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McMinn and Cheese



  • My week in media

    September 24th, 2022

    Monday: I’ve given up on the Game of Thrones prequel thing. Cancelled my Now TV subscription. It’s absolute gubbins. A boring, dark, slow turn off. Just like the royal funeral.

    Tuesday: I’m sort of looking forward to The Peripheral, coming soon to Amazon, and based on William Gibson’s novel, which I have read. Another genre show! Most of them are poor, and yet we genre fans keep giving them more of a chance than they deserve.

    Wednesday: I’ve cancelled Paramount+ too, because apart from Star Trek there’s nothing on. And in the absence of a current new Star Trek, I’m not paying. I have been rewatching the original series, which is still great (and, crucially, not too dark in terms of its visuals). I think my subscription will run out before I have time to rewatched the unloved third season. But both my daughter and I agree that Season 3 of ToS is actually brilliant, simply because the stories are completely bonkers. There needs to be more absolutely bonkers television.

    Thursday: I resubscribed to Netflix after these cancellations, but there’s very little on. I burned through The Lincoln Lawyer (average), and then couldn’t bring myself to watch Stranger Things. I’d already lost interest in the second season. So I put on Lost in Space, which is a weird modern TV show because it keeps its language clean and doesn’t feature any sexy stuff. But I do actually quite enjoy it. There’s some father-daughter stuff (which pushes my buttons, natch), and the storyline isn’t bad at all.

    Friday: I’m in a the mood to give up on the Lord of the Rings prequel thing, which (like House of the Dragon) is also boring and slow, but at least not dark. It’s lush to look at, and you can see stuff because the lighting is mostly high key. But, but, but, it is dreadfully slow, and almost nothing happens. The most recent episode was over an hour long, and (as the Guardian recap noted) ‘ruthlessly packed in’ 17 minutes of story. But it’s on Amazon Prime, which I’m paying for anyway. So I’ll watch it to the end, and Amazon will call it a success, but it’s not. It’s awful.

    I was talking to a friend (hi, friend) and mentioned how many mediocre genre shows there are on Netflix. They’re all pretty much of a muchness. I’ve noted before, Netflix think they have a formula for making such shows, and they’re sticking to it, even though it means they all seem the same. There are (a very few) exceptions, like Travelers, but they are rare. It happens, but it’s rare, but it happens.

    Saturday: The BBC have a formula, too, for the vaguely science fictiony techno thriller audio dramas in their Limelight strand. They’re all pretty similar, all have youthful casts, and they’re all a bit rubbish (even if they don’t all go down the anti-vax road). They have characters who start every sentence with, “So…” and they do that irritating thing of telling a series of linked individual character stories rather than making six episodes that tell one story. This is as bothersome to me as the doorstep fantasy novel with twelve p.o.v. characters. I’m just tired of it: it’s time to ring the changes on these things.

    This is why I have hopes for the William Gibson thing. Amazon do seem to be picking up some interesting properties. I wish they’d look at some Tim Powers IP, or Robert Charles Wilson: I would be here for the TV series based on Spin. I also think Bezos made a massive mistake in buying the Lord of the Rings Except Not Lord of the Rings rights. It’s a colossal waste of money, and their best move would be to cancel it now, rather than sink even more money into it. It’s just not good enough.

  • So I bought a rowing machine

    September 21st, 2022

    It was funny to wake this morning and see one of the people I follow on Twitter abuzz with the news that Peloton (they of the overpriced exercise bikes and treadmills) were launching a new rowing machine. You’ll laugh at the price, which is over $3000, and that’s not including the $44 per month fee to subscribe to the on-screen workouts.

    The Peloton machine looks high tech, but in terms of its technology, it seems to be mainly about the huge screen and other electronics. Meanwhile, over the summer, I’d been hatching my own plan to get a rower, and I’d spent some time researching the options. It was all prompted by an offer I saw on Amazon, of course.

    There are three main rowing machine technologies when it comes to the resistance you feel when you push/pull. There’s magnetic resistance, which can be dialled in, giving you control similar to that found on some exercise bikes. Then there’s the air resistance, with models that use a big fan that spins as you pull. The harder you pull, the more wind resistance there will be (again, something familiar to cyclists, who will feel that wall of air grow stronger the faster you go on the bike). And then there’s water resistance, which uses a stumpy cylinder of water containing paddles. Again, the harder you pull, the more resistance you will feel.

    I opted to order a water rower. My OH was sceptical, not wanting a giant piece of equipment in our house, but then she saw a water rower on display in Nature & Discovery (French retailer), and tried it. And liked it.

    So I ordered the water rower that had been the Amazon offer. It cost around £360, which is a bargain if you compare the prices of the WaterRower brand originals you will find on the John Lewis web site. But! Of course this would be a made-in-China copy of something more expensive, so you couldn’t be sure. It might turn out to be exactly the same thing but cheaper. Or it might be something that didn’t quite fit together properly so that you ended up with stripped threads and wobbly bits.

    I was forewarned that the item would arrive in two separate deliveries. I ordered at the end of August, and the delivery date was set at 5-7 September.

    Well! The first part, the big box containing the water container, arrived on the 1 September. But I was again warned that the other part (the rails and seat mechanism) would arrive later.

    Time passed. The tracking number I’d been given for the second package didn’t work. I contacted the seller about this, and they sent another tracking number that didn’t work. The 7th September passed. And the 9th. And then the seller stopped responding. I waited a couple more days and then reported a problem with the order. Amazon refunded me. I got a return label. But I contacted the seller again to say that I wouldn’t be bearing the postage costs and the box wouldn’t go in the boot of my car. (I don’t really know this, but I wasn’t going to try.)

    Meanwhile, plan B. You get what you pay for. So I ordered the entry level actual WaterRower A1 from John Lewis, and it arrived last Friday. It arrived in two boxes, both at the same time. It was fairly straightforward to assemble. I am the absolute worst when it comes to handling allen keys and nuts and bolts, but there were no dramas. I filled it up with water to the calibration line, and we were good to go.

    Compared to the Peloton, it’s a couple of grand cheaper (£849 from John Lewis, including delivery), but it looks quite nice. It doesn’t have a huge screen, but a small LCD one. The slightly more expensive models have twin rails with wooden sides, but this one just has a single aluminium rail. It’s stable enough: no complaints. The lack of a big screen and fancy electronics doesn’t matter to me, because I’ll be using my Apple Watch. The LCD screen displays your strokes per minute and a timer and stuff, but as long as you can see your strokes per minute and you have your fitness watch, that’s all you need. I’m trying a month of Apple Fitness+, which is much cheaper than Peloton’s $44 a month, and brings you Rowing with Josh (and a couple of other trainers for variety). So you stick Josh on your TV, and you start the workout from your watch, and you can do a fast 10 minutes, or 20, or 30 etc.

    I’m not one for structured workouts, but actually Josh is quite personable, and he does encourage you to do regular intervals of harder effort, to get your heart rate up into the zones.

    So it’s pretty good. I like it. It’s a funny thing, but I’ve always wanted one. I mean, always. Wanted one in that strange way where you internally believed you’d really like something without ever having tried it. Which I hadn’t. Literally the first time I sat on a rowing machine was after I’d assembled it. So it’s lucky I do like it. Importantly, so does my OH.

    Meanwhile, I’ve got half of a different water rower in an unopened box in my garage. The seller has told me to keep it or throw it away. *shrugs*

  • Audio Hijacked

    September 19th, 2022

    In the Time Before, I was a Pro Tools user – got quite good at it, too. That was what my home studio setup was based around. This was with an M-Box and a G5 Mac, which tells you how long ago it was. If you’re under the age of 50 this is probably all letter and number salad so far. I had all the plug-ins, too, thanks to my employment at a main dealer for Pro Tools. And when I say all the plug-ins… anything that could work with my Mac, I had. I also had a bunch of Native Instruments software, um, instruments and various other things.

    But that was then. Nowadays, on my M1 Macbook, I’m “reduced” to using GarageBand to record and edit the podcasts I’ve started making. (This is not one of those Best Setup articles, by the way.)

    Garageband is all right, but it has some frustrating limitations. For example, something I used all the time in Pro Tools is the Strip Silence command. It was a very quick and convenient edit, something to remove the spaces in between the noises you actually meant to record. With minor tweaks, it could remove most of the background noise, the squeaks, the bumps, the stomach rumbles, and so on. If GarageBand had Strip Silence, I’d probably not be complaining about it at all. I’d prefer a Mixer view, and a way of creating Sends and Returns to reduce processor load, but even Pro Tools has changed its interface a lot in the intervening years.

    Logic has Strip Silence, among many other things, and I’ve got a feeling I’ll end up getting it, notwithstanding its price tag. What stops me now is that both it and Pro Tools contains too much stuff aimed at music production, which for various reasons is too much. I don’t need stomp box effects, or flangers, or even reverb. There’s a gap in the market for a piece of multi-track software dedicated to speech. It could be a “cut down” version of Garageband, but one that comes with Strip Silence and some other clean-up tools, noise reduction and so on. Adobe Audition offers a good tool set (although aimed at video production), but it’s even more expensive than Logic. The student/teacher version has you paying £17 a month for ALL THE SOFTWARE. I’m struggling for hard drive space as it is.

    At the other end of the market are super-simple recorders like Piezo and other Rogue Amoeba apps. But Fission, for example, their simple audio editor is too simple. As for free software like Audacity, the interface is horrible, even if it does do (what they call) Truncate Silence. Audacity just looks like something from the Commodore 64.

    Part of my concern here is that music software in general is an absolute disk hog. Even GarageBand has its loop libraries, which take up tons of space. I’ve found that clicking to download one particular loop downloads a whole bunch of them, and it soon gets out of hand.

    But the biggest nightmare of all with all audio software is the shit that gets installed all over your hard drive, deep into the system. Even Rogue Amoeba software requires you to start your Mac in Recovery Mode and override the security settings, so it can install some deep code.

    Just out of interest, and because it used to be my favourite software, I just installed the latest “home” version of Pro Tools. What a shitshow! As well as installing a million files all over my system, it looks horrible on a laptop screen, and won’t support 96kHz, which is a bit shit.

    And then when I decided I would not be using it (or paying the monthly subscription), it took an hour to find and uninstall all the intrusive stuff it had put all over my system. I’m still not sure I’ve got all of it. Clean My Mac was very little help.

  • Stasis

    September 17th, 2022

    The universe tends towards entropy, and Britain’s post-war settlement lurches on to its own heat death. I find it interesting that the language of science uses words like “chaos” and “disorder” when describing the tendency, when for me the ultimate fate of the universe would seem to be stasis. Static. It’s the same with traffic, isn’t it: when everything stops, the tabs call it “traffic chaos” when its actually traffic stasis. Paralysis.

    That queue to view a wooden box draped in a flag is more stasis.

    This week, “out of respect”, everything has got a little bit shittier. Funny that. Respect for the corpse of a symbolic link to lies about Britain’s past takes precedent over everything else, whether it is our freedom of speech or customer service.

    Brexit and the pandemic both already did considerable damage to the economy and our quality of life. I’m sure there are still some areas of the country where it’s possible to see a doctor, but around here, it’s more or less impossible. My most recent in-person appointments have been with a nurse practitioner and a paramedic, and I’ve spoken with what seems to be the last available doctor over the telephone. I say “spoken”. Mostly the conversation was me asking them to repeat themselves because I couldn’t hear a word they were saying.

    I read in the Graun the other day that, in desperation, people are “going private” in order to get operations impossible to get on the NHS. Which made me despair just a little bit (more), because of course all those private operations will be done by doctors also employed by the NHS, often in NHS hospitals. So if I’d been writing the headline, it would have been about rich people jumping the queue and making people who can’t afford private healthcare wait even longer. But what do I know?

    I’ve always believed that things would have to get much much worse before people woke up and started taking action. Well: people are finally out on the street, but they’re queuing to look at a flag on a box. Meanwhile, 50 Stop Oil protesters were jailed on a single day.

    I heard a discussion on a podcast about the realities of abolishing the monarchy. There’s a clever sleight on hand the media does over this. They pretend there’s a binary choice between a political (and probably unpopular) president, and a symbolic head of state who lives in several palaces and castles. I don’t give a shit about King Charles vs President Blair (which is often the way the binary choice is presented). But I would love to see the rest of the parasites cut off from the public teat, and the end to scenes such as we’ve seen this week. Prince fucking Edward with his chestful of medals from five minutes in the army. Prince fucking Andrew anywhere anytime.

    And it’s not just the unelected monarchy; it’s the House of Lords, and the honours system, and the system of patronage and old school ties. It’s the crests and the logos and the crowns (give the diamond back to India) and the sceptres and the magic wands. It’s the unfit-for-purpose Palace of Westminster, which should be replaced with a debating chamber with enough seats for everyone which are arrayed in a semicircle rather than on opposite benches. It’s the first past the post election system and the lack of true representation. All of that! Not just King fucking Charles, so don’t reduce the debate to, “Would you want a President Blair, though?”

    But the answer is, actually, yes I would, because his term would be limited, and we could vote him out if we wanted to. Better than what we have now, which is stasis.

    So put all that shit in a museum and give us a working democracy instead of this charade. 

  • Lonely Heart Clubhouse Episode 5: Karlheinz Stockhausen

    September 14th, 2022

    Really, this should be episode #9, and a retcon should move this week’s subject further along the row to ninth position.

    This episode is all about the German avant garde composer who was surely the inspiration for the Beatles’ experiments with tape loops and sound collage.

    The thorny question of which Beatle was the most avant garde has rumbled on for decades, with Macca making the case for himself in recent years, and Lennon blowing his own trumpet throughout the 70s. It was John who put out Two Virgins, but it was George who put out Electronic Sounds, and Paul who was behind Carnival of Light, which few have ever heard.

    As always, Elodie does the research and I step on the punchlines: avant garde a clue.

    Like the previous episode, we sat outside the house in France on a summer evening, so this podcast should be subtitled Chihuahua with a Chainsaw.

  • Failing

    September 10th, 2022

    Younger daughter FaceTimed from Albuquerque this afternoon, asking for help with charging the camera battery. She has borrowed my Olympus OM-D for her year in the US, and took with her the charger and battery (of course), but not a lead to connect the charger to the mains. I told her to get a cheap figure-8 power cable when she got there.

    This she did. So now she was on the phone/screen, holding the figure-8 lead and the Li-Ion battery from the camera, and asking how it was possible to connect one to the other. I explained that she needed the actual charger, and for a moment she was nonplussed, thinking she hadn’t packed it. But she had, and the pieces were soon put together.

    But then I was left thinking how much I’d failed her, that she didn’t understand the basics of how this camera system worked. What a world! We’ve already fast-forwarded past the stage of removable batteries, so that younger people are all at sea with something as basic as a system camera. This is like when I discover that my students don’t know how to set margins and line spacing on a document.

    There’s a frightening tendency to just accept things as they are, whether that’s a document template or an operating system.

    DEFAULT POSITION.

    As someone who has always run screaming from the defaults, I am frankly bewildered. The idea of using an iPad as my main computer, and being stuck with the fonts that came with it, makes me shudder.

    Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the bugbear of the dead Queen and the expectation that I’ll give a shit. You know that Tories and monarchists are going to bleat on a fair bit with their platitudes and bromides, but what really sticks in the craw are the lefty liberals who solemnly intone that, even for republicans, this is a Moment.

    Default position. When it comes to things like this, people always reveal their true colours. The privately educated, Oxbridge media crowd who are paid to have opinions for money, are going to reliably explain (Oxplain?) why this is Important, even to those of us who have never watched a Royal wedding, funeral, or Christmas speech. So they all fall in line behind the party line. This is a Moment.

    No, it fucking isn’t. All I’m feeling right now is a low-level irritation that people won’t shut the fuck up. I was also pleased to note the quiet roads when I went out on my bike. A little throwback to the happy days of lockdown. But earlier, I came home from town to find my OH watching TV, a long and repetitive ceremony in which the King dealt with some admin at length. Riveting, I thought, as I walked through the room with the shopping bags. And flashbacks for me back to the Investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969, which for some reason (possibly whooping cough) I was at home to endure, wondering why Andy Pandy (or whatever) wasn’t on.

    So, just as I failed my daughter when it comes to technology, the media has failed to seize the moment. Absolutely nobody is asking why we’re not taking the opportunity to abolish the monarchy and move on. And yet, when it was safe to do so, a year ago, five years ago, when it was only theoretical, that’s exactly what they were doing.

    The most important discussion we’re not having is, with what do we replace up the Queen’s twat as a toast when we sit down for drinks with friends. Up the King’s twat is anatomically incorrect, so what? Up the King’s Arse?

  • The Hobbit Habit

    September 3rd, 2022

    It’s fair to say that the fantasy genre is having a(nother) moment, with huge series based on established intellectual property in the works and on release and all over the press. What with all the Star Treks out there right now, fourteen-year-old me is in TV heaven. And what’s great about this particular cultural moment is that the casting directors have made a real effort to give us diversity. It is simply amazing to look back to Game of Thrones, just eleven years ago, and take note of how pale the cast was. For no reason. Peter Jackson’s terrible films were longer ago (but still in this century!), and were equally white – apart from the bad guys and their elephants – but also very short of women.

    I wrote previously about Wheel of Time, which I had never read but quite enjoyed, especially for its prominent female characters. I like to go into something like that cold, as a non-fan, and let the storytelling win me over. And it did. And now we have House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power, which are like expansion packs for the originals, especially in terms of diversity casting. 

    The complication with all these IPs is the existing fan base. Whether readers of the books or viewers of the films, these people are going to have opinions. And what they never seem to understand is, whatever changes the producers of the “new” thing make are neither here nor there for newcomers. They don’t matter. Game of Thrones was a phenomenon because it was great TV. As a reader, the books did nothing for me. And the fans should really get their heads around the idea that Amazon/HBO are definitely not going to spend all that money for a show that will only be watched by hardcore fans who are steeped in the lore. Which is not to say that these things should be immune from criticism, but they need to be assessed on their own terms, as the thing that they are rather than the thing they are based on. So as far as I’m concerned, everything is fair game. Casting can be race and gender blind, whatever. 

    So I’m not even going to pretend that it’s controversial to cast Lenny Henry as a Hobbit Harfoot. Suffice it to say that even Tolkien noted that they were “shorter and smaller than the other breeds, browner of skin…” 

    But what I think is an issue here is to base something on what are essentially footnotes. Both House of the Dragon and Rings of Power are really the products of exposing the iceberg. As I said above, I shouldn’t be judging these things on the source material, but, whatever you produce needs to stand up.

    When I say exposing the iceberg, I suppose it’s not quite the same as Hemingway’s theory, but both GRRM and JRRT were filling out genealogy and history as part of the world building, so that when Aragorn contemplated the broken sword he was evoking long-past events as part of the elegiac tone of LotR. But both of these new series are taking the footnotes and fleshing them out with story and dialogue.

    And it’s all a bit clunky, it has to be said. You can write this stuff, but you can’t say it.

    While Rings of Power has clearly had an enormous amount spent on it, the money obviously didn’t go to the scriptwriters. (The writers, of course, are always the people being told that they can’t be paid much, but the exposure will be good for them.) Yes, there are creatures, and big glowing special effects, and elfin pinnaces, and huge sideburns glued to faces. But the dialogue is all a bit George Lucas, and the hair is all a bit Movie of the Week. Once you start seeing a character as a young Michael Heseltine, you can’t stop. And show me an actor with pointy eared prosthetics and unsuitable footwear climbing an ice cliff in a snow storm and all I’m seeing is a cartoon. The stakes couldn’t be lower.

    House of the Dragon looks cheaper, and – a weird but inevitable effect – all of the actors look like Daytime TV versions of the original cast. It can’t be helped. Emilia Clarke may not be a natural blonde, but she definitely looked better as a fake blonde than literally every House of the Dragon Targaryen. None of them look like they belong in a blonde wig, or however the effect is achieved. Grey or black stubble with white blonde hair just sends you into the uncanny valley. And I’m afraid that Paddy Consdine (as Viserys) looks like a bit of a chinless wonder in a bad blonde wig, a charisma-free zone. Not buying Matt Smith in his role, either; he’s too much the lightweight.

    Finally, the other challenge with filming the footnotes is also to do with stakes, and this is always the prequel problem. Because we know the future, the past can’t help being less interesting. Funnily enough, the producers of Strange New Worlds have absolutely met this challenge head-on, and they’re having fun with it. But I’m not feeling it with either of these fantasy series. I’ll probably keep watching though, because there’s nothing else on and I am a prolific watcher.

  • Homecoming surprise and delight

    September 3rd, 2022
    Boot abandoned at Eurotunnel terminal

    It would be unfair of me not to mention that our return journey from France this time was far less traumatic than others in recent times. We were travelling on a Thursday night / Friday morning, but I don’t really think that during peak season the day of the week makes much difference.

    Eurotunnel have reverted to the old way of doing things: check-in, followed by waiting for your call at the terminal, followed by passport control (Boo!), followed by boarding (Yay!). This, for old hands, was the way it always used to be, and the way the terminal was originally designed. But then a few years ago, for some reason, they decided to put border controls immediately after check-in, and it was usually a horrible experience.

    You’d think after 20-odd years that they would have mastered the art of moving people around like this and wouldn’t need to keep experimenting. But the sheer quantity of temporary plastic barrier they now have gives the lie to that. My mind always goes to dark places when I think about this kind of thing. For example, theme parks always make me think of concentration camps. The trick is to prevent the “customer” from being able to see too far into the future. One of the terrible design decisions Eurotunnel originally made was to allow the car park to feed into the lane to border controls in multiple places. This used to lead to bad-tempered gridlock, as everyone tried to get twelve lanes into one. Now, they’ve installed bollards which filter you around the car park in a zig-zag route, and they’ve resigned themselves to having people in high-viz direct cars into the queue for the border controls.

    The bit-of-a-ball-ache part of the journey home was that we arrived quite early for our crossing. The cat’s in the car, so you don’t want to dilly-dally. But for the first time ever we were told to sling our hooks. Instead of printing out lettered hanger to display in the windscreen, the machine printed out one that said EXIT. Well! I suspect this is part of their master plan to reduce the level of insanity in the terminal. Unfortunately, we’d arrived too late to make wandering the Cité Europe shopping centre worthwhile, so we just parked up in Pet Control and waited 90 minutes.

    That was the bad news. The surprise and delight part of the journey home was that – although we were told at check-in that there was a one-hour delay to all crossings – we ended up getting on an earlier train after all. An earlier train that actually left early and didn’t get stuck in the tunnel. I also enjoyed seeing the boot that had fallen out of someone’s car (?) and been left behind, unnoticed. I just think people should be properly attired when they travel. That might not mean top hat and tails, but it definitely means no pyjamas, and keep your shoes on.

    We were sitting in the car waiting for our letter to be called (the terminal itself was full of screaming children – or one screaming child, which is the same thing – which is too stressful for Oscar), and a bloke in a hi-viz started walking around telling people they could all go NOW.

    I love it when that happens – it’s rare, but it does. So then we went through border controls (which was a standard level of shit rather than the unprecedented level of shit we got last time) and drove around to the boarding area. Now, this is where I felt TOTALLY VINDICATED for my previous comments about the stretchers, faffers, toilet visitors, and sleepers. Because as soon as I brought the car to a stop in the queue, the barrier lifted, and we were off to board the train. Take THAT, all you men who get out of your cars and o-so-casually wander around winding me up.

    (There was one tricky moment, because we were all directed down the wrong boarding ramp, and we had to reverse back up. Reversing in the car is something I absolutely hate – it’s my #1 anxiety dream – so this was not fun. But still!)

    Anyway, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Managing expectations. First lower them, then deliver the surprise. It’s exactly what Apple are so good at.

  • Lonely Hearts Clubhouse Episode 4: Lenny Bruce

    August 31st, 2022

    Episode 4: Lenny Bruce

    Fourth along in the back row of the Sgt Pepper cover is an image of standup comedian Lenny Bruce which looks… nothing like him! I suspect because Peter Blake colourised a black and white photograph and stuck the head on a (generic?) body to which it didn’t belong—because in the original photo Bruce is sideways on, with his head turned towards the camera.

    This upsetting detail aside, Bruce has always been categorised as the comedian who was hounded to death in the cause of free speech. At this particular cultural moment, of course, free speech has become a political football, as people with dreadful opinions and huge broadcast platforms complain that they are being silenced by people not employed by billionaire media moguls. As Zoe Williams argues in this recent article about Durham University, the battle between the academy and the billionaire-owned press as to who should be the arbiters of free speech has been raging for decades.

    As usual, Elodie has done the exhaustive research – especially into Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trial –, and my job is to see how quickly I can derail her script with my terrible dad jokes.

    Written and researched by Elodie McMinn with contributions from Rob McMinn.

    This is another episode we recorded outdoors because it was just too hot this summer to sit inside in a stuffy room with all the windows and doors closed. So you’ll hear the background noise of a French village at night, which all adds to the fun. Chihuahua!

    One more note: a reminder that episode one is missing because Elodie mislaid all her research and her script so we couldn’t record it. How could this happen, you ask? Well, one of the problems of using Pages on an iPad is that every document ends up being called Blank##, and it’s surprisingly difficult to give them a proper name. Maybe it will turn up one day.

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  • Stretching the point

    August 29th, 2022

    Twelve weeks or so ago, last half term, we were here in France and, as is my habit, I went for a walk around the village almost daily.

    My wife’s house is halfway up a small mountain, and as I’ve said before, whichever way you turn (on foot or on a bike) you end up climbing fairly steep hills either immediately or soon thereafter.

    The right turn out of our house takes you onto the steepest bit of the road up to the top village. It’s about a kilometre, all uphill, and most people would find themselves out of breath in fairly short order. The kind of out of breath where you cannot carry on a conversation.

    Last half term, walking up that hill was hard. I would have to stop to breathe every couple of minutes, and you do find yourself breathing hard. Sometimes I run the first few tens of meters, because the cat will try to follow if you don’t sneak away from him, and then you really feel it.

    My fitness has plummeted over the past year, largely because there was something up with my hip, a pain that wouldn’t go away. It took months, because of course it did, to get a doctor’s appointment and an x-ray and then a follow-up appointment. I was convinced that my bone spur, which I’ve had most of my life, had finally worn out my hip joint and that – at 59 – I was going to need a new hip.

    Turns out, according to the doctor and then the physio I saw afterwards, there was nothing wrong with my joint. And, anyway, the bone spur is in the other hip. Oh. No arthritis in evidence. Oh. No, the problem was muscular. Ohhhh.

    So now the problem was that during the months of feeling almost continual hip pain, I had not been moving enough and I was really unfit. Being unfit and in pain, I had also barely used my bike. I’ve properly fallen out of love with cycling over the past couple of years.

    The solution, as with so many things in life, is stretching.

    But I am really bad at stretching. I forget, or I can’t be bothered. No matter that I know it’s good for me, I very often – like right now – think about it and still don’t do it because I hate it. You’ll be shaking your head, wondering why someone can’t take five, ten minutes, to do a few stretches. I’ve got this really stupid mentality: if the results aren’t instantly beneficial, I don’t want to do it. There was one physio visit a couple of years ago that ended up being a good ol’ massage of what the therapist said were extraordinarily tight muscles. The effect was immediate: I felt like I was floating on air when I walked home. But have I tried to see a massage therapist since then? I have not. I am my father’s son.

    It’s really pathological, and I won’t embarrass myself by listing all the reasons I can come up with why I won’t at least do stretches at any given moment.

    While my relationship with stretching is problematic, one thing I have tried to do throughout this summer is move. Apple Watch users will be aware of the rings. One is for standing up at least 12 times a day; another is to notch up at least xx number of minutes of exercise per day (my setting was for 30, and now 35 minutes); and the third is to burn a certain number of calories through activity.

    It’s during holidays that I sometimes struggle to close these rings, because I’ll often sit down to read in the shade on a stupidly hot day and I won’t move much. 

    I’ll confess that I haven’t used my bike much this summer – a handful of rides, none enjoyed. But I have tried to walk every day: either around the village, or on a loop through the woods, or around the lakes at Malsaucy. I did do one big hike over the mountain, too, but I really hated that, especially the coming back down. The issue there was that recent flash flooding has absolutely destroyed the traditional mountain paths, to the point where they’ve become steep and hazardous.

    But as you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve done pretty well closing my rings over the past couple of months. I know there are a few days without the green dot, but they are few, and were usually on days where something prevented me following my normal routine. Airport runs, pizza nights, violent thunderstorms. My hip still hurts a bit, but a lot less than before, and now I know it’s just tight muscles, I’m not that concerned.

    At the beginning of the summer, I would have to stop to breathe half a dozen times on that long kilometre up to the top village. For the past week or so, I’ve been able to walk up at a steady pace without stopping even once. Which is good, right?

    I’ve just got to keep this up for the next 30 years.

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