Month: August 2017

[This got edited 9.ix.17 as daughter rightly pointed out that the bit about dilatanty didn’t make much sense as it was.]

That does sound rather like the title from a Winnie the Pooh story “In which Christopher (Robin|Evans) forgets Toto’s birthday and makes an interesting discovery”.  Oh dear, I can see I’m in danger already of going off at tangents and perhaps getting draw into Vinni Puh (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqdiEUp6s4E) but we’ll come back to that another night.

My 2017 life does seem to have become rather busy.  There is some fun and socialising in it, so J and I went to Mosquitos at the NT Dorfman on Tuesday and yesterday evening we met up with daughter’s fairy godmother and both children for a lovely evening so blog rambling took a bit of a battering.

Catching up today I was a bit sorry and embarrassed to realise that I’ve missed yesterday’s anniversary of going over from St. Jean Pied-de-Port up and over the border into Spain. That was quite a day with a pretty tough climb up to the top of the pass and an exhilarating descent.  That was when Toto first got his name and went from “proto-Toto” to simple “Toto”.  Of course, it also represented a huge change for me in the voyage of discovery as I understand little Spanish and speak even less and as it really represented a step into the unknown in terms of the cycling.  I must come back to all that another day.

However, I can’t resist sharing a 2017 discovery: I’m dilatanty.  Never mind Toto being “Toto”, this is big: I really quite like being dilatanty.

I’m being annoying I know!  Yes, I can spell “dilettante” (well, not confidently, but I know it’s not “dilatanty”).  Yes, too, I know I’m am seriously dilettante: I’m always getting into things that fascinate me that I really shouldn’t, but that could get us into diversions into dynamic P-technique and back into ventures from 20 years ago into SEM (Structural Equations Modelling) and names like LISREL, AMOS and LAVAAN which have been diverting me a bit this last week.

[Start of editing of 3.ix.17] So what’s a “dilatanty”?  Well, OK, I admit I made it up, but from “dilatant” which I discover is a real adjuective which I’d never met.  This all started when I got a question from J by text which took me into laminar and turbulent flow.   (We do have such strange and exciting SMS conversations!)   That took me back to dim and distant memories of the Navier Stokes equations and Reynold’s number and hence, into Wikipedia, the black hole or strange attractor without which my universe would be incomplete.

As Wikipedia is not black hole, but really a very rewarding attractor, I emerged from it, which nothing with mass does from a black hole.  The reward I emerged with was “dilatant” and it came about because I looked up “Reynolds number” and, as I love biographical detail, well a little biographical detail, I am a dilettante, I followed a link which took me to Osborne Reynolds (1842-1912; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reynolds) he of the famous number.  And it was in that fascinating little biographical piece about him that I found “dilatant materials” for the first time.  They are materials, usually granular materials like sand and soil, which expand when subjected to shear forces.  A shear force acts in one direction on one side of an object, and in the opposite direction on the other side: pick up a pack of cards between finger and thumb, finger on one face of the cards, thumb on the other.  Now slide the finger one way and the thumb the other and you put the pack of cards under a shear(ing) force and what happens, packs of cards being what they are, only very loosely held together in that plane, is that they shear.  Now most materials, like the pack of cards, don’t change their size in an axis perpendicular to the shear forces.  Dilatant materials expand, ah, I got this wrong the other day, dilatant materials do change size, dilative ones expand and contractive ones compress.

The big leap I made the other day was about a continuing preoccupation of mine: what happens to me when I feel under shear forces,  usually from modern bureaucratic mechanisms.  I often feel that one side of me is being pushed and the other pulled.  Thinking about the image of sand or soil changing thickness under shear, I couldn’t help feeling that something grumpy and recalcitrant often expands in me when I feel subjected to such shear forces and stresses.  With a punning leap I realised that I am not just a bad parental celebrator of my bike’s birthday, and hopelessly prone to random thought walks, and hence truly a dilettante — but that I am too a dilantanty.  Actually, two days on now, I recognise that sometimes I crumple and compress in such situations so I am truly dilatanty: sometimes dilative dilatanty, sometimes contractive dilatanty. [End of edited bit, I hope it makes a bit more sense now.  It may make little or no more sense, it was always a bit wild, but at least now I’ve got the physics terminology right.]

And on that note, and grinning stupidly, I shall take myself off from the blogosphere and find a glass, perhaps of Raki, to celebrate that discovery, and to raise that glass toward St. Jean Pied-de-Port, towards Santiago de Compostella.  However, I shall also raise my glass eastwards as, with two lovely colleagues from Ulm and Tirana, we have finally finished a paper today.  We started it, well, planning it, three years ago, I think they had been thinking about it even before that.  This version is version 30 or 31!  OK, what’s in my glass won’t be Raki but Blerta says her glass will be Raki in proper Albanian fashion.

In the UK it’s been one of our bank holiday weekends, which means that Monday, today, has been a holiday for many people (anyone not in areas that can’t stop, like the NHS etc., workers in those fields, at least, those who have proper contracts, get to get a day off in lieu of the holiday they missed if they work a bank holiday).  It’s also been really consitently hot and sunny for the first time in a couple of weeks.  On Saturday J and I watched two whole episodes of “Cardiff Singer of the World” which actually went out live months ago but which we have “time shifted”.  We started on it before J went off to India so it’s been a broken bit of time shifting.  Not unlike this blog in that.  We watched that on top of at least one episode of “Brooklyn 99” on Netflix which daughter has got us watching dubbed into French for the benefit of our French.  (But with English subtitles as probably only daughter’s French is up to getting all the humour without them.)  The result is a bizarre bit of time shifting (as I regard watching any made for TV or made for Netflix series as time shifting) and language and culture shifting which we greatly enjoy.  That was a four hour orgy of TV for J and me which is extreme for us.

Last night we had visitors for food and drinks and talking well into the early hours.  They’re parents of tnp’s (son’s) friend and we’d never met before. That was lovely but again, unusual for us.  The warm weather meant we could begin and end the evening on the roof terrace we gained when we had a loft conversion done some years back.  Lovely and all too rare.

Today I spent much of the day out there in the sun, several hours of it just sunbathing with a book.

I guess this is what normal people do with a bank holiday weekend.   I suspect that we’re not normal!

I really must stop wittering on about IT … well, so my lovely daughter tells me!  Actually, what she said, and she and J were meticulously careful about this, was that two posts in a row about IT is as far as I can reasonably go.  I know they’re right but I did turn to some R today and it went really smoothly.  When you find some R code you’ve never really played with much before generates a nice picture like this from some data in someone else’s paper …

… in perhaps an hour in all from inputting the data, checking it, working out the code for this analysis (a confirmatory factor analysis or CFA if want to know, OK, I get it family: you didn’t!) …  then it does remind me that there are good times working with IT and open source empires of code.

But I am disobeying a direct family order.  Enough of that and finally back to last year and the ride.  By the 25th I’d moved on from the Loire, I’ll go back in days ahead (this really is a time travel game) but this was the track from the 25th:

The start looks like there were two succubus inspired detours:

But that first dog’s hind leg bit was deliberate: into the local supermarket from the campsite to stock up, then a little bit that was back on my tracks and then off properly.

The next very straight detour stabbing south in that image was pure Google maps playing with me though.  It/she was quite clear I should take what looked at first like a lovely, well metalled track alongside a sort of canal.  The canal was, as you can see there, ruler straight and wide enough to have boats on it and what seemed like a great towpath on which to cycle … until it petered out in increasingly narrow, gravelly wreck, hopelessly hostile to cycling.  I remember I was getting very battered by these experiences and I was probably audibly cursing as I turned back, what I knew was pretty much due north and completely away from the direction I wanted.  I remember cycling back past calm looking men fishing whom I’d passed some minutes before and wondering what they made of this madman disturbing their zen.

I wasn’t entirely happy when I got back on the main road either as it, and the tracks I turned onto then seemed to continue to point rather more north than seemed fair.  However, inevitably, we hit the Atlantic the route turned due south.  Then the wonderful sun and the strange sandy, pine tree covered route helped cheer me up.  I have very few ‘photos from the day, precisely six in fact, and I think it was a funny day of continuing adjustment of mood.  I was fighting a nasty, niggling anxiety that I wasn’t making enough distance to make even Compostella reachable, let alone Finisterra.  That meant I didn’t spend time on ‘photos.

This does give a feel of the countryside and the absence of cloud cover though:

It was truly wonderful!

The green colours of my route on that map above show that the route was pretty flat all day which at the macro level was true.   However, that ‘photo tells the other side of that: that the route went over sand dunes that were never actually flat but rolled up and down.  The gradients were gentle but you could never see far ahead which amplified my anxieties about my slowed progress.  At times I was close enough to the coast to be able to hear the waves but there was almost never a point where I could see it.  I think there’s a sort of edge rib of quite high dune near the coast itself.  Presumably some quirk of wind, waves and afforestation have created that.

I see I didn’t do a blog post last year for any of the 24th, 25th or the 26th.  I’m not sure why.  However, I see that the one from the 27th,  http://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/my-last-rambling-post-for-today-road-surfaces-and-tree-root-ruckling/,  referred to some other challenges I hit on the 25th.  One was those tree roots ruckling up the surface of the track in a way that would probably have been fun on a mountain bike with suspension, but could be a bit grinding on Toto-to-be.  The other was what I called in that post “tightrope cycling” and I see I promised that I’d some day come back and explain that.  Well now, a year later, I get to make good on that promise.  This is a minor example:

That’s actually a lovely concrete surface but it’s quite narrow, I’d guess about 1.5m wide and that’s not a lot when you meet people on bikes coming the other way (most walkers kindly stepped off the concrete for we cyclists).  You can also see two other challenges: sand.

OK, yes, I can count, I know, sand isn’t two, it’s an extraordinary number of individual grains.  Ah, but it is two really when your on that trail: there is sand-on-the-side and sand-on-the-track.  The sand-on-the-side means that you slow to a pretty immediate stop if you come off the concrete.  That sand is soft on the top, so your wheels go in deeply immediately; however, it’s heavy and damp lower down so your wheel also stops as if you’d hauled on the brakes with all your power. You really don’t want to come off the track without at least one foot out of the pedals and ready to stabilise you.  Then, and that in the ‘photo is a very minor example, there is sand-on-the-track.  That was sometimes thick and completely covering the track, particularly in places where the track took some turns around trees or large rocks.  That meant that you really had to have your wits about you as the sand-on-the-track was bone dry and basically turned the lovely concrete into an instant skid pan.

It was all quite enjoyable when I was doing well: I bowled along reasonably speedily and had that enjoyable experience of having to have all my wits and senses about me: look out for sand, listen out for people coming the other way hidden by trees or big rocks, hold the handlebars lightly but responsively to handle the tree root ruckles.  However, it was tiring.

As the hours rolled on, I realised that I would have to stop in Biganos.  I remember that I was disappointed as that was only 96km achieved in the end and I know I had had aspirations to get much further south.  However, Biganos seemed a lovely name.  I had difficulty finding somewhere to stay, there was no campsite (that I could find) and I remember that several cheap hotels I ‘phoned in the now rather deflating late afternoon/early evening heat were closed for the summer or full.

This was the final trail:

Actually, that’s not as bad as it looked.  I came into the town in the top right hand corner of that satellite image. (Do you like the shift to satellite imagery?  So do I!  Brings things back in a very different way to the way the route maps do, or don’t.  Ooops, I’m getting geeky again!)  I remember that dead end to the top left was about me stopping to make ‘phone calls to find places and I remember that I found somewhere a little bit more expensive than I’d hoped for.  That’s the little stub off the main road on the bottom left.  That swing off along the main road, off then to the right (under a railway line I remember) and then back on myself and round a great square of car park was me going to the local supermarket to get fodder … and back to the hotel.

Now this is a Google/satellite miracle:

You really can see the hotel, well, you can on the original, I think this is a rather compressed version.  Today I looked at it and thought “Oh no, I have no recollection of that.  Surely that was a campsite?!”  Gradually, and I think the fact that I could zoom in and see this level of detail …

… cracked the ageing memory and suddenly I could remember the hotel, remember the lass behind the counter in that central atrium who told me that the supermarket was really my best hope for food.  I can remember the room on the ground floor in that right hand square wing of the hotel.  I can even remember, vaguely, two sets of car conveyed fellow guests who arrived after me.  It’s funny stuff memory isn’t it?  It’s a funny but amazing realm this of the human wetware, who would waste time with hardward and “soft”ware when they have wetware in their own cranium and the chance to talk with other wetware engines walking around the world?!  The family were right all along!

Enough for today.  I think I shall sleep well tonight, reconnected with the pelerinage after the recent disconnection.  Good enough wetware work for one virtual pelerinage!

This has been a hiatus.  From last Wednesday to Monday (16th to 21st) I was down in South Wales visiting my parents and that overlapped in dates with the week I had not cycling with J last year (12th to the 20th of August back in 2016).  As anyone who has followed this site/blog will have noticed, today’s post is also reappearing in a cosmetically rather different looking format.  In fact, much of the last two days, since I got back from South Wales, has been taken up with trying to get my head around how best we as a family should be using WordPress, the open source web site and blog managing software that has underpinned this site and blog, and my work one (CORE System Trust (CST)).  Like the software I use for pretty much all my data crunching these days (the R project),  WordPress is is open source, i.e. open for anyone to get the full source code, and free to use and to develop and it’s amazing.  However, both projects share the problem that perhaps comes with that when what you are doing is hugely broad in what it might do, constantly evolving, and needing to run on constantly changing hardware and in a constantly changing world of security threats.  That results in enormous complexity to the enterprise and it can become rather opaque to the naïve end user, in fact, both projects are pretty Byzantine in both the good and bad sense of that adjective.  They’re huge and often beautiful and capable, they’re also sometimes hard to understand and frustrating if you haven’t spent the last few years immersed in them.

So the last couple of days have, as you can tell, been frustrating.  I have been unhappy with “theme” that I have been using for both my sites and that I was proposing to use for J’s quite pretty but desperately out of date web site that showcases a bit of what she does.  I realised I needed to find a better option, for her site and this, or at least, to find out if there was a better option.  Bang goes two days!  I think I have pretty definitively established that there are better options. I think I’ve even established that one starting choice is between two main contenders each representing a sort of country within the WordPress empire: Divi and the Genesis framework.  (What auspicious names eh?)  However, each then offers literally hundreds of, on a not entirely daft analogy, towns within their countries.

In order to try things out, I have switched this site and blog into one of those “countries”: Divi.  I’m taking up their 30 day money back if not happy, option. In fact, on my analogy, I’m in the town of Divi (theme) within the country of Divi-builder (country).  I messed around with the Explorable tow (theme), which looked as if it would be great for such a geographical, exploring site and blog as this one, but that seemed to beat me to a pulp rapidly so here I am, licking my wounds, cursing how much time I’ve lost and generally trying to recoup some of my losses.

I’m also pondering on this experience, which is quite a familiar one for me and I’m trying to rejoin the great aspects of having done the big ride last year which I suspect were, in small part, about not getting into these messes, about staying in different psychological and physical realms.  In fact, this has reminded me of the frustrations I faced on the ride with the site/blog and my IT.  It’s reminded me just how long it took me to get any site up at all, and how little I managed to create on it over the whole trip (or since).  It’s all left me pondering about our funny world which has such strange virtual realms in it.  One problem is that they’re not virtual, this blog is real, and, if I succeed in posting it, which I’m sure I will despite the frustrations of the last two days, then you, whoever you are, may be reading it and that makes it real and virtual.  And yet, in its relative newness, in its transcendence of some things like geography and cost, the web is a bit virtual still, magical.

The frustrations of the my struggles to find my way in all this have made me feel like the sailors caught in the storm of Prospero’s making in the Tempest: sucked into his island and lost.  I, like them, am physically dry and completely unharmed, but psychologically I am more battered than that.  I, as they did, “stand amazed” (that’s got to be a quote hasn’t it?) by the power of the WordPress/web world but also by my seeming powerlessness within it.  I am lost and diminished by my lack of the magic to manage this new, modern world better.  I doggedly try to go on, I know there are moments of magic when I manage some of the things I want to do.  However, I fear that I’m a Trinculo or Stefano, lurching around and cursing the magician who got me in here and fearing WordPress has become my Caliban: a misshapen beast of untrustworthy urges leading me astray.   I know really that, like Prospero’s brother, it is my perhaps excessive longing to have power over these technologies that is the real root of my troubles, but I want to blame, I need to blame, others, the true magicians of the cyberworlds who create these realms.  (And don’t map or document them very well because it’s all so obvious to them.)

Enough.  I can go no further, I will lay down and rest.  Well, not true, but I will just stop.  Sometimes that’s the most important survival skill in these strange worlds: not to keep trying, not to keep following the next will-o-the-wisp, just to stop and hope, as is sometimes true, that it will all be a bit easier tomorrow.  An early good night all!

Oh no!  Firefox just crashed on me and lost the last ten minutes typing.  Ouch.  OK.  Starting all over again.

I didn’t manage to blog at all yesterday.  I went up to Leicester to facilitate a focus group with people who had kindly agreed to take half an hour out of their therapy, and give us half an hour of their own time, to talk with us about experiences of discussions with mental health professionals, doctors mainly, about psychotropic medication.  The focus group was excellent and really brought back very good memories of working in the therapeutic community in Nottingham, and of many psychotherapy groups.  I guess there was an interesting message to me about still being able to be in groups in that sort of non-therapist way.  I’ll be pondering on that one.

Anyway, the train journey up had no train company wifi/internet and the journey back I opted not to pay for it so I had very unreliable internet via my mobile ‘phone both ways.  In the light of that I decided not to post a blog but I knew there was an element of avoiding something.  I could have done a post, as I think this one will be, with no images, pretty easily really, and just uploaded in one go when I had a connection.

So what was I avoiding?  I think I knew then there were two things.  One is a funny sort of dislocation, the other an unease about my declared audience and aim here.  They’re separable but the twine around each other a bit.

Let’s start with the dislocation.  There’s a dislocation from the ride, the pilgrimage, the pelerinage.  A year ago today, as I’ve said, I was on a break from the ride, often in a car, and on holiday.  It was lovely (most of the time!) but it wasn’t the same.  In 2017 things feel a bit dislocated too. J has returned from over three weeks in India and we have hurled ourselves into a huge amount of sorting out, throwing out, of books and paper the like.  Our son, tnp, was off at a music festival when J returned, and he only returned last night.  Meanwhile, after a brief two weekend days with J back here, yesterday she shot off up and down to Exeter for part of her work portfolio, and I shot off up and down to Leicester for a piece of mine.  All the sorting out, as I’ve been saying here, has also involved a lot of disinterring, and mosty then throwing away, things from my past, from my shared past with J and then with J and daughter and tnp and racing up to the present day, and things from J’s past before we met and even more things from my past before we met.  It’s all felt a bit surgical and violent at times.  Did I need quite such surgery?  I remember as a medical student there was a rule about how deeply you could get a probe into a penetrating abdominal wound tilting things toward an “exploratory lapartomy”.  I think I feel I’ve penetrated the soft underbelly of my past in the last few days/weeks and found myself involved in full open abdomen surgery.  Yuck, what an image!!  It’s not really that bad (and a needed exploratory laparotomy could be life saving of course). Much adipose mess needed to go and has gone but perhaps it’s all impinged a bit on the four of us reconnecting.  In fact, we haven’t all four been in the same place for more than a minute so far and we won’t be again until Tuesday next week (if then!) Such are not atypical modern lives of four people of our ages I suspect.  What’s this regressive longing for more tranquillity, more time, more rhythm?!

OK, that’s the dislocation.  What about the other thing?  Well that’s a funny one.  I know the pilgrimage last year had roots (oops, just typed “routes”: is that a keyboard pun?  A word processing Daddy joke?)  Down manic thoughts and fingers, behave!

The pilgrimage had its roots in that occasion, noted in this blog at some point in the past I know, when “Tante” Lucienne called my plan to hitch off to Chartres a “pelerinage” and I had a little epiphany, an slow identification of the French word and its English meaning (can an English agnostic/protestant translation of a Catholic word for pilgrimage ever capture its native resonances?)  I knew she hit something absolutely on the nail about me.  As I thought about it, I also knew there was something of a tension between how extraordinary it is for a (now) 21st Century agnostic to do a pilgrimage and how wondefully out of my ordinary it was (as the plan came to fruition at last one year ago) to think of cycling 1,500km.  However, the other side of the idea is that it has been in some way so ordinary.  The route has much that is pre-Christian simply because you’re often following readily navigable routes from A to B and it’s been a Christian, and more recently a pluripotential, multi-spiritual, or frankly personal, pilgrimage for over a thousand years.  So many people have done this, 99% of them are “everyperson”: no longer known, identifiable individuals.  I would just be joining that sort of sociological, anthropological human snail slime trail across Europe.

I know that the reason I have rekindled my blogging is to help myself return to some meditative, reflective, possibility that was created by that and that is hard to hold in the pressures we create for ourselves in our usual 21st Century lives (I’m using that “ourselves” in something only just bigger than a singular “my” but it is a bit bigger, it does include some of my overlap with the three others of our nuclear family, our wider family, friends, colleagues and the “no man is an island” (I can’t make that “person”.  There’s a sense of disrespect to Donne winning over the wish not to be sexist!)

In that sense the realisation, the commitment to myself, that this is a meditative, blog for myself, is right, and yet then I struggle with is it worth it?  What does that mean?  If so why is it public? Etc. I know I was dissatisfied with a feeling that recent posts had been sort of collapsing in, getting self-centred, selfish, mundane.  So what? Oh dear, I never was any good either at keeping a diary or at meditating.  I will continue to ponder and aspire to meditate.

However, in the way of things, a bit like the gift of the work in Leicester, I got to look at comments here (because of course, I may write for myself but it’s wonderful when someone catches the blogging frisbee and throws it back with his/her own arc on it!)

I loved picking up Daddy jokes and skiing and pissed and piste the Gregory had thrown back, and then I followed the link (https://www.durhamcathedral.co.uk/worshipandmusic/sermon-archive/pullman-pilgrimage) that Helena thrown and I read this in that link:

“Pilgrimage, if it is real, must always be a journey into truth. It is not enough to overcome ordeals, have beautiful experiences, return home with travellers’ tales to tell. There must be some glimpse of truth: about ourselves, our world, our God. No-one who is aware of the threats we face in our century can go to Compostela without a sense of sorrow for the destructiveness of the past and present, and without realising afresh that the language of hegemony and conquest can have no place in today’s world.”

I’m agnostic so I really don’t have the tools for the “God” bit in there, but the rest is perfect.  Why blog yourself when someone else does it so perfectly and you can just cut and paste? (With the URL of course!)  Well, that’s just teasing myself really, because he’s right about the whole “into truth” bit, not a lot easier than “God” but more my terminology.  The journey does continue and will. “Onwards” as I seem to keep saying here.

Today started with breakfast with a man J had worked with in India.  He’s borrowing our appartement in the French Alps. (Oooh, aren’t we posh?! Well yes, in some ways.  Ho hum.  Now that really is an issue I need to deal with here some time.)  Anyway, it’s great to think it’s going to get a bit of use this summer and it was lovely to have coffee and remember good times, both summer walking times and winter skiing times, that we’ve spent there over the years.  Hence the “off piste” phrase I suspect.

However the real off piste line I’m taking here is that I’m still, in 2016 stuck in a time warp that has now locked me for at least 36 hours south-west of Blois … and I’m leaving me there for another day, ooh, given that tomorrow is a work trip up and down to Leicester, I suspect I will leave me stuck there for another at least.

OK, so let’s leave 2016 and the pelerinage in that suspended state because today has been another odd day with reminders galore of my own history.  That started with meeting X and our reminiscences about times in the Alps but also the pleasure of hearing he and J discussing their recent experiences in India. After that, I soaked some very welcome sun while sawing up old fence posts that have been littering our tiny back garden here for a month or two since the fence was replaced … then I joined J & daughter in the continuing mammoth task that has dominated the last two days: winnowing our books while relocating them.  All three of us have a powerful love of books and so this was a pretty massive effort which yesterday mostly involved J & I deciding what of our surfeit of fiction could go, and organising the rest onto the new shelves in our “den”.  Today was the turn of the non-fiction so for both of us it was another strange time line experience.  One time line is the one in which you find yourselves revisiting when you bought the books, before or after we met. The other time line is back to when the books were written, and as we both believe the history of any field is a vital part of that field, that took us back to at times to the 19th Century, and, finding my copy of Burton’s Anatomy of melancholy, back to the 17th.  (No, I confess I haven’t managed to read it: that’s the whole thing about fighting your way through the thickets of books: with notable exceptions, they’re in “keep or go” question precisely because zero, one but so rarely two of us have read them.)

It’s been a funny process and a lot of books have gone to into the big green plastic recycling bin.  Mostly those have been the ones that have aged in that modern way in which they have long been superceded probably by more recent editions of the same book.  Others are stacked up for redistribution with people to be asked if they want any and to be offered to J’s academic employer (she’s much more sanguine that they’ll want them than I am!)  Some of the fiction, and not entirely the children’s fiction, will go to India to the schools run by the person J & X met there.  Slowly, a much more organised house, that looks a bit less like a car boot sale, emerges.  Boy it’s hard work.  And tomorrow J & I take trains off to other parts of the UK and all will this domestic work will become another victim of the pause button.

Enough!  It’s tomorrow (OK, a bit of artistic licene there: I’m not actually as temporally challenged as that would suggest).  Early departures for J & daughter so early up for me too.  I’ll come back to Hokusai tomorrow.  (Oh didn’t I mention him earlier?  Sorry, that’s the sort of thing that happens when you go off piste.)

This is a bit odd.  I re-read yesterday’s stub of a blog post and was struck by how bad the writing was and have tidied it up a bit.  I have just looked back at “days” to remind myself where I was in terms of the site/blog I was this time last year and found that I posted a new blog post Why do I say “she” about google maps? My IT succubus! and so I read that and found it pretty garbled but was intrigued to see that it replayed things I’ve returned to in my posts this year, particularly the frustrations of being led astray.  The last few days this year I had also been going through old piles that cluttered up the loft conversion room here in our house that J & I use as our “study”.  (I think I put scare quotes round that as it seems to exaggerate what happens here!)  That has taken back over much of the last 30 years as I’ve ruthlessly purged things.  I’ve also scanned and archived papers that formed some of the piles and they went back to Likert’s paper from 1932 that led the idea of “Likert scales”.  I found myself re-reading notes on it that I made in 1987 and quotes I took from Likert’s paper that we can reasonably assume he wrote in probably 1930.  J, daughter (those are their chosen noms de plume or noms de blog incidentally, son is “tnp”) have spent much of today finally redistributing books that have been in piles for months, onto the new shelves we have in the “den” (which is a more accurate designation than is “study” is for this womb-of-the-rather-random-blog room!).  That took all three of us through between a few to about 50 years of reading matter.  This all starts to feel like some Rashomon or, as I’ve chosen to title this, a temporally kaleidoscopic experience.

So why write a blog?  That, in keeping with the rather Moebius strip or Klein bottle weave of time hare, takes me to the day before yesterday, a.k.a. Thursday 10th August 2017.  In the afternoon I and Helena of comment fame here in the blog met up.  We had chosen to go to the Dulwich Art Gallery, not far from home for me and public transport accessible for Helena and a place we rightly guessed would not be as rammed with humanity as many galleries and exhibitions in town.  We did the glorious Sargent watercolours and sat and nattered with tea, coffee and cake afterwards.  We covered a lot of ground but one issue was that of this blog, both commenting on the social awkwardnesses of blogging.  Helena has much more experience of writing blogs than I do and has blogged with purpose, in fact for some different purposes, some more personal, some less but all quite explicitly seeking an audience for a good cause.

There’s some of that for me about this, actually, that’s not really about the blog, it’s about how I hope the site will be in month or two from now. I have a real hope it might become a genuinely useful resource that people wondering about cycling to Compostella from the UK might find and might like.  I guess I really hope that if I persevere, and do the ride again, as I hope to it will get much more useful.  Perhaps if get to do it a few other times by different routes, the Camino del Norte and the Camino Portugues, and if I do the London to Rome ride I’ve also promised myself, assuming I live long enough and my knees and hips hold up, then I think this could become quite a good site for others to use for information.  I hope it might become a site where others put their own experiences and advice.

However, there’s a real difference between the site and the blog for me.  Both were very much just sketches as things finished last September and the blog has stuttered on.  I’m hoping this burst of blogging revivifies it for me.

And that’s the point: I think the blog is a sort of ongoing meditation, some very low grade self-therapy, something that sometimes fills little holes left by not being in therapy, by not offering any therapy to others and allows me a little bit of space for “free association” or “free floating discussion” (that’s the term used in group analysis for our anologue of the psychoanalyst’s “free association”).  I do it publicly, perhaps partly because I’ve been much more a group analyst than an individual analyst and what happens in a group always has some “public” element to it: it’s not bound into a dyad with a strong commitment to confidentiality and, however much the group commit to confidentiality and not revealing each other’s identities to anyone outside the group, what happens in a group, for it “stays in the group”, is shared. Talking with Helena was helpful as it clarified that I’m always happy to feel that anyone reads this, always cheered if someone comments, but it’s not written to solicit that, it’s probably the first time since being in therapy that I’ve built myself a space to speak to myself out loud, to follow where the kaleidoscope, the rashomon of my experiences takes me.  If it has appeal to others, great, but I need to know it’s for me!

Now that seems quite a paradoxical thing to say so publicly, somehow the 21st Century blog, built on Tim Berners Lee’s, CERN’s, http/html and the extraordinary web that has grown from that, takes the diary into a new public form.  For the first time in my life I seem to be just about managing to keep a diary of sorts.  Oh brave new world that has such fun in it!

Oh dear, I think this is going to seem particularly ill formed and incoherent when I re-read it tomorrow or beyond but enough now.  I’ll hit the “publish” button and be satisfied to be able to do that.

 

This will be quick as daughter and I are off to Heathrow to meet J back from her three week work/leave trip to India.  I hope J will appreciate us arriving: she knows that it’s my idea of a nightmare for jsut two of us to get into an metal box powered by an infernal combustion engine (a diesel one to make things worse, though we can plead that when we bought it people were still saying they were the right thing to do).  It’s even been a nice day here, almost perfect for cycling with high cirrhus now cooling things fast.

Not only are we getting into the (smallish) tank, but we’re doing it just on the rush hour, on a Friday, and going to be on the M4 as everyone floods out of London for the weekend.  Aargghhh.  Probably should have gone at midday but then the parking fees at Heathrow would have needed a second mortgage.

There is something appropriate about going off to meet J though as this day last year was the last before I would meet up with her for our “week off”, using said infernally combusting tank to explore the south of France leaving Tito-to-be locked up safely somewhere.  I wanted to get to from Blois to Cahors to be well on my way south by the time we met up, but we’ll come back to that.

There was one detour near the start, just after loading up with food as I remember it.  This time I realised pretty rapidly that we shouldn’t be climbing if the route, as I knew it should, was going to on the South of the Loire again.  Here’s the pertinent bit of track from last year.

Hm. It’s funny looking at that a year on. The change in colour of the track confirms that I’d stopped. That must have been where I bought food.  I can even picture the place and some of the road now, despite the passage of time, and that’s a bit odd really as it wasn’t very preposessing.  Not horrible but not the best aspect of Blois (which has a glorious chateau in the middle, but I knew I had to let that go and that I had seen it at least three times before!)

Then it was off along the voie verte and minor roads, high cloud softening the heat rather like today at least for the morning.  I piled on but was running out of time … as I am now.  OK:got to go!  Will continue this story, a bit out of register, tomorrow.  Just to balance things up, I’ll also go back to yesterday 2017 and a conversation with Helena and some thoughts about why I’m blogging all this.   But now, hey ho, we must off to Heathrow.  “Onward James and don’t spare the …” hm, no!

Ah yes.  This was a long one: 147km in two long stretches.  Looking back at the gpx record I see that I didn’t get away until 10.00 and I didn’t arrive in the next of the B&Bs in Blois until 19.40.  I honestly have NO idea how google maps and I managed to make the departure go so obviously well:

That is sensational isn’t it?  “Why don’t we just hop over to the roundabout, across it and straight off towards Orléans? We’ve go a long way to go today and we know we need to get a move on if we’re going to make it to Compostella.”  “Oh no, let’s go off in completely the opposite direction and then go on a loop, with a couple of side stabs for the sheer hell of it, before returning to almost exactly where we started and heading off.”  To be fair, I think it actually started with a very convincing combination of google and a road sign both saying that that first “L” was the right way to go.

Not a good start.  Then there was a long run from Chartres to Orléans on a fairly busy and not very attractive N road, the N154 by the look of it.  I remember cars, vans and artics coming past at speed.  I can also remember that kept up pretty much the longest, fastest stretch of cycling that I managed in the whole trip.  It wasn’t pleasant but it was pretty flat, the road surface was good, is suspect there was a bit of a tail wind or tailish cross wind and I can certainly remember thinking “Wow, I’m holding a faster speed than I manage to and from work [those were the days] in London despite the weight.  Feels good.  Will it last?”  That means I was rattling along at 27-30kph which I think wasn’t bad at all.

I had a late lunch in Orléans right next to the cathedral.  It’s a funny late gothic edifice with very strange (to my mind) towers with what look like circular temples on the top.

I’ve seen it, albeit briefly, before and remembered being underwhelmed.  This time, with a nice lunch glowing in me and a buzz from the distance I’d covered, I gave myself a while to look at it again and really liked it.  But enough of that now or I’ll never get to sleep.  As you can see from that ‘photo, it was quite a cool, cloud covered day that kept threatening to rain but never actually did.  I think that had helped the speed as there was no danger of overheating.

I set off along the cycle route on the south side of the Loire that would, in principle, take me all the way to Blois.  At first it was lovely.  Lots of other cyclists, mostly I would say, locals only going a short distance and often with children.

I managed to overtake him pretty soon after taking the ‘photo!  His parents were behind me and that was the rather lovely modern bridge to the west of Blois that takes you over and then you pick up the cycle route off to the right.

And you start seeing these:

And for a while everything is nicely signposted and grand.  Though actually, on a road bike, some of it isn’t easy going, very rough track.  One odd thing about this stretch was that I realised that I was exactly retracing a route we’d done as a family a year or so earlier on two hired tandems.  It was funny just how precisely some bits of the route, and even the individual trees and houses, came back.

Cycling was harder now and quite suddenly, the signs on the “voie verte” stopped … I think I wasn’t concentrating enough and missed one sign and took a while to realise it as it seemed I was following the obvious route.

I don’t know if you can see it but I am sure the voie verte takes a right just in the top right hand corner and ends up running right along the river bank there.  You can see a little stub at the point at which I had realised I was off the route and then that lovely straight bit along what was a pretty deserted local road, only for google to tell me, when the bridge over the Loire I needed must have been all but in sight, that I should hang that left to get to Blois. At first it was plausible and very straight but gradally that spike deteriorated into a dirt track that felt increasingly dangerous for anything but a mountain bike … so back I went, and was led literally into a farm yard and a complete cul de sac with quite literally no way out, and finally, with me deciding to guess where the river was from the sun (honestly) I made it back to the bridge.

Over to the north bank of the Loire and still a long hack into Blois:

I was exhausted when I made it to the latest B&B, another of the industrial chain of them that were proving convenient to book, but, as you can see again, tended to be on the edges of towns.  I was so tired that I opted not to cycle about 1km back up the road to the nearest cafe/bar for a drink and a last intake of food.  I just ate up what I suspect was the last of the Canterbury chocolate and some other iron rations (nuts I think) and collapsed into the bed.  I was frustrated by the diversions but proud and relieved that I was a 147km, further, well probably about 100km as the crow flies and I’d really enjoyed Orléans cathedral and quite a lot of the voie verte.

And, by some serendipity, I have just found the perfect quote:

“I think [the Merry-Go-Round] is a very good way of travelling if you don’t want to go anywhere … Especially if you have plenty of marmalade sandwiches to keep you going.”

It had been a bit of merry-go-round, but it was still proving a very good way of travelling, and Paddington Bear was right about the principle that you need a lot of food, though I found French patisserie much better than marmalade sandwiches.  How did Paddington end his stories?  I was looking for “and that was another good day” but that’s not popping out of google.  Hey ho, neither are PhD dissertations about heat related illness and death on the Haj!