Inconsequential rambling

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Further Selected Reports from a Bedfordshire Field Study, with Various Musings on the Same

I understand that, in her dispatch dated earlier to-day, Professor Gillson related a number of features and observations of this land and its inhabitants. While no doubt eminently qualified in her own specialised discipline, whatever that may be, Prof. Gillson has to her name substantially fewer published works - not to mention professional and social accolades - than your correspondent, and it is therefore to be expected that her experiences in these godforsaken environs would provoke an overreaction from her that could be described as somewhat flustered and flighty. Nonetheless, her observations as earlier reported do to a extent give a flavour of events thus far. It now falls to me to present further excerpts from our field notes.

Flitwick area, c.1530 hours - We appear to have happened upon a primate enclosure of some kind. Slightly smaller than a man, they were engaged in uttering a wide range of sounds in a register slightly higher in pitch than that of their human cousins. Furthermore, at exactly the time at which we arrived, the inmates were staging some form of break-out. In their hundreds they were streaming out onto the surrounding streets, clad in what can only be described as some manner of ritual decoration, possibly for mating or hunting purposes. A mass of black blazers, black trousers, white collars and matching ties swam before our eyes as we attempted, finally successfully, to negotiate this tide of livestock.

1830 hours - Eureka! The ovine research project, as issued by Mr. & Mrs. Charles Hunt of the Royal Society, has been completed with great success. We shall be presenting our report to the Society imminently.

Man or Animal?; or A brief study on the Bedford Character

Conducted brief field trials this morning to determine the answer to this age-old question, contemplated by all the greats of the past century. No time for the full text of our article as am currently observing the effects of some road-side berries I found on the academic mind, having quietly adminstered them to Professor Ewanson's drink whiole he was looking the other way. Some brief excerpts from our field notes should suffice in the meantime.

Task one: ordering breakfast in a local bar: Prof. Ewanson administered some basic tests looking for intelligence which included asking the simple-looking staff to match up spoken words in their own language with pictorial representations of the same. Although we can report some loose correlation between pictures selected and words spoken, we are unable to report any notable indicators of intellegence. Must also report that subjects leered impertenantly throughout testing.

On a local thoroughfare:

Hordes of natives sighted sitting over the pavements, drinking strong liquor despite the early hour.

Furthermore, a rather frightening altercation with youthful native on a bicycle, who swore at Prof. Gillson in its local tongue and seemed unable to distinguish between the pavement and the road.

A savage and uncivilised place indeed.

Further Scary Evidence

In response to the mavellous reception generated by J Andrews' little contribution yesterday, we thought we'd offer up a further gem from the local paper:

It's no Moose steak

SIR- Now that smoking in public has been banned, isn't it about time our interfering 'Big Brother' government also gave some serious thought to outlawing vegetarianism and insisting that these pasty-faced bean-eaters do their bit for the environment too?

It is proven scientific fact that each flatulant Norwegian moose expels 2,100 tonnes of harmful methane in to the atmosphere every year. That is the equivalent of driving 13,000 kilometres in a gas-guzzling Jee, or two jumbo jets flying across the Atlantic.

If you factor in all the obnoxious gasses produced by cattle, sheep, goats, hens and other farmyard creatures, the amount of pollution must be absolutely astronomical.

Eminent scientists are forevr warning us of the terrible damage all this is going to do to our environment, causing global warming, melting of th icecaps, widespread flooding, hurricans, tsunamis and, no doubt, plagues of boils.

Therefore it must surely be incumbent on us all to do our bit for humanity be eating as many of these flatulent animals as posible before they have the chance to pollute the atmosphere still further.

Most, if not all, of those scruffy, long haired, bearded Swampy-style beatniks who recently picketed Heathrow Airport were probably vegetarians.

I suggest they would be doing more to protect the environment if they went home and tucked in to a nice juicy moose steak instead of sanctimoniously haranguing innocent people flying off to Torremolinos for a well deserved summer holiday.

No doubt some Leftie do-gooders will moan that banning vegetarianism would be a 'breach of civil liberties'.

But is it any more so than the Guardian-reading busybody who threatened to have me arrested last week for lighting up my pipe as I stood innocently in the pouring rain, annoying absolutely nobody, on Flitwick railway station?

Charlie Garth,
Flitwick Road, Ampthill

Today, we walk through Ampthill.

Bedford nightlife

Good morning from Bedford, the home of the takeaway pizza. (Or, at least, that's how we've come to see it. In that respect it shares a similarity with Doncaster, Grantham and Morcott.)

Yesterday's walk passed by in fairly routine manner - blazing, alarmingly intense sunshine, further equipment breakage (the water carrier), some Sport Beans and a few rock anthems thrown in for good measure. Shortly after arriving at this, our fifth Travelodge so far, we decided on a brief trip to the local pub.

The Bird In Hand sits on the corner of a large housing estate in which every road is named after a bird. (Curlew Crescent was a particular favourite.) We walked into the main bar to find the room empty save for two people. The barman, a very widely-built fellow with shaven hair and a fixed stare out into the room, stood motionless. In the far corner, a man whose piercings were threatening to outnumber his tattooes sat slumped at a table, gazing at a copy of The Sun without ever turning the page, his two empty and one half-full pint glass on the table next to it. On one wall was pinned a food menu offering four options: chilli and chips, burger and chips, hot-dog and chips, chips. The stillness of the room was underlined by the two ceiling fans that hung motionless in front of the bar. One had its full set of four blades; the other only three. Wading through the silence, we made our way to the bar, ordered our drinks and sat down in the far corner.

The room remained silent. Attempting not to draw attention to ourselves and thereby incur the wrath of an establishment whose unspoken code had been breached, we kept our voices to a whisper. Meanwhile, the barman stared. Bereft of anybody to serve or any barmanistic tasks to undertake, he simply... stared.

After some fifteen minutes or so had passed, the barman disappeared from sight for a moment. From nowhere and with no warning, the room was filled with the loud, loud strains of music. "Son, you are a bachelor boy, and that's the way you'll stay," it sang. "Son, you'll be a batchelor boy until your dying day."

Perhaps you've heard the song before. We hadn't. And we never want to again.

The music having reached its bizarre conclusion, the room was once more plunged into silence, as abruptly as it had been hauled out of it moments earlier. Shortly afterwards, the barman came over and closed all the windows near us. That way, nobody would hear our screams.

We left quickly.

The Challenges Become Heated

Following on from the rather heated demands from Kate 'I love Corby' Harper, made in the comments here, we thought we'd share with you some of the more private communications we've been having to put up with. You may have noticed a recent demand for us to be photographed by a Rushden shop, and our polite and respectful request for an incentive to do so. Well, we were most disappointed to simply receive, in reply, the demand 'Do my challenge'. When gently pushed for further incentivisationalism, all we got in return was, 'Do my challenge. It would make me happy. I want you to do my challenge'. We had to stand firm, however, as we had made clear at the outset; to change our policy now would only result in sulkings and pizza retractions from the rest of you. So after a few more demands and strops, we finally wangled a pizza out of it.

All this fades to nothing - nothing! - though, when you see the full deviousness of this challenge. The supposed shop, called BJs, appears in no telephone directories for Rushden. It appears in no on-line directories. It cannot be sighted on a stroll down the streets of that town. No indeed: the nearest shop of that name would appear to be in, of all places, Corby.

Yes, what we have here is a vicious insabotagiationising effort of our Corby-loving nemesis. She, it seems, would have us halt our quest and return to the land of the damned, where we can only assume she has some nasty, twisted fate in store for us.

But never fear, we're not to be distracted from our task even if it does mean we're a pizza down. Onwards, then, to Bedford; BJs be damned.

4:30

4:30
Originally uploaded by mr_e_main

A worrying omen

A worrying omen
Originally uploaded by mr_e_main

Someone appears to be trying to tell us we're about to die...

HPIM0043.jpg
Originally uploaded by mr_e_main

HPIM0042.jpg
Originally uploaded by mr_e_main

Ill-advised planning decisions

Ill-advised planning decisions
Originally uploaded by mr_e_main

Monday, September 10, 2007

A letter printed in Bedfordshire On Sunday, 09/09/07

"SIR -
I am angry with the write-up about the twins domed to die.
I do not believe the story.
I just think Mrs. Osahon wants to stay here.
I say send her back.
Jane Andrews,
Hastings Road, Kempston"

Oh dear. What have we let ourselves in for in coming here?

In answer to your messages

Jon, Helen and "Kevin": thanks for your good wishes. They have indeed spurred us forward in our hour of need.

Sam: sadly there was no Merry Man action whatsoever in the vicinity of Robin Hood Airport, nor did we even see a single bow or arrow. Which was quite a relief after last year.

Kat: Your advice was good. All hail Compede, for it is good and noble.

Rosy: Your bribe is good. To be honest we were planning on doing the sheep thing anyway in thanks for such a lovely evening before we set off. Any other tasks you'd like to request?

Sue and Pam: Get knitting!

Kate: We still blame you for Corby.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

It has been noted before now that these treks of ours - these odysseys; these voyages; these perambulatory eccentrips - are something of an ideological contradiction. We eschew all forms of modern transport but rely on a wide variety of 21st century technology to support us in doing so. Well, we make no apology for it. After all, what could be more traditional than a stroll through the countryside accompanied by a 30-gigabyte hard disk digital audio player connected to a portable active speaker system, guided by a Global Positioning System satellite receiver connected by Bluetooth link to a PDA running Windows Mobile, simultaneously tracked by a second GPS satelite receiver connected via a GPRS uplink to technicians in Durham university and plotted in real time on the World Wide Web, reporting on our progress using a keyboard connected by an infra-red beam to a PDA, which uses a Bluetooth link to a GPRS modem to send data and pictures via an e-mail gateway to our blog provider, combined with a second mobile phone sending updates to an SMS gateway and thence to the blog, and carrying a portable DVD player and several discs to while away the long, cold evenings? Exactly. We imagine you've all done the same thing.

Only this time it's nearly all stopped working. The first inkling that all was not as it should be was before we even set off, when we discovered that our "hotline" phone was completely functional unless you wanted it to make a sound of any kind. Not terribly helpful as a telephone then.

Next was the comment left anonymously on our blog simply asking "Where are the pictures supposed to be appearing?!" Indeed, it appeared that not a single photo had been posted, despite our using a Flickr service especially designed to do just that. Unable to fathom why, we've taken the Argument From Ignorance approach and assumed that someone just has something against us. Anyway, we quickly found a solution to that. His name's John.

Next, our internet tracking system stopped working for an entire day (see earlier post). That has now been put down to the fact that most of Leicestershire has rubbish mobile reception.

Next, the big one: on a roadside outside Corby (where else?) Ewan knelt on and thereby resolutely smashed the Pocket PC that has been the source of our navigatory prowess as well as our blogging panache. Yes, the poor old thing, on its last legs already, was unceremoniously dispached from the world of function.

But at least we could still send blog updates by text message. The marvellous little service whereby we send a text and it appears as a blog post a moment later. You may remember it from such gems as "We've got a Yorkie," and who could forget the classic "Selby does a marvellous curry"?

Well, no. A couple of days ago we discovered that since about day two, none of those has got through either. The reason? Two days into our walk, the SMS Country service spontaneously changed to become only available to those in India. No, really. So it turns out that you had no idea that we'd been answering al your comments, and even composing poetry, as we walked. Not a word of it.

Anyway, the real purpose of this post is to announce that it all now works again! Without going into too much detail, let's just say that Curry's in Kettering came to the rescue, and we are now once more entirely blogtastic and hotlineal. And we'll start answering your comments... Again.

Kettering to Rushden - Some Observations

Some themes we've noticed so far:

- The Yorkshire region of our walk was defined by power stations.
- The Midland region has been defined by windmills, both functional and decorative. The functional ones scared us a bit at first but we liked them in the end.
- Fewer southerners request that we have a reason for our walk: we began last year, when people asked why we were walking to Edinburgh, to consider saying things like 'It has been foretold', or 'Because our ASBO requires it'. Southerners, maybe being more used to pointlessness, just tend to laugh and congratulate us. And in the case of a receptionist yesterday, insist on giving us more tea.
- Whilst all regions are equally primarily suited to Meatloaf and Alice Cooper, the south leans toward 70s disco classics where the North was all with the 70s and 80s glam stadium rock.
- The south has also seen a surprise entry on to its top 10 listening classics with the hits of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
- A key split between north and south is revealed in public footpath blocking methods. Where the north favoured piles of manure and farm machinery, the south has so far revealed a penchant for motorways and huge piles of felled trees.