Men on bikes

Struggling up the nasty ascent out of Alfriston, there were three of us: Three middle-aged men travelling the South Downs Way on mountain bikes.

Monty and I were a little ahead when Tweeter, bringing up the rear, was severely displeased to be overtaken by ancient, hunch-backed hiker in shorts and wife-beater vest yomping up the hillside at quite a startling pace.

The grey-stubbled loony evidently stoppeth one in three for as he drew level with my hard-pedalling, hard-suffering friend he held him with his glittering eye and muttered succinctly "You know what your problem is? your saddle's too low, you need cleats on your shoes and you're in the wrong gear".

"So, did he say anything to you two?" Tweeter asked when he related the strange ecounter to us a few minutes later, lying in the sunshine on the iron age fort at the top of the Down (just a few metres above the Long Man of Wilmington, had we but known it )

Monty and I exchanged glances "Well yes - he said we looked... weary...  he said he felt ... weary". And just at that moment a shadow flashed across us and we looked up in the sky "A buzzard?" I asked "some bird that's bigger?"

We were on the South Downs Way, some 80 undulating miles of it. Well, "undulating" is one way of looking at it. "back-breakingly steep" would be another way. But another way again would "astonishingly beautiful"

Fifty miles of bridleway we covered on the first day, then B&B in a country pub where, oddly, we met a wedding party, then thirty more miles the next day until after the hair-raising descent into Eastbourne that concludes the path we cycled another 30 miles along the coast to Rye and home. 115 miles altogether, four punctures, five new inner-tubes, one hair-raising double brake failure and a trip home for one of us to fetch a replacement bike.

And just one crash: myself, on day two, painfully and irritatingly: no blood to show for it! What's the point of falling off your mountain bike onto the hard flinty downs but having no heroic trickle of dried blood from elbow to wrist? Oil-stained calves alone don't make you a real biker.


The sun went behind a cloud and, re-energised by the view, and our rest on the ramparts, we got back on our bikes and pedalled away; it wasn't long before we caught up with the old man again, he was barracking a hapless inner-city group of kids on Duke of Edinburgh who were carrying insufficient fresh water.

We ignored him and pedalled on, like one, that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, and having once turned round walks on, and turns no more his head; because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread

A Week in May

Twickenham, May 2010

Church St, Twickenham by Maxwell Hamilton

The last two weekends of May were dominated by rugby at the stadium: a weekend of Sevens, the Premiership Final and England v Barbarians combined to jam up the town for four whole days: an insouciant breach of the covenant of trust that the RFU owes its neighbours. Exacerbating the annoyance: on the last afternoon unfamiliar and uncertain traffic police were drafted in from North London and proved cluelessly bereft of common sense: despite the street being completely clear five mins after the kick off they refused to open the road; I phoned Control there and then and told them I was hemmed in by numpties. "There's no need to be rude to me Sir' said the closest numpty, mildly, "and I'm definitely not letting you through now."

The crowds reached 80,000 and some friends of ours who live on the main drag made thousands selling homemade cakes to the crowds from their front garden.

*****

Across the road from us lives Alice. She and her husband bought her house just before the war, new from the builder, for about £300. Just a short time later her husband volunteered, went off to fight and, missing in action, he never came home. She waited through four years of war and then another four years of peace before, losing hope, she declared him dead and she told me that because of the delay she never got the letter from the King that other war-widows received.

Alice never wanted to live on the Middlesex side of the river, but that was what they could afford and there she has stayed, alone but certainly not friendless, for seventy-two years. She is deaf and sleepless and now that the weather is warm and windows are open at night, her radio - talk, not music - wakes me up in small, still hours between 1 and 3; Sometimes it's loud enough for me to even make out the words.

I asked her about the rugby crowds and did they bother her? She said I shouldn't complain, sixty years ago the stadium held 100,000, and anyway it is all much better policed nowadays

*****

Every Sunday morning my mates and I go cycling. The bright warm early morning Sundays in May are the perfect-weather highlight of our year and those weeks we go further.   On the last Sunday in May we rode a sweeping circle, never more than ten miles from home, taking in two grand country houses (Syon and Osterley) several miles of the Grand Union Canal and the River Brent, as well as the London Air Parks in Hanworth where a Zeppelin landed in 1936, and the old Feltham Marshalling yards where steam trains once met and were divided and restacked.

A puncture and a canal-path diversion for a broken bridge delayed us and we were out for two hours; half a mile from home my friend Karl peeled off sprinting for the local church where his bell, and seven impatient bell ringers awaited him (when he got there they had gone).  His church are running a £14,000pa deficit (the vicar says on her blog) despite making lots of money out of the rugby crowds - car parking. The last two weekends in May - with four games! - were especially profitable.

*****

Our entrepreneurial friends on the road to the stadium had a fiftieth birthday and we were invited for drinks and smoked salmon with sour cream on blini (when I was young smoked salmon came on crustless triangles of buttered brown bread, when did that change?) . At the party was a slightly-well-known Twickenham based actor who is currently appearing in the West End. Tall, blond and striking, she dominated the small back room and the assembled company; Mrs Botogol and I affected not to recognise her, but other guests were fawning and politely praised her work; she beamed.  I dropped the name of an even more famous Twickenham-based actor - whom we know from school, and was rewarded by a momentary frown across her peach-perfect brow. I am a git.

Fetching another canapé from the kitchen I introduced myself to our hosts' next door neighbour, who was hovering shyly near the red wine. He told me he had lived in his house, alone, for almost sixty years. I asked him if Twickenham had changed in all that time. "Not a bit", he said, happily, "Not a bit". I wondered if he knew Alice, who has lived no more than two hundred metres away from him, for all that time.
They've never met.

The prism of the past

We invited our old English teacher round for dinner.

picture B T

Well, not that old: after all 60 is the new 40 and if I'm honest he didn't seem that much older than us. You should certainly be thinking Dead Poets Society more than Goodbye Mr Chips

"Oh Captain, my Captain", I essayed when we shook hands in the hallway, and then "Ouch" as Mrs Botogol kicked me sharply in the ankle; but she needn't have bothered because Mr Robb wasn't paying any attention to me.

We are the prisoners of our pasts and captives of the prism through which we are perceived and in his eyes I was still 15, and my dad was the maths teacher, and I was giving up English in favour of computers and physics and if there are two cultures, I am in the other one.

Mrs Botogol, on the other hand, went on to A-Level English. Indeed she studied the subject at his alma mater.. there was a bond.. as there was also with the our eldest whom Mr Robb was there to coach, for she faces A-Levels of her own this summer  "Wisdom is not finally tested in the schools", I said, "wisdom cannot be passed from one having it to another not having it. Wisdom is of the soul, it is not susceptible of proof, it is its own proof."

They weren't listening - they were discussing an article Mr Robb had written for an on-line journal comparing Brideshead Revisited with The Great Gatsby.

"That Anthony Andrews never did much, really, after Brideshead", I opined. Cast as the oaf I rose easily to the challenge: "when you think about it Robert Redford was much more successful".

"Be a dear and go and check the potatoes, will you"

And so it came to pass that during the only literary meeting in our house for eleven years (I am not allowed at  Mrs Botogol's book club) I spent the hour in the kitchen while Mrs Botogol and our guest settled in the drawing room (no, we don't normally have a drawing room but somehow it had risen to the occasion) where they engaged in grown-up literary criticism of the most sparkling and erudite kind, occasionally sending for more smoked salmon blini (easy on the dill, dear, and can you have a look in the cupboard for those smoked almonds we got from the nice deli in Winchelsea ?)

When eventually the roast was captive and the vegetables under control and I ventured in to top up their glasses they were talking about Chekhov "Did you tell Mr Robb how I once wrote a blogpost about Chekhov", I asked lamely, and there was a sudden silence. I realised was trying too hard.

"What?"

"I said how long do you reckon it takes to cook a Yorkshire Pudding? Only my batter looks really watery  - do you think I should add another ten minutes?"

I am large, I contain multitudes.

We had roast beef and plenty of gravy, and although the Yorkshire was soggy (no one asked me for the recipe) the potatoes were perfect. Mr Robb and I drank two bottles of red wine between us; he asked me if I was in IT and in retaliation I told him about the teachers at school whom I had particularly admired.

Next week my mates are coming round and we are mostly talking rugby.

Dinner Party Redux

"Are you going to blog us again?", asked my host, expertly wielding a welcome bottle of champagne,  "like you did the last time you came round to ours?"

A is for Access by Ben Zvan

I was embarrassed:  "Well, ha ha!, I... well, sorry about that. No, I don't think so.. I mean I don't write about everything I do!"
"Oh don't worry: we didn't mind at all: after all it was very funny"

I searched his face for any hint of sarcasm, but he held my gaze unwavering. 
"Oh. Well... thanks"
"Yes, very funny indeed. The kissing and the shoulder and all that..."

I helped myself to a too-large handful of wasabi peas and groped desperately for compelling change of subject but had barely even mentioned my opinion of Jedward before my hostess edged in our direction.
"Ah, darling, I was just saying to Alibert how funny his blog was at the New Year"
"Oh yes!", she smiled, "tell me, Alibert, did Sylvie really say that to you?"
"Oh, well, I don't remember!  No doubt I exaggarated a bit, you know, ha! ha! ... but hey! who would have though Simon would save them the other week, eh?"
"Oh, do you often exagerate in your blog?"
"Well, ha ha! writers' license and all that, and anyway she was hardly likely to read it, and I don't expect I'll ever meet her again"

At that precise moment,the doorbell rang. And, of course, straightaway I knew.  Without a trace of a shadow of a doubt,  I knew.

"You have other guests?" I asked weakly, and Mrs Botogol glanced sharply at me from across the room, "is it anybody we..."
In the far off hallway door opened and the newcomers bustled in...
"Sylvie!"

An Urban Wind

When I left for vacation the Canary Wharf evenings were still warm and full of promise; the pale, gold, stupidly expensive Chardonnay in First Edition was still sweet and, after work, the dockside tables at All Bar One thronged with strappy-topped women flirting with their close-cropped, jacketless co-workers.

Urban Shred by ecstaticist

 It was summer.

Now I am back from vacation and each lunch time a cold wind, an urban wind that carries rain and also dust, howls through Westferry Circus. Outside Smollensky's chairs lie overturned and the evening crowd huddles indoors.  On the pavements of the Wharf prowl disconsolate security guards, dressed as policemen, with bolt-cutters confiscating the unguarded cycle-locks of the hapless, and I?  I have a chipped tooth that will force me, reluctantly, once more to visit the dentist.

It's the New Year (I cannot be the only person, surely, whose year begins in September?), but it's not yet a Happy one ....  and sometimes all of our thoughts are misgivings.

The old year ended in August with two strange encounters: an old friend and I went on a date, and a cyber-friend became real:

The date was with Frustrated Poet, whom I have known twenty-five years, and our expedition was to admire Gay Icons...  followed by dinner. No, not that sort of date, and the icons weren't all gay, either.

As FP and I ambled slowly around the National Portrait Gallery I amused myself feigning incredulity at the portraits we encountered Elton John? He's never gay!  Will Young? get away! Hang on? Be serious now - Graham Taylor's gay? ¹ Until, after a while, we tired of my game, and amused ourselves otherwise: quoting When Harry Met Sally, competitively, over fish and chips and a very fine bottle of Burgundy ²  My, we got some funny looks.


The cyberfriend, just a few days later, was none other than M4GD, regular of this blog, who revealed her true identity - and a surprise - when she met Mrs Botogol and I to listen to Pasadena Roof Orchestra playing a free gig in Canada Square ("Um, Good Evening, Canary Wharf" - well, let's just say: Glastonbury it wasn't)

Meeting an on-line acquaintance in real life is always an ineffably odd experience: I have done it several times and yet still I am unsure whether masks are truly dropped....or raised.  On balance I suspect it's only on-line where you really know someone.


So, now, back from France (moules frite in the square, rose wine on the table, drunk too much, spent too much, penniless again) the rhythms of the New Year (school, rugby, sunday roasts, a new season at Richmond theatre) firmly re-assert themselves and by way of self-improving New Year resolutions I have joined the Royal Institute and booked my 2010 Triathlon.

At work for the next month or two we are mainly budgeting:  for - at the centre of this institution that champions capitalism and thrives on risk, that makes decision on the minutest flicker of a price, in which millions of dollars turn on a basis point - at the centre of this institution there beats a Stalinist heart --  and we are updating our five-year plan.

------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Not gay. And not totally overwhelmed with enthusiasm for being a Gay Icon either, by some accounts..
(2) Was it even two bottles?

Wine and Cider

picture by vad_levin

Over two weeks at our house, our very big⁽¹⁾ house in the country⁽²⁾, Mrs Botogol tells me that we have entertained 26 guests, not including the builder⁽³⁾.  That's a lot of wine and cider drunk (and a lot of tea as well), and plenty of conversation and much opportunity to learn the new and the unexpected.

"No", said one of our guests, "that's not how it works at all - in fact Come By means clockwise and  Away means anti-clockwise"

It made so much sense. I have often wondered how sheep-dogs worked out the problem of my-left versus your-left, and there was my answer: not left and right at all, but clockwise and widdershins.  Because wherever in the field you are standing my clockwise is always your.... clockwise.

Yes, with 26 guests you learn new facts like these, and by way of these facts you learn about people.

In this case about myself: for although I knew our friend was a sheep farmer, and a resourceful and self-reliant entrepreneur, and a person who is often under-estimated, even so it still didn't occur to me that she had actually trained her own sheep dog.

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(1) not really....
(2) the nicest thing about our house in the country is that we are in a town.
(3) there is always a builder. If you own a second house, there is always a builder.

On Camber Sands...

picture by Hiddenson

..we could connect nothing with nothing.

Actually, it wasn't that bad: we made a pretty good hash of our Fibonacci spiral.

We had a 30m line and a stick and we worked out an effective MO: one of us at the action end applying a considerable centrifugal force to drag a tethered stick through the heavy, wet sand to mark out the sections of the spiral, the other at the centre playing the important role of 'dead weight' : anchoring the line and encouraging the hapless scribe: "keep it taut! keep it taut!"


We constructed 10  sections, the last with a radius of about 25metres, marking out, then, a pitch of about 500m²
  
The beach rangers didn't like it all. "We don't like it at all", they said, dismounting from their landrover. "What is this about and can we please see your CRB certificates"

"It's a Fibonacci Spiral", I said, "constrructed from a famous sequence of numbers discovered by Leonardo of Pisa, son of Bonacci, and often, it turns out, found in nature, defined as F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2), Pete! Keep it Taut!"

"And with the ratio of successive terms tends toward the Golden Section!", exclaimed the young beach warden, relaxing, "That's OK - we were worried that you were doing something irregular".

I see ghosts

My Ghost by piccadillywilson

How might you know if you are a brain in a vat? Short of being able to order up a useful mind-focussing, clarity inducing red pill, on the internet, that is.

One clue that might lead you to believe your life was a scripted simulation might be the sudden emergence of new themes, or abrupt changes in your story - as unseen undergraduate experimenters move on to a new module in their degree course and devise a new set of experiments for their imprisoned but unaware and virtual subject.

Has your life suddenly become dangerous?  Is everything recently very French? Are you encountering purple vegetables with worrying regularity?

In my case I am being tortured by frequent encounters with co-workers from my old consultant days.

They are everywhere.

Encountering two in a Canary Wharf wine bar last month was unremarkable happenstance; meeting a third at a mini-rugby festival felt like coincidence, but when I noticed fourth ex-co-worker running on my shoulder at the Richmond Park 5k  I suddenly suspected enemy action

By now I was even beginning to recognise them and recall their names. (Somewhere a tentacled hand pressed pause and made a note of my pleasing progress)

So, when a fifth ex-colleague phoned me up out of the blue last month to ask me for coffee, and then a sixth turned up at in a meeting at work I wasn't even surprised. "I've been expecting you" was my (slighty unusual) opening conversational gambit but she wasn't thrown (they're good, the holo-deck programmers, they're very good) and somewhere far away someone decided turned up the heat a bit "I know! How about giving him a an alumni reunion?" and lo, I have been to two such occasions in a fortnight.

I see ghosts, I see them all the time. And last night I saw very many of them. And if the spectres of age, and the credit-crunch and a sense that things could have been different, if those spectres were also there, and they haunted us, well, we didn't let it show for there was free wine and canapes.

It had been ten years since I last saw David and it's been fifteen years since we worked together in a city in Africa, and it was good to see him again, and when everyone else had gone we stayed and we reminisced about old friends and narrow escapes, sale pitches won and lost, clients satisfied and upset and do-you-remember-whens, when suddenly it hit me

"You know, David", I said, "you know - we used to be friends didn't we" and he laughed, "Yes Alibert, so we did".

Since I last saw him he had found time to get married and father an eight year old - and I didn't even know.

"Have you been to many other reunions lately?", I asked; and he looked at me strangely.

New Year Makeovers & What We Are.

Just like John Thain, I have redecorated.

He spent $1,200,000 on his office; I can report, dear reader,  that on my cubicle I spent less: Approximately $1,199,985 less.

Thain's centrepiece was a stupidly-expensive designer rug, purchased solely to demonstrate his wealth and power  (only a banker could do that, right?)  My centrepiece was some new art postcards from the National Gallery, which I blu-tacked onto the glass partition between myself and my neighbour to allow me to surf the internet undetected improve our mutual privacy.

Thain was sacked. But even so, I guess he won't have to worry about his pension like I do. Oh well.


New Years Resolutions - because We are what we repeatedly do.


This year I have stolen three themes from older, wiser friends, who know better.

Theme - learn moderation, not abstinence

• in drink: to drink with friends and loved ones not with clients or co-workers, to oil a conversation not to wash down a plate of pasta, to accompany a smoked salmon blini, not Trial and Retribution
  
• food: to eat three meals a day not four (or two). To be able to tell whether I am hungry and if I'm not, to stop eating. At all costs to avoid canapés.

Theme - to OCD only the good habits (because it's hard when a habit takes a hold)

• to weigh myself once a week, exercise five times - and blog twice
  
• to have breakfast with my children every Wednesday -  whether they like it or not
• to be nicer to Mrs Botogol
  

Theme - to have more human contact at work

• fewer emails, more phone calls
  
• seek out Kate, whomsever she is
  
• find out the name of the youtube, Ocado and google-news fanatic in the next door cubicle. I mean - why not? after all these years...
  

Meanwhile... at work 

In our secret santa  last month an anonymous co-worker bought me a book of art pictures. It turned out to contain two of the postcards I have on my cubicle wall.

My first thought was "That is an unusual present for a secret santa" 
My second thought was: "Ah, I can see why they bought this: just because I have art postcards on my cubicle wall they think I am some kind of arty-type of person"
My third thought was "But I do have art postcards on my cubicle wall.... perhaps I am some kind of arty-type person"

What we actually are.

We are what we hang on our cubicle walls.

A new blog

picture by Laineys Repertoire

I have known Mystery Shopper for twenty-five years.

Some time garage attendant, fence-builder, cashier, waste pipe unblocker and strawberry handler (unfortunately, yes, in that order), I always knew that one day he'd make something of himself.

And now he has: he's a Frustrated Poet - and you can read his new poetry blog here.

Party Time

Carnival by AARigo

Mrs Botogol and I did indeed go to a party at the weekend.

When did everyone start hiring staff for their parties?

It's hard to recall, now, the precise moment when our friends suddenly crossed this boundary that separates the ordinarily middle class from the genuinely wealthy.

It can't be that long ago: I can definitely remember being greeted at front doors by the hostess rather than a bewildered Serb, and taking my own coat upstairs and piling it on the heap on the bed rather than having it pulled lightly from my shoulders with a  "thenkyu, and iss thiss a pressent? I vill tek thet es vell"

In the hierarchy of wealth Canape Shifters must have come after cleaners and probably after Having Our Colours Done,  but before, I reckon, Cranial Osteopathy, personal trainers and dog walkers. I wonder if all these services will be relinquished in tidy reverse order now that the carnival is over for the wealthy bankers as well as the extremely wealthy bankers.


Still, the axes don't fall until next week, and meanwhile it was a good party, a fin-de-siecle-party, a stuff-the-credit-crunch and drink champagne all night, a we've-even-hired-a-band party and there were loads of staff: not a canape went unpassed, not a glass untopped up and not a guest unwelcomed.

It's good to see old friends, and we were amongst bankers so I was thankful I didn't have to single handedly defend the Wall Street bonus system all over again.

I did wish I had a pound for everyone who asked me whether I had been fired yet, for I'd have eleven pounds which would make up the rather repetitive small talk:
- "Good to see you as well".  "No, not yet luckily Ha! Ha!".  "Well anyone working for an investment bank has to be worried don't they?". "Well, I hope you're right".
"No, no idea at all, ha ha! Perhaps I'll hand out canapes at parties."

If there are any canapes, and if there are any parties.

Ageing Calmly

Clearly a pub for grown ups (Teddington Arms) 

Last week at the Bank of England we were shown round by the Curator of the bank's museum. He told me he had joined the Bank in 1960 which is a long time ago by anyone's reckoning.  He didn't swear, but then he was quite comfortably Over 21.

I found the very existence of a Museum - and a curator - to be very reassuring: it's pleasing that the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street cares about history (new joiners are apparently even encouraged to read it):  a sense of history and a knowledge of the past crises must be eminently useful when a once-in-a-lifetime event happens along.

Happens along every week for two months.

Anyway, even despite the end of the world, I'm having a week's holiday. Yes, it's probably unwise: almost anything could happen while I am away: I wonder if there will be a department, let alone a job to come back to on Monday. I comfort myself only with the fact that I occupy a very small and very remote part of the Organogram .

Anyway it's half term, and it's good to get away from it all, so this week Mrs Botogol and I have had some old friends round for a dinner party and we have been to the theatre.

Our dinner party guests exhibited no rudeness,  and neither did they wear caps - even with the heating switched off in the new, cost-conscious-credit-crunched Botogol household.  However, over the cheese course, they did all gang up on me as the sole representative of the Global Investment Banking Industry present holding me personally responsible, by way of excessive greed, for the gloom that now threatens to engulf even totally blameless Brand Consultant Thingummies.   Perhaps I did start it, when I referred to Richard Fuld as a Master of the Universe. Whatever; it was Mrs Botogol who certainly put a stop to it when she leapt unexpectedly and somewhat frighteningly, to my defence.  "He's not a greedy Investment Banker, he's just a very naughty boy".

But again, she didn't swear, and neither was she rude - which is a good thing: when you get to our age too much swearing is, quite frankly, unsettling, especially if it's loud swearing and for that reason our theatre trip also wasn't quite the success we hoped for and I can't necessarily recommend How to disappear completely and never be found at the Southwark Playhouse where they swear a lot; and very loudly indeed.

The play is a modern day Reggie Perrin (who was forty-six in the first novel, cold, chilling thought, but also didn't swear). It's about a seemingly successful executive who finds himself suddenly overwhelmed, friendless and all at sea...

He decides to disappear.

In his last few days at work Charlie humiliates himself flunking a sales pitch and - in a direct nod to David Nobbs  - goes to see the company doctor, who hands out drugs very much stronger than the two aspirin that poor old Doc Morrissey doled out to Reggie, and accuses him of being depressed.

"But, that's the thing", says Charlie, "You see, I'm not at all sure the problem does lie with me: I'm afraid that things might genuinely be shit"

Time Out: The Bear consults with his maker

picture by J.Salmoral

Last Tuesday I snuck out early from work. Impending doom is supposed to focus the mind, but  for me: not: it clouds it, and I couldn't concentrate. Instead I holstered my Blackberry and hurried through the warm evening to St Paul's Cathedral, to hear the first of their series on science and religion. I had been invited by a religious friend, Mark, who has never quite given up hope that'll he convert me. I agreed to go with him for much the same reason.

The panel were not a cross-section: they believed, and so each of them were dominated by a great unseen presence of their imagining: invisible but constant, with an authoritative answer to every question,  a small assured voice in their ear, nagging at their better judgement. I refer of course to Richard Dawkins who dominated proceedings from afar.

I wrote in my notebook the words "DAWKINS" and "GOD", and underlined both and annoyed Mark intensely by making a tick every time either got a mention. "First to ten?" I whispered, as Dawkins took a commanding 6-2 lead.

The panel soon achieved a consensus: science and religion should work together. There was no need to see them as fundamentally separate, they can learn from each other: different domains, you see.

It was all terribly Church of England. I longed for a fundamentalist view to spark some controversy, some hissing even: a scientist with contempt for the supernatural? an evangelical bible-literalist to tell us we the earth was younger than the Great Pyramid? Either would have been good, but instead we had Nancy Cartwright, Nicholas Last, John Millbank and Roger Trigg.

In my notebook I recorded every thought from the speakers that seemed to me interesting or novel. Trigg had the most  - by a country mile -  so here's two of his:

1. If you cannot conceive of anything that could shake your faith, in other words if your faith does not exclude anything... then you believe in everyhting and nothing at all. He was thinking 'religion' I was thinking 'climate change'
   
2. Scientific study as we know it could only have arisen in Christian context. It was Christian teaching that allowed the possibility the God could have created the world anyway he wanted...so it was in order to investigate exactly how he did do it. I was thinking 'Arabic Maths? Egyptians measuring the circumference of the Earth?'

Nicholas Last asked the unbelievers present (I sat up straight) what they would consider to be evidence for the existence of God.

It was a good question.

Last had a poor answer - that the whole world was evidence for God [see (1)].  I thought of Carl Sagan's answer. That would do it for me.

At the end there were self-important questions from the audience "Don't you agree that science itself requires more faith than belief in  God?" (No), and then were released into the humid night.

I took my friend to one my favourite pubs, which was a mistake because that was evening it had no beer. God saw us coming...or did he? We settled into a corner table and considered the evening.
"It ended Dawkins 15, God 11", I told Mark. "I call that a clear win"
"You can say that if you like, he mumured, "but Dawkins wasn't even here . ..and we have to assume that God was"

We are going again on the 28th.

What's in a name?

Johannesburg. Pic by Michael Heilemann

When we lived in South Africa I made an unusual friend.

It was 1994 and I was 31, but Vaatjie must have been nearly 40 when I knew him: a large man, a South-African man, a boertjie oke, and he looked it.  Indeed every inch of him looked the Afrikaans-speaking, beer-swilling, braai-loving no-nonsense-taking, very restless prop forward that he was.

There was something dangerous about him.

"I was born on the wrong side of the tracks, Alibert" he'd sometimes tell me over over his third Castle. He never elaborated but one winter afternoon outside the Loftus Versfeld I witnessed a chance encounter with an old acquaintance: a burst of Afrikaans swearwords (I'd learned those), raised voices and a flash of anger; and it was easy to believe him.

Vaatjie was a middle manager in a large South African bank where he was in charge of a chunk of one of their change programmes - the change programme that evidently required hot-shot, 31 year-old international management consultants to help run it. If ever there was a fish more out of water than Vaatjie hunched over a spreadsheet in the Programme Management Office, then I never saw it.

In twelve months living in Africa he was the only white person I ever heard speaking native languages to black people, "What was that?", I asked one time, after a bunch of kids had agreed that they would 'watch' my car for only 5 Rands, "Ah, look, man, it's a mixture, ja? but mostly Zulu, it's how people speak at work - in the mines in the farms". I asked him where he'd learned it  "Ah, see, Alibert I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks".

When we moved back home it was hard to keep in touch - he's not really much of a letter writer. In 1996 I was back in Jo'burg and I looked him up; we went to Ellis Park to see Gauteng Lions play the Crusaders and outside the stadium the women handing out leaflets for the local lap-dancing club greeted him by name.

Around 2000 Vaatjie emailed me to tell me that had been, as the South Africans have it, retrenched.  Like so many jobless bankers before him he found work in Saudi Arabia.  On the personal scale just as much as the international geography is destiny, and I live in England. He did come to London once - we saw England beat South Africa again - and that was the last time I saw him. It must be the best part of 10 years.

Vaatjie is pronounced Fikie. It's not a  name - it's a nickname; it means 'barrelly', in English he'd be called 'Tubby'. Not so dangerous after all.

In the country

picture by Andrew Stawarz

Weary and footsore, we paused to rest at the very lip of the Cotswold escarpment.

The evening light had that dreamy, golden quality of a perfect English day, and we could see for miles. Far beneath us a real, live steam train crossed patchwork plains and centuries; and either Patagonian physics had spread to Gloucestershire, or the air was ozone clear for I could make out flocks of sheep grazing the slopes of the Malvern hills twenty miles away.


In the sixteenth century, so local legend has it, Thomas Cromwell sat just a few yards from our resting place and watched the righteous fires of the protestants consume Hailes Abbey where in happier time his friend Stephen Sagar had been Abbot.

Five hundred years on, in more peaceful times, we rested against a low gate set in a brand new, spanking-smart, dry stone wall. A Narnia-door to nowhere, at first glance the pointless gate merely connects two fields, but look sideways! ... it stands exactly at the mid-line between two newly planted avenues of trees that march from the field behind, two miles or more, down the escarpment, through the village of Wood Stanway, across a wood, all the way to the simply ludicrous but awesomely splendid Stanway Fountain, the largest gravity powered water jet in Europe.


The Stanway Estate was leased by Hailes Abbey to Richard Tracy in 1533, the very year of Henry VIII's divorce, with the writing on the wall for the Catholic Church in England. The Lessor was none other than our well connected Abbot Sagar who evidently understood not only the way the national wind was blowing, but also local politics, for when the Dissolution Act of 1536 was passed, who else was appointed head of the commission to dissolve Hailes Abbey but one Richard Tracy.

Sagar held out, negotiating terms, for three years, before he and his 21 monks finally acquiesced on Christmas Eve 1539.

The Abbey and its estates were eventually sold for a total of £539, and one can suppose that as both sitting tenant and vendor Tracy's purchase of the freehold of Stanway was on not unfavourable terms.... and that neither was Abbot Sagar disappointed with his pension of £100pa (His monks, you ask? ... £8). And now, get this, Stanway has remained in the Tracy family ever since. In these sort of deals is won possession of our green and pleasant land.

The last time we walked that way we were soaked to the skin, and it was miserable and misty.

Today it was just beautiful.

Autre Lands Autre Moeurs

by Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton

Last weekend we went to France to entrust our oldest child into the hands of a foreign family we had never before met.  We knew they would be OK, though, because we found them on Facebook

No, not really! Ha ha!  The truth is that the grandmother of the French family (the grandmere if you will) went to university - back in the 60s - with the mother of one our friends and since then their two families have indulged in some reciprocal god-parenting, and meeting up in the Languedoc, and anyway they are both doctors so I am sure they'll be all right;  and they have children just about your age, well a little younger and so you'll have a great time, anyway it's Bastille Day on Monday, so... fireworks!

Such are life's connections made.


We arrived early and so we parked up outside their apartment for 20 minutes of nerve-racking anticipation.

As we waited the sun went behind a cloud, the temperature dropped and it began to lightly rain. Along the pavement walked a grizzled, tobacco-stained Frenchman, who paused to stare into our car. I wondered aloud if she would get a room of her own or would she have to share with the truffle-pig, and our middle-one suddenly cracked 'It's not too late!", she cried, "Get back in the car! Drive for the ferry!"

But it was too late and forty minutes later we found ourselves seated around an immaculate Louis XIV table, with hosts of ineffable French elegance, sipping the tiny coffees we had been given and wishing we weren't all wearing jeans.

In came a small child, about 10, but as elegant as her mother, and without a flicker of hesitation surprise she gravely went around the table introducing herself to each of us in turn, with a kiss on each cheek.

The family Botogol were each of us thrilled and appalled, on the edge of our chairs with the rising tension, as she progressed inexorably toward Botogol-minor, the last in line writhing in his seat, breathing hard, glancing from side to side searching for means of escape, 11 years old et ne jamais avant été embrassé

GAFCON or Not?

Finery by Lawrence OP

A fascinating consequence of the looming schism in the Church of England is the rare window it opens into my religious friends' souls.

In polite conversation one isn't supposed to do God so while I know perfectly well that my three cycling buddies all rush off to worship at three different churches after our Sunday morning rides, I've never been able to discern whether it is differences theological, ontological or even musical that draw them to their different altars.

Indeed I couldn't begin to describe what it is, actually, that they believe in - for they are all Anglicans.

For instance do they believe in the Garden of Eden? in Noah and the flood? In the water-boarding of Job? What's their opinion of the Filioque Controversy and was Jesus unbegotten? Do they believe in the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary? or in the secret marriage of Jesus to Mary Magdalan with a resulting bloodline protected through the centuries by the Knights Templar?

I have simply no idea. Their religion, they will tell you, is central to their lives, and I acknowledge that, but about the details its simply not polite to ask. (I do know that they don't all of them count the Catholics as properly Christian but that hardly sheds any light)


So, when I bumped into one of my three God-fearing friends at the station last week, and he and I travelled up to town together chatting about the weather, the credit crunch and the stories in our morning newspapers, the front page schism spread gave me the a rare and unexpected opportunity to delve a little deeper.

I asked whether he was thinking of joining the GAFCON cell that's formed in Twickenham (apparently they have booked the church hall under the disguise of being of a harmless Yoga group and, having fallen out with the St Margaret's GAFCON, must communicate directly with Richmond GAFCON Command via double-blind dead letter drops)

Well, he said, smiling, no he hasn't "After all, we have a woman vicar at our church, and I'm perfectly comfortable with her"

"But this is all about women bishops isn't it?", I asked, "What about them?"
"No", he said, "I don't agree with women bishops but I wouldn't leave my church over it"
"And what about gay priests? Would you leave your church over them?"
"Well now that is different - Yes, if my church had an openly gay vicar, I think I would have to leave and go somewhere else"

A little silence, as tumbleweed drifted down the aisle.

"The lad Mark Cavendish did good on Wednesday didn't he!" and then we were at Waterloo and we separated.

My friend works at a large and very successful global firm (you will have heard of it) which firmly - and I believe sincerely - champions values of inclusion and diversity. They have plenty of women partners and an active LBGT network, and no doubt gay partners as well.

I thought back to the Ken Costa, and his campaign to bring God to the workplace; and I couldn't but help a little shudder.

On Safari

Book Club by wander.lust

Mrs Botogol and I are nothing if not energetic and after Interesting2008 we rushed straight home for a Safari Dinner organised by Mrs Botogol's book club

Now if you're thinking: "Safari Dinner"? Isn't that a slightly childish activity, best suited to giggling twenty-somethings in an alcoholic haze rushing excitedly from room to room down the corridors of the halls of residence for an endless succession of courses each one progressively more dried-up and more burnt than the one before?", then I'm retorting: "You haven't met Mrs Botogol's book club!"

To this day Mrs B will maintain that they do all read the books but I, frankly, suspect a poker school. Let's just say that the first Wednesday of last month (The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy) featured precious few Brodie's Notes but rather a lot of mysterious ATM withdrawals, and all along our street they are still talking about that all-nighter pulled in the back garden of number 50 during the long, long, cicada'd, mexican, velvet summer of 2006 (The Beach by Alex Garland)

A week or two ago some neighbours knocked on the doors in our road to apologise in advance for the noise of an upcoming 21st birthday party - "Oh don't worry about it all", charmed my friend and fellow book-club widower, Roger, "make as much noise as you like for next week, round at ours, there's Book Club!"

On Safari, the husbands rose to the occasion (without a barbecue even) and did much of the cooking while the book-club critiqued: it was like a cross between the Hell's Kitchen and the F-Word. I has been allotted course three of seven labelled, confusingly, the starter. With one husband-course before me and two to follow, reputations were up for grabs and Sabotage and Mischief caught my ear and laid out their tempting wares. After some thought I decided upon a rich and creamy high-carb, spoiler following which courses 4-7 would surely languish uneaten and unappreciated. Potato soup with lardons and focaccia bread, preceded by an amuse-bouche of an individual ravioli parcel stuffed with goats cheese all in a sour-cream source. But midweek Mrs Botogol saw the Ocado order and she suggested firmly that I might switch to my signature prawns in a warm courgette salad. I cooked it theatre-style in front of my less than amazed guests.

All in all, I think it went down very well.

And let's be clear: not a single one of the courses at our safari dinner were the least burnt or dried up, indeed the book club safari was a resounding success, for I heard a rumour that one of the club sometimes reads this blog, and I don't want any small waxen miniature Botogol pierced with a ceremonial needle on the first Wednesday of July (Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad)

Just 15 seconds

picture by Dioboss

The worst part of the triathlon is coming out of T2 (the second transition: bike to run)

The point about transition is: you have to concentrate.

Otherwise you might spend valuable seconds, say, running the long way way around the bike racks, falling over your own pedals and then pulling your elastic laces too tightly and feeling your toe slowly and irretrievably bruising between km3 and km4.

But that's the same for T1, I hear your cry, so what's so special about T2?

Well, what makes T2 different is: it's the start of run. So, you rack your bike, you change your shoes, you straighten up slowly and you gingerly test the legs that have turned to jelly from the cycle-ride and you get going and you suddenly realise that there's no point jogging the 200m from transition area to the start line... dude you've gotta RUN¹

I was in the Thames Turbo Triathlon. I achieved a personal best [:-)] 2min 20sec faster than last year, with improvement on all three legs (in retrospect I realise 5 mins was hopelessly unrealistic)

I copped a red light at the junction by waterworks; I wobbled and faltered when I took the u-turn at the roundabout much, much too fast; .... yes, I got lost in T2....; and I stopped momentarily at km3.5, adjusting my elastic laces in a (no doubt) vain effort to save my toenail. And, infuriatingly, I ended up finishing just 15 SECONDS slower than my mate John.

Not that I am competitive or anything.

When I went back afterwards to retrieve my bike my neighbours were telling war stories. "I overtook you on the bike", 652 announced to 534 (rather gleefully, in my opinion) "and I overtook you again during the run!"

"Yeah," said 534, only slightly annoyed, "so I sure whupped you in the transition, didn't I?"


In other news: in a fit of inexplicable absent mindedness last week, we somehow forgot all about the credit crunch and went and bought a house (yes, we're those ones mentioned by name in the recent Halifax market survey). Oh well, we'll enjoy it when we retire. When perhaps it will again be worth what we paid for it.

Meanwhile to any of my American readers who'd like to rent a beautiful 15th Century English house, in the charming town that Henry James loved and treasured... well now's your chance.

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¹ My children tell me that only Americans can use the word 'dude' and get away with it; but I rather think I carried it off.

Pearls and Grit

Oyster by Swamibu

"So, why don't you ever write about me on your blog?" asked my friend Mystery Shopper, plaintively.
"Well, give me something to write about"
"What sort of thing?"
"To be honest, M-S, it would have to be pretty good"
"How good?"
"Pretty. Good. You know: Insider information... Celebrity Gossip... Free Opera tickets... An idea for a dotcom start up. Tell you what: for a dotcom startup I'll even throw in a dozen oysters and a margarita"

Twenty four hours later we were discussing domain names in Wrights, between us two pacific, two mersea, two dover, three spanish and three wasabi, and before us a barman sweating over a couple of rock-hard limes.

"But Botogol, what if my idea is rubbish?"
"50/50 on the oysters and I get the last Wasabi, but don't worry: I'll blog about you anyway"
"As long as it's not just a collection of half truths and cheap jokes at my expense"