Absurd

This is actually an improvement on what we had at the start of the year. I don't mind if it's wet, as long as it's sufficiently above freezing that your tyres stick to the road.

Earlier this week I was riding up a hill near Timsbury that was so bad that even in the saddle, if I tried to put any power down, my back wheel would start spinning. It became an exercise in smooth pedalling at snail's pace but I eventually made it up without mishap. I did it as a test to see how bad the lanes were when it was 0 and had rained the previous night. Now I know. At least the scientist in me isn't dead.

It was nice to get back on track with training this week. I did my first hard tempo ride today, compared it with an identical ride at this time last year and ... I was slightly slower but the conditions were crap. Heart rate and splits along the flats were the same, so I probably lost most of the time taking it easy on the muddier bits of the bike path.

It would have been nice to be a couple of weeks ahead but it's hard to achieve when you don't actually ride the bike. Training is quite simple in that regard. Onwards, upwards, bigger, better, more and I'll see where I am in three weeks. Probably here.

What else is happening? It's the Chippenham club do this Saturday, which will be a good laugh. I'm even in line for a prize this time. Result!

I'm reading Beryl Burton's autobiography, Personal Best. She was an amazing athlete. She must have been one of the first women to break a men's record (277 miles for 12hrs in 1967) ... and it was on the same day that the men's record was set! Her 12 hr mark stood for two years until another bloke broke it. No woman has come close to 277 miles since then, even after tri bars and disks were introduced some 20 years ago.

Lots on at work. It's been go-go-go from the moment I got back. BikeRadar Live, new triathlon mag called Triathlon Plus launching, shows, trips, blah, etc. Better 'n being bored innit.

The absurd thing is that despite being 6'0 tall, I'm about to become the second shortest member of our team. Four of the others are taller!

Roads

The good news (from the me-centric view of the world, naturally) is that the weather has improved out of sight since last week. Temperatures up to 10 degrees, a bit of rain but so much better than ice.

The bad news is that I have been sick with a cold since the start of the week, thus haven't been able to take advantage of this fortuitous state of affairs. So much for the healthy diet, although I think it's because I haven't been drinking enough beer.

It's not a "flat out on your back for a week" cold, neither is it a "get over it in a couple of days" cold. It's more a case of a runny nose with just enough tiredness to convince me to stay at home and off the bike. But it hasn't yet turned into a cough and I hope to keep it that way. Maybe a couple of gentle rides on the weekend, we'll see.

It's bloody annoying. From a training point of view, I was all fired up to reach September '08 fitness by April and was definitely ahead of where I was at this time last year. That may still happen, depending on how soon I can shake it, but it's not ideal. I suppose I was bloody lucky last year not to get sick at all, beyond the occasional sore throat. Payback time.

From a wasting my life point of view, it's also annoying. Of course you can't avoid being sick but it's nothing time. I can't do much work, can't go out, don't feel tired enough to sleep, don't feel inspired enough to do anything else (like get the heater fixed) and have a tendency to think about things too much. I do enough of that already.

Like where the economy is going. Or what is the economy exactly? And why is failure rewarded (or bailed out)? Surely that makes the problem worse? And why useless jobs (like the hundreds doing nothing at Beijing airport) are necessary to keep the world's population employed. And the problems they've got in the Middle East, you know. And the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow. And more things besides.

This is where something like The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own come in. Two very fine fillums, a bit on the crudish side occasionally but a fair dinkum portrayal of Australian culture overseas in the '60s and '70s, with plenty of elements still extant today.

Dost thou taketh the piss? Nay, verily I speaketh the truth.

Scene: chatting to an older Australian couple in a pub last year. Asking them about Bath:

"It's a bit of a dump. All the houses are the bloody same. They're a bit like Masterton Homes."

I kiddeth thou not. This is almost a verbatim quote and they were serious. Roll on the cultural revolution.

Postscript: QI is also very good.

Strewth

Starting with the weather, as usual...

It's been the coldest week I can remember in the UK. That's not saying much because I've only been here two and a bit years and I can't remember how cold it was in my childhood. Actually it's colder than I can remember it ever being in Belgium, although I was usually never there in January.

On a couple of nights, it got down to -4 in Bath and a lot colder than that out of town. Given that we had a bit of sleet and fog, I decided it was too risky to ride in the mornings - even on the bike path - and restricted myself to just a couple of lunchtime rides. These were actually quite good.

I should really do something about getting the heating fixed. The oven will only heat the front room, which is not ideal. I thought it was gunna be fixed over the Xmas break but apparently not. Oh well, that's what base layers are for innit.

So not an ideal start to the year but it's getting warmer and wetter this weekend. Hurrah!

Work's been busy, but we've had a solid start to the year. Bikes tend to do well in recessions, so I'm in the right game. Of course, Future ain't just about bikes.

I finished In Defence of Food and am rapidly running out of Xmas books. It's an OK read and as I wrote in the previous lot of bilge, I agree with its premise: eat real food.

That means growing things like veggies yourself or getting them from farmers markets or even the organic section at the supermarche. It means cooking it from first principles, not microwaving it from a fourth derivative using the chain rule. It means eating omnivorously and not worrying about what individual nutrients do. It means eating stuff that actually tastes good, so you don't overeat (avoid diet products). It also means taking an appreciative attitude towards food that goes beyond it being just 'healthy' or even 'fuel'.

If you're an athlete, you can't ignore the fuel aspect so you have to factor in getting enough calories, especially carbohydrates. That's where the luxury items come in.

It's funny that nutritionists have managed to break down food into very small parts but haven't been able to put them back together again without losing something. That's the beauty of complexity (cue The Blind Watchmaker reference).

It's also one of the reasons why I gave up science: I just didn't see the point of what I was doing. The chemical problems I delved into were solved by engineers using a very basic 'let's try this' approach. I could show what happened on a more micro scale but it wasn't going to change anything.

At least it's sunny

Back home after a lovely 35 hour journey between Sydney and Bath. I'm glad it's sunny, because it helps mitigate the fact that it was between -4 and 2 today. It's forecast to get chillier next week too. Dry is good though, because there's not much chance of ice.

The Air China flight home was easier than the outgoing journey. Two 10.5 hour legs plus a six hour stopover in Beijing airport. Two hours would have been better but beggars can't be choosers. I did get to have a good look around.

The main part of the terminal, which is the hub of a Y, is impressive to behold. It has an enormously high roof which looks great but must be a bugger to heat. It was -9 outside and I had to keep walking around to stay warm.

The number of gates that will fit on the Y isn't enough to cope with all the planes. I think there are other terminals but this seemed to be the main international one. The strange thing is that there is a huge area of tarmac for the planes to land on, which leads to long taxi times (15 minutes or so). But also if you're not lucky enough to get a gate attached to the terminal, you need a reasonably long bus journey to get to your plane. Maybe they just ran out of money to build more terminal.

There are no banks in the terminal, despite there being one marked on all the maps. It appears to have been replaced by a watch shop. There are a couple of currency exchange places, but they charge 50-60 yuan (£5-6) per commission. I wanted enough for a cuppa but I wasn't prepared to pay upwards of £10 for Chinese airport coffee. Although the exchange places assured me that none of the shops would take credit cards, I found a cafe right next to my gate that did and had a passable apple pie and coffee for 43 yuan. On the flight I drank Chinese tea, which was better than the alternative.

The signage is a bit lacking. After disembarking from the Sydney flight I again tried to figure out where I had to go to transfer to the next flight. This time I started at one of the 'foreigners' immigration gate before being told to go to the 'diplomatic' gate then finally the cunningly hidden 'international transfer' gate. Last time I went to the international transfer gate first but because it was a domestic transfer I ended up at the diplomatic gate...

On the efficiency front, I noted there were a lot of people employed at the airport who were doing absolutely nothing. Mostly they were working in airport shops but the immigration officials manning the Chinese gates weren't being kept busy either. A few more on the international transfer gate wouldn't have gone astray. I don't think inefficiency is necessarily a bad thing for the economy anyway. We can't all do essential jobs.

On the whole, given that the actual flying time between London and Sydney (21 hours) was roughly the same as going via Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, I'd fly Air China again.

Books

Some holiday reading was done, although I occupied much of it with re-reading The First Book of Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber.

100 things you didn't know you didn't know by John Barrow. I quite enjoyed this collection of the application of mathematics to real life situations. Did you know that it's slower to board planes from the back first than in a random order? The fastest way, which has been patented, is to board even (or odd) numbered rows starting from the back, window seats first. Then odd numbered rows, then non-window seats, again even followed by odd, back to front.

The most important thing is to get all those in window seats on first, because they can put their stuff in the overhead lockers without greatly obstructing those wanting to get past. Also they won't have to get up for those in aisle seats.

It'd be tricky to actually implement this but it could be largely done via boarding groups. I think some airlines already do this. Of course it means that passengers would have to pay heed to the boarding calls. The Chinese don't, they just all line up as soon as the first announcement is made so it becomes a random mess. But strangely quicker than boarding from the back first, so maybe they know how these things work.

There are lots of other interesting nuggets in that book.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel. This won the Booker Prize a few years ago, despite getting a bit of a pounding from critics. I found it engaging enough although the author was a bit wide of the mark when he said 'this story will make you believe in God'. If anything, it reinforced the opposite.

[Don't read if you don't want to find out what happens]

The story is about Pi Patel, a 16 year old Indian boy whose parents run a zoo in Pondicherry. They decided to emigrate to Canada and en route, their boat sinks. This leaves Pi in a lifeboat with a tiger, a hyena, a zebra and an orangutan. The tiger eats all of them except for Pi, who manages to assert his authoritaah and survive, eventually landing in Mexico.

While recovering in hospital, he is visited by two Japanese who work for the department of transport and want to know what happened to the ship. He tells them his story, which they don't believe. He then tells them another one, which more or less substitutes humans for the animals and is more plausible, but not quite as entertaining. Given that he can't prove either story, he leaves it up to the Japanese to choose which one to use in their report. They go for the animal one, which is meant to be the allegory. Or at least that's the way I read it.

While one should never let the facts get in the way of a good story, I think Mr Martel cheated and did the reader a disservice by not telling the second version in full. Real life can be told in an interesting manner. Reality TV shows do not fit into this category.

Eric by Terry Pratchett. One of the few Discworld books that I haven't read. Well I have now. It's only short (150 pages) but it's one of his funnier ones. Loosely based on the story of Faust, except the lead character is Eric, a 13 year-old boy who summons up a demon to grant him three wishes. He gets Rincewind the wizard instead and the wishes take an unusual twist.

The Demon King of Hell is good. He has remodeled Hell to be like a typical medium sized company with various stupid and annoying regulations. There's even a sign on the door that says "You don't have to be damned to work here, but it helps." And it has a coffee machine.

In Defence of Food by Michael Pollan. I've just started reading this and while I like and agree with the book's premise, it's told in a rambling, ranting fashion with the occasional nugget of good information in there. The author argues that 'nutritionism' - the ideology that has arisen from nutrition as a science - is misguided and that we should eat real food and not processed nutrient-enhanced crap. He says it's the latter that has led America into its dietary health epidemic, and the rest of the Western world is following it.

Nutrition is a typical reductionist science: let's take everything apart and see if we can work out what each bit does. e.g. does eating lots of saturated fat lead to higher bad cholesterol and thence to heart disease. The author cites modern reviews of the literature which come to the conclusion that for the most part, it doesn't. It's hard to believe because this points to a gigantic con on the part of the scientists, journalists and the government.

But nutrition is also a fairly modern science and you just have to look at its history to see that the goalposts are constantly being moved as to what you should eat. Fats are bad, protein's bad, carbohydrate is bad ... I cringe every time I see potatoes being maligned because they are "carbs". Potatoes are one of the most filling and, dare I say it, nutritious staples you can eat.

The message appears to be eat real food, mostly plant based. Obviously that includes beer and chocolate. It doesn't include margarine, which for a long time was one of the worst things (besides mercury) you could put into your body. And when this was discovered, they simply re-engineered it to make it 'healthy' again. What a swizz. Just eat butter.