Man's stuff

I'm not the most practical of men. There's a school of thought that men should be burly, rugby-playing DIYing-part-time-mechanics. I'm svelte rather than solid. I would play rugby, but I don't like the tackling aspect and the idea of putting up a shelf terrifies me. But I recently had a mechanical break-through. Since I bought a car about 18 months ago, my skills have flourished. I quickly worked out how to fill the washer fluid. Then I moved onto checking and topping-up the oil. But last weekend, over the course of an hour, I blossomed into a fully-fledged domestic mechanic: I changed a headlamp. I'm pretty-damn pleased with myself; I've never seen it done and the instructions were rubbish.

I needed a manliness boost. Only the week before Marg (my little sister for those who don't know) sent me a text complaining about a bad day, which ended with the sentence: "Do you know how much a new clutch is?", or the textual equivalent. I vaguely remembered buying her some kind of ladies' accessory for Christmas, and being the ever-protective big brother I replied thus: "Oh no, what's happened? Has someone stolen your wallet?" Of course, she wasn't talking about a small strapless handbag. No, the clutch on her Clio had gone.

But allow me to attempt to assert my masculinity and return to the headlight: It tested me both mentally and physically. Taking the unit out was a tense moment. It was the point of no return. If I couldn't fit the unit back in, my poor Fiesta was going to be like a bride short of a veil, an Easter without an Egg, or a girl band missing the fit one who can't sing very well. With the unit out I spent a while with it on my lap, perplexing me with it's solidity. The solution was obvious really; outflank it and attack from the rear! With the bulb replaced and the unit in tact, the final challenge was slipping it back into the car. I say, slipping, when I actually mean cajoling, forcing or indeed ramming. But after a certain amount of persuasion it was done, and unlike most of my programming efforts it worked first time.

To change the subject: Why is Binyam Mohamed referred to as "a former resident of Guantanamo Bay"? Surely, he was an inmate? Resident sounds like he was on holiday. I'm not making any comment whether or not he should have been there, or whether "there" should have been there at all, but really; I can't believe it was Butlin's.

That paragraph was a bit heavy-duty. To break the awkward silence, here's one about football. I've been having daily handover meetings with Paul who's taking over my job (among others) while I move onto a new "opportunity". We're a few weeks into that now, so this week's meetings have been a little more laid-back. Today, we got talking about the Champions League. Why, I pondered, is the draw next week, rather than as soon as possible after the Quarter Finalists are known? Does it not make sense to allow the clubs, fans and local authorities the maximum time available to arrange the ties? It was proposed that the draw was actually rigged (with warm balls apparently) and this extra week was just to allow the TV companies enough time to complete their horse-trading. So, we spent a short time predicting the draw and came up with the following:
Man Utd vs Villarreal (keep United's powder dry for the Semis)
Barcelona vs Porto (big in Iberia; pretty much guarantees Barca in the Semis)
Bayern vs Arsenal (big game for the Quarters, and should hopefully - in European eyes - put Bayern through against the weakest English team)
Liverpool vs Chelsea (This one crops up every few years. Big audience and should get rid of Chelsea as no one likes them and Liverpool are awesome in this competition, for some reason).

Actually, in hindsight, allow me to be more cynical. The 4 English teams will play each other and Barca and Bayern will avoid each other. This means 2 English teams and probably the two other clubs who guarantee the TV companies the biggest advertising revenues in the Semis.

I've neatly covered most possibilities there. To take it a step further: Man Utd vs Barca is the dream final. They will be in the other half of the draw to each other, probably with a Barca-Bayern semi to avoid another all-English Final.

I'll close there, safe in the knowledge that football is, yet again, the solution to all of man's communication needs. Who needs practical skills, when all you need to be a man is a basic level of football chat?

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.

A Saints Fan in New York

Whassssup! Yes, I'm back, fresh from the year 2000. I come bearing retro gifts such as Big Brother, the dawn of Digital TV ("Monkey; we need more Tele") and Economic Growth (whisper that bit, if you're reading out loud).

Seriously, I was fresh at about 2000, but now it's 2200 and I'm 3 beers in, so what happens next is anyone's guess. All I've got left is the super-strong cider that Marg gave me for Christmas, so if this post goes on long enough then the typing might get rather less professional than the current flowing pitter-patter.

So the world continues to turn, a fact that I think people seem to overlook from time to time. There are some bad things: Gaza, Celebrity Big Brother and the Credit Crunch is now extra Crunchy. There are some middling things: Kaka to Man City (he's a great player and I'm pleased he might be coming to England, but it's all about money), George Bush (STILL President, but only for a couple more days) and this Post (started decidedly middling, if you ask me). But there are also some good things: Last.fm (I've been sitting in silence for the past 2 hours before I remembered that with the internet I can listen to any sort of music I want to: Indie Disco = Nice), the Sales (I got a really nice new jacket for £-3. Now that's amazing), and I'm engaged.

I should probably say we're engaged, but as Julie is clearly out (otherwise why I am half-cut on the computer?) the first person is appropriate here. Anyway, I popped the question whilst in New York in early December. We had the greatest, coldest weekend sprinting around NYC before I stooped to bended knee on the final evening. She said yes, and so we returned to the UK with an awful lot of people to see and a wedding to arrange.

Wedding arrangements are coming together surprisingly easy. We timed it well. Sorry, I should say I timed it well... as we had the Christmas break to start looking at venues. We looked at the great and the small and have settled for a little place someway between the two extremes. More of that to follow in another post. Suffice to say the name is especially appropriate...

We've also seen the Vicar. He didn't seem phased by my Catholicism. In fact, he suggested we consider mixing in a bit of Mass into the service. I promised to discuss the matter (or should I say Mass-er?) with my Mum, who gave the true Catholic response that a Mass would just delay the drinking and she'd say a prayer for us that morning instead.

The photo which has slapped itself into the top left-hand corner of this post is from New York. Something bizarre happened while we were at the Rockerfeller Centre. Every picture taken there is brilliant; we both suddenly became photogenic. No idea why. Maybe our features react well to the light from ice.

Anyway, time is up. My beer has run out, last.fm is now playing something called 3D Sex Show by Shitdisco and Julie is back (a good thing, but talking is disrupting my flow). So, I'm off.

T'raa

A Blog is for life, not just for October 4th

Bonjour mes amis, and welcome to installment #2 of my little blog . Well, I suppose it's #3 if you count the Fins entry. I don't and it's my blog, so #2 it is.

The gap between posts is inexcusable. I know of at least 3 people who read the last post, and they deserve more than 2 months of a zero log blog. During that time much has happened in the world. My timbers were shivered by the return of piracy to the high seas. To make ends meet next year I may dust down my old Pirate outfit, and borrow SLAM for a days buccaneering on the Solent. I think I'll target something smaller than an Oil Tanker. Maybe the Gosport - Portsmouth ferry. I could hold it to ransom till Pompey agree to swap divisions with the Saints. Probably better swap players too, while they're at it.

The Americans elected Barack Obama President. What happened there? 4 years ago they reelected Bush, a fact that should have led to the whole nation being stripped of voting rights. Allow me to remind you of some highlights from the last 8 years. There were the terrible events of 9/11, the largest ever attack on the United States, for which the US have never really got revenge. Instead they went into one unwinnable war that I think people generally agree with, and another one for which the good people of Iraq will be paying for many many generations. Ever find any WMDs, George?

As if 9/11 wasn't bad enough, Bush completely ignored the horror of Katrina hitting New Orleans. More people died in New Orleans than on 9/11, but they were not bankers or businessmen. No, they were the poor who didn't own a car to leave the city. And because they were poor and in most cases Black, they didn't count for much and were left to fend for themselves.

And then he's decimated the strongest economy of the world, bringing ours down with it. And what does he do? Absolutely sod all. The fact is, the US government pretty much shuts down when a new President has been elected. Obama is currently as powerless as you or I, and Bush's only task for the next two months is writing a list of all his mates he'll exonerate on the eve of succession. Our system of handing over the reins (or reigns, geddit?) at least gets the job done quickly.

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned Guantanamo Bay.

But that's enough ranting, I think. Onto lighter issues. One of the side effects of living with the lovely Julie is that I'm now something of an authority on X Factor, and to a lesser extent Strictly Come Dancing. But absolutely not I'm a Celebrity, the name winds me up, for the same reason that I Can't Believe It's Not Butter does.

I should point out that I haven't been sucked into the X Factor completely. I have not and will not vote, but I find it a fascinating human experiment. Anyone with an ear knows that Alexandra should and hopefully will win. The only other contestant who comes close is Ruth, but powerful and emotional as her voice is, it lacks the absolute pitch perfect delivery. Compared to those two, I'm amazed at how limp the singing of the other contestants is. Yes, it is on tune, but whenever there is any kind of backing vocal you can't hear them. It's so patently obvious. On singing talent Rachel should have stayed by an ex-drug addict isn't a great image for the show, so they worked her out by cleverly manipulating the judges comments, leaving the images they want on the show. So we're left with a poor man's barber shop quartet, and two annoying children who are surely up past their bed time. At least JLS can harmonise, but I'm very bored of the Claw and the impossible-named-one.

Anyway, now I've invalidated my masculinity on the internet it's time to close. I'll endeavour to post at least a couple of times in December, which should be achievable as I only work 10 days out of 31!

The Fins

Ok, I haven't actually got as far as turning on the TV. Instead I quickly logged onto FaceBook to do some quick self-publicity (which if anyone is reading this is almost certainly how you found me). Disgusted with myself for being so narcissistic, I decided to even up the score, by a bit of free advertising for Rauf's band, The Fins.

Second only to Radiohead in my Top 10 of Live Performances Attended, they've released a single called Adaptor, which is exceptional. Check it out for yourself: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=H3DTkG2YBM4

If you like it, you can buy it on Amazon and iTunes (I think). I have no idea how they managed to find the funds to do this, but hopefully you'll agree it's been worth every penny. Incidentally, the video was put together by my tenant Ben Clayton, who this year also made a video for Ann Summer's. Tough job, I'm sure.

Whatever happened to alec.fitzsimmons.com?

Bonjour and welcome to my very first official blog entry. Those of you familiar with alec.fitzsimmons.com will know that the site was blog-tastic in content, but not in format. Crucially you, the reader, were unable to interact by posting your own comments. Or more accurately, post nothing. This enabled me to continue posting for a couple of years blissfully unaware that no one was interested.

But now I'm back with a real blog. The old website has sadly departed this virtual world. I'm not really sure what happened to it. The company who hosted it were taken over, and after ignoring 3 or 4 emails from them, my site suddenly disappeared. The new hosting service laughs at me with it's arrogant UNIX operating system. I ran away, but such was my need to vomit something onto the internet I found myself here among other technophobes.

My last entry on alec.fitzsimmons.com concerned, I believe, the adoption of a facial dressing. Such a cliffhanger to end on. The demise of the webshite, was tantamount to losing the final DVD in a 24 boxset. I'm sure all my anonymous readers were desperate to know how the beard panned out. Well, days after finally working out how to manage the beard I met the love of my life at the Dickie's wedding. Shan't dwell too much on this, but Julie and I are very happy. What a difference a beard makes. Of course, Julie has never seen me without it, so I guess I'll be facially hirsute for the rest of my life.

Things have indeed changed. I'm out of Twickenham and living in the leafy, hilly town of Haslemere. Sounds very nice, but I was chased by a scissor-wielding lunatic a few weeks back. At last a practical application for 5 years of run training!

I'm still fitter than your average bear. When I planned 2008, I scheduled a lot of races, focussing principally on the London Marathon and Ironman UK. However, I had to withdraw days before the Marathon due to Shin Splints. That injury and a lack of swimming mojo and cycling time, necessitated my withdrawal from IM UK. I kept fit by sporadically training for and then completing a BIG RIDE from Fleet to Fowey in Cornwall. One day: 250 miles. Now I'm back running with a far more basic plan for 2009: Sub-3 hour London Marathon, then a bit of fun.

So, what will this blog contain:
- details of how I'm planning to conquer the 3-hour marathon (I'm right on the borderline of ability for this goal, so it should be interesting)
- occasional details of who Julie is. Here's a snipet to keep you going: No she doesn't need glasses
- critical assessment of modern culture and politics from a man who really can't be arsed to read anything except Runner's World
- maybe a joke here or there. Not here though.
- brief lectures on the credit crunch. No, I don't understand it either, but that doesn't stop me from commenting.

But for now, that is all; Match of the Day is about to start. What the point is in watching it is anyone's guess, though - I know all the results, have seen most of the goals on the news, and there are only 4 matches. Rubbish.