Do I get the hand soap that has shea butter in it because I wash my hands so much it dries out my skin and that might help, even though it means that when I wash my eye it will have a film of moisturiser on it?

Hmmm. Might make it shinier.

DUMB RUN II

20:00, 21st June 2008

Dumbarton Castle, Dumbarton

This time it’s personal…

Dumbarton to St Andrews. Overnight. By bicycle. From coast to shining coast, this far north the sun never truly sets.

Starting in the zombie-ridden wastelands that bank the River Clyde, we’ll take you first through a relentless set of climbs accompanied by clouds of blood-sucking insects that will bring about significant weight loss if you have to fix a puncture. Then we head into Scotland’s industrial heartland. Mile upon rolling mile of near deserted A-roads will see you skirt the Antonine Wall and slip ninja-like past Falkirk’s Great Wheel before descending towards Linlithgow, Queensferry and onto the Forth Road Bridge for dawn.

But it doesn’t end there. Take possibly your last chance of respite at the Wild Bean Cafe at Dalgety, watched with deep and abiding suspicion by the man behind the bullet-proof glass, and steel yourself for the interminable crawl around Fife’s sultry coast for a mid-morning finish in the grey North Sea.

There is no support. That’s why the gods invented multitools and puncture repair kits. There is no mid-way feeding station. If you’re lucky you will manage the navigational hazard that is Cumbernauld and find the all-night services. There is no transport to the start. How you get there is a matter of personal logistical planning. There are no return coaches. What do you think this is? Butlins?

This is SCOOOOOOTLAAAAAAAAND!

Only the strong survive!

Oh, all right. We might manage some disposable BBQs and a sausage on the beach. If it’s not raining (stop laughing, class of ’07!) And we can probably stretch to a beer or three.

But only if you let us know you’re coming.

The Dumb Run. So tough it makes the Dunwich Dynamo look like a pootle to the pub.

I don’t think I mentioned it, but Frood brought me flowers and a bottle of pink bubbly on Valentine’s Day this year.

I’d got him a bottle of 1998 Rioja and a bottle of vintage Cava. I’d contemplated rum, but it was a school night.

Now to those of you out there whose long-term relationships (or even newly minted ones) contain a hefty dose of romance, this might sound perfectly in keeping with the occasion. Thing is, Frood and I have been together for 18 years and this is the first time he’s bought me flowers. He even remembered that I like lilies (I only ever have roses and/or lilies in the house, because of the scent, but I don’t buy flowers very often).

He rendered me so absolutely speechless all I could do was look at them in shock for a few seconds and then go back to washing dishes.

It is a long standing joke between us that while I’d like him to show the romance of Gomez Addams dancing the tango with Morticia every so often, he’s more likely to stick breadsticks up his nose like Fester. He even said, as he presented the flowers, that he’d looked for breadsticks but couldn’t find any.

Rubbish. He just knew it would spoil the moment. There’s a whisper of girly romance in there after all. Not just the romance that is utterly Frood.

They have almost all opened now into glorious, delicate, aromatic inflorescence. Beautiful.

Words fail me. I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry. This is almost sick enough that I want one.

Hey kids! You too can play the role of the evil Dr Cornelius, taking the man who was once James Howlett, trapping him inside Barry Windsor’s extraordinary vision of the Weapon X Lab, and torturing him to the point where he is reduced to animalistic instincts and primordial rage by his own suffering!

Did they really think that through? I’m reminded of Levinson’s under-rated Toys, in which kids blithely try to beat their own hi-scores on various war games. Chillingly, it was never made clear in the film whether or not the kids had been told that the point was eventually to do it for real, controlling remote-controlled planes to shoot down the enemy. The way Levinson directed the actors playing the children, I was left with the distinct feeling that they wouldn’t have cared.

Maybe I’m over-reacting because I’m ill, and because I’m immersed in the Marvel mythos sufficiently to have a fairly good grasp of the intended moral and political significance of the Weapon X project (I’ve just finished reading the entire X-23 back catalogue, after all), but, seriously:

Where it all began! You can make Wolverine’s admantium skeleton in this fun playset. Playset includes Chamber with handle to inject Ooze into Wolverine mold to form an Admantium skeleton!

I’m kind of rendered speechless by the level of desensitisation it would take to consider the process of injecting liquid metal into a living creature — even one as cantankerous as the hairy runt — fun.

Might as well have a Fisher Price Slaughterhouse. It would be more humane.

As I said in my last post, I’m at home sick. It’s nothing serious, just a bad cold. In a couple of days my immune system will have kicked its sorry ass and I’ll be fine again.

However, despite it being nothing more than a bad cold, I am staying at home. Not only do I feel like I’ve been kicked in the face repeatedly by someone wearing boots covered in runny cow excrement, I have no desire to pass it on to anyone else.

I have noticed, in recent years, a veritable proliferation of products claiming to prevent, relieve or cure the symptoms of the common cold. Even ‘flu, although what most people call ‘flu is not the debilitating, three-weeks-in-bed-feeling-like-death of proper influenza (trust me, I’ve had it): it’s a bad cold. “Flu” is a diminutive, and I suppose the illness is as well.

Go to your local chemist’s and you can get everything from Lemsip to relieve symptoms to First Defence to stop you getting them and even anti-viral tissues to stop your bogies passing it on. All of these products are sold on the premise that the proper thing to do is to get on with it. No lollygagging around at home in bed for the upright, responsible 21st century citizen! No! Front and centre, man! Get that Beecham’s All In One down your neck and let’s be avin’ you at your desk like a proper soldier!

It occurred to my rather cynical head that the inherent assumption that we should all be prepared to go to work despite being at war with a virus does little more than provide an ever-growing market in which pharmaceutical companies can ply their preventative wares. Because while the various pills and potions might relieve the symptoms, making you feel like you might just about be able to cope with dragging yourself to work and putting a brave face on it, you are still infectious. You are still capable of passing it on. Which means that other people will have to buy the pills and potions in order to drag themselves to work, while the rest of your colleagues, seeing the illness spreading like wildfire, will empty the shelves of prophylactics on the basis that they kill 99.9% of germs.

Let’s just think about that for a moment. The rhinovirus (one of the various cold-causing virii) is so small you could line up 50,000 of them inside a millimetre. You can fit quite a number of those in a drop of snot. It only takes 1-30 to start an infection and they can survive for up to 3 hours outside the body. Most transmission occurs when someone touches a contaminated surface and then touches his own face (or, presumably, someone else’s). A victim becomes infectious 8 hours after infection and the degree of infectivity increases with the symptoms, which start 1 – 3 days after infection and peak 2 – 3 days after that. In that whole process there is a helluva lot of opportunity to pass on the disease.

Let’s say you had OCD and used 99.9% effective anti-viral wipes every time you touched something. In an office containing a couple of infected people, and so many viral particles produced by sneezing, coughing, or manual transmission to objects, how many thousands of virus particles do you think will survive the wipe? And we already know it only takes between 1 and 30 particles to cause infection. 99.9% of 50,000 still leaves more than enough to create another victim.

In other words, what happens when you down that Lemsip Max Strength and head to work to prove to your boss how responsible you are is that you take your nasty germs and give them to everyone else at the same time as making a stack of dosh for the various pharmaceutical companies who peddle their prophylactics and remedies. It’s not that the preventatives don’t work: the point is that they can’t be 100% effective and the cold virus is a fecund little bugger who will win hands down every time through sheer weight of numbers.

Then you’re down to the nasty-tasting paracetamol and fake-lemon drink. And even that can prolong the process — a fever is your body raising its temperature to levels that the invading germs don’t like in an attempt to kill them off. It means the immune system is doing its job, and by taking medication to stop this process you’re just prolonging the agony so that really, all you are doing is lengthening the time you will need to take the remedies in order to feel better.

More money to the pharm companies. In the UK, around £200 million/annum, according to The Ecologist.

So next time you see a television advert telling you that if you take Cold and Flu Begone you’ll be able to make that next sale, or get in your boss’s good books, remember that it’s the pharmaceutical company making the sale and your boss won’t like it when he’s got your cold.

Stay home, wrap up warm, drink plenty of fluids and remember the human body evolved to deal with minor infections like this long before we knew what a germ was.

I’m off work at the moment with the first really heavy cold I’ve had since I started doing triathlon (so there you go, kids: serious physical training doesn’t necessarily weaken the immune system). I don’t read a lot of fiction these days, as I find the quality depressing, but when I’m ill I will read with the same voracity I did before I became such an intolerant critic.

My first day of lying in bed feeling sorry for myself I read two books with superficially similar themes: Bareback by Kim Whitfield, called Benighted in the States (presumably for some colloquial connotation lost on we Brits); and Bitten by Kelley Armstrong. These are both debut novels.

Bitten follows the trials and tribulations of Elena, the only female werewolf in a population of about 35 living in a human world, and her battle to find happiness by coming to terms with her true nature rather than making herself unhappy by striving for “normal”. It’s the typical tale of the girl ignoring passion in favour of decency, only to discover that she herself is passionate and passion is the way to go. It just happens to be dressed up in fur and fangs. It’s a romance novel given a violent edge by the twist of lycanthropy.

It read to me very much as a wish-fulfillment book — and I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, in and of itself. I have no issue with people writing their own fantasies. Unfortunately it’s written in first person, and Armstrong does somewhat belabour a number of the issues past boredom to the point where I wanted to take the author (not the heroine — the author) by the throat, shake her roughly and say “Get on with it woman! Stop throwing in new cul-de-sacs in the plot: we all know where you’re going with this and have done since roughly Chapter Three!”

I found the prose sometimes clumsy and there was a strong overtone of action-adventure novel that I found distracting from the overall theme. It reminded me of Romancing The Stone, which is not a good thing.

By contrast, Bareback was a rare treat: an original treatment of a popular genre. In Whitfield’s story we are dumped unceremoniously in a world where lycanthropy is the norm and always has been. The poor unfortunate “cripples” who don’t change at the full moon are forcibly taken at birth into the arms of the Department Of Regulation of Lycanthropic Activities (DORLA), which is part-police, part-Inquisition. Reworked history is woven quite skilfully into the tale, so as the work progresses the reader comes to understand how this world is similar to our own in so many ways; and yet so utterly, utterly different. The story tackles a subject that is politically relevant to where we find ourselves now, here: the issue of those people who are vital to society functioning smoothly and yet who are treated as less than second-class citizens by those who consider themselves to be society; as well as the shocking, although inevitable, consequences of that subset of the population declining in number. The ultimate punt in Whitfield’s book makes pharmaceutical companies witholding new medicines for financial gain look almost acceptable, and turns the notion of embryonic genetic selection for desirable attributes on its head (almost literally).

Whitfield also manages to address the issue of being true to one’s own nature as opposed to “fitting in”, and yet manages to do so while leaving the reader with uncertainty as to whether her protagonist made the right choice: which is as it should be. How many of us are ever sure we’ve absolutely made the right choice? Also, Whitfield’s protagonist has to deal with the consequences of her decisions, and not all of them as blatant and obvious as what happens to the guy she was dating.

It has its flaws, of course. If the barebacks (the people who don’t change) were regarded with such distaste by the rest of the world, how on Earth did DORLA get away with acting without due process? There were a couple of major questions raised about how DORLA came to have such power to act seemingly outside what we would consider to be the law. I would have liked to see more reasoning for DORLA’s ability to lock people up indefinitely without access to a lawyer; and for their ability to use physical torture without apparent fear of retribution. Whitfield did offer up a hint of an explanation, but I found it inadequate. This is a minor complaint in an otherwise nicely told tale.

Both of these books were stories that just happened to involve werewolves, even though, superficially, werewolves were the point of the tale. For me Whitfield was the more successful: her prose was more elegant, her story more subtle. While I found myself throwing Armstrong’s book down on the floor a couple of times to have a rant to Frood, I read Whitfield’s cover to cover with nary a word of complaint.

If you want plenty of descriptions of golden fur, wolf foreplay, sex, angst and muscular bodies, Bitten is the book for you. If you want something that explores what can happen when a vital section of society finds itself no longer feeling part of that society, then I strongly recommend Bareback.

The juxtaposition of the Spokes reminder for Polite Cycling with the Specialized Fortress gloves tickles me pink.

If they’re polite to me, I’ll be polite to them. But woe betide the elbow polishers…

Film-makers capture rare footage of Arctic Wolves.

Better late than never, I suppose. Not that I necessarily subscribe to the aphorism, you understand.

And now I must go do the washing up and get the pheasant on…

A question has been plaguing me for a while now — every time I think of posting it to the blogosphere I’m nowhere near a computer; whenever I’m sat at a computer I forget.

Except just now. Because Munky sent me a story about cake.

OK. So. Here it is. The big question.

WHY DO THE FISH IN WE ♥ KATAMARI MAKE THE SOUND “QWERTY-U-IOP” WHEN YOU ROLL THEM UP?

Is there a reason the fish speak keyboard?

Please. You’ve got to help me with this. It’s driving me utterly insane mental.