a few miles from the beach (Dawlish Warren a 2 stops away on the train), a year with a flat with a sea view (in Exmouth, if you stood on the window sill and there was no car parked on the street).

I now find myself in Buckinghamshire, handy for London, but not famous for having an coastline.

Any chance I can find to go to the seaside I will now take, and having friends recently move to Brighton is a perfect excuse to visit the coast.

We could not have picked a worse day to visit the seaside! It was great to catch up with friends (more of that tomorrow), it must have been the wettest and windiest day the south coast has seen this year, it rained from the moment we left our house in Wycombe in the morning, to the amusements on Brighton Pier, all the way back to Wycombe in the evening. My waterproof proved not to live up to it's name.

We had a great time though, catching up on news eating food, lots of coffee and plenty of copper coins lost in the arcades.

But hopefully next time I see the sea the weather will be more suitable for ice creams and sun bathing. 

3 Spring Pictures

A break from all the serious stuff, here are 3 pictures from when we had the lovely sunny weather a few weeks ago.

All taken with my new camera that I got last month for my birthday, I love the colours and details that it shows, and I realise now how rubbish my old camera was!

What are the chances?

Tonight is High Wycombe Skeptics in the Pub, a meeting of rationalists, humanists, atheists, secularists and beer lovers. Do come along if you feel any of those labels fit you, or if you just fancy chatting to interesting and intelligent people over a few beers.

The point of this blog entry was not supposed to be an advert for SiTP (but too late now I've done it!) but rather I was reminded of our meeting 2 weeks ago when the excellent Stevyn Colgan gave us a little talk/presentation about the year he decided to test luck.

It was an interesting and funny story involving much walking under ladders, collecting lucky charms, crossing the path of black cats and horseshoes. He tested his luck by rolling two dice multiple times to see if he would roll double six more than statistically likely.

I won't give away the results of his little experiment, as he hopes to do the talk around other groups, and maybe put a book together on the topic one day, but it got us all thinking about luck, and superstitions we may hold.

The next morning my mind was still full of rabbits feet, charms and chance, I considered walking to work not stepping on any of the cracks in the pavement, but abandoned the idea and got on with making my way to work.

I had only walked 50 metres when I saw this graffiti daubed on the wall...



Double one, snake eyes...the unlucky roll of the dice! What are the chances of that?

Well, the chances were the same as the day before, as I am fairly sure the graffiti had not appeared overnight, but because of what was on my mind I noticed it that day.

It was a perfect illustration of some of what Steve had been talking about the night before, and the phenomenon came up again in an excellent book I read last week by Richard Wiseman called Quirkology. (it is a form of what I know as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, although I don't think Wiseman calls it this).

I also noticed that these dice, as well as not being very fair, are also impossible, as the six always opposes the one. I checked my collection of dice to confirm this! (Yes I have a collection of dice I may post a picture later in the week!)

Putting all this together it looks like I am going to have a lucky week... fingers crossed!

All Being Equal

I have posted this on Facebook before, but it is important enough to post again.

A conservative group called the Coalition for Marriage started a webpage and protest against the governments plans to allow same sex couples to marry. This has over four hundred thousand signatures so far.

In response a website called Coalition for Equal Marriage was set up, arguing that any two people in love, what ever their sex, should be able to get married in the UK. This has now got over forty thousand signatures.

I don't believe that the fact the Coalition for Marriage has over ten times the amount of signatures as the Equal Marriage site is reflective of the majority views of the British people, but is rather a testament to the strength of conservative lobbys and publicity.

If you do agree with the Coalition for Equal Marriage please sign up on the site, and lets try and show the true thoughts of people on this issue.

I Found a Funny Shaped Sweet...

...and thought I would share it with you.

I never promised any level of standards in my blog posts.

Living by faith

I have been on another course of antibiotics this week, this time the tablets are brightly coloured and huge, which means they are more likely to work (It is true!). I have no real idea how they work, or why they work, or even if they will work, but I have faith that my doctor prescribed them for a reason, and for my good.

Why do I put faith in my doctor? Well because she did all her training and learning and got the job as a doctor, she understands more about how the pill works, she has experience of the pill fixing problems similar to mine before, and she has one of impossibly cold stethoscopes.

This is not a blind faith, it is a faith based on good evidence, evidence that is all around me, a culmination of hundreds of years of scientific progress (I see it, for instance, in the rise in life expectancy, and in the development of my mobile phone),

I know that if i put my mind to it I could understand how this pill could fix my problem, I could read books, or find someone to explain it to me. I could do experiments myself to find out the effects of the pill (If I had a lab, and lots of time and money).

But I don't need to, as I have faith that this pill could solve my problem, and if it doesn't (and it is actually looking that way) I will go back to the doctor and she will try something else.

So, (and it especially came to mind on this Christian festival to which faith is central) please don't call agnostics and atheists faithless. It is just a faith placed in arguably more important areas, and a faith that can become fact through understanding.

Right, I need to go and try and swallow this huge pill now. I may need a miracle.

Blog Awakening

This blog seems to have gone quiet, and for that I apologise. I have decided to restart it, and make a concerted effort to keep it up to date. The last thing I want is for the blog to go dormant and the government donate it to charity.

So I will try to update it with something each day, even if that something is just a quote, photo, link, or quick thought.

I will start with this picture of a Red Kite catching some lift over Hughenden Park in High Wycombe.

I was really happy with this picture, but most people just go 'it's ok'. I am posting it here today, and will keep posting it until you realise it is good.