Tag Archives: life

Plain walking

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It’s Sarsen Trail time again, our mostly annual uptake of the 26 mile walk over Salisbury Plain from Avebury to Stonehenge, of which we do the first 11 miles and then get the coach back to the start. Except that this time we did the 15 mile second half, and my outraged legs are still letting me know their thoughts on the matter.

Well, we like a bit of a challenge and we’d always wondered what lies beyond the halfway point. And now we know. A lot of Salisbury Plain, and a very, very, very, very, very long track, for which the term ‘wends’ was specially invented. The fact that four fifths of the word ‘wends’ are also in ‘endless’ cannot be coincidence.


It is also extremely dusty, but you soon learn to walk on the upwind side when traffic comes along.

Weather on the first weekend of May is always a bit of a lottery – some years I’ve picked up a nice tan, others it’s been tipping. This time was a winner, with a mostly bright and breezy day – optimum walking conditions. Getting blisters can always be awkward because you start to favour the unblistered foot and develop a hobble which puts strain in unaccustomed places – but I got a blister on each foot so that all balanced out.

There are pluses and minuses to the second half, quite apart from the extra four miles. The first half takes you over the highest point of Wiltshire and the views are spectacular, but you then go down into the low ground and though the scenery changes, views are never that great again. For the second half, the scenery rarely changes but you can see all the way to the horizon. And you start with a nice view down into the Vale of Pewsey.

The drawback is that having walked for a couple of hours, you’d be happy for a bit of a change, which you don’t really get.

The first half takes you through the occasional town and village; the second half just skirts around the military training area. You never see signs like this in the first half.

And I’ve never before been overtaken by Batman & Robin, who were running the parallel Neolithic Marathon.

But the biggest plus of all must be finishing at Stonehenge. So much nicer than grinding to a halt on a lonely hilltop in the middle of the Plain prior to taking a coach back to Avebury. Even granted that the finishing area is some distance removed from the monument, you can still see it as you come over the hill and you really feel you have arrived, um, somewhere. A lady with the kind of voice that was bred to issue orders to servants welcomes you in over the loudhailer and even though your legs may have been on autopilot for the last hour, one foot in front of the other for as long as it takes, you know you made it.

Looking at Wiltshire Wildlife’s site I see that the event was the grand climax of Real Nappy Week – probably a coincidence, but a worthy cause nonetheless.

Party excuse

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If you find the sidereal calendar just so drearily predictable, there is an alternative. Decimalise!

I am currently 16140 days old. My next centennial birthday is on 23 June this year, when I’ll be 16200 days. Or maybe I’ll just keep my strength for the millennial celebrations on 1 September 2011 when I hit the big 17000.

I may just call it 17 mega-days. I’ll be 17 again but without the spots and hormones.

Spread the joy and work out your own:

http://partysuppliesonline.com/decimal_birthday.htm

It’s the colour that counts

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I think the first audio cassette I ever held in my hands belonged to my grandfather. I’m guessing it emerged after he died in 1975. And it was so frustrating because nowhere in my grandparents’ or my parents’ house was there any kind of device for playing the thing. Goodness knows what Granddad was doing with it in the first place.
We’ve almost come full circle …
Over the last six months I have discovered iPods. First, Bonusbarn upgraded his white iPod Nano to a green one. I bought the white one off him and put my downloaded music onto it. This didn’t take long. Bit by bit it began to fill up with other stuff. I bought a widget for playing iPods on a car cassette player. See, it was dawning on me that my beloved set of car-listening compilation tapes was wearing thin, stiffening up, stretching, generally getting wonky … and I had no means for re-recording them. A lot of them came off LPs I had once bought but no longer possessed, and even if I still possessed them I no longer had the means to play them. Some came off CDs which I still own but we barely have the means to re-record them. The only tape mechanisms now in the flat are the ones accidentally attached to a couple of radios. They record, but the quality ain’t great and the new recording often sounds worse than the one it’s replacing.
And now the white iPod is full, so I have been given permission to upgrade to a purple one with eight times the capacity of the white one and twice, or possibly four times the capacity of Bonusbarn’s green one. It was a cheaper option than buying a decent tape recorder. He doesn’t know this yet.
But this means I can go one step further than with the compilation tapes. I created them in the first place because while I enjoyed the works of the selected artists I didn’t necessarily enjoy them by the albumful; and anyway it was fun to mix and match the absolutely best songs. Which led to the inevitable heartbreak of having to leave some of the good, but not entirely the best good, stuff off as it can’t all fit onto a 90 minute tape. With a purple iPod this is no longer an issue.
Of course it’s not quite as flexible as mixing and matching the recording of your own tape, or if it is I’ve yet to find out how. iTunes will let you shuffle your music randomly, or play it album by album, in alphabetical order of title rather than year of release, and in track order. But you can still have a certain amount of geeky fun classifying everything by genre and playlist. You’re essentially populating a database, after all, and fun doesn’t come more geeky than that.
It’s not quite as fun as the good old days of putting coloured stickers on your cassette collection for ease of classifying, but it’s better than nothing.
It also goes without saying that I totally ignore Genius, the cunning means by which iTunes studies your musical tastes and suggests music you might like to purchase to go with it. Until iTunes drops DRM completely and unconditionally, it will be a cold day in Hell before I buy something there. Anyway, one of the joys of life is serendipitously picking up a track at random from the background noise of your day to day existence, deciding you like it, hunting it down and acquiring it. Being fed music by Apple would miss the point completely.
And speaking of DRM … it was a truly frabjous day when Amazon launched its own reasonably priced DRM-free MP3 download section. That way I’ve been able to select favourite tracks from LPs that I formerly owned and added them to the purple iPod too. It means that in some cases I have paid for something twice in the course of my life, but only by a matter of pennies.
But this led on to a further moral conundrum. Another huge plus of the unambiguously legal Amazon service was that the dubious attractions of the dodgy Russian download sites vanished. I admit to having frequented them in the past but it was becoming clearer and clearer that the money wasn’t reaching the artists concerned, even if the Russians maintained that was the artists’ fault and not theirs. So I stopped using them.
But some tracks that I want to iPodise aren’t available on Amazon. I’m thinking specifically of the early work of Mr Oldfield and the entire oeuvre of Sky. The dodgy Russians have the Oldfield corpus covered, and do at least have Sky’s second (and best) album and half of their fifth. So on the grounds that I have already bought Sky2 and Five Live in my youth, and Sky have had their royalties off me, I admit to reacquiring them for a handful of roubles.
But now the question looms in my mind: what will replace the iPod …?
I comfort myself that both LPs and audio cassettes needed special, though cheaply available, equipment to play on. As do MP3s and whatever format it is iTunes converts them to; but even so, more and more of my music is becoming available on a big electronic database somewhere and I’m reasonably certain it should therefore be convertible to any other format that comes along. We have the raw data; what we make of it is up to us. No one will be stumbling across mysterious recording media in my effects after I’m gone; what I have will be plainly available, there on screen, in rights-free format, for anyone who wants it.
For the fun of it, here is Toccata from Sky2. Drummer Tristan Fry looks like he’s enjoying it most. For his more energetic solos he was known to take his glasses off.