Wallymath Strikes Back

I've been credit crunched, and I'm not afraid to admit it. I'm not flat broke, unemployed, eating rats or living in a tent, but my life has definitely been adversely affected. I shan't bore you with the tiresome details, but Julie and I can't move out of our small rented flat until my flat in Twickenham sells. But, as Andrew & I aren't going to undersell that and buyers are thin on the ground, Julie and I are stuck.

It's a strange turnaround in life, from the heady days of loose-credit and multi-pub. Through the weekend haze and midweek blues I wasn't especially happy in life. That's all different now. I can't spend recklessly now, in fact I can't really spend at all. But life is definitely better. Don't worry, this isn't going to turn into a soppy love-story, as I suspect no one wants to read that. It'd be a bit uncomfortable for all concerned.

Nope. Instead, it's about time this blog got a list. So here is the alec.fitzsimmons.com endorsed list of Credit Crunch Good Stuff:

• Cooking: As I don't really go out anymore, 90% of my socialising is chez la maison. With people coming round Julie and I make a bit more effort and we've each added a couple of tasty dishes to our repertoire's. The new techniques and flavours picked up on the effort-meals have carried over into day-to-day cooking and so life definitely tastes better. Everything comes with a credit crunch topping.
• Leftovers: Following on from that, we've also become ultra-efficient. Very little food gets binned, instead getting turned over into some wierd concoction worth experiementing with.
• MPG: Efficiency also stretches to the road. Now I'm driving 62 miles a day, I can make big savings driving at 60mph. The display I work to on my dashboard is Miles Per Gallon. I've found (and this isn't much of a surprise) that 70mph isn't too bad, but go to 80mph and watch that MPG plummet. So I cruise along at or below the speed limit. It takes about 2 mins more on a 50 minute journey, but I'm never going to get a speeding ticket.
• Running: Speaking of speed, running is the perfect Credit Crunch activity. Once you've got a pair of trainers there's no cost. Just go out and enjoy the countryside.
• Health = Out running in the fresh air + eating fresh home-cooked food - boozing all weekend. Simple equation, really. Of course, I was pretty healthy 18 months ago when I did Ironman, but since then the Crunch has helped hold the health if not the fitness.
• The best spreadsheet in the world: Well, maybe not, but I suddenly found I needed to know how much money I had in my bank account every day of the month, how much I was spending and where I was spending it. So over the course of a couple of weeks last summer I devised the most fiendishly clever spreadsheet. 3 straight-forward sheets form a simple interface, but mask the complicated conditional array formulaes that magically give me an amazingly accurate picture of cash flow on any particular future date I choose. Without this tool I would have had to move back to Twickenham. That's not an exaggeration; it's been that important.
• Blogging: Staying in gives me the time to blog. alec.fitzsimmons.com was never updated after I met Julie, but now I've got time in life I can write. You can be the judge of whether or not I should have bothered.

Actually, a few people are reading this blog. My big sister Susan always sends me an email with some pertinent point, such as why trying to board the Gosport Ferry might be a bad idea. Big Ride Dave surprised me with a generous review of my last post. And Greeks has reacted splendidly to my following of his blog. At last some of my entries have comments!

And that's where I shall close tonight, dear reader. If you're enjoying this then make a comment. If you're not enjoying it then lie. After all, it won't cost anything!

England Crash

Bonjour mes amis. Comment ca va? Je ne suis pas anglais, ce soir. Mind you I shouldn't really be French either, as they lost to my other Mother Country, Ireland this evening. But at least that was a good game. Yes, we're back to the good ol'days. The England cricket team crash in the West Indies, and the rugby team play awfully to beat an Italian side so under-strength that they played a clumsy forward in the integral creative Scrum-Half position (note. I know very little about rugby, so I apologise for any factual inaccuracies).

And, of course, the country ground to a halt under a week of snow. I did my bit by carefully heeding the advice not to drive and worked from home 3 days during the week. Haslemere actually missed the worst of it; places only a couple of miles away got about a foot of snow on Monday, whereas we only got 5 or 6 inches. I attempted to venture in on Thursday, but as I skated out of control down my drive-way I decided that being unable to make it 10 metres safely wasn't a good omen for the rest of the journey. Thankfully the drive-way leads down to a flat run-off where there is another car park. So, I parked up and went back inside, having travelled about 25 metres, my shortest ever drive.

I made it all the way to Bracknell on Wednesday. As always, I was listening to the Today Show on Radio 4 for the first half of the journey. I can't get XFM until I'm over the Hogs Back, so I get 30 minutes of intense news first thing in the morning. Of course, it's not always about the Middle East and the economy, and they do have some light-hearted moments. On this particular occasion, they were discussing Twitter and Facebook. They had a lot of fun joking about Poking each other, proving that Radio 4 comedy isn't quite as fresh at 6:30am as it is at 6:30pm. Now, I've yet to sign-up to Twitter, but I am very familiar with Facebook. One of the serious points that the correspondent made was that Facebook struggles to generate a revenue stream, as people don't want advertisers penetrating their social network. And he mentioned that he (probably a man in his early 50s) was always being targetted by companies offering to release some of his pension early, not something that happens to me. No, the right hand bar of my Facebook home page is occupied by dating agency adverts featuring inprobably good looking girls, wearing outfits that suggest the first date would be memorable but probably not followed by an invite to meet your Mum. I pondered whether this was because I had never set a relationship status, so as far as Facebook was concerned I'm a 32 year-old single man likely to follow such links. Intrigued, I logged on and annouced to the world I'm engaged. Sure enough, I lost the dating sites and now have Virgin Media, Sky and some kind of Google-racket targetting me. I feel like I've grown up.

Those of you who've been following this blog for a little while will have noticed the complete lack of any comments about running. I am due to run the London Marathon this April after having deferred my place at the last minute last year due to shin splints. I was hoping to crack 3-hours after 6 months dedicated training, but the last 4 months has been massively frustrating as my right shin threatens to develop into proper shin spints. Last year it was the left shin, so I suppose I should take some comfort in that at least the other shin has healed. I've managed down my target now, which is now simply to get to the start line, so the interval sessions and tempo runs have gone. I'm doing one long run a week, plus a brisker 6 miler with Phil at lunchtime. And today was my first really good quality long run without shin problems for over a year. I'm in love with running again. The run was extraordinarily varied. Last night I had left my car in Midhurst, so I had to run there to collect it. Along the main road it's probably only 7 or 8 miles. But I zig-zagged cross-country, climbing 3 big hills (Marley, Blackdown and Bexleyhill) via trails that veered violently between boggy, muddy, snowy and stoney. There was a definite snowline on Blackdown, and the climb through crisp snow to the top was my most inspiring running moment since the tears after Ironman. 20 minutes later as I crossed a boggy field my shoe got stuck in a particularly gooey divot. I hopped back to get it, covered in mud. The whole thing took me 2 hours 20 minutes but I must have lost 20 minutes looking at the map.

Anyway, that's about it for this installment. I've got Match of the Day to watch. Thankfully, it's a Premiership day: England Team would definitely have crashed if it'd been an international weekend.