A green and legoland

Our Irish surfing tour has taken us through some the world's most green and pleasant countryside. I have particularly enjoyed a couple of spectacular coastal rides around parts of Connemara and the Dingle peninsula. 

But why does no-one mention the awful domestic architecture? In amongst the awe-inspiring celtic hills  are to be found  quite the most monotonous selection of  drab  houses that you'll ever not want to see: lifeless rendered boxes with roofs of  concrete tiles, PVC windows and sterile gardens... usually complete with a digger or trophy 4x4 on the drive.

As usual, the excellent Lonely Planet Guide to Ireland has an explanation, 'Around two-thirds of construction undertaken in Donegal today is aimed at the second-home market and...locals too are opting for the comforts of modern housing. Indeed, far from mourning the loss of their ancestral homes, many admit that the old cottages are too strong a reminder of hard times suffered by generations of their forebears. It's a tragic loss for such cottages to be replaced with hoards of identikit homes that invite names like "Legoland".' 

A swimming invitation I failed to resist

A panorama taken at Killary Loch on my iPhone using an incredibly easy photo app. Clicking on this link will open an interactive version of the image that looks almost perfect - except for that annoying shadow!

Builder's cleavage seen in WsM

Summer fruits in Wellow

Warming up in Wellow

And talking of plans, in what way could super-civilised Bath be a suitable training ground for the rigours of the Pyrenees? Great for shopping; yes. Theatre; definitely. But col cracking? Dites moi plus.

My cunning plan of visiting friends while they are away on holiday so as to gain free accommodation and eat their raspberries has brought me to Chris and Sue's pad in Wellow, just outside Bath. It's a very des res in a very des village which sports just one pub and a shop that, as far as I can tell, is only open by appointment. And the weather has been beautiful: summer has arrived and the raspberries are ripening a treat.

How, I hear you ask, could this possibly be good preparation for anything other than an extremely comfortable retirement?

For one thing, Wellow is in a communications black hole: no mobile phone signal of any kind and a router password that won't let me past, ie no internet connection either. It's a salutary lesson in how most of the world lives, including the bit I shall (did I say that?) be going to. I can't do blogging, googlemaps, emails, texts, mobile calls, or indeed look anything up on the interweb. If I want to check my emails, I have to cycle up the nearest hill until I hear the little 'you've got mail' ping on my phone that announces I am within range of a transmitter. I then freewheel back into Wellow, read and answer the mail before cycling up the hill again, carefully listening for the whoosh sound of mail being sent. It's all pretty much done at a pace that Jane Austin would have understood but with less ironic social comedy.

Did I mention the hills? Like Rome before it, Somerset's own Aquae Sulis was built on seven large mounds of water-filtering Jurassic limestone. And Wellow, bless its middle-class socks, seems to have followed suit with no thought given by its founders as to how its site would affect its future mobile phone reception. In order to reach Bath one has to climb two hills. And these are not just hills - they are hand-crafted, beautifully scenic, lung-sapping M&S hills, chock full of bends and false summits that – reader take note - are just as big on the return journey.

According to my fancy new satnav (see under 'boy's toys' on previous post) the highest of these beasts is over 200m! Even allowing for the trivial fact that that I'm not starting at sea level and that some hills are not as high as others, my legs tell me that the total climb each time I pop to and from Bath to buy a loaf of bread-that-is-not-just-a-loaf-of-bread etc from the wonderful, and wonderfully named, Thoughtful Bread Company, is over 750m. That's seven hundred and fifty metres people! This is, as it happens, almost exactly the height you have to climb to cross – to take a not-completely random example - the Col du Portillon on the border between Spain and France (see here if you don't believe me).

How do I know this arcane truth? Well there is one final way in which Wellow has proved to be good preparation for whatever lies ahead: Chris is a map addict and has a treasure trove of atlases and maps that have been quietly feeding my imagination, as the TBC have been quietly nourishing my body. Like a three-seed granary loaf in an airing cupboard, some sort of plan is slowly growing.

A stroll in the park

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I am just about fit enough to climb Cadair Idris – one of Wales' top 20 peaks -  twice. The bad news is that my navigation skills are so poor that, in order to get where I was going, I almost climbed Cadair Idris twice!  

Early June 2012 saw me getting away from the whole jubilee thing. Republican north wales seemed like a good place to do it and Snowdonia lived up to its reputation nicely: other than the occasional bit of bunting and half-hearted attempts at a street party, it was a 'Isn't she wonderful'-lite zone. 

In addition to giving my grumpy streak free rein, the trip-ette was a gentle way of exploring whether I enjoy the reality of travelling, as opposed to the armchair idea. I didn't do any exotic journeys when I was a student, only getting as far as a Foyer des Jeunes in the suburbs of Paris. But, with the sale of our house imminent, I thought it might be an idea to check out what level of comfort my old bones (not to mention my old teeth and bowels) will require.

So I packed up the car with all the wrong stuff, hastily joined the Youth Hostel Association and set sail for the only available last-minute YHA bed at Tycorn Bunkhouse, which was conveniently close to Pen y Fan - the modest 2900ft peak of the Brecon Beacons which les blokes had recently walked up. It was, however, bloody miles away from the challenge that I had identified for day 1: Cadair Idris.

Fizzy up top

Tycorn was a slightly spartan if perfectly acceptable hostel whose only drawback was that it was located at the far end of a six mile track! No phone, no signal, no computer. Simple supper, off to bed in an empty bunkroom, 5.30am start for the long drive to CI which I reached at about 8.00am and up which I stormed up in less than two hours. Good start!

The one on the right looks very like Tasmania, doesn't it?

As I turned for home in the growing mist, I thought that this was all going to be very straightforward. However 15 minutes later I had managed to mistake two lakes for two completely different shaped and much larger lakes! By the time I had worked out my error (thanks to a illuminating shaft of sunlight), I was in the middle of nowhere, at the bottom of a scree slope, and had no option but to turn round and climb up again. It was very hard going and I had to stop many times to catch my breath. About half way up, I suddenly noticed that someone else was coming down the same slope. What a fool - it led nowhere. He had obviously made the same mistake as I had. However, as he got nearer I realised that I was the fool for, as his shorts, singlet and sure footed stride made clear, knew exactly where he was going and he was running there.

Show off!

I saw several other fell runners over the next few days. All were travelling light and all were travelling fast. And all left me completely speechless.... 

Betwy's Tea Rooms

After limping away from the car park I hauled into the side of the road when I saw a sign advertising tea and cakes. It was a rather unprepossessing venue - an old Methodist chapel in which I was the only member of the congregation other than a very bored tea lady who perked up a treat on my arrival. I drank gallons of tea and wolfed down all the welsh cake that could be found while hearing how the local primary school children were taught the Welsh language but not ICT, how they were trying to find ways of increasing use of the hall, and how annoyed everyone was that the Olympic flame had been driven through the area at high speed. It was that sort of random conversation, all conducted to the click click of her knitting needles!

I rather admire the passion that the welsh have for their language and in Betwy's Tea Rooms I discovered an exciting new addition to my limited welsh vocabulary. How to improve attendance at the village hall? A poster on the wall said it all: ffilm shows!

If they call children plants, what do they call plants?

Motorway walking: Snowdon

On to check out my objective for the next day – Snowdon – close to which I found a very convenient camp site that, at only a fiver, was a bargain. I put up the tent, had a nice warm shower and cycled up to the next village where I found a café with wifi and Guinness. Sanity restored.

I slept surprisingly well, lulled to sleep by the reassuring pitter patter of rain on tent roof. Next day I got to Snowdon well before the tourist buses arrived and had the Pyg track more or less to myself on the way up – an ascent which, as the previous day, only took about two hours. Again the weather definitely got worse at the top and I decided to crawl the last few yards to the summit, not because I was tired but because I genuinely thought I might be blown off!

Such was my confidence in my navigation skills that I decided against finding a different way down and instead retraced my morning path, passing dozens of mainly young people heading for the top - in various states of unreadiness for what lay ahead. Slightly the wiser, very wet and cold by the time I got back to my campsite, I luxuriated in a hot shower before heading back to the local caff to charge my phone and take in a well deserved glass of something. 

Faeces hit Tryfan

Possibly due an over-long nap the previous afternoon, day three started far too soon, and certainly in plenty of time to find myself at the foot of Tryfan by 7.00am. Tryfan is, apparently, the only mountain in England and Wales for which one, officially, has to use one's hands. (The others one can just walk up…in theory.) It was certainly steep but I made good progress climbing up rocky crags for 40mins or so when I had to stop because the cloud rolled in.

Tryfan. The only way is up.

Bad move. Climbing is fine as long as you're going upwards but when you can't go any further, when you look over the edge and see nothing, when the mist sweeps up from below and you're there on your own...that's when it can get a bit frightening. 

Sitting down alone in the fog eating my rations did not help my courage at all. So I decided to engage reverse gear and maybe find another way up. As I was doing this, up popped Ian and Phil! Both had clearly done this climb before and Phil was in training for a climb up Mont Blanc the next week, so he was clearly someone worth following. 'You have to attack it' advised Ian who promptly did just that. Courage returned and we shimmied up some pretty extreme lumps of rock or, as Phil called them, 'technical sections'. In less than 30 minutes we reached the top.

As if climbing the thing isn't enough, you have to do the 'leap of faith' at the top! I didn't.

After some chat ('Very unusual to have this to yourself'), pictures, sandwiches and  the leap not leapt, we dove over some fearsome boulders to find our way down and encountered…another apparition – a young lad with his dad, just on the way to the summit. He couldn't have been more than 13 and was wearing his Man United teeshirt and a pair of ordinary trainers. Stroll in the park. Rather put us in our place.

Good and bad news

So success and failure in equal measure. It was reassuring to find that my body could more or less cope with climbing three peaks over 3000 ft in three days. (Ok I know that's measured from sea level and I started several hundred feet higher than that.) It's a bit like skiing in that one falls into bed after supper in the confident belief that one will never move again...until the next day dawns.

Less reassuring was managing to lose my way on all three days at some point; once seriously. On more than one occasion I was mindful of my status as a single parent and took the sensible option. What if there isn't one? With navigation clearly an issue I feel it might be essential to acquire a new boy's toy!

More useful and more fun might be a walking companion, preferably four footed, for future strolls in the park.  It is quite absurd how readily I start conversations with other people's dogs! 

A/ life

Paperport VX

MicroPhone LT

PictureWorks Copier

Cardscan SE

ClarisWorks 4.0

User’s Guide Apple Mac™ OS system version 7.5.3, revision 2

KidWorks 2

Corel WordPerfect 3.5e Patch Notes

I have measured out my life in manuals. Even though I’m not technically minded, there is evidence in the form of annotated printouts and scrawled post-it notes to remind me of struggles in a bygone ancient landscape. For example I have instructions dating from April 1989 from Time Computers of Blackburn Lancs describing how to install and format a new hard disk for, I think, my first PC, an Amstrad PC1512 – the one with the green writing on the screen. Apparently I was still struggling to get it going after five days and was complaining about the poor quality of the instruction manual. The reason is clear for on the back of the letter are some hand-scribbled instructions to create directories md#ability, cd#ability, copy#a:*.*

In themselves these mean virtually nothing to me now. Yet I must have got things going because the Amstrad served me well for many years, until I got my first Macintosh computer. You know? The ones that are so easy to use.

My first mac was a Duo210 which had a neat idea of slotting a laptop into a desktop. Released in October 1992, the design was way cool, very grey and industrial. And it worked…just, though the speed was very slow. It apparently ran system 7.1 at the equivalent of 30mph (25Mhz actually). It’s still up in my loft somewhere…

Then at some point I must have invested in a clone. The paperwork suggests this was an Apus Umax C500 with a top speed equivalent to 150mph (160Mhz) using a PPC 603 processor. Then I got an upgrade, a new processor took me up to over 200mph - unheard of speeds that required a special mini fan to keep the processor cool. I probably used a bit of bluetak (sorry BlueTak) to keep it in position.

It looks like I also installed a Twin Turbo-128 (“Providing the latest in computer graphics technology’) that enabled me to run a bigger monitor. I can’t remember much about this and the lack of accompanying print outs and scrawled notes suggests that the operation went without a hitch.

Unlike the internet. I think it was around this time that the internet for everyone else was invented and I bought my first modem, a USRobotics Sportster which delivered a mind-bending 14,000 bits of data to my little study every second. Surely the wires would just melt with all this information? Well, they might if you could get it to work.

First line: check out, type “\d\d\d\d” (up to 11 \d, whatever works for you) check

Second line: check wait, type “ost name:”

Third line: check out, type “CIS”

Fourth line: check wait, type “ser ID:”

Fifth line: check out, type your CISid exactly then “/GO:PPPCONNECT”

Sixth line: check wait, type “sword:”

And so on. Does that make any sense to you? There was a time in my life when I would marvel at the mysteries of ost names and swords – otherwise known as host names and passwords – for these were the mysterious incantations required to access, not the internet, but the gated community of CompuServe, back in 1995, according to the date on the HELPPPL.TXT file which I have temporarily rescued from the two-foot high pile of paperwork that was on its way to be recycled.

Spot On

Fax STF

FreePPP

Just listing the names is a trip down memory lane for me. There was obviously a vogue for jamming words together to create product names – ViaVoice, MacLinkPlus – and a positive obsession with anything working – PictureWorks, ClarisWorks, KidWorks.

Those were the days and many an evening too when I would huddle over my little Apus computer sending messages that would nowadays be called emails to SysOps, who would now be called Helpdesk Operatives. Some had human faces: I was mildly rebuked by CW (SysOp 71154,3221) for calling him Mr CW Good: ‘Mr Good is my father, and he doesn’t have a CIS accountJ. Call me CW’ he said. Before pointing out that it made a difference if I typed /d/d/d/d and \d\d\d\d: silly me!

It sounds dangerously like the sort of conversation that technical people have about programming, doesn’t it? But that’s not me. Or is it? The paperwork suggests otherwise. From May 1997 I have a message from Joe (SysOp 111111,2431) telling me that the initialisation string for my modem is ATS0=0 Q0 V1 &C1&D2 \N3 %C0&K4^M. Wow! I’m impressed. Did that mean something to me then? And, more importantly, did I spend from 1995 to 1997 trying to get on to the Internet?

I believe that those who want to know about ancient civilisations often find that it is through the documentation of everyday activities, such as tax records and business letters, that they discover more than through the ‘official’ records. So it is with my own history. If I want to know what I was thinking back in April 1999, I can see that I felt I needed to order a Vimage Vpower G3 240, whatever that was. I think it was the same thing as a Mactell G3 PowerJOLT TM for which I have just come across the installation instructions. The process didn’t actually involve programming, but it seems to have required the use of a soldering iron or, at the least, earthing myself via a little wire wrapped around my little finger and running to the nearest radiator. What is this? Plumbing!

This last task probably represented the zenith of my technical skills: opening up the old workhorse and changing its processor. I’d never attempt it now!

But, of course, I don’t need to. With the arrival of the iMac and, shortly afterwards, Apple’s OSX operating software, the opportunity and the need for such heroics seemed to diminish. Yes, we could still slot in a bit more memory (watch out for that static!) but the kit generally just started to work. Maybe Apple got their act together or maybe I just got a life.

My final technical flourish seems to have involved networking (no, not that sort of networking!). Buried in the middle of an old issue of MacUser (1998) I have also come across a couple of articles called, ‘What is Ethernet?’ and ‘Network an iMac’. Clearly these took me a long while to absorb because it was not until April 8^th of the following year when I upgraded my ‘old’ machine and invested in a second mac for the house, the new candy-coloured iMac. (That’s also in the loft.) Heaven knows if I had any time to play with my 6 and 8 year-old boys, I was busy installing an Ethernet adapter to my rapidly growing little empire in order to link up the computers in my house (the new iMac) and my study (the old Umax).

If you tried to get in touch with me during this time, can I apologise now? I have clearly spent far too much of my life hunched down over a flickering modem or scratching my head at whether A> is the same as A:. Life really is too short. So it’s out with the  old. A pile of paper, a pile of memories, a pile of detailed technical information of which I probably retained less than 1%.

What is important is the knowledge that there are millions of people out there who, like me, still find the world of computing difficult. So now, among other things, I teach those who are terrified of computers how to switch them on and type a few words…maybe how to open an email account. I tell them it’s easy once you know how but don’t forget your “sword:”.

Conversation. But not as we know it.

There is probably no such thing as ‘normal’ where teenagers are concerned. They’re full of surprises; you never quite know where they’re coming from. So this evening’s entertainment could not have been predicted, except perhaps in the sense of  it’s being typical of the way my boys approach the world. Why should we assume they need to focus on one job at a time, as we were encouraged to do: ‘sit down and read a book’, ‘let’s play a game’, ‘switch off that radio and do your homework’? I probably don’t set a particularly good example myself, in that I often have the radio on in the background as I’m doing domestic chores. This is especially unwise in that I frequently have to switch down the sound in order to stand half a chance of understanding the…what can you call them? Grunts is too short. Outpourings too emotional. Perhaps just ‘sounds’ that are thrown in my general direction without warning, from distant rooms or – one of their favourites – from doorways?

Tonight’s was a particularly diverse (= random) collation partly because I had little in the fridge, again, and partly in order to finish up some odds and ends. So maybe six or seven things on the go. And an interesting programme on the wireless. Allegedly. Jack was initially cleaning his car and wanted to know how he could get a water stain out of his car seat. Charlie was trying to get his phone reconnected by actually paying his overdue bill. As I moved the fishcakes into the top oven, he threw some figures at me complaining that he was overdrawn and I, typical guilty parent, immediately started working out how much I could give him to get things straight. ‘Why does this jumper say hand wash when it’s 100% cotton? See: look at the label.’ Jack had moved on to getting some washing into the machine, despite the fact that we have someone ‘viewing’ the house in a couple of days and I didn’t want the place littered with his drying clothes.

As I cut the cabbage, I agreed that the culprit might be a tiny leather tab on the zip. “Those stupid bastards at Virgin say they can’t take the payment’ is the sort of comment that needs no response, besides I had a cheese sauce that needed some attention and, mercy me!, I appeared to have quite forgotten to put the awfully named Pollock pie from the microwave into the top oven. ‘I’m going to machine wash it anyway’ seemed like a good solution to that one, especially since Jack had, by now, sat down to fill in a complicated form to claim a refund for a trip to the dentist. I could see trouble ahead; best get some butter on those potatoes while I still had the chance.

‘Sorted’ announced son no. 2 a couple of minutes later in a tone that clearly required me to enquire for further details of how he had been so clever. But not necessarily to listen in detail. I heard something about what the bastards at Lloyds Bank had or hadn’t done as I was giving the mash a quick stir round. And then Liz, my lodger, strolled casually through the kitchen after her shower, wearing just a towel round her. As you do. 

‘Am I living in a care home?’ was just the right sort of question to bring me back to reality. ‘Noooo, I don’t think so,’ I said out loud with a definite hint of uncertainty in my voice.

It was time to get some plates out, so we could enjoy some of that quality family conversation that is supposed to happen round the dinner table but of which, alas, I can remember little. We old people just can’t focus, can we?