I’m generally rubbish in the mornings. Even if I get out of bed early I dither so much that I’m rarely in work ’til 10. At the weekend I can dither until 2 or 3 pm and commonly get to 11pm on Sunday rueing a wasted weekend. At work I’m generally useless until I get my coffee inside me.
On holiday in Sweden I generally had strong coffee with brekkie, and on days when I got that I was fine. Other days I would flag terribly.
I’ve moved my morning coffee from first thing after getting into the office to first thing after getting up. I think it’s worked. I’m even finding time to eat some brekkie before heading to the office. It’s all good. Let’s seef it can withstand the crushing oppression of a British winter.
22/8/05 17:32 linköping
without question the best way to see linköping in a day is by bicycle. Which is a shame because there are only 2 available for hire. In the whole city..
Today we awoke in stockholm and got the 0820 train out of there to linköping. We didn’t feel great after the late night and early morning, so cancelled our planned day trip and instead took a day off and just wanderedroundthesquare hadacoffee sawthecathedral walkedtothetouristinformation walkeddownthecanalandbackupagain walkedouttothecarhireplacefortomorrow gotthebusouttooldlinköping wherewewalkedaroundsomemore… We probably would have found our original planned trip easier going!
Tomorrow we’ll check out rök where sweden’s bestest runestone is, and berg, where the göta canal runs through a huge series of locks.
In a car.
I’ve just spent 4 days being extremely productive, level headed, calm, capable… competent even. I just worked out what it was. I just spent two weeks in Sweden getting heaps of the above. This cannot be a coincidence.
Now I’m back at work in this SHITTY BACKWARD TOWN in this DECLINING POWER it’s much harder to get simple, wholesome meals three times a day, and the fresh air is the processed sort, piped into the darkened spaces where I sit inert, twitching instructions into a plastic box. Nevertheless, my trip has changed me for the better. I am eating salad! And it’s tasting good!
Now if I can just start getting to bed before 2 AM I might be able to hold onto my functioning brain for long enough to turn this here lifestyle around…
When Kate and I were on holiday in Sweden, we had a continental breakfast nearly every day (or was it every day?). This did NOT mean a wet croissant and some apricot jam, as it does in travelodge-alikes up and down Britain, but means a choice of 2 or three breads, 3 or 4 crispbreads, cheese, ham, salami, pickled cucumber, tomatoes, eggs, butter, jam, muesli, yoghurt, cereal, coffee, hot chocolate, water, juice…
When we hostelled in places that didn’t provide breakfast, we went to the supermarket and stocked up on Wasakloster (or something. I called it Monk’s Cheese) which was semi-soft, holey, with a mild creaminess and a faint tinny overtone in the pre-sliced version that I liked.
Oo, there it is: Wästgöta Kloster - yum!
Whilst there we reckoned this was a top way to start the day, and except for the depths of winter, which may well call for porridge unequivocally, we resolved to continue this pick-n-nibble ritual when back in blighty.
Tesco had two likely candidates: Emmental and Jarlsberg. Emmental is waaay off the mark, and Jarlsberg is close. Today I thought I’d go to the deli counter and ask if they have any swedish cheese at all. The answer is “No” though the response I got sounded a lot like “Jarlsberg” which was a good guess, being only about 90 miles from the swedish border.
I marvelled at how such a huge supermarket with shelves of cheese could not have a single cheese from a country that, while not famous for its cheeses, is not among the lesser known of nations, nor is its cheese particularly outrageous. Studying the shelves, I found the culprit. It’s the british cheese-buying public. And the supermarket marketeers.
Of course the supermarket must stock a profitable set of products, giving extra shelf space to the more popular varieties. In that regard, we have only ourselves to blame. While we keep buying conservatively, the range on the shelf will continue to narrow.
On the other hand, the suits at the supermarket will tell us that we have “more choice” than ever before. This is where I think they’re pulling a fast one. There seems to be an inordinate amount of cheddar on the shelves. Any guesses as to how many types? Let’s see, you could have mild, medium, strong, extra strong… extra mild, why not. Now let’s offer a budget edition, a regular edition and a fancy edition. So that’s 5 strengths x 3 budgets … oo and let’s offer ALL those varieties over the deli counter too, and add 10 fancy ones, say with port or whatever. That makes 40 types.
Well, I did a quick count. Taking the shelf and the deli counter together, and ignoring different sized packages of the same stuff, there are no less than 58 ways to buy cheddar. This is the sort of “choice” you are being offered when you hear that word used in a buzzwordological way. Parents’ choice in education… Commuters’ choice on the railways… Choose from 58 varieties of CHEDDAR. What’s that? You want Monterey Jack? (actually that’s available in Tesco but not in my Sainsbury’s) Taleggio? Belle de fontenay? Sheep’s cheese? A train to the west coast that won’t get stuck in Crewe for 48 hours? A school that isn’t geared towards tolerating Chavs while they disrupt the kids who want to learn? Tough.
Oo that got a bit political in the end. It was supposed to be about cheese.
Stop buying cheddar! Make the bastards give us something more interesting to eat!
Ahem…
Well, I was sitting here being faintly miffed that nobody has written a new blog for me to read when I thought, why don’t I metaphorically get up off my arse and literally sit down and write one for everyone else to read? And now I’ve started it, the answer becomes clear: because I have nothing to blog about.
That’s a bit of a fib. I have a few drafts filed away, but they all need more research than can convicingly be passed off as reading a standards document or commissioning a development board.
In other news, I saw an interesting house with “attached garage and workshop” which was only £9k outside my budget… I’ve asked for viewing appointments to about 5 places this week. I think I’m at the key jumping point as I’ve got the capital and the saved monthly outlay from selling the Spitfire, and the landlord wants to more than double my rent (which still makes it cheap, but does rather nullify the savings I’ll be making on the absence of the wee car)
In America (at least in California) they have a junction called an all-way stop. This is where every road into the junction has a STOP sign. Everybody stops, then, depending on who stopped first, they go one at a time. If it’s not certain who stopped first, then it goes in some kind of rota that I never quite figured out. I think it goes clockwise. You’d never get this in a British road layout, and I set myself wondering why not. I figured British drivers are not patient enough to stop when, for example, there doesn’t seem to be anyone coming, and they’re certainly too aggressive and selfish to sort out for themselves who should be going next. To introduce the all-way stop into today’s driving climate and culture would be to introduce an accident factory.
When you look at British road layout, there’s nearly always a clear notion of one route having priority over another. Even the roundabout, which seems to keep all routes flowing with equal priority, breaks down at high volumes of traffic, as a stream of traffic entering the roundabout at A and leaving at C effectively cuts off B completely. In this case, the roundabout is the same as a give way, or even a stop sign.
I believe that there is a positive feedback loop between the aggressive, mefirstmanship of British drivers, and the road layouts that more and more clearly state who has the right to be on what part of the road.
My commute to work in York entails a lot of waiting in stationary or near-stationary traffic on the priority route. The effect of near-stationary traffic on a priority route is that the lesser routes that want to cross that route are effectively barred. I’ve been letting cars out a lot lately and making some observations.
1) people do not expect to be let out, to the point where they will miss my flashes and waves altogether
2) a notable proportion of vehicles I let in in front of me leave the road at the next or a very near exit, thus having no nett effect on the progress of my journey.
3) When the traffic is busy, I can sit stationary for say 30 seconds and only lose about 100 yards of distance. This is made up very quickly. Meantime, in that 100 yards, you might get a cyclist being able to turn right, a few sets of pedestrians able to cross the road, or a vehicle turn out of a side road to head unobstructed in the opposite direction to the queue.
4) if you let one person out at every junction, it delays your journey by a matter of minutes at worst, and significantly reduces the number of vehicles waiting to come out of side roads.
The key difference between the four way stop and nearly every british junction is what I shall call ‘latching’. When the number of cars approaching the junction reach a certain level, the junction “latches” onto one state, and prefers one entrance to another absolutely. The 4-way stop, though it takes longer to clear at low traffic levels, does not latch, and services all its entrances equally. This means that no matter how heavily you load the junction, all its inputs keep flowing. This is analogous to the difference between ‘circuit switching’ and ‘packet switching’ in communications.
I think certain junctions should carry a sign ‘alternate when busy’. When the priority road is stationary, it should be mandatory to let one person out in front of you as you pass.
I still need to do the math to back this one up.
are great. Tomorrow I will not be wearing what I am wearing right now, to whit: sandals, hiking socks, brown 3/4 length trousers and a home-made turquoise tie-dye t-shirt.
Waiter, there’s a bone in my chicken.
Yes sir, in the old days that was how they kept their bums off the floor.