You’re a sweetie, gecko. I really needed this today.

If that’s Stan Lee and Larry Uber then we’re talking 1980s. I don’t think I own the original of this — it’s a Spidey strip, not an X-Men or Wolverine one. But, like The Magic Roundabout or Badly Dubbed Porn, I suspect this works better if you don’t know what the original dialogue was.

Dear Fife Council,

I have just attempted to attend my regular thrice-weekly swim session at the Fife Institute of Physical and Recreational Education.

You will note I said ‘regular’ and ‘thrice-weekly’. That’s right: I am one of the regular customers who use this facility all the time and help pay for its upkeep. I am one of those people you should be trying to attract, instead of letting rumours get round that you’re planning on demolishing it, along with Kirkcaldy, and building a new one on the Randolph Industrial Estate in Kirkcaldy (which I couldn’t get to of a lunchtime) owing to lack of popularity.

You will also note that I said ‘training’. This means not splashing about in the shallows, using the pool as a wallow, or doing an impression of an entire troop of macaques on speed suddenly discovering the joys of an unattended diving board. Nor does it mean using the pool as a handy perfume-removal dip. It means trying to fit in as many lengths as I can in the limited time I have available during my lunch break.

Currently I am on a three times a week schedule. That may increase. I am even planning on using the gym.

However, I have just gone to the pool for my regular lunchtime session — we can’t all be early birds every day — only to have to stand in a queue for 20 minutes because half of reception was inexplicably closed, to be then told that the pool was full and I couldn’t get in for another twenty minutes. As I had to get back to work this was impossible and thus was my lunch break wasted.

Why has this happened? Because, in its infinite wisdom, Fife Council has decided that under 16s should get in free all day every day for the entirety of the summer break.

Is this really necessary? I understand that it’s excellent to promote healthy activities for kids, and I’m all for that, but would it not be possible to have a couple of hours during the day, including one at lunchtime, for those who use the pool as a serious health and training facility to do so without having to contend with screaming children who don’t care about lane discipline or even, apparently, swimming?

Is that really so much to ask? I buy a Fit Fifer card, which means effectively that I am paying for my swim sessions in advance, and because of the way the scheme works, I have a limited time period in which to use up my pre-paid swim sessions. If I go to use up one of my pre-paid sessions only to be told that I can’t because the pool is full of children who haven’t paid at all, and no provision has been made to make sure there will be a time when I can get into the pool, I’m going to feel pretty hard done by.

Which, for the record, is exactly how I do feel.

As I said, I’m entirely supportive of schemes to get children engaging in healthy, active pastimes, but those of us who carry on using the facilities even when we have to pay, and doing so regularly to a schedule, would greatly appreciate some consideration as well.

Yours etc,

Little Miss Cranky

It is very hot here in Fife. Not as hot as it is in Portland, but they have a continental climate over there. I don’t like heat. I certainly don’t like spending my days poking about in skips wearing full PPE [ObNonHealth&SafetyAware;: Personal Protective Equipment, i.e. hard hat, hi-viz, steel-plated rigger’s boots] when the weather is like this:

Don’t like the heat. It makes me irritable and cranky and I don’t sleep properly. This makes me tired and grumpy and means I find it difficult to get up in the morning, especially when I’m having a bout of vivid and violent dreams, as I am at the moment. This in turn means that I miss my morning swim because I have to get to work, and that leaves me with either missing the swim or fending off screaming brats. Either of these things has a further negative impact on my mood.

Right now I’m about as grumpy as a razorback with PMT and a ringworm infestation. Bizarrely this means that everyone thinks I’m cheerful because they don’t realise I cope with this level of irritation by forcing myself to be superficially chirpy. I’m also relatively unstable, as was evidenced yesterday when I sampled some of the Bosnian Turkish delight someone had brought back from holiday and it was like I’d been drip-fed a full score of chupa-chups in the space of ten seconds. I can’t even remember what I started wittering about but I think it was something to do with puffins being rabbits in disguise and drunk pigeons. Either way it caused the office ladies to ask me what I was on.

“Sugar.”

Well, sugar and warped biochemistry anyway.

Oh gods. Screaming brats. Can I really face it? I did go out on the bike last night. You can tell it’s the Tour — normally you’d be ignored, treated as street furniture. At this time of year people lean out of passenger side windows, screaming at you. I think they mean it as encouragement, but having been a cyclist for as long as I have I instinctively take preparatory steps in case they are about to hit me with something. It’s like being overtaken by a motorised barnacle, grasping tendrils thrashing wildly in the search for morsels to sift from the air.

It’s a bit like the crowds at the top of Alpe D’Huez, only everything happens at 25 mph.

Please don’t. Just give a friendly wave once you’ve passed. Screaming and leaning out of windows is terribly distracting and somewhat nerve-wracking. I am not a morsel. You cannot eat me. Go be a barnacle somewhere else.

I was in the pool at 08:00. Anyone who knows me will be shocked.

I am not a morning person.

However Fife Council, in their infinite wisdom, have made pool access free for all under-16s for the rest of the summer holidays. This means my lunchtime session on Wednesday was hampered by a plague of Biblical proportions. Small, squealing, slippery creatures paddled about like some Cthulhoid spawn recently hatched from a giant egg-sac, goggling eyes staring while mouths gaped vacantly, no doubt searching instinctively for some netherworld teat from which to suck all the goodness out of life, the very marrow of existence fuelling their tiny, pasty-white bodies.

The floats on a rope will not keep spawn such as these out of the training lanes. No. Nor are they affected by the screeching whistle of the lifeguard, merely turning to stare balefully at the red-clad pool attendant who would dare interrupt them in their newly-hatched quest, scoffing at the foolish assumption that the shrill sound could possibly force them to do anything they did not wish to.

But my training programme has been, well, programmed, so a sudden invasion of demon brats into the pool is no excuse. Thusly I found myself churning up and down before work.

I am not amused.

Unfortunately Bob thinks this is a great idea and is now cheerfully talking about maintaining my pool sessions at this time even after the brats are gone.

How I hate him.

Snaffled from Ythy:

It has been… what? 4 months since I left Devon? So far the only things I’m really missing are my own bed and the Munky Band Name Generator.

Did I not ever tell you about that?

Well. As long-term readers will know, the conversations that Frood and I have tend towards the silly. Hence, for instance, Frood’s comment when we were watching some documentary about lightning with my Mum the night before last. The scientist on the screen, in a prelude to introducing the ignorant to the concepts of sprites and jets, is telling us all about how the storms of Texas are so vast and potent — the so-called ‘supercells’ — that they produce every kind of lightning imaginable.

Frood immediately interjects with “Cheese lightning?”

“Oh for god’s sake!” Mum snorts. She still hasn’t forgiven him for the ‘Boots of Death’.

“Well I imagined it!” says Frood.

This is fairly typical.

The Munky Band Name Generator was a bit like “And Finally…” in that random snippets of conversations would provoke a cry of “That’s a great band name!” and down it would go on the piece of paper that eventually gained the official title of the Munky Band Name Generator.

Examples included:

• The Withered Hand of Jeremy Beadle
• The Absent Magical Owl
• Colossal Arctic Ant
• The Thoughtform that is the Concept of Bleach

I wonder what Frood did with the list. We really ought to make them available to the world at large, and then perhaps we’ll get some interesting bands rather than the soft-pap vanilla mush that is the likes of Keane and Coldplay.

I finally bought my long-coveted Hilleberg Nallo 2 GT with the proceeds of the house sale. Frood and I decided it would be worth it because our Vaude Hogan, while fine for one person, is just too small for bike camping for 2. I love the look of the Vaude — it’s still one of the most unusual designs you’ll see — but the porch space is tiny.

So we went palatial. My gods the Nallo GT is huge. Not quite big enough to get bikes in the porch, but easily big enough for changing gear, cooking, sitting sheltered from the rain having a fag (or whatever), snogging by starlight or any of the other myriad things one might wish to do when camping with one’s nearest and dearest. There’s even a line strung across the top — I think it’s for hanging knickers from so they can dry, but I suppose we could hang bike shorts from it. It’s the sort of thing you could use for all sorts of kinky perversions, if that was your gig. I expect you’ll have to double-pole the tent for anything strenuous, however. You can do that, the pole sleeves are designed to take double-poling for ‘extreme conditions’.

Now we just need to decide where to go. I could use a holiday.

Speaking of which, there’s a rather inspiring article about the Caledonian Forest in the Scotsman. Sounds like the sort of place I should take Maura.

From Fully Ramblomatic (If Bruce Campbell were a website he’d be this one), poetry based on the combat moves from Prince of Persia, for instance:

‘Harassing Cyclone’
(triangle, square, square, triangle, triangle)

His hands are upon me
Teasing
He rapes me with words
How I loathe him
His sickly triumphant smile
As his fingers once again
Reach for my breasts

‘You shouldn’t dress like that
if you don’t want it,’
He says with oily hateful words
The others turn a blind eye
Even Captain Magnificent
What was I thinking
When I joined this superhero team

I think you’ll find that was part of the plot from Alan Moore’s Watchmen.

‘Angel Drop’
(square during vertical wallrun)

The cake
is vanilla

I asked
for chocolate

The tears
They will not
stop

There’s a thread up at the Clubhouse, although it’s rather League-oriented. I will write a more generic, cycling-specific report when I get a chance.

Although, to be fair, I think that hedgehog spoffling and lesbian strawberry-bootlace bondage are the stuff of legend, and that’s why I’ve been along to this thing for the last 5 years. Never mind the 120 miles on a 70″ fixed gear: jelly-babies restrained by cable ties and the sexual uses of Oidz are the real points of interest.

Black Phoenix Alchemy looks as interesting as Chris Brosius’ stuff.