Last weekend I went down to Bristol to buy a tent. I went cycle camping in France in 2010, which I enjoyed. I stayed in B&Bs/hostels during my LEJOG attempt last year, but I'm planning a short camping holiday in June: I'll cycle down to Portsmouth, go round the Isle of Wight, then come home via Southampton.
I've been doing some research online over the past few months, and Hilleberg have a very good reputation. They're expensive, but I'm willing to pay extra for something that will last, and several people have been using the same tent for 20-30 years. (Taunton Leisure describe these tents as an investment.) Also, these tents are made in Europe (Estonia) rather than being outsourced to somewhere like China; I see this being a bit like "FairTrade", i.e. the tents have to cost more in order for the company to pay the staff a fair wage. I'm not planning to go on an Arctic expedition any time soon, but I'd rather have a strong tent in mild weather than a weak tent in severe weather. Dave's Wild Camping tested a Hilleberg Akto in 80mph wind, which is quite impressive, and that was in the UK (Cumbria). I was out cycling last Tuesday (15th May), and I was pummelled by hailstones 3 times, so even in the British summer I may have to deal with unexpectedly bad weather.
My main concern about the tent purchase was my height. I'm 1.86m tall (somewhere between 6'1" and 6'2"), and I like being taller than average. However, it does have a few drawbacks, e.g. I sometimes wind up with my knees wedged against the seat in front when I go to the theatre. Tent manufacturers always list their dimensions, but those can be misleading. For instance, I used a Quechua T3 in Breton, which was supposedly 2.15m long, but I was pretty much jammed in there. So, I wanted to try some tents out before I bought one, i.e. actually lie down inside them. There were a couple of camping shows in London earlier this year, e.g. The Motorhome, Caravan & Camping Show at the Excel Centre. Unfortunately, they didn't include any Hilleberg tents there. Taunton Leisure have stores in south-west England, and they're happy to put up tents within the shop; the trade-off is that it's a long way to go. Since they offer free delivery, I considered buying a tent online and then swapping it if necessary (to save money on train tickets), but in the end I decided that it would be better to see the tents in person.
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I think it's a bit of a cliche that people who live in a city tend to ignore all the tourist activities. It makes sense, in a way: the tourist is only there for a short time, so they have to cram in as much as possible, whereas the local resident can see those things any time, so there's no particular rush. However, that can lead to indefinite postponement. In my case, I've lived in London for 16 years, and there are several things that I still haven't got round to doing, so I think it's time I started doing them.
With that in mind, here's my "bucket list". If you would like to join me in any of these, let me know; similarly, I'd be interested to hear any suggestions for things I've missed out.
There are elections in London tomorrow: the bit that's got the most publicity is choosing a new Mayor, but we also need to choose people for the London Assembly. I've been caught out at general elections in the past, when they've asked me to vote for local councillors and I've had no idea who to vote for, so I've just gone along party lines. This time, I've tried to be a bit more diligent.
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TL;DR - I'm going hippie and voting Green.
Edit: I've now voted, and the ballot form for the London-wide assembly candidate was different to what I expected. There were 13 options, for 11 parties and 2 independent candidates. So, I had to vote for a party rather than a person. That avoids the problem of a wasted vote, since each party can presumably choose who to give its seats to. However, I then wonder why they bothered listing all the candidates in advance. Also, what happens if an independent candidate wins enough votes for 2 seats: do they choose who to give the spare seat to, or do the figures get rearranged? (This problem generalises to any party which winds up with more seats than candidates.)
Back in February, someone deliberately drove their car into my (hire) bike while I was queuing at a traffic light. I reported the collision to the police, and they phoned me last week for more info. On my report, I described the driver as "Female?" because I only saw him/her for a couple of seconds and I just noticed that he/she didn't have any facial hair. However, the police said that a man had identified himself as the driver, which could well be correct.
I received a letter from the police yesterday: "After careful consideration of all the available evidence it has been decided that the other party will not be prosecuted for the offence of driving without due care and attention. I can confirm however that this office has written to the other party and reminded them of their responsibilities as a road user, to drive safely and comply with road traffic law." Oh well, that's something I suppose. The police also gave me the driver's name and address, which surprised me: maybe that's in case I need to make an insurance claim, since he didn't stick around to exchange details at the scene.
More recently, I had a near miss with a private ambulance. ( Read more... )
Edit: Following up on this, Addison Lee (the company that owns the ambulance) have been in the news again! This time, the guy in charge has implied that collisions between cars and bikes are inevitable, and claimed that drivers pay road tax (which doesn't exist). More info at road.cc and The Times.
Back in August 2008 I wrote about supermarkets and carrier bags. So, a few years on, how have things changed? Sadly there's been no real improvement.
* Asda previously announced that they would no longer give out ("disposable") carrier bags after 1st August 2008, so people would either have to buy a "bag for life" or bring their own bag in. They've now removed the signs, but they're still giving out free bags, so they didn't really follow through on that policy. They've exchange my bag for life a couple of times when it's got tatty (holes), although I had to queue up at the customer service desk for a while.
* Sainsbury's still offer the same choice as before: they'll give out free bags if you want them, but they also give out Nectar points if you reuse bags. They normally ask how many carrier bags I've reused; today I filled up 2 bike panniers directly and I only got 1 point for that. Still, at least they asked me whether I wanted any carrier bags.
* Tesco (metro) still start shoving stuff into their own bags unless I actively stop them. I then have to fill the bags myself, and this recently caused a problem when I passed an item back over the scanner and got charged twice for it. The checkout guy corrected that, but it was an extra faff. I haven't tried using my store card there, so I can't comment on points for bag reuse.
Basically, I don't think we can rely on the supermarkets to voluntarily reduce carrier bags, so we'll need the government to implement some kind of "bag tax", e.g. charging people 5p/bag. Wales have already done this, and the EU ran a consultation last year but I can't find the results.
On a similar note, I recently replaced my TV and DVD player, so I went to Richer Sounds. Now that I've unpacked the new equipment, I don't have room for the empty boxes in my flat. However, they're also a bit awkward to get rid of: I can recycle the cardboard, but the styrofoam inserts will probably need 2 bin liners. I tried taking these boxes back to the shop in the hope that they could be reused, i.e. Richer Sounds could send the box back to Sony and use it for an identical model TV. Failing that, maybe they could dispose of it for me. Their website talks about their "green credentials": they'll recycle old electrical equipment (following the WEEE regulations) and they will also recycle old batteries. However, the guys in the shop said that they couldn't reuse packaging. They could direct me to the recycling depot but if they took the boxes then the whole lot would go to landfill. So, I brought the boxes back home. I'll offer them on Freegle, in case they're useful to anyone moving house, but that probably won't come to anything. I realise that the shopfloor staff don't define policy, and the TV manufacters would also need to accept returned packaging, but it all seems like a missed opportunity.
Last week the Express published a blog post: Hey cyclist, stop shouting...
Basically, the writer (Penny Stretton) was doing a driving lesson, then she swerved to avoid a lorry and almost hit a cyclist. This cyclist then shouted at her, which ruined the rest of her lesson. In fairness, she admits that she shouldn't have been driving when she was tired (cf Highway Code rule 91) and that she should have spotted the cyclist sooner, so I don't want to dwell on that, particularly since she's still a learner. I'm more concerned about the conclusions she's drawn from this experience, and the self-contradictions in her article (which apparently escaped her editor as well).
All I know about this incident is from the driver's point of view, but it sounds similar to a collision I was in last year, so I'm inclined to sympathise with the cyclist.
Quoting her article: Trying to compose myself, I took a deep breath and looked up to see a lorry ahead, half parked and jutting out across my lane.
If she looked up, that implies that she was looking down beforehand, i.e. she wasn't watching the road while her vehicle was moving. This is extremely dangerous. If she needed to compose herself then she should have pulled over to the side of the road first; failing that, I'd prefer her to do an emergency stop in the middle of the road rather than driving blind.
Quoting again: He screamed and shouted accusing me of "trying to kill him" which was a rather hilarious exaggeration actually, although it wasn’t so funny at the time.
I don't think that she ever intended to harm the cyclist, i.e. this was just incompetence rather than malice. However, I also don't think that she understands how much damage a car crash can do: if you hit someone with a ton of metal then it is often fatal. Last year a 13 year old child was killed by a learner driver in a car park, when the car was only travelling at 4mph. Forgive me if I don't see the hilarity in that.
It's also not clear where the cyclist was (relative to the car) before the near miss. Quoting again: while I certainly should have spotted him quicker, slowed down and hung back, let's get things straight – he shouldn't have been trying to overtake me so quickly, either.
If he was trying to overtake her then that implies that he was behind her, but if she could have hung back then that implies that he was ahead of her. Also, she later says that he: was ambling along at wobble pace, swaying so much that I'd earlier been worried about passing him at all.
If she was worried about passing him, that implies again that he was ahead of her, so he couldn't have been trying to overtake her. Similarly, if he was ambling along then he couldn't have been going "so quickly".
Finally, she said: Also, couldn't they see I was a learner, in car plastered with BSM and cut me a tiny bit of slack?
If he was ahead of her then he probably didn't get a very good view of her car. Also, what exactly should he have done differently? If she came up behind him (travelling faster) and then swerved towards him, it's hardly his fault for not getting out of the way in time! Maybe he should have stayed quiet and assumed that she'd learn from the experience on her own, but she seems to disagree with his assessment, which implies that someone needed to tell her how dangerous that was. I'd be interested to hear the BSM instructor's view on this, since apparently he didn't explain this to her either.
All in all, another reminder that the tabloid press isn't a reliable source of information.
Yesterday the BBC published an article about Fabrice Muamba: Can you be 'dead' for 78 minutes? It's interesting, but I think that some of the information is inaccurate.
Quoting the article:
"The important thing in such cases is to start CPR quickly.
This artificially pumps the blood round the body, buying medics time to work out how to get the heart working properly.
Every minute delay in starting CPR reduces the chances of survival by 10%."
"It is a proven concept that the only effective treatment for ventricular fibrillation (VF) is prompt defibrillation. Yet, defibrillation is only effective when it is administered within the first few minutes of a Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) episode.
A study published in an October 2000 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that survival rates are highest when defibrillation is delivered within three minutes of the time of collapse."
"But CPR alone is not enough. That only gives someone suffering a cardiac arrest a 5% chance of survival.
While he lay stricken on the pitch, the footballer was given oxygen and three shocks using a defibrillator."
This morning I went to the dentist for root canal surgery. Proverbially this is supposed to be quite unpleasant, e.g. "that film sounds so bad that I'd rather have root canal than watch it". It certainly wasn't fun, but it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. For instance, my frenectomy and laser eye surgery were both worse. Anyway, I've hidden the gory details behind a cut tag.
As a side note, I looked at the posters in the window while I was in the waiting room: since these face outwards, I saw the mirror image through the back. I now know that the opposite of "smile" is "slime".
Edit: Actually, no, the opposite of "smile" is "elims" which is less amusing. I think I misread that because each letter in "lim" is symmetrical, so I treated them as a single unit when I was reading backwards.
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Anyway, I think I need to be more diligent about going for regular check-ups at the dentist, rather than waiting until there's a problem.
When I moved to Croydon, I needed to get a bin for my kitchen, and I chose a Brabantia twin bin. The key concept here is that the metal bin is divided into two sections (with separate plastic bins and liners): a 23L section for normal waste, and a 10L section for compostable waste, e.g. potato peelings and banana skins. I'm enough of a hippy that this seemed like a nice idea, but I didn't really think it through.
Dividing my waste is easy enough, and eventually the bin will fill up. Then what? The council will collect my normal rubbish if I put the bin bag outside my front door, but they won't collect my food waste. More specifically, they don't offer any kind of recycling collection to people who live in flats above shops: you can only get a recycling bin if you have a front yard to put it in, and my front door opens straight onto the pavement. That means that I have to take my recycling down to the depot, or to a public recycling bin (e.g. at the supermarket). Unfortunately, they don't accept food waste at any of these facilities. You can collect compost at the depot, but that's no use to me. So, I wind up putting all of my waste into the same bag, and it goes to landfill. That means that there's no real point in separating out my waste within the twin bin, so I might as well just have a normal bin with a single section.
Still, suppose that the council were willing to collect my food waste. According to their website, I'd be issued with a kitchen caddy and an outside container. I would then put my food waste into the kitchen caddy initially, and empty that into the outside container every couple of days. So, I wouldn't actually use the compostable section of my twin bin in that scenario either, and again I'd be better off with a normal bin. Potentially I could use the twin bin instead of the kitchen caddy (to free up space on my worktop), but then I'd still have to store the caddy somewhere (since it's council property).
So, when would the twin bin ever be useful? If I had a garden with a compost heap then I could fill the compostable section of the bin, then throw the entire bag (including bin liner) onto the heap when it was full. However, that's not applicable to me at the moment. Also, because the green bin liners are compostable, that means that I have to replace them every couple of weeks, even if the bin isn't full. Otherwise, the food waste starts to eat through them: I then wind up with a liquid mess inside the plastic bin and I have to rinse that out.
Also, the normal bin liners are easy to buy at a supermarket, but I have to go online to get replacements for the compostable bin liners. There are liners sold in supermarkets for kitchen caddies, but they're the wrong size for my bin. So, if I had a caddy here then it would make sense to use it; if I lived elsewhere, I could empty it onto my hypothetical compost heap.
So, I think there are two lessons for me to learn from this:
1) Don't buy stuff on a whim, with vaguely good intentions. I should make sure that I have a specific plan for using it.
2) Next time I move house, I should try to find out what the council policies are in advance.
In previous posts, I've described features that I'd like to see implemented in mobile phones:
* Radio/GPS tracking to meet someone in a park (Sep 2005)
* Dual-SIM phone (Sep 2007)
With the growth in smartphones, I suspect that the first option is now feasible. I found an article from 2010 (Finding Your Friends via GPS), which lists various Facebook apps to help with this, but the closest match ("Find My Friend") no longer exists. Has anyone used a similar app?
I recently bought a new TV and Blu-ray player, and these both have ethernet ports in the back so that I can stream online video (e.g. BBC iPlayer). Playing futurologist again, here's something I'd like to see: link a TV program or film to IMDB. That way, if I'm watching TV and I think "Hmm, she looks familiar, where do I know her from?" I could use my remote control like a laser pointer and the TV would pause the film and hop to a bio page. If facial tracking is too difficult at the moment, I'd settle for an equivalent option during the end credits.
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