A fortnight of cheese sandwich lunch stops

Day 1: With view towards Bagnères de Luchon (1230m).


Day 2: Pic de Bacanère (2193m).


Day 3: Carrefour d'Uls (1820m).


Day 4: From Gîte d'Eylie en Haut (990m).


Day 5: Cabane de Bessett (1494m), looking back at what has already been climbed and descended in the morning.


Day 6: Between Col d'Auédole and Pas de la Core (1550m ish).


Day 7: Auberge des Deux Rivières (541m).


Day 8: Soggy cheese sandwich in lashing rain with zero visibility, Col de Pause (1527m).


Day 9: Salle de manger, Gîte Saint Lizier d'Ustou (740m).


Day 10: Passerelle d'Ars (1485m).


Day 11: Col de Bassiès (1933m).


Day 12: Former aqueduct, above Marc (1010m).


Day 13: Barrage de l'Etang d'Izourt (1647m).

Meeting the neighbours

All happening in Homerton this evening ... traffic collision outside the block turns out to be our suspected local dealers trying to execute a handbrake turn in order to get away from a police pursuit. The driver missed the turn and hit a neighbour's car instead, which then rolled into another neighbour's car. The driver legged it leaving his girlfriend to deal with the police, two of whom ran after the driver eventually tackling him on the green. They've just brought him back kicking and screaming ... literally. 
Meanwhile half the street has come out to watch the performance and piece together what happened, swapping notes and perspectives from our various vantage points, having a laugh at the poorly planned escape attempt and commiserating with the car owners. Conviviality in action! It may not be pretty but it works.

Season's greetings ...

So in a week we have a spate of acid attacks in the neighbourhood, a riot brewing on Kingsland Road following a death in custody, a man beaten up on a local cycle path, and dealers now taking up residence on it. It's an odd, angry summer, this one. All thunder storm and gusts of wind out of nowhere. Anything unmoored is being buffeted into a gutter, and the rest of us cling on to our umbrellas and find the nearest wall to stand with our backs to. Youth workers talk of withdrawing from some streets because, like fake news, and alternative facts, and trolling, and Brexit, and Jo Cox, and shrapnel at a kid''s concert, the borders have shifted.

Up North

It seems that there comes a point in the life of a challenge eventer's feet when they finally give out a definitive signal that they've had enough. Losing sensation in my big toes was pretty much it for this year at least. Discretion, and the avoidance of gangrene and subsequent amputation, being the better part of valour, I finally had to accept the inevitable and withdrew from this year's North York Moors 100.

Yet having overcome the feeling of being gutted this actually turned out to be a good decision on many levels. First, I had always wanted to see the North Yorkshire Moors, and now I could walk around some of them at a leisurely pace with a camera. Second, Dingo Baby could  join in, rather than sit in a community hall waiting for me to arrive at some ungodly hour of the morning to hose me down and carry me home. Third, I could drink as much ale along the way as I wanted.We soon discovered however that there are other challenges that need to be overcome when travelling up North. All restaurants seem to close at 9pm (at least in Whitby) and if you happen to be still eating your spotted dick and custard too bad; cleaning of floors and tables will just go on around you. And don't even think of being a soft Southerner and asking for a spoon just because the waitress forgot to give you one. You can manage your seafood chowder with a fork like everyone else.  Likewise should you put on a jumper when sitting outside on the pub terrace, no matter that the sun is setting, the temperature dropping and the wind picking up, expect a chorus of 'soft Southerner'. 

The need to  test the plethora of 'best fish and chip/yorkshire pudding/homemade cakes in Yorkshire' claims in every village in the county led to challenging mathematical calculations of the ratio of calorie intake to walking time necessary to burn it all off. And if you ever want to sadistically see your Siri SatNav lose it, then tell it to find Botton Village or some other obscure, but ridiculously beautiful, dot in a dale. We also walked through fields with some of the scariest looking rams I have ever seen. I am still haunted by their appearance of being the bastard off-spring of a pig-sheep mash up and if anyone knows what breed they are I really need to know so I can stop thinking I imagined them.

Such challenges, however, are more than compensated for by big sky walks that take you from the sea, to moor and dale, forest and fields of rampaging wildflowers, interspersed with people that will stop and chat along the trails (even if only to point out that you're a soft Southerner for walking in boots instead of sandals).

THE fight

At least half a dozen times each year I drag Dingo Baby to the theatre because 'it's good for him'. It is not his favourite art form but he comes along, valiantly trying to see what I love about it. The closest we got to shared enjoyment was Butley in 2011, with Dominic West as the English lecturer falling apart at the seams.

Given this sacrifice it seemed only fair that when a couple of tickets popped into his hand for the boxing 'heavyweight championship of the world', namely, Joshua versus Klitschko,  I could only say yes. It's not that I don't like the athleticism of boxing, particularly the lighter divisions, and despite appearances it requires strategic intelligence. I even tried Muay Thai for a year but gave up after hitting myself in the nose (it's a short, embarrassing story). Both Joshua and Klitschko seem like nice chaps with none of the trash talk of fighters like David Haye.

But it's obvious that unless you're going to pay £6,000 for ring side tickets you will get a much better view of a boxing match in a pub on a large, HD flat screen TV. Sitting up in the god's at Wembley Stadium requires binoculars. Not even the two large screens around the stadium provide the detail necessary for a really visceral experience of sweat and pounding movement. The whole show is designed as a spectacle for television, complete with fireworks and platforms raising 'AJ' up into the air to shadow box for the cameras before the fighting begins. Music at decibels fills any interstitial moment, between bouts and between rounds, and yet there is an odd silence at times including during the fights. There is no commentary in the stadium, only the murmurs rising to roars of the crowd. It is boring with intermittent flurries of action.  

So 'why?', is my question, are 90,000 of us coming along to sit in a cold arena to watch something we could better see at home or in the pub. And the answer is that it signifies the continued importance of 'the gathering', the need for human contact with like minded others. 

Then the question becomes, 'who are these like minded others?'  And here I begin to delve into unknown territory.

We arrive early for the preliminary matches, including watching an excellent bout between Katie Taylor from Ireland defeating Nina Meinke from Germany for a WBA lightweight championship. At this stage the stadium is almost empty. 

As the bouts become heavier the crowds get bigger and I am slowly surrounded by predominantly young, white, men, well groomed, smart-casually dressed (loafers, sometimes with tie and blazer), drinking and occasionally enjoying a return to the 80s as they emerge from the men's toilets with a spring in their step. This energy contributes to frenetic explosions of dancing to House of Pain's 'Jump Around', and rousing sing-alongs to Gala's 'Freed from Desire', something from Usher, and that classic of arena events, 'Sweet Caroline', oh oh ohh. Amidst chanting of 'Oh Anthony Joshua' (to the riff of White Stripes's 'Seven Nation Army') I am on a football terrace. With the chanting of 'tits out for the lads' I'm back in Australia (sigh). At my age I can at least challenge the lads around me on their use of the latter and asked loudly to no-one in particular why men are so fascinated with breasts and were they not breast fed as babies. 

While there are few women those that have accompanied their men folk are split between casual sports wear and what is affectionately known in the UK as 'totty': the smallest of dresses no matter the weather, the highest of heels, the longest of lashes and hair extensions. I blame the WAG effect at boxing matches and the endless shots of the glamorous partner who has to sit in the front row and watch her man get beaten up. And of course there are the William Hill Women who get to hold up the Round Number every three minutes. They must get some kudos for being able to get in and out of a ring in heels and mini without flashing a knicker. 

Sitting in my sneakers, thermals, cardigan and wool coat, with half a pint of real ale and a bag of pick 'n' mix, I was in a foreign land. Supporting Klitschko was also not helping given the uber-nationalism being whipped up in the stadium. I added the mental strength to lose in front of this crowd as one of the skills of boxing (as well as an ability for agile ducking by spectators to avoid pints of beer missiles), although in fairness, while it's not possible to say it was a good natured crowd, there was a cheer for Klitschko at the end. 

On the hour tube journey home this crowd dispersed as we looped through the city on the Jubilee line, stations north, west, south and finally east. I have no compass for their location but I'm wondering if it might not be important to take a GPS to them next time ... I have a feeling the future of this country is somehow tied up with this cohort of young men and what brings them together to chant mantras of belonging.         

Economics ... what is it good for? Not much apparently.

In an effort to demonstrate a statistically significant negative correlation, with a p value less than 0.001, between the declining usefulness of economics as a social science and Mz Kitty's eye's glazing over, I spent 90 minutes in the company of economists last night.

This required first removing some confounding variables, notably random gents seemingly disturbed by states of singularity and wanting to know if they could have my mobile number to arrange a visit sometime soon. I appreciate that outliers can make the other dots in a series feel uncomfortable, or apparently get the wrong idea about the availability of the outlier for social outings, but I feel no need to be drawn into anyone else's line of best fit.

After some precision dispersal I found myself unfortunately regressing into a mental foetal position as speaker after speaker spoke about the state of statistics and economic measurement in India. Note that's not discussing the state of poverty in India, but rather how their ability to measure it has gone into decline since the original launch of the book, 'Poverty and Income Distribution in India', in 1974.

Detecting a fairly low level of standard deviation in the discussion, someone in the audience finally dared to ask how the eminent scholars (some of the world's finest, at Yale and MIT for example) might actually address poverty in India. The response from the MC was 'that's not the topic of discussion', and we returned to talking about how to measure it instead.

If you've got some of the finest economic minds in the business sitting on the podium surely they could have offered some thought on how to address poverty in India, or the world for that matter, especially now that it's over 40 years since the first publication of the book and in that time India has radically changed, culturally as well as economically, as a result of globalisation and neoliberalism.

To be fair, maybe I'm just too focused on my indeterminate ethnography with its pretty pictures and thematic analysis, underpinned by the certain belief that human beings cannot be reduced in totality to discrete variables, diced into quartiles and measured like so much daal. But I'm happy to work with statisticians and I even got a distinction in statistics in my Psych degree. I know my T-test from my Chi Square. And yes, I get that the underpinning data, government statistics, could be better, and statistical tools, and statisticians, need to be robust.

But dear economists, even with these caveats, in these days of re-writing the economic curriculum take a stand on what this thing called 'poverty' actually means for real people and the human implications of what your measurements are telling you!

I have no review of the actual book. I was going to buy it but by the end of the seminar my eyes had reached peak glaze and the only thing that appealed to me was the cover photo.

Perfect Day

Today has been, by Mz Kitty's definition, perfect.

A run in the morning as the sun is getting up, through a frosty white Victoria Park with noone but the hardiest souls sharing the glories of a still winter's morning.

My sourdough bread finally, after two years of experimentation, rose to the occasion and actually looked almost like a proper sourdough.

Then on to join thousands of like minded souls in the streets of London, reminding the newly inaugurated President Trump et al that we will be watching them.

Back to the marché for my coffee and the London Review of Books, to finish reading a 10,000 word essay on the life and works of David Bowie, some esoteric poetry, and squeezing in the latest instalment of Alan Bennett's diary for good measure (which I shouldn't really find as interesting as I do).

Home just in time to receive my new Salomon gortex-lined trail runners (although feet still slightly encrusted from last Sunday's mud so might wait a few weeks before christening them properly).

Some more baking of chocolate custard tarts, complete with home made flaky pastry.

Then anticipating a few hours in front of the goggle box with my fella (who did all the cooking yesterday for the coming week) watching Taboo and finishing a jumper.

It can only be bettered by the knowledge that tomorrow is Jane Austin, Cocktails and Knitting Appreciation Society day!

I suspect I may have hit seasonally adjusted middle age, where the desire to go out dancing in winter is outweighed by the desire to stay on a comfy sofa.