lazer-guided commentaries

Yesterday I attended Field Day in Victoria Park in the rain. Chris and I spent most of the day at the Homefires Stage. Particularly good were:

• Tunng — massively enthusiastic and talented modern folk group. Great performers, moving songs (esp. Jenny Again — lyrics on this page).
• Jeffrey Lewis — perhaps the highlight of the day. Wonderful lyrics and delivery (the Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror! The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane!), and complete with a silly illustrated song about the Creeping Brain. Highly recommended.
• Alasdair Roberts — Melancholy Scottish folk occasionally segueing into drone/shoegazer-noise (whee!).
• Efterklang — Somewhere between Sigur Ros and Sufjan Stevens. Quite a big group — nine or so people? — and they wore capes!
• King Creosote (with Pictish Trail) — Guitar and harmonies. Plus a dirty sing-a-long song to finish.

For some reason, the stage was more than an hour behind schedule all day, but we didn't much mind, having nowhere in particular else to be. In the intervals when we sampled others of the many delights on offer we managed to catch part of Lightspeed Champion's performance (I wasn't paying much attention), part of Richie Hawtin's set (lumpy, crowded, good visuals, average sound) and the end of Foals' set (undistinguished pop a la mode, carefully coiffed, styled, packaged and presented; maybe check back if they ever do anything original^[1]). Apparently there was a whole village-fete style thing happening elsewhere in the park which I managed to completely miss — I shall have to check that out next year.

In terms of new music, and things slightly out of the ordinary, Field Day has been a great success. Great fun.

I was sitting on the sofa chatting to Sally earlier this week, describing to her my heroic ride through the cold on the way back from Brighton. She wondered why I hadn't been wearing the windproof, waterproof one-piece suit I own. The one that, after a moment's thought, I realised I had been carrying with me. Both there and back. The one I'd completely forgotten about and that would have spared me a good three hours of arctic-level windchill.

What's the word for the opposite of "astute?" (thesaurus.reference.com suggests dense, dull, dumb, idiotic, imperceptive, naive, obtuse, retarded, slow, stupid, and unintelligent.)

Sunday was my flatmate Claire's birthday, and some months ago she arranged a large house in Saltdean, near Brighton, and invited her friends down for the weekend.

I rode my motorbike there and back. It has just in the last week or so turned cold, and the trip proved something of an education in techniques for staying warm at 70mph (that's 112km/h for you S.I.-using modernist hipsters in New Zealand) with nothing between you and the ambient degree or so below zero except a couple of layers of cotton and a pair of summer riding gloves. The main, somewhat naive technique — liberal application of polypropylene underwear and general doubling-up of items of clothing — proved insufficient to the challenge, and passers-by^[1] were treated to the spectacle of a shivering, stamping, arm-flailing, hand-rubbing, moaning, groaning, Michelin-man of a motorcyclist at regular intervals along the M23.

The weekend was great fun — once I'd arrived and regained feeling in my extremities through the magical restorative action of neat whiskey — starting off with an evening trip to a local pub in Rottingdean just over the hill, followed the next morning by a traditional English breakfast involving all manner of fat-laden meat products. On Saturday afternoon we visited the Lanes, shopping for bits and pieces (very cool earrings for some; very cool hats for others; and drinks for all, come 4pm). Brighton's brilliant: lots of interesting shops, and lots of cool people, thanks I suppose to the university. It reminds me of Wellington in a way.

After returning home for our meal of supermarket pizza and red wine, we caught the bus back into Brighton where we stayed for the next eight hours or so in a succession of increasingly loud and confusing clubs. I particularly enjoyed this part of the weekend: it's not often I go out dancing, and the clubs we visited were just great fun. I think pretty much everybody had a great time. I had so much fun that Sunday was a day of enforced quiet contemplation while waiting for the monstrous hangover — severe enough to make even a full English breakfast unappetizing — to pass. So it goes. What a waste of good scrambled eggs.

Eventually I recovered enough to attempt the trip home, this time wearing almost every piece of clothing I thought to take with me, as well as two pairs of gloves, a balaclava, and a scarf. Lessons learned: 1) Heated grips are not as ridiculous as they might seem on the counter in the shop at the height of summer, although a heated saddle still seems a little over the top. 2) The headlight on my bike is almost unusably dim, except on full-beam, when it is blinding. 3) It's at about this time of year that frost starts to form on the roads in the evenings.

I arrived home safely, despite a couple of frost-related hair-raising moments, and caught up on sleep with an early night. Overall, it was a great weekend: good company, lovely location, perfect weather, dancing like a mad eedjit, and plenty of bacon. Many thanks to Claire for organizing the whole thing.

On Saturday I went out and bought myself a spare helmet, so that I could carry passengers. I took Claire for a ride that afternoon. Everything went well up to the moment I pulled out from the kerb. I got half a metre out and the bike fell over. Can you guess why? (Hint: small, heavy, yellow, iron, attached to brake disc)

Boy, I felt stupid. Still, I guess that's yet another thing I'll never do again. The only consequences, besides the hard-earned lesson and a slightly jittery Claire, were a smashed-up right front indicator (now lovingly swathed in duct-tape) and a brake disc that now needs checking out at the mechanic's, just in case.

We didn't let it stop us: I made sure the brake was OK and we went for a ride anyway. It went fine - great fun! We went up the A12 to Green Man interchange, turned around and came home again.

On Monday and Tuesday mikeb and I took a tour of the south-west of England. Here are some photos mikeb took. iPhoto mangled the anti-aliasing on some of the images; let me or mikeb know if you want better-quality copies.

The plan was to meet in Richmond at 10.30am on Monday. London traffic being what it is, lunch in Richmond at about noon was followed by an early afternoon departure along the A4 (not the M4) south to Southampton, where we took a break for orange-juice tops on the Town Quay.

Given what we'd learnt about how far we travel per half-day, we revised our destination at this point. Originally, we had planned to visit Beer in Devon, but it seemed like a bit of a stretch, and since I'd visited Bridport in early 2004 and liked it, we decided to go there instead. Upon arrival in Bridport, we rode directly to West Bay, found a B&B to stay at on West Bay Road, and walked down to the beach, where mikeb took a fair few photos of the dramatic and beautiful cliffs.

I phoned Hadyn to skite about the fact I'd made it to Bridport before he had (it's a long story). This backfired: Hadyn was there that weekend also! We met up for a pint at The George in West Bay, and then called it a night.

We were up next morning for a full English breakfast, over which we chatted with a couple who were taking their summer holiday driving a classic MG around the southwest. We rode on to Beaminster and then took some minor roads (which were outstanding!) to the road ("Sandy Lane") leading back south to Cerne Abbas, where we saw the giant! Amazing! Then we turned North again to Yeovil and Bath, where we stopped for lunch. Continuing on in the early afternoon, we took the wrong road out of Bath (toward Trowbridge and Salisbury instead of toward Chippenham) and stopped to look at the map. mikeb came off his bike and broke the gear-change lever, rendering the bike unridable. We called in the RAC, who carried his bike back to Bath. I followed the truck. There, an engineer repaired the lever by drilling out the snapped peg bolt and putting in a fresh makeshift peg. We managed to limp home via Marlborough, a White Horse at Cherhill, Newbury, Thatcham (for dinner at a roadside pub), and the M4, with me arriving home exhausted finally around 11.30pm.

Biking in London is truly painful for someone who doesn't know the roads. Yesterday mikeb and I spent the afternoon buying equipment for our tour of Sweden. He was travelling by tube; I was travelling by motorcycle. He consistently beat me to every place we travelled to. It was a miracle I got to stay in one place long enough to buy anything at all.

For instance, take the trip from my place to Decathlon outdoor-supplies in Surrey Quays. After we'd been to Infinity Motorcycles in Holborn, I returned home, only to drop the bike (smashing the right indicator housing, breaking the front brake lever, and scraping the fairing). After repairing the right indicator (with the magical duct tape!), I headed for the Rotherhithe Tunnel under the Thames.

It looked so simple on the map.

Here (marked in bright green) is the route I intended to take. Note the simplicity and elegance, not to mention concision.

Here (marked in red) is the route I took by accident instead. Note the triple crossing of Tower Bridge, induced by a heady combination of panic, ignorance and right-turn-prohibitions.

I arrived at Decathlon five minutes after they closed.

Fortunately, mikeb had already searched the store for the equipment we needed and was in the process of checking out when I arrived. He bought us

• a 3-man tent, weighing ~3kg (only £80, too!);
• a tiny gas cooker and a gas cylinder for it;
• a maglite torch

which means there are only trivia (a coil of wire, a roll of duct tape, a set of mess tins, a spork) remaining on the shopping list before we're ready to go. The ferry will cost £144 one-way from Harwich to Esbjerg for the two of us together (two people, two motorcycles, one two-berth cabin); we haven't booked yet because we haven't managed to collect all the required travel documentation yet and so don't know when the earliest we can leave is. I am starting to get a bit nervous.

I am the proud owner of a 2000 Suzuki GSF600S Bandit (faired). A few weeks ago, I took out a provisional driver's licence and took the Compulsory Basic Training (CBT) course that let me drive a 125cc motorcycle legally on the road with L plates. The week before last I sat and passed my driving theory test. Last week I extended this with a five-day training course that built up enough skill to tackle large bikes. By the end of the course I was a confident rider of 500cc Honda twin-cylinders. On the Wednesday I took and passed my practical, on-road driving test. Three days later and I'd tried out and bought my new bike.

It's heavier than the Honda (208kg dry weight!), and it's a four-cylinder where the Hondas are twins, making the bike more responsive at higher revs but less quick getting away from a standing start.

Here's a picture of the model — mine's black, though.

So far, I've taken it the 400km round-trip to Birmingham, for Noel and Bree's housewarming party, and there's a plan for a weekend in Brighton when mikeb and I return from Sweden in a few weeks time.