Financial institutions and me

Why is it so difficult to get anything done with banks? Credit card companies fall over themselves to give me good service -- nothing bad to say about my BA Amex, and MBNA have given me an 18k limit on a single card, for crying out loud! But banks fucking hate me, and I don't know why. This is what has happened this year.

Natwest

My NatWest debit card expired in 02/08. Having not received a new card in the last week of February, I phoned them up asking when I'd get it. They said they hadn't sent one out (what the fuck?) but would do immediately, and suggested they send it to my local branch, Surbiton. I asked if they'd inform me when it arrived and they said no need, just go in to pick it up. I went in on March 4th and they had no card, and told me to wait to be called.

I didn't get called. So I called back. They'd lost the card, and said they'd send a new one out, this time to my home address. That didn't arrive either, so I called them again and they had no idea what had happened to it. A stop was put on it and a third new one was being sent to the Wandsworth branch. My account is still held there because they advised me not to bother moving it when I moved house. Wandsworth is a pain in the cock to get to from work or Surbiton.

A week later, beyond the Easter bank holiday and 4 weekends since I should have got my automatic replacement, I went to Wandsworth and picked the card up. Because it was a replacement the man explained I would not need to activate it, it would just work immediately. I went back to work. That evening I tried to draw some money out, and my PIN didn't work. I called them up the next day and they said no, of course it didn't, my previous card was stolen and they needed to send me a new one.

Fucking useless. I went a month with no debit card/cash card. They offered me £12 compensation. This was less than the amount in charges I had to pay for using credit cards to withdraw cash during that period.

Tesco

Also in March, I opened an account with Tesco savings. I have some money put aside and wanted to take advantage of a bonus clubcard points offer they had for new account holders. I opted for the "Internet saver" account, the main benefit being that you can manage everything online. It is October 28th and I have still never once managed to log in to my Tesco account.

The initial application happened online. One of the things it asked for was a password, which I provided. All the details were sent to me in a form I had to sign and return, but "password" had become "mothers maiden name", so I scribbled out what was there and wrote the term I use for that instead.

A week or so later they sent me something else in the post, saying that since I'd changed something they needed an extra signature. So I sent that back and waited.

Sometime later I got more stuff in the post. Spread apart by a few weeks I got a one-time registration number, my account number and sort code, and my online customer number. Precisely because they all came in the post, and were sent at different times, I could never manage to lay my hand on all of these things at once. Massively frustrated by the amount of things I'd had to do through the post for an Internet saver account, I gave up for a while. About 2 months, in fact, after which I had a huge hunt for stuff and found all the details. I went through the, what, 3rd stage of online registration? And hey presto, their site says they need another signature. I have no printer at home, so I had to wait another week for them to send me a copy of the form themselves. I signed it and returned it, 4 weeks ago. I still can't login to my savings account. I do hope the money's safe.

Nationwide

Because of the NatWest fiasco, I wanted to move away from them. Fuck them if they can't do a simple fucking thing like send out replacement debit cards. Oh, what a mistake this has turned out.

I started opening the account in June. Another fill-stuff-out-online-then-do-stuff-offline load of nonsense, it took me almost to the limit of 90 days to get round to visiting a branch with proof of who I am and stuff.

When my account finally opened, Nationwide gave me a cash card. No overdraft, no chequebooks, no debit card, no chip + PIN. It seems I am 12 years old or something. Nationwide come with a great reputation and I tried to find out what had happened and if I could change it, by using their recommended way of contacting them: through secure messaging on internet banking. They aim to respond within 5 working days. I sent them 2 messages on October 10th and here we are on the 28th with no responses at all. So now I have two bank accounts, both of which I need to keep, because my direct debits have made their way across but I'm not transferring my salary + spending money to an account that doesn't have a bloody debit card on it.

Why do banks hate me so fucking much? I'm really angry and depressed by them all.

A new type of django relationship: Generic Intermediaries

Bloody hell, it's a second technical post in the space of a week. I was really bored last night (when I wrote most of it, as the publish date suggests); had seen both of the Family Guy episodes on FX several times before, and similarly I've seen Die Hard enough times for it to not really require another viewing. Now, if it had been in HD... anyway, the upshot was that out came OmniGraffle, before I knew it I'd created a diagram and then, well, a picture needs a thousand words of explanation. So, after the lozenge, here they are.

NB this stuff is also included in the django-slots wiki; I thought it would be sensible to post it somewhere that might have an audience, as well as this blog.

◊

Generic intermediaries: relationships with characteristics

Introduction

This document describes the GenericIntermediary django model and IntermediaryKey, a key-like object. Together these two classes provide a mechanism for giving characteristics to relationships between models.

Existing relationships in django

fixed relationships

Django already provides relationships between models. These allow you to link single or multiple instances of models to one another. Their existence is reflected in the database schema behind those models, be it generated when using syncdb or defined explicitly with dmigrations. I'm calling these relationships fixed because the model on either side of the relationship is explicitly specified in the code.

generic relationships

The content types application (django.contrib.contenttypes) ships with django and is in INSTALLED_APPS by default. As well as providing a unique identifier to all model instances in your project through an app/model/id triplet, you also get the ability to specify a generic foreign key and/or generic relation. This lets you genericise one side of a foreign key relationship: that is, specify that your model can be attached to any other model. This relationship is specified by using two fields: a ForeignKey to ContentType, and a regular field used to store the ID of an instance of that type. As with the fixed relationships, therefore, this requires columns in your schema, to reflect the fact that the model is related to something else.

Generic intermediaries

Generic intermediaries are a way of specifying that a relationship exists between two model types separately from the instances of those models. The relationship is then given characteristics through a new model, in which the fields containing the instance IDs are also stored. This model can then be used to create a mixin, a Manager-style object or Key-style object, to give new attributes to existing models without requiring schema changes. This is how django-slots is implemented.

Diagram

This is a diagram of how django-slots is implemented, including the slots_demo app which provides the Page and Style models.



Explanation

Page and Style are django models, implemented as normal, with whatever attributes they require.

Between them is GerenicIntermediary In concrete terms this is a model with just two attributes, each of them a ForeignKey on ContentType and a unique_together constraint ensuring only one relationship between two types -- in one direction -- can exist. The direction is important: as with the diagram, the two keys represent the models on the _left_ and _right_ hand side. The left-hand model is that which the right-hand types are _against_; in django-slots therefore Page is on the left.

Slot is a django model which has a ForeignKey on GenericIntermediary This is, in effect, a declaration that Slot implements characteristics of a relationship. Missing from the diagram (bolded to remind the author to remedy this!) are the attributes which contain the IDs of the instances which are related, that is, the ID of the Page objects and that of the Style objects.

Left at this, scheduling would be possible. You would create a slot like this:

# assume we have Page and Style objects called page
# and style respectively; we also have two datetime
# objects, start_time and end_time
cp = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(Page)
cs = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(Style)
gi = GenericIntermediary.objects.get(left=cp, right=cs)
slot = Slot(relationship=gi, against_object_id = page.id,
        slotted_object_id = style.id,
        start_time = start_time, end_time = end_time)

and retrieve it so:

# same assumptions as above; also same cp, cs,
# and gi assignments
now = datetime.datetime.now()
# look for a slot that now falls inside,
# against our page
try:
   current_style_slot = Slot.objects.get(
       relationship=gi, start_time__gte=now,
       end_time__lte=now,
       against_object_id = page.id)
except Slot.DoesNotExist:
   current_style_slot = None
else:
   current_style = cs.get_object_for_this_type(
     id=current_style_slot.slotted_object_id)

This is horribly verbose and inconvenient. It's also not required.

Intermediary keys

Also missing from the diagram above is IntermediaryKey. As the name suggests this is a key-like object which relates to the GenericIntermediary. Informed heavily by the GenericForeignKey API, IntermediaryKey works by specifying which two fields together point to the instances on either side of the relationship. The first argument denotes both the relationship field (the foreign key on GenericIntermediary) and the side of the relationship, using normal django key__attr syntax; attr will always be one of left or right.

By having an IntermediaryKey the model gets an attribute which, like the fixed relationships, returns the actual instance of the related model.

This is how Slot uses IntermediaryKey

against = IntermediaryKey('relationship__left',
                         'against_object_id')
slotted = IntermediaryKey('relationship__right',
                         'slotted_object_id')

all this really gives us is the ability to use .against and .slotted as shortcuts to the instances of Page and Style in a relationship. The only improvement we can make to the previous examples is to shorten the current_style assignment:

current_style = current_style_slot.slotted

Still horrible, though.

Usage by django-slots

All the verbosity can be reduced (to taste) by the implementation of a class to define characteristics of the relationships, and the use of techniques to attach these classes to existing models.

django-slots' Slot model/class is the first such relationship (because GenericIntermediary and IntermediaryKey were invented for this project!); ScheduleMixin is the technique which attaches them to existing models.

The introductory blog post explains at a high-level what this means, in that it shows the API of django-slots. To fully understand the way to get from the above code to provision of attributes and methods, read up on mixin classes and see ScheduleMixin in models.py

Conclusion

GenericIntermediary and IntermediaryKey are not replacements for fixed relationships, nor generic relationships. Instead they are a way of representing the fact that a relationship exists between two arbitrary classes separately from the instances of those classes in the relationship. This is useful where:

• the relationship between two models has characteristics itself;
• one model's relationship with another is not, or need not be, an attribute of either;
• a model wants to declare which other models are related to it, rather than the other way round; or
• there is a need for another model to key on your own, when you cannot change its schema (eg in 3rd party apps you don't want to fork)

The mixin technique currently employed by django-slots demonstrates the first three of these use cases:

• the relationship exists between two times
• Style and Page are separate models with no explicit fixed relationships
• Page declares that it would like Style to be attached to it; Style does not declare itself as tied to Page -- or anything at all

other random thoughts

I don't believe time is the only characteristic that could use this technique, which is why I've written such verbose documentation. I'm struggling to come up with proper use cases for, say, geographic foreign keys (where instead of start_time and end_time you might declare a bounding box, or latlong + radius?), but I have a gut feeling it could be useful.

alice

alice
Originally uploaded by Darren Foreman

After being sent a youtube clip of a stealth ninja cat this afternoon I was searching for evidence that Ruth's cats aren't evil. That made me look at my own photos of them, and find this one, which I just feel like flagging up here as my absolute favourite. Awwww.

Introducing django-slots

Sigh. Was it inevitable? I don't think it was, but it's happened anyway: I'm putting a purely technical post on my blog. Sorry and all that. Those of you who couldn't give a toss about python, django, coding, my job, and so forth can turn away now. Normal lack of service will resume shortly.

◊

django-slots

This post introduces django-slots, a system for scheduling relationships between django models. It's an open-source (head-above-parapet) project which allows django developers to include time-based foreign keys in their applications/projects.

At the time of writing django-slots should be considered pretty nascent. Some reasons for this are detailed near the end. Nonetheless I believe even its current state provides enough useful functionality to justify its release.

Background and rationale

The first iteration of django-slots was a weekend pet project of mine, inspired by two things. Firstly, the team to which I belong at work were busy implementing several different solutions to what I considered a single problem: making a relationship between two objects occur for a period of time. Secondly, I believe that as a software engineer my job is to make my job easier; and as a software engineer on a CMS this mostly means that my job is to make everyone else's job easier too. This comes down to two things:

1. Engineers should not be required to make changes happen at a particular time (and this means doing deployments etc).
   
2. Users should not be using my software at times when I could really do without them calling me up saying it's broken (ie weekends, midnight, etc)

Both problems are solved by writing software which allows the future state of the data in my CMS to be scheduled, and previewed, in advance.

What django-slots is not

• django-slots is not a system for making things appear and disappear, or exist and not exist
  
• django-slots is not a tool to explicitly make something happen. It is not a replacement or wrapper for cron; nothing is ever triggered.
• django-slots is not a replacement for foreign keys, or other normal relationships between entities
• django-slots is not perfect or finished. By a long way.
  

What django-slots is

django-slots aims to provide developers with a way to satisfy the generic requirement of scheduling changes to relationships, designed with websites in mind. The most common concrete and specific example is probably to schedule a particular ad/sponsor/promotion to appear on a site between two times.

django-slots allows developers the freedom to define what "something" is through an intermediary mechanism. Unlike a normal ForeignKey, a relationship between two models exists separately from the instances of those models; the instance-instance relationship is bound to a period of time, known as a slot.

With this approach django-slots also provides a platform on which developers can build other tools to report, audit, preview, and more. A timeline of relationships means you can see the state of your data in the past, present, and future.

Furthermore, django-slots decouples models from one another, allowing them to exist and develop independently. No changes are required to the models which are scheduled, and no schema changes are involved in declaring the schedules attribute. django-slots is designed to be simple.

Finally, the mechanisms in use to implement the relationships inside django-slots are available for use by other applications. Specifically this means the definition of generic relationships between arbitrary model types on both sides (as opposed to the one-sided relationship already possible with GenericForeignKey). Where django-slots is concerned only with time, I envisage other applications in areas where similar concepts (universally identifiable points, etc) apply, eg geography.

Code

django-slots is hosted on Google Code, and there is a minimal installation guide on the wiki system which it provides.

http://code.google.com/p/django-slots/wiki/QuickstartGuide

Description

django-slots is used by telling your models to use a provided mixin class, and declaring a schedules attribute. This attribute should be a tuple of other class objects, which must be other django models.

By setting up your model like this you are declaring that a relationship can exist between it and those in the tuple. Your model is extended with properties and methods for querying and managing instances of these relationships. You can then schedule a relationship to exist, retrieve the current relationship or that for a given time, and retrieve a timeline of all relationships between your instance and instances of the other models.

API/usage

# models.py
from django.db import models
from slots import ScheduleMixin

class Style(models.Model):
 # define your style model here
 ...

class Page(ScheduleMixin, models.Model):
 # Style is the foreign key which varies according to time.
 # NB. you don't need a default it it makes no sense to have one
 ...
 default_style = models.ForeignKey(Style)
 schedules = (Style,)

# views.py
def detail(request,...):
 page = Page.objects.all()[0]
 # the Style scheduled for right now, if there is one
 style = page.current_for_model('Style')
 if style is None:
     style = page.default_style
 # do stuff with style
 ...

# properties
# dictionary of schedules keyed by model,
# each entry is an array of slots ordered by time
page.schedule
# dictionary of all objects (or None) currently
# scheduled, keyed by model name.
page.current
# returns next scheduled objects (ie, where start time is
# later than right now) in same format as current
page.next
# returns last scheduled objects (ie, where end time  is
# earlier than right now) in same format as current
# per-type query methods
page.last
# just the array of slots for Style
page.schedule_for_model('Style')
# the Style object currently scheduled, or None
page.current_for_model('Style')
# the Style object scheduled next, or None
page.next_for_model('Style')
# the Style object which most recently finished, or None
page.last_for_model('Style')
# finding what's scheduled at a particular time.
# NB this only works on a per-relationship basis;
# you cannot pass a datetime object to page.current()
page.current_for_model('Style',jan_1st)
# scheduling an object
page.add_to_schedule(style_object, start_datetime, end_datetime,
                    notes)
# a signal catches this and deletes all relevant slots
style_object.delete()

What's missing

As mentioned above django-slots is by no means complete. To my mind there are a few fairly crucial missing pieces right now:

1. Removal (descheduling) of individual slots
2. An admin interface.
3. A test suite.

And there are bound to be far, far more. Hopefully such holes will be filled; better yet, hopefully others will (help) fill them.

Colophon

django-slots should work in any out of the box django installation, though it was written alongside django 1.0. The only configuration requirement is that django.contrib.contenttypes is in INSTALLED_APPS (this is the default).

men and boats

men with radio controlled yachts on Rick Pond
Originally uploaded by Darren Foreman.

Haven't confirmed whether or not it really was a race, but in the course of trying to put decent titles etc on the flickr set about the walk described in the previous post I have stumbled across this: Hampton Court Model Yacht Club.

Oh wow. I don't know what to make of that at all. The idea, the web "design", the any of it.

blimey, a walk

After getting a prod on twitter I managed to do today what I've failed to do so many times this year, and drag my sorry carcass away from the TV/xbox/laptop on a Sunday to go for a walk. Turned out to be a very good idea 'n all, for a number of reasons.

Not that I hadn't spent a bunch of time in front of the TV, xbox, and laptop this morning anyway. Got up with a vaguely woolly head and did a bit of coding unrelated to work, a habit I've surprisingly fallen back into after a 4+ year hiatus. More of that later, possibly; I'm undecided whether to ever launch or publish anything, the main motivation is just to learn how to do python well so I can do my job better.

Aaaaanyway. Coding on hold I put the xbox on to play Death Magnetic a bit more (what an album!) but left meself on Yahoo! Messenger so I could chat to the still-in-Pakistan missus when she popped up. Pop up she did, apparently with a very bad hangover, and she soon went back to bed after not much more than a quick hello. After that the twitter prod happened so I showered, sorted my GPS and camera (k850 in flight mode! hah) out, put a spare shirt in me bag and buggered off towards the Thames, destination Richmond.

I didn't go to Richmond. I did this:

Surbiton, Kingston, Home Park, Thames Ditton at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail:GPS Geotagging

Hmm. That's not a bad embeddable widget (the other one everytrail do is worse). Anyway, I took the familiar route from home to Kingston Bridge, which on a day like today always reminds me, as if I need reminding, why I love living here. It's just such a nice view and walk. But I wasn't really hanging around to savour it, this was a very workmanlike trip, done to take advantage of the nice weather as an opportunity to do something vaguely healthy. I had my mp3 player on very loud, a bag on my back to both make sure my posture was OK and to provide some extra weight (the dual aim being to get some upper body benefit as well as lower body, and to just generally use up a few more calories than normal), and I was keeping up a pace that meant after just a mile or so I could feel me shins saying hello.

Mind you, it would have been really stupid to be out and not take any photos at all. I took some duplicates (ie, I've done this bit quite a lot) around the river and at Kingston Bridge -- including a pretty poor panoramic effort -- before diverting off a familiar track and into Home Park (which seems to also be called Hampton Court Park).

Oh, wait, I already skipped over the whole didn't-go-to-Richmond thing. Yeah. I got to Kingston Bridge and decided it was a daft idea. For one, I don't actually like Richmond. I do like locks, which means Teddington Lock would have been good, but I fairly recently walked with Ruth to Richmond Park which involved trekking as far as Ham along the river. But even with the spare shirt (designed to change into at my destination, out of the super-sweaty one I'd be in at that point) I didn't relish the idea of finishing up that far away and having to get a couple of buses back. Also I was sort of time-bound, in that I wanted to get back in time for QPR vs Southampton (4-1! Come on!) on the box at 4pm. So, all those factors combined to make me decided on a new route: from Kingston bridge, back on the other side to Hampton Court and then a train to Surbiton and home.

Turns out I went to Richmond, though, sort of. On the north side of Kingston Bridge there's a sign saying "Welcome to Richmond Upon Thames". Sure, it's only the borough, but, meh... along the river towards Hampton Court I spotted a sign which piqued my interest (the royals are going to kill a bunch of animals), discovering in the process of photographing it that I was next to a gate into Home Park that I hadn't previously known about. I knew there was a golf course there, and that in that area there was also a park, but I didn't know there were a few public entrances. Having stumbled upon that one I diverted my route.

Christ, was I ever glad I did. Not that I don't like walking that stretch of the Thames, but I've done it a few times and new things are always better than old. Better still, there were mushrooms and deer! The 'shrooms were pretty cool, but the deer took me by surprise, almost literally. I first spotted a few wandering around the car park of Hampton Court golf course, and then there were 3 just sitting on either side of the path I was walking along. Being a huge wouss I avoided walking between them, but did use poor digital zoom to get a snap of them once I was a safe distance beyond.

Home Park does actually seem to mostly be a golf course. It's quite boring. Oh, but before the deer I had gone past a lake where loads of blokes were, I think, racing radio controlled yachts. They were certainly using them, and a little portable tannoy thing was counting down 60 seconds until the start of something. I didn't hang around to see what it was.

Jubilee Gate was quite useful because it gave me a you-are-here moment, and showed me I was on the right path to one of the exit/entrances which is right near Hampton Court -- and that I could still avoid walking alongside the river. After crossing a couple of fairways I headed up a big corridor of trees towards a fairly majestic gate with the palace behind it. The gate was shut. It's shut from April 1st to the end of September. Toss. But it said I could go to ... Jubilee Gate, and walk along the river, to get to the Palace. Ah well. I hadn't actually expected to find a gate directly into the Palace gardens there, and am glad I haven't been there by myself since Ruth wants to take me there anyway. But it did annoy me that I had to backtrack.

If any of the above is interesting that's quite a surprise, and it's also quite sad, because that's about it. The rest of the walk was, obviously, along the river to Hampton Court bridge, then an ice cream before changing my mind (again) about the train and treading the roads through Thames Ditton and back home. Really nothing special, and that's why the pictures end as well. Still, 9.2 miles at 3.4 miles an hour is decent, in fact my brother had suggested I try to do a round 10 miles in 3 hours and that's the pace I managed, if not quite the distance.

Back home in plenty of time for the game. Got a call from Ruth telling me it wasn't and isn't a hangover; she's proper ill. :-(

Blogging about things which aren't travelling is hard

Hard enough that I don't think I can be bothered with it. I did vaguely think about posting some reviews of all the books I've read recently but tbh I think I'd rather do that using @oo5 on twitter.

Clearly, in order to keep this blog going, I need to go travelling somewhere. Alternatively I could post something about scheduling arbitrary models against one another in django, but I'm not a tech blogger and don't really intend to turn into one.

Crathes Castle

Crathes Castle
originally uploaded by Darren Foreman

Tuesday was easy. We had it all planned out. Go see a castle, come back, go walking, eat.

After a breakfast -- comprised of cereal, then scrambled eggs on toast cooked by the German Apprentice (still learning English, but apparently understood enough to know what 'salmonella' meant, judging by the instruction from the kitchen we could overhear) -- we went back to the bus station to get our transport to Crathes Castle. About 2/3rds of the way back towards Aberdeen, this castle had two distinct advantages: it was supposed to be really good, and the bus stopped right at the gate to the grounds.

Brushing aside the incomprehensible footwear compliments I received from an alighting passenger, we boarded and, as far as the driver was concerned, Ruth asked for two returns to Crathie [mumble]. Crathie is a village in the opposite direction, which the bus does indeed go through. After some confusion while the driver figured out that he wasn't driving towards Crathie, I realised the error and said "Crathes". Mix-up cleared up, the driver then sold us a ticket which doesn't exist -- a pass that would let us travel all over the place on that route, and other Stagecoach services. The exact kind of ticket we'd asked about on Monday at Aberdeen bus station and had been told doesn't fucking exist. In fact this was a better ticket -- cheaper than two individual passes, he sold us a family ticket that costs 19 quid for two adults and up to 2 children. Zero is, after all, "up to 2".

Crathes was great. It's the ancestral home of the Burnett family, and beyond that I don't have much to say about it that wouldn't just be a rubbish description of the pictures I took. That said I do of course need to boast about having seen and photographed a real live red squirrel. :-D Upon my return to London, and mostly as a result for having twittered about it, I learnt that this was actually something people were jealous of. Coo!

Actually, one notable thing which you won't find by reading up on the history of Crathes elsewhere is the sales technique of the woman in the ticket office and merchandise shop. We just wanted day tickets, but she virtually imprisoned us in her attempt to get us to join the National Trust. Despite our perfectly reasonable, logical, and sensible objections, she nonetheless kept insisting that we should pay the 50-odd quid fee to get a year's free entry to, and apparently of even more use, free car parking at NT properties.

We have no car, and Ruth is spending 10 of the following 12 weeks out of the country. Even when we said this, and promised to join the Trust upon her return -- so that we got a full year's benefit of our membership, of course -- she still insisted that joining NOW NOW NOW was the best thing we could do. Her basis for this argument was some utter nonsense about winter being a shit time anyway, and buying it now we'd already have our membership ready for when the weather starts clearing up.

That woman was fucking mad. We managed to pay just for day tickets, and escaped. As I said, the castle was great, and the gardens were too.

Back at the gate for the bus, we found ourselves unfortunately in the midst of the 2 hours where there are no buses to Ballater. So instead we had to go to Banchory, a fairly nondescript town about halfway between Aberdeen and our real destination. Had a pint, went in WH Smiths, got the next bus. It was a pikey shitty bus only really suitable for journeys of, say, 600 yards, rather than 20-odd miles. Cramped, uncomfortable, it was the first long road trip of the whole holiday that made Ruth feel ill :-( plus any chance of walking had disappeared. Ah well.

Back at the B&B we needed to get changed and find somewhere to eat. What with Tuesday not being Monday we'd envisaged having our pick of the restaurants in Ballater; and being Ruth's birthday she wasn't to pay a single penny towards it. The only thing required was that she needed to pick and book the place, since I hate using the phone.

She phoned every restaurant in Ballater, including the hotel bar at the Hilton Craigendarroch (oh how I wish we'd known about that place earlier! think of the loyalty points, the room upgrade, ... sigh), and found nothing. Zip. Nada. FUCK. ALL. Every restaruant in Ballater was full, apparently, and we had to go further afield. Specifically we found a table at a place in Aboyne, probably the nearest village once again back in the direction of Aberdeen. Called the Candlestick Maker, it was virtually empty and we learnt it was shutting within the next month. In fact the day we were there was the last Tuesday they were opening at all, as for some reason that was the weekday they were taking off in their last month. Who knows why?

As it happens the food and service were both spot on. Shame. I guess if Ballater's food really is that good then they just couldn't deal with the competition...

The bus timetable was very kind to us, either side of the meal. It dropped us off 10 minutes before our booking, and picked us up 10 miutes after we left. Who needs cabs? Even the local scrotes weren't particularly scrotal.

◊

I did think I'd blog about Wednesday separately, but to be frank I can't be bothered. There wasn't much to it: bus to Aberdeen, lunch, train to Dyce, cab to the airport, couple of hours in the lounge, flight to T5, bus home, hello cats, hello Wooj.

turn that wine back into water

Ballater from on-high
Originally uploaded by Darren Foreman.

We checked into our B&B properly after lunch, a bit surprised to find we essentially had an entire wing to ourselves. Certainly an entire floor, they said "your room is upstairs" and it, our toilet, and our shower room, were the only things that were. And after tourist information had asked for a double room, which by the sounds of the phone call was likely to be a twin room turned into a double, the presence of a bunk bed was an eyebrow-raiser.

Thankfully there was a double bed as well. The bedroom was the full depth of building, giving us a view above the caravan park to the hills beyond at one end, and to Craigendarroch over the local housing at the other. The latter window was slightly worrying as it had no curtains, yet also the most scope for being spied on(!)

Also worrying, to us big city types surrounded on a daily basis by the scrotes of Broken Britain, was the knowledge that the front door was never locked and being asked if we wanted a key to our room. Such things are apparently not required in sleepy Ballater, and we felt almost guilty for saying we would like one. It reminded me of my bag quandary in Auckland the other year.

Anyway, the weather was gorgeous and the day was still young. On came the walking boots, out came the GPS and camera, and off we went. In Ballater tourist information we'd snagged a leaflet of local walks and decided to combine two of them: first walk along the river Dee until it met the one which went up Craigendarroch, the big fucking hill. So we started out through the caravan park, past the golf course, through a car park, and up to a church. Except it wasn't a church, it was an ex-church that's now a "restaurant with rooms" called The Auld Kirk.

At this point we actually had no accomodation for the following night (Tuesday). When booking in Aberdeen we'd deliberately given ourself an extra bit of freedom, although I'd tried pretty hard to convince Ruth that staying 2 nights in the same place would give us freedom, as we wouldn't have to check out and find somewhere that day. And I'd succeeded :-) but this place tested that, because it looked like a fucking cool place to stay. But we didn't, deciding instead to explicitly look in advance for opportunities to stay in a converted church on some future holiday.

The Auld Kirk was also the place where the two walking routes joined, so we left the first and joined the second. The trek up the hill is graded DIFFICULT but unlike another one of the same grade, it did not (apparently) require a high level of fitness or proper hill walking equipment. Good job, as I have neither.

Not really sure how far up we were when we turned back. It wasn't all the way, and from some angles it looked quite near the top... but from others it didn't at all. Either way it was a decent walk, got the heart going and the sweat beading, and was exactly the sort of things we'd had in mind for this holiday.

The Auld Kirk
Originally uploaded by Darren Foreman.

We headed back down the hill -- and it was probably a good idea we'd given up, as it started to rain. The descent would have been a bit more slippery and dangerous if we'd not. Back to the Auld Kirk where we waited for about 2 minutes for a waitress to come out, then we gave up and went to a pub in the centre instead. Beer and quiz/bingo machine session later we went back to the B&B. We ran into the landlord who was so happy about our request to stay a second night he did a little dance(!), and he'd just sorted out a curtain on the rear window too. Mint. In the room we happened to catch a good BBC show about learning magic tricks and stuff. Can't remember what it was called or I'd use the name and link to it.

It was only about 6pm. It would have been a shame to waste the great weather and countryside, so we actually went out for another walk. Cambus O'May had been on a signpost in a picture in the Aberdeenshire brochure we'd gone through back in the Aberdeen hotel, partially responsible for convincing us we could head inland for a better time. It's a few kilometres from Ballater along a walking track which traces the old train line, and it was that we headed along, finding its start point after a wander through the local housing estate.

Ice cream van music still in our ears, we wandered for a while, stopping at one point for a chat with a local dog owner whose Collie dog apparently loved rounding up sheep... just so long as it was on its own terms. It hated being told what to do. Daft thing, does it think it's a cat or summat? ;-)

We didn't bother going all the way to CoM though. It was getting nippy, we were getting hungry; we got as far as a decent view of a little castle-turret shaped house and turned back.

This whole Deeside area had done a very good job of reminding me of Tasmania, but I couldn't quite figure out why. It hit me on the way back into Ballater that the reason was fucking obvious: probably more than half of the towns and villages in the state were essentially Scottish, built on very similar lines in very similar countryside. A further similarity was soon evident as we struggled to find somewhere to eat. It was a Monday, and most of the restaurants were fucking shut.

In the end we had a meal in another hotel, which was piping through a fucking terrible local line-dancing AM radio station which interspersed the songs with ads the likes of which I thought had died out in the 80s. The best song by far was Turn The Wine Back Into Water, a Christian country lament from a guy imploring that God sorts out his addiction to grog. Nothing like taking responsibilty for your own actions, eh. I've since discovered, in the course of writing this, that it's by a bloke called T Graham Brown. Now that's a website.

Despite the awful music and terrible decor, the food and service weren't that bad really. Shame we had to tell about 4 different members of staff that no, we weren't staying there (and we never will!).

On Tuesday we were going to do one of the things you pretty much have to do, given how many there are in the local area: go see a castle.

the Dee after tomorrow

the Dee,
originally uploaded by Darren Foreman.

It's a bit sad when I make a pun that doesn't actually make any sense, but, meh. I have totally lost my decent-title-writing mojo (if indeed I ever had such a thing). Anyway, about last Monday...

After a considerably calmer breakfast than Sunday (which was a fucking awful zoo-like experience), we checked out from the hotel and headed, via a Diet Coke purchase, to Aberdeen bus station. Everywhere was pretty busy because unlike in England on the same day, it wasn't a public holiday. The buses into Deeside run every 20 minutes, but not the whole way -- the service to Ballater is only hourly.

We'd given ourselves 20 minutes or so to buy a ticket, having researched the night before that a Bluebird Explorer would sort us out. It was only about 0930, and our plan was this: get the bus to Ballater (just under 2 hours), see if the B&B would take our bags, then double back and go to Crathes Castle. Back to Ballater in the afternoon and check in properly, explore, etc.

This plan failed. Immediately. First, we were in the queue for tickets until after 0945, thanks to there being only one person selling them and a couple of very awkward customers ahead of us. When we finally got to the front of the queue the woman said there was no pass she could sell us, and that our best bet was just to buy two singles to Ballater. Oh well. Two singles to Ballater then please...oh. You buy them on the bus. So we queued, and missed the bus, for nothing. Thanks a bunch, Aberdeen bus station! We spent a couple of minutes cursing our lack of foresight -- with hindsight, if we'd come to the bus station the day before, just after booking our B&B, we'd have found this out and not missed the 0945. Bollocks.

... time passes ... Diet Coke ... T3 magazine (load of shite that is) ...

Got the 1045 bus, paying £15 each for period returns to Ballater. It was £12 for a single, and we thought the extra 3 quid was worth it so we could come back on Wednesday, if we wanted (at this point I favoured a cab to the airport).

It fucking tipped it down while we were on the bus. Really bad weather. Things weren't looking good...until we got to Ballater. Off the bus, the sun was out, storm passed. With hindsight, our lack of foresight had turned into a blessing -- if we'd got that 0945 we'd have been utterly pissed on.

originally uploaded by Darren Foreman.

When booking the B&B we had discussed with the staff at the tourist information centre that we were using public transport, so they explicitly said they'd book us into somewhere in the centre of Ballater. So, a not-as-short-as-expected walk ensued -- past 2 hotels and a few more B&Bs, next to the caravan park on the edge of town, there we go.

Even after our delay and the walk it was still a bit bloody early, but the people at the B&B were super-friendly and took our bags in, letting us go free, even giving us a recommendation for lunch venue.

Wandering slowly to take in the views all around us, we strolled back to where the bus dropped us off and beyond and found the venue. It was a restaurant in the building where Ballater's own tourist information is; it looked busy, so we went in next door for leaflets instead, and ended up paying a quid to visit the Royal Train Station exhibit/reconstruction. There used to be a train line which terminated in Ballater, for Balmoral castle which is only a couple of miles away. It was built for Queen Victoria and was in use right up to the 1960s, though most of the exhibit is set in the 1800s. There's a replica super-posh-opulent carriage, and some interesting titbits of information. For example, her maj back then didn't trust the accordion-style things which join carriages (and were very very new back then), so instead made the whole train -- which was up to 800ft in length -- stop, whenever she wanted to move to a carriage other than her own. Now that's posh.

By now we were really quite hungry so went for lunch in another restaurant (website fucked at the time of writing), where I had the phenomenally Scottish combo of haggis to eat, Irn Bru to drink. Christ I love haggis, but even I had a bit of a struggle with the quantity they served. Conversation focused mainly on an angry, anti-Royalist Ruth getting constantly pseudo-riled by my consistent and persistent devil's advocacy. Heh.

Lunch over, it was back to the B&B to check-in properly. First impressions of Ballater were, frankly, fucking great.

Park and Walk

It just occurred to me that, as well as gloss over Old Aberdeen way too much, in the last post I failed to mention something else about Aberdeen that we discovered on the Sunday. Aberdeen city centre has a Park and Walk scheme.

I'll say that again. With emphasis. Aberdeen has a Park and Walk scheme.

I'd heard of Park and Ride schemes before, but this was new to me. New and confusing and stupid. Isn't "park and walk" the same as just "park"? Y'know, park your car, because you're within walking distance of your destination. Where's the scheme? Why have roadsigns? Aren't "park and walk" regions just, err, car parks?

I wonder if anyone will ever come up with a "park and drive" scheme: drive somewhere, stop for a bit, then drive on until reaching your destination...

Footnote: somewhat unbelievably, "park and walk" schemes seem to be commonplace. I'm going to stick my neck out here and offer it as evidence of broken Britain. Harumph.

Exit condition

William Wallace
Originally uploaded by Darren Foreman.

So, hmm. Aberdeen. Bit grey. But hey, maybe that's just because it was the early evening, the skies being grey, maybe first impressions aren't always accurate. After all we hadn't made it to the beach, hadn't made it to Old Aberdeen, in fact let's face it we'd done very little other than wander up the main shopping drag. Aberdeen, after all, is a city with a sightseeing bus tour from a chain company, which to my mind implied that it must be a decent tourist city.

So, our plan was to get that bus. At the very least it was a form of 24hr bus pass for the bits which were likely to interest us. Yes, our London attitudes may have been a little patronising towards the place -- we had already learnt, courtesy of a tourist city map given to us by reception staff at our hotel, that one of Aberdeen's claims to fame is that there are over 30 places called Aberdeen in the world (another is that it has the largest permanent funfair in Scotland; the council website has a list of amazing things about Aberdeen) -- but we were trying to rectify that.

First though, a Diet Coke. An easy purchase, but not a quick one, thanks to untold grief being had by the woman in front of us in Somerfield. She was about 150, being served by an under-18, and there was a little communication issue going on. The girl behind the till had mistakenly typed in 2 quid instead of 20 quid, and the resulting odd-looking receipt made the old woman desperately confused and convinced she had been short changed. To top it off her fags had had to be put through the till separately, so she had to hand some money back, and, oh, it was just so traumatic. Noticing this, a supervisor opened another till and we got through. I suspect the difficulties are still going on at the other till a week later.

Up to tourist information and, hmm, it's all still very grey, isn't it. Even with a blue sky, it seemed to kind of just accentuate how grey the buildings were. But we'd still not been elsewhere... and were destined not to venture far for an hour or so, because we missed the sightseeing bus by one minute. D'oh! So after getting our leaflets etc we went for a wander around some back streets and, fucking hell, we found some colour. Not immediately; first we found some more grey buildings, but less square, on a less straight road, basically some character and stuff. We found sculptures and things, and then we found a big park, in the middle of the city, leading towards the bridge on Union Street which would have been lovely if it was over a river, but in fact was over a busy road and a railway line.

At the end of the path in the park we went up the steps, which was a mitsake. Heading back the way we came might have taken an extra 10 minutes, but at least it wouldn't have had the strongest stink of piss this side of the old coach station in Manchester. By christ it was awful.

Right. The bus. It starts outside Marischal College, a building that looks like a church but as the name suggests is not. However, it also isn't a college (any more); there's a bit of scaffold around it, as it's being refurbished for use as the council offices. This is great, because as they told us, the current council offices -- built in the 60s with no respect for the surroundings -- are going to be demolished when it's completed. Those offices are fucking horrible, and hide Provost Skene's House as well. There's a photo on flickr.

After setting off the bus goes first past stuff we'd already seen, so rather than take much notice I instead spent a bit of time trying to work out what the bloke in front of us was all about. This was a man on an Aberdeen sightseeing bus, in Aberdeen (duh), wearing an Aberdeen FC shirt and 2 Aberdeen FC wristbands. So presumaby he knows the city already, which probably meant he wasn't missing much by putting his (red, possibly Aberdeen FC branded) headphones on so he didn't hear the commentary.

Aberdeen beach
Originally uploaded by Darren Foreman.

He didn't get off. We did, after going first through Old Aberdeen (which looked very very nice) and getting to the beach, just beyond Pittodrie, Aberdeen FC's ground. Just opposite was the most terrifying looking bar this side of Gibraltar, and I intend to never go in it even if for some reason AFCW play up there one day. It makes me shiver to remember it. And I can't find a photo of it anywhere, except as a tiny part of this one (about halfway up, on the right, in the car park).

The stop at the beach was just beyond "the Aberdeen Eye", which offended Ruth. It's a big wheel in a small seaside funfair, probably 1/8th the size of the London Eye. Ruth was not impressed with the whole Eye naming therefore. She'll be glad to know that googling for "Aberdeen Eye" in quotes gets no results other than for opticians, at least on the first page; though without quotes it led me to discover that its real name is the Grampian Eye Big Wheel.

She was impressed, perhaps worryingly so, with the 2p machines (which seem to be called "Penny Pushers", but I can't find a decent page about them anywhere, only gadget sellers with nostalgia-fest desktop versions for sale) though, and we spent the best part of 90 minutes in the arcade, heh. Then we wandered along the seafront, took a few photos, had an ice cream, and got back on the bus 2 hours after getting off it.

The Aberdeen bloke was still on the bus. In a different seat, but still on the bus. Perhaps he had got off at some point, but even if so it meant he'd got off later than us and got back on again, having done more than a full circuit. That seemed odd to us. Still had his headphones on too.

After the beach the bus winds through the harbour area, full of working boats off out to either fish or do stuff at the oil rigs. It's not pretty. But after that, it heads out past some old city walls, across the Dee, near an old prison, and then to a big park. There was a pony show on that day, coming to a close at the time we got there, and we'd pretty much decided not to bother getting off until we got all the way back round to Old Aberdeen.

At Marischal College we were kicked off. Everyone was, even Mr Aberdeen, because the bus was broken. Not some trivial thing like a broken exhaust or engine or something, no; the CD player was fucked so there was no commentary. Rather than have a person do it, they were just piping a recording through the speakers (and badly, as it was about a minute out of sync with where were were for most of the journey). Being broken they just took the bus out of service and told everyone on board to come back in an hour. The buses are only once an hour, and they finish at about 4.30pm, so an hour is a big chunk of the day lost!

Mr Aberdeen wandered off down some side street while we went back to the tourist board, but first a phone call. Despite what we'd seen on the tour, and were about to go and see, we were still pretty keen to get out of the city. I had booked 4 nights at the Holiday Inn Express and we'd only stayed one night so far, but we wanted out. Ruth phoned up and asked them if we could check out in the morning with no penalty, and thanks to my having booked a flexible rate we were told we could. So, tourist information board it was and within half an hour we had a room booked at a B&B in Ballater, some 40-odd miles inland, in the Cairngorms national park.

Diet Coke bought, we got back on the bus (as did Mr Aberdeen!) and got off in Old Aberdeen. The main thing here is King's College, nowadays part of Aberdeen University. It's lovely and we spent 45 minutes or so doing the tour our leaflet suggested, taking loads of photos and feeling invigorated -- the weather had been great all day, we'd loved the funfair and now found something really nice in this city, and best of all had an escape route sorted. Aberdeen is not somewhere to stay for 4 nights, but 2 nights was spot on.

Walked back to the city rather than wait for the bus and do the whole circuit again, went for a pint in a decent pub in the city then went back to the hotel. Booked ourselves a table in the Indian we'd been turned away from the previous night, had a fantastic curry, then went to a WORLD FAMOUS pub just down Union Street that neither of us had ever heard of before, and whose name now escapes me (lasting impression that it left). Played a lot of quiz machine, then back to the hotel. The Untouchables was on TV! Senior.

Dragons' Den ideas

I love Dragons' Den. Can't get enough of it (so long as "it" refers to the UK version, not the dodgy Nigerian version we stumbled across on Sky one night). And I want to go on it, so I've been compiling ideas in my head. Now I've decided to commit them to blog post, so I don't forget them.

1. The Scotch Easter Egg. Like a normal Easter Egg (ie, huge) but not chocolate. Instead, a scotch egg. Initial market research conducted at a friend's birthday party suggests I would be able to sell at least 3 of them, not including the ones I'd buy myself. Not sure yet how much I'd ask for, or for what equity stake.
   
2. The Party. I'll host a party where the tickets are 20 quid, but only spend a tenner per person on catering and venue hire etc. I want a 400 quid for 50% stake. 100 people at a party is 2 grand income, 1 grand profit, 500 quid each, 25% profit on investment. That's my projection for month one, after which the business will cease trading.
   
3. The Bank. They're quite profitable, so I want to start one. I'd like £30million investment for a 30% stake. With the money I intend to hire a few people who know how to run a bank, that can invest the rest in the things banks invest in to make money, while I draw a huge fatcat salary and bonus, much to the ire of that bloke who presented the worst episode of Dispatches I have ever seen ("oh no! private firms pay their bosses loads of money, while their customers lose out if they go bust! oh no!").
4. My house. I want £60k for a 25% stake in my house. It's a good house, easily worth that much right now and in a nice area. It's already worth more than that. When I sell it they're as guaranteed a profit as it's possible to be. What I intend to do with the money is piss it away on fruit machines, lager, holidays, and plastic musical instruments for my xbox 360.

Not sure how I can fail really. All my ideas are better than the wondercock pants that show off yer meat and two veg prominently, as seen on a recent episode (9.17pm paragraph in the linked page).

Capital Radio and me

When I were a lad I used to listen to Capital Radio a lot. I have fairly vivid memories of Saturday mornings filled with it, on the occasions that my brother and I would stay at home rather than go down to stay with our maternal grandparents, as happened every weekend until 1988. At Christmas there was always the top 500 songs, played virtually back to back (maybe just between 9am and 5pm? was radio even 24hr back then?) over the course of several days, almost always culminating in Me and Mrs Jones, Layla, and Hey Jude. I remember listening to Pat and Mick's individual shows, not just their single(s), and to the commercial chart show which differed in some way to the one on Radio 1, though I can't remember how. I even remember some of the ads. Well, two of them: Harry Enfield in Stavros mode advertising a new newspaper, the Independent, with the strapline of "It flippin' is or are you what"; and new train route (now defunct!) Thameslink, singing "Thames-link! Thames-link! The train that takes you // straight through London // without changing stations // yeah!".

Well, now I work at Capital Radio. Actually I work for Global Radio (I think), who just bought the company I joined in March (GCap Media), and who own Capital Radio amongst a whole host of other stations across the country. Odd that we're named Global really, but meh. I'm not really a fan of Capital these days, but it is ace to work at a place I've known all my life. Still getting the hang of working for a company that isn't a pure internet company (this being my first such job!), but there are actually quite a few benefits to that. And best of all I get to keep working in central London, and bumping into (literally) DJs. In the last few months I have managed to stumble past David 'Kid' Jensen, Pat Sharp (uttering the word 'cunt', though not at me), Paul Gambaccini, and Henry Kelly in the corridors or at security. What a list! I'm sure I've also been in close proximity to various people who weren't broadcasting in some way in the 80s too, but I couldn't care less about them (actually I know full well that I've seen Alex Zane an awful lot).

Aaanyway, the real point of this post is just to puff my chest out a little bit. Capital launched their new website yesterday. It's not just a redesign -- it's a complete rewrite from the ground up by the team I belong to, a wholesale move from the outsourced version which existed before to an entirely in-house solution. I'm pretty proud of it for a number of reasons. Every part played is a big part given the small size of the development team here, but I'm (hopefully not unreasonably) particularly proud of my own contribution because of the technology we're using. As if this post wasn't boring enough already...

Capital's site, and the CMS which powers it, is built using Django, a framework written in Python. Nothing majorly special about that, but before March this year I had never coded with either, having never even heard of the former. Leaving Yahoo! after 8.5 years was a gamble for me, and likewise this place took a punt on me, believing my "I'll have no trouble picking it all up" spiel having been presented with a CV that said I could only code in Perl. I'm double pleased that I've repaid their faith, and proved (to myself, even) that I wasn't just boasting.

Though maybe this django and python lark is just really, really easy ;-)

The grey before the red

Sheriff Court
Originally uploaded by Darren Foreman.

Forgot to note last time another thing about arriving in Aberdeen -- the proliferation of oil industry adverts at the airport. All the revolving things by the baggage reclaim were for various petrochemical exploration and extraction companies, giving the place a very very industrial feel. And that was apt, I suppose, given the amount of grey in the city. I mentioned it before, and this 'ere photo shows it off though actually looks pretty good with the blue sky behind it, and in truth a lot of the buildings were in isolation nice to look at. The main problem is that they weren't isolated.

Our hotel was on Chapel Street. A very functional Holiday Inn Express, they at least recognised my Priority Club membership (I think) and gave us a voucher for 5 quid off at a local chinese restaurant. But it was way too early, and too bright outside, to think about going for food just yet so we went for a wander to see what was nearby.

Union Street is Aberdeen's main city centre road, and fucking hell is it ever depressingly dull. Long enough such that most businesses seemed to have two branches separated by about 1/3rd of a mile, it's just a very uniformly grey set of shop fronts which, I assume, look as they do because granite doesn't take paint very well. But that can't be the reason, even certain businesses seemed to have changed their frontage to suit the city -- specifically William Hill, whose branches were distinctly monochrome rather than the blue I expected.

Lush in Scotland stinks just as bad as it does anywhere else.

At the top of Union Street is the building from this photo (not sure what it is, actually; possibly the law courts?) and then Castlegate. This is a big pedestrianised square with a pub on one corner, a few eateries and shops, and a big castle at the end. Well, not that big a castle, I guess. Just beyond it, we thought, was the beach, so we ventured onwards and came across a terrifying-looking pair of tower blocks. After a wrong turn at the roundabout which took us almost into the harbour area, we did go along the main road towards the beach a bit further but in the end gave up.

Back at the square we had a drink in the pub on the corner, called the Blackfriar. Choosing the back room after a somewhat frosty reception from the group of gents standing at the front room's bar, we just had the one (Harviestoun Bitter and Twisted for me) before trudging back down Union Street and to the hotel. Quick change and out for chinese, with the 5 quid discount, but not before being parternally and patronisingly turned away from the heaving Indian restaurant just round the corner. We had the audacity to ask if they had a table available without reservation. Oh dear.

The food in Yu, the Chinese place, was really very nice. We both ordered our dishes in a type of sauce we'd never heard of -- Ruth had duck, I had chicken -- and it turned out that basically she'd ordered Lemon Duck and I'd ordered Lemon Chicken. I took advantage of the 5 quid discount to actually just order an extra dish that cost about a fiver, fat fuck that I am. Can't even remember what it was! Back at the hotel we were neither of us particularly taken by our first evening in Aberdeen. I had a real sense that the (lack of) colour was having a psychological effect that made me dislike the place more than was perhaps fair; a sightseeing bus tour the next day was going to test that theory.

London to Aberdeen

[No photos on this post, I'm not uploading anything to flickr over free-but-slow airport wifi]

Jeez. Not blogging for months on end doesn't half get me out of the habit of decent titles for the posts I do bother to make. How utterly pedestrian, but unfortunately inspiration has deserted me. Had I come up with anything better before finishing the text below then I'd have come back and removed the sentences prior to this one, but in fact I've come back to write this! Ahem. Anyway, as I write I'm sat in the BA lounge at ABZ, otherwise known as Aberdeen airport. I've already spent longer than 2 hours getting here in plenty of time for the somehow-they've-made-it-90 minute flight back to Heathrow, from where I arrived on Saturday afternoon, where this post really starts.

Actually it starts on Friday evening, when a cheeky bottle after work started me off down the slope towards a hangover on Saturday morning, which I had promised myself I'd avoid. Flying with a hangover sucks, and to be fair to myself I didn't do too badly... but nonetheless I was, as Wooj says, in deficit in the am. Not bad enough to make the cab to T5 be awful, though the traffic round Hampton Court made sure of that anyway. Our driver was a strange mixture of cockney and landed gentry, occasionally lapsing into a definite twang one way or the other on specific words or phrases. I mean, the Jairmans have figured out how best to deal with a trifling road accident, why the bally hell can't we English? It's simply ridiculous. Anyway, gawd bless yer and 'ave a lovely flight.

Disappointingly for my English sensibilities, but in accordance with my desires as a traveller, T5 does actually appear to work as well as BA's recent spiel claims. Yes, we chose a particularly slow queue for the fast bag drop but that was entirely the fault of the passengers ahead of us, not the staff. Once our bags were in we zoomed through security and found our slow, winding way to the Galleries First lounge. You can tantalisingly see it the second you're past the x-rays but to reach it you have to go left, downstairs, along, upstairs, upstairs again. Worth it though, that's a fucking proper lounge right there. Of all the lounges I've been lucky enough to visit in this 2-years-and-counting frequent-flyer odyssey I'm tempted to rate it above the previous winner, Qantas's first class lounge in Sydney (experienced back in May). Ruth is slightly less convinced of this but still agreed that it was superb.

Superb, and empty, in fact. There was hardly anyone else around having seconds from the hot food buffet, enjoying way too much custard on their cakes, or necking free champagne and kettle chips. Oof. Copious consumption before the gold card runs out! Got on the flight feeling appropriately bloated and was instantly, after the seatbelt sign went out, thrusted a sandwich and Breakaway chocolate bar. Mmm!

Domestic flights have no business class, which is good because it meant that I had managed to get us in row 1. It's not a great row, possibly worse than row 2 (there are no seats in front under which you can sort-of stretch your legs), but there's still something childishly goose-bumpy, for me at least, about having seats in row 1 on a plane. And there is still the very genuine benefit of being able to get off first (or complain, and receive compensatory BA miles, if for technical reasons they have to kick passengers off from the back and you get off last. Hello, Jersey trip last year!).

Aberdeen, I subsequently learned, has the distinction of being The World's Most Improved Airport. I choose to ignore that presumably you need to be fucking shite in the first place in order to have sufficient room for improvement that you win that award, because it would be rude of me to point it out. But there are some odd things about this airport nonetheless. Upon arrival there seemed to be no distinction between landside and airside, though with hindsight that appears to be mostly because we arrived on a domestic flight. So that's understandable. Less understandable is the Customs Red Channel comprising a sign that says "Customs Red Channel", being very much landside, and in actuality being a pillar next to the car hire desks with a phone on it. Very curious.

The cab ride to Aberdeen city centre was uneventful but informative, as our driver expressed surprise that anyone bothered to visit (t)his city as a tourist and then proceeded to tell us what high-fat foods we should make a point of buying while here. Rowies were the main recommendation, supposedly available any time of day or night at the 24hr bakery opposite our hotel which was, in some Scottish comedian's opinion, the best street in the whole of Britain. His justification was the presence of a strip joint, the aforementioned bakery, and a strip club. And he was right, all such things were there, but the bakery wasn't open at all during our stay. I remain a man that has never eaten a rowie.

Right. I do intend to write up the rest of our trip over the next few days but right now, and especially in the absence of any photos to break up the flow, I can't be bothered to write any more; suffice it to say for now that Aberdeen is grey. Very, very, very grey.

Regime change

What responses there have been about my last post (public and private) have concentrated on the Wii aspect. That's predominantly my fault, given how I phrased everything, and it means we all missed the point: Wii Fit is first and foremost a measurement tool. It's not a game in the sense that practice or learning techniques in themselves could get me better scores; the nature of the gameplay is such that they will only get better if you do actually get fitter (which, yes, the games themselves are supposed to do). As for the two activities I do the most, I don't aim to jog a particular distance or get a particular score in the boxing, and being the only player in my household there is no competitive aspect to the charts.

The balance board is good at measuring. As scales they are accurate, and as daft as the "Wii Fit age" thing is, any activity you repeat at roughly the same time every day which uses a consistent measure is useful as a way of determining progress. So for the sake of argument let's remove Wii Fit's training games from the equation -- pretend the graph is a set of results from normal bathroom scales, and say that 4 weeks ago I started a fitness regime which primarily involves a 3km jog five times a week. How long should it take for me to lose some inches/weight, and/or feel noticeably different?

Wii Fat

23 days on the trot and no progress
Originally uploaded by Darren Foreman.

23 days into my Wii Fit regime and I'm almost exactly the same weight/BMI as when I started. Specifically, my lightest weight was on day 3. When I first bought the thing I said to a few people that it was a game of chicken between losing weight/size, or the novelty wearing off. I think the novelty is winning :-(

The game itself says, and in fact it's common knowledge, that you need to give a new exercise regime a bit of time to yield results. But how long? I don't feel noticeably better, nor am I smaller. The missus says she thinks I'm looking trimmer, but I don't see it in the mirror myself. In fact looking in the mirror makes me far more miserable than it did before. Where I used to see a fat bloke who was fat because he didn't do any exercise, now I see a fat bloke who gets up 45 minutes earlier than before and does 10 minutes of boxing exercises each morning, a 20 minute jog most mornings, a few minutes of step basics 3 times a week, and wonders what the point of them all is.

NB those are all from the aerobic exercises designed to burn fat, but I do intersperse them with activities in the yoga, muscle workouts and balance exercises too; though mostly in those I discover that my balance and posture are already pretty good (I put that down to 20 months of MBT-wearing). I've also been carrying a deliberately heavy rucksack for the last 6-8 weeks to and from work; cut down my alcohol intake; started using the stairs instead of the lift most times at work, where I sit on the 4th floor; and mostly swapped what would previously have been a pastry or sandwich for some fruit, at breakfast and lunch.

It's really pissing me off. I might give it 'til 31 days out of stubbornness, but if I don't feel any better or get any smaller by then, someone's going to have to explain why I should continue bothering.

same old song and dance

Two months without an update? Guess that's par for the course. Latest attempt du jour at letting a good 6 or 7 people know what I'm up to involves my new twitter account (see panel on right, when it's working; twitter goes down more often than the planes in Air Crash Investigation), and a getting-less-vague-by-the-day temptation to start using Facebook. The latter urge probably comes from the drip, drip, drip insistence of a couple of individuals who know exactly who they are. :-P

As for walking, well, we have done a bit of that. More in Australia, and Vietnam after that, and since then a few things like Richmond Park and Hengistbury Head in Dorset. Go look on everytrail... if you can be bothered. Most of the time I can't, so you won't find much there anyway.

Where's my new home cinema thingy whatnot? Hmph. My TV feels incomplete.

couple of walks

We've done two walks here so far:

Bondi beach
Nielsen Park

Can't tot up the distance properly because I've failed to get the GPS working, and because on the second one everytrail.com seems to think it was only a mile long. I reckon it was about 3. In fact fuck it, let's assume roughly 7 miles, roughly 2 miles for the walk into Kingston recently, cheat a bit by rounding up and make the running total 40 miles.

Weather in Sydney seems better today so we might get some more done, maybe even the harbour bridge!

Sydney, days 1 and 1.5

Just about to nod off but thought I'd write something here first. It's coming up to 1530 on Friday afternoon and we're knackered.

Not exactly stereotypical Australian weather here, it must be said. We arrived yesterday morning to torrential rain at 6am when Kevin and Sally met us at the airport. 45 minutes from landing to airside despite not using the Express Arrival lanes. The rain stayed pouring until we got to their house, and after the tour and dumping our bags Sal went to work. Kevin took Ruth and I to our first box-ticking venture, a mostly dry affair at Bondi Beach. We parked almost in Bronte and walked the coastal path to Bondi itself, heading inland when the heavens re-opened for some breakfast at Paris Go(?). Back to and along the beach afterwards, we spent a little while watching a nutter swimming around the rocks at the northern edge. It was windy and the ocean was pretty mean.

Walked back along the same coastal path and to the car, then came back to Willoughby for 3 hours kip while Kevin took Rowlf out for a swim. The evening was a BIG box-ticker for Ruth, as she went to a ballet at the Sydney Opera House. Prior to the performance the 4 of us had beer and chips at a bar; and ... OK I'm fading here, so this is the end of the post. I'm just dryly and dully listing what we did in linear fashion and it's not fun to write which means it's probably even less fun to read than normal. Maybe I'll write something better before tonight's pub crawl. Not likely though.

oh, and while I'm here

What happens to men of a certain age, disposition, wealth, and status within their company that makes them think white jeans are ever a good idea? They're not.

I wish there was a shit-hot chess player whose surname was "Flash".

Don't wanna be like common people

Shock! A post to my blog. Double shock! Not a post about walking. Although we did walk into and around Kingston the other day, so I should add another couple of miles or so to the running total, but I can't be arsed. It'll get added to properly over the next few weeks because Ruth and I are off on holiday, and our holidays always tend to involve lots of walking; this holiday in particular does because we've planned it that way. We're off to Sydney, Tasmania, Sydney again, and Ho Chi Minh City.

As I type, however, we're still in Blighty. Specifically we're in the BA FIRST lounge in Heathrow's Terminal 4 (no T5 chaos for us) near gate 10. One of the very few times we're able to take advantage of my for-one-year-only Gold status with BA and we're larging it to the full. Well, as full as possible -- Ruth tried to get an Elemis spa treatment and was told they're fully booked for the evening. This despite us being pretty much the first people to check in for the flight (10pm last night), and to drop our bags off (7pm this evening) and having made a beeline straight here (left the house at 1815; in the lounge at 1925). Oh well.

Quick aside: Ruth's reading the New Statesman. Not the most popular periodical in a place like this, I'd wager (and I really would, capitalist pig that I am. Though the odds would be shocking).

Anyway, having left a genuinely fat feline at home we are, spa notwithstanding, living la vida fat-feline. A bunch of cheese and strudels and sarnies and bagels already washed down with some champers, I'm now tucking into the sweets with relish (NB: not actually eating sugary goods covered in hamburger condiment) with a glass -- a glass, no less! -- of lager, while Ruth has a coffee and some kettle chips. All this is taking place 2 hours before we take off for Australia, ensconced in the best business class seats the upper-deck of a BA 747 has to offer.

I'm so glad and, despite my tone, somewhat humbled bordering on embarrassed, that I was lucky enough to have had the fiscal and temporal opportunity to take those 2 months off in 2006 and flit around the world. It's that which kick-started this holiday because, combined with a bit of help from my previous employers, is how I earnt enough miles that Ruth and I can now do what we're doing. Come November I'll be on the outside of these lounges, wistfully remembering what it was like to be a scruffy Morden pikey drinking himself daft and stuffing his fat face with salmon and cream cheese bagels, in amongst the power suits and blackberries and people asking "which risottos do you have this evening?". Granted, for a further year I'll be that self-same pikey drinking himself daft and stuffing his fat face with whatever fare the business class lounges serve, but after that... well from this distance, it doesn't bear thinking about.

Right. Enough of that. This holiday will have to try very hard not to rule. Look out bro, we're on our way. See you in 24 hours or so.

Walton wander

For the first time in over a month we actually went out for a walk... met up with Ed and Monica for the first time in ages on Saturday. It was meant to be a nice long wander and we decided to start from the Anglers at Walton on Thames, to walk along the Thames Path for a bit. I'd mis-remembered, thinking it was where we finished last time when it was in fact where we'd started. In the end it didn't matter because we didn't do very much at all; by the time we'd all got to the river it was tipping it down with rain, and instead of walking we went for a pub lunch. Once the food was finished it was dry out so we headed towards Sunbury Lock, but turned back when we reached The Weir pub because time was running short.

Total including car park to river to car park: 3.7 miles. Running total for the year: 30.4 miles. Number of days of the year to day: 77.

Oops.