Old age

Last year, I smoked between 10 and 20 fags a day and could run 3.1 km in 16 mins.

This year, I quit smoking in February and yet can still only run 3.5 km in 19 mins.

Doesn't bode well.

Balls

Joy of joys, Nikeplus has seen fit to upgrade their website in the month or so since I last checked it. For the uninitiated, Nikeplus is the chip thing that plugs into an ipod to measure running distance, calories etc and play you music / motivational American chatter as you jog round. I've always been disapppointed with the amount I could play about with the data once I uploaded it to the website, so am hoping that this has now changed. Certainly looks better anyway.

Unfortunately the same could not, apparently, be said for me yesterday. I have a pair of - well - shall we say "skimpier" running shorts that I have only worn a couple of times before. I don't normally wear any jocks when I'm running, as my shorts are all fitted with that horrible mesh thing that keeps your bits in place. Leaving my building yesterday things did feel a bit snug down below, but I thought I was being paranoid, pulled my t-shirt down a bit further and tottered off.

All was fine until I was halfway round the park when I glanced up to spot a girl walking the other way staring right at the general vicinity of my crown jewels. The look on her face was a cross between pity and horror - she made the mistake of glancing up at the exact moment I spotted what she was doing and looked mortified and sad at the same time. Suffice to say my running speed increased dramatically for the remainder of my route and I shall be ensuring I wear 3 pairs of pants next time I wear those shorts, if I don't burn them in some sort of cleansing ritual instead.

Man points -325. Self Esteem -99.

Sicily day two - Palermo to Enna

03/07/09 - Palermo to Enna

We were up bright and early on our first full day in Sicily, heading back to the airport to pick up our hire car. We hit the jackpot on the model of car we hired and soon were crawling back through the Palermo traffic in a 2 week old white Fiat 500 with a mere 900km on the clock.

I started to think I'd made a grave error bottling it at the rental desk.
'Would you like super insurance? A bargain at 160 Euros'.
'But it's only 150 Euros to hire the car'
'With an 800 Euro excess on the insurance for damage, 1600 Euros for theft'
(shoots quick look at nervous looking girlfriend/driver) 'err.....yeah. Go on then'

Yet here we were, 5 abreast across the 3 lane motorway, J transformed into a demon behind the wheel, steering our wee car expertly through the mayhem. The general rule of thumb seems to be "see a space and put your car in it before someone else does". The white lines have faded almost into oblivion and it appears that there is no real rush to repaint them, as this only confuses matters. Somehow, it works.

Soon, with the help of our at-that-point-trusty-sat-nav, Heather, we were on the motorway heading to the interior. We were booked in to spend a night at a farm house in near Enna, a medieval (or older) town clinging to a rock in the middle of the highlands and the centre of the island. The main roads are excellent and pretty empty, and for some reason I never quite established almost exclusively raised on pylons about 50 feet above the ground. I guess it's either to prevent the government having to buy the farmers' land off them to construct the road (as they can still access it beneath the overhead road) or it's some kind of earthquake protection. Either way, it feels a little like you've been transported into the future and are travelling in your hover car through the Sicilian countryside. It did at the time anyway - I should mention we only discovered that the car had air conditioning after around an hour, and prior to that I was imitating a german shepherd (i.e. the dog, not just a shepherd from Germany) with my head / tongue lolling out the window in a desperate attempt to cool down.

First sight of Enna is pretty awe-inspiring. It clings to a rock which rises out of the surrounding land and resembles a medieval fortress. You can see why various armies took years trying to invade it; you can almost taste the history. It would appear, however, that those town planners 1000 years ago never stopped to think that one day a small hatchback car would be invented and may wish to drive around the city streets.

This should have been the lesson we needed to disregard the sat nav, or at the very least pay equal attention to where it was sending us rather than blindly following it. We should also have learnt that aiming for the 'nearest town' to our accomodation doesn't work somewhere like Sicily.

Technology has succeeded in exactly replicating a human's map reading prowess. Unfortunately, Heather is the exact replicant of someone who is utterly pish at it. Navigon, the manufacturers, proudly state that they use the same maps as Garmin. That's a bit like giving two people the same road atlas and expecting them both to choose the best route to a destination. The poor dear got horribly confused, sending us up streets barely wide enough for our tiny car, telling us to drive through no entry signs and finally, taking us down an alley too narrow to turn round in and commanding us to 'go straight on' - through a saftey barrier and down the set of steps on the other side. J, stunning me at every turn with her driving prowess and potty mouth, finally had enough and demanded we shut Heather the hell up - lo and behold our new tactic of using our eyes to find the nearest main road worked a treat and after what we thought would be the most stressful driving experience of the trip we were heading back down the mountain in search of our farm.

We paused only long enough to stop an take a photo or two of the town across the valley - when in a moment of karma my foot got caught in Heather's lead and off she went, flying from the windscreen, out the door and across the road. She turned back on again, but the tension in the atmosphere was palpable as we drove off again. We were angry with her for getting us lost; she now bore a grudge for what she obviously felt was an overly aggressive response from me. Without a road atlas, we were going to be in for a tense tour.

Sicily part one

It's surprising how little of the excitement in my life actually makes it onto the hallowed posts of STTR. For something that is meant, in part, to document this period of my existence, I rarely have the enthusiasm or inclination after an event to launch into grand detailed musings.

Sicily, however, was a trip we had been looking forward to since last December, and we crammed a hella lot into our week in the sun. I want to share that for posterity, and as such have decided to do a post about each day we were there - in order to break up the monotony of both writing and reading about it. So where to begin?

02/07/09

Day one in Sicily. The usual godawful start to proceedings with a 3am alarm call. Entertainment provided by drunken businessmen on the 4.09am Clapham-Gatwick service (who the hell can get leathered until that time and still make it into work the next day?!).

It's as true for me as it is for the majority of other travellers, in that nothing really beats that moment of arriving somewhere for the first time. I remember reading my Rough Guide to New Zealand way back in 2001, about the view from the plane as it arcs over the bay on final approach to Auckland - and then being almost beside myself with excitement as I looked through my Air New Zealand window to see it glistening beneath me.

Arrival in a strange land brings this amazing sense of the unknown, promises of adventure and the, well, foreign. I always stare out of the window of the plane as it taxis to the airport terminal, convincing myself that everything looks different to back home. No matter where it is - the vehicles are different, the airport workers are different, all is exotic and strange and not at all like home. In actual fact, of all man-made locations on earth, airports are probably the most stupefyingly generic - in fact they're actually designed to look the same so that people don't get disorientated or lost and end up being cavity-searched in the middle of the runway, rather than queueing for passport control.

No matter. Blessed with a friendly and altogether far-too-posh sounding Easyjet pilot on the way over ("for those of you on the left hand side of the plane, you may want to look out of your windows in a few moments as we pass Mont Blanc - I'll just drop the wing a little to give you a better look"), we landed in Palermo in the blazing heat of a July afternoon. A slow train journey into the city centre later (It's so Italian! The train is just sitting at a platform whilst that guy debates the necessity to buy a ticket with the inspector! Darling - the camera!!) and we'd arrived.

Palermo. The very name is enough to conjure up thoughts of bustling traffic, Il Padrino and shouty men doing business in medieval side streets.

We timed things to perfection, lugging our suitcases from central station, up Via Roma to our guest house - arriving a full 10 minutes after the start of the siesta. What to do? Faced with 5 hours to kill, 35C heat and some very heavy baggage, we did what any self-respecting Brit abroad would do. We found the nearest bar.

Dawdling over 2 beers by the Teatro Massimo allowed us to slowly get accustomed to the fact we were in Sicily at long last. After 5 months of abstinence, I succumbed far too bloody quickly to the thought of a cigarette but hey, I was trying to fit in. And something about smoking in that situation just seemed to make sense.



Having been politely offered the bill without asking (we were either drinking too much or too slowly, we couldn't work out which), we tottered back in the direction of our hostel. We were in for a shock.

Booking accomodation via Hostelworld.com, it appears, is no guarantee as to the quality of the establishment. We'd booked a double room with shared bathroom for a reasonable EUR 23.00 per person per night. All we wanted was it to be clean and for the air conditioning to work.

Imagine our surprise, then, as we walked up the stairs and into the foyer of the Palazzo Salvona. This ain't no hostel. This is plush.

The guest house is in one of the massive tenement apartments just off Via Roma, one of the main shopping streets in Palermo. It's been rennovated to an exceptionally high standard and our room, for which we had paid a relative pittance, had a huge bed, sofa, effective aircon and two huge windows (well, french doors really) which opened out onto balconies. Amazing. I highly recommend staying there if you're ever in Palermo - although ensure you get a room on the second floor, not the third (of which more later). The "shared bathroom" was next to our room. In fact, we had a his and hers as there were two. I expected a row of sinks and a couple of communal showers and toilet cubicles - these were palatial self-contained bathrooms. Go in, lock the door, and the whole place is your oyster. Have a little dance if you want to.

Following a recommendation from the receptionist, we found ourselves in Piazza Bellini later that evening, sitting outside a pizza restaurant and surrounded by Moorish architecture and neo-classical statues. A few Birra Morettis and a massive feed later, it seemed almost fitting when a busker turned up and started playing jazz on a trumpet. Less expected was when he launched into a lounge version of the theme from the Godfather. If the respectable men in suits at the next table took offence, they certainly didn't show it.

Ok Go

I think I've seen a video like this somewhere before, but to have a band doing a choreographed treadmill dance whilst singing their song.... genius.

Final Cut

I told J the other day that this 1998 Brit Flick (starting the 'Brit Pack' at the time - Jude, Sadie, Ray et al) is one of only two films I hadn't previously heard of that turned out to be really good. The other is Glory, a drama about the American Civil War with Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington that I subsequently found out had won Oscars and shit.

Anyway, I've bought Final Cut on DVD from Amazon and am about to watch it with her - I really hope it's not utter twaddle like the other Jude Law film which we saw recently and prompted the initial conversation. As a rule, if you have never heard of a film until it's on DVD, it means it's pish and has gone straight to the 2009 equivalent of the Woolies bargain bin.

My Blueberry Nights is one such film. 2 hours of our lives we can never reclaim. I may sue.

Back to normality

After what seems like a month, I returned to work today from annual leave. And woah, as if it wasn't a mere 2 hours before I'd started feeling like I never left. There were a few exciting developments though - not least the arrival of a Dyson AirBlade in the toilet. This represents a bit of a radical departure into "high quality fixtures and fittings" for the toilet in question, given that the bogs don't flush properly and the water from the taps sprays all over one's crotch should you stand too close to the sink. It resulted in me going to the toilet about 4 times today though just to try it out. All good for the hygiene in this Swine Flu conscious age, I suppose.

Graduation day

Portsmouth Guildhall. A suitably impressive location to congratulate one of the country's newest Masters of Geohazard Assessment.

God I'm knackered. Too much booze last night catching up with a long lost mate, too much touristy wandering about today and not enough sleep in between. Good, then, that I've got to get up at 6 in the morning to drive to Portsmouth.

It is good actually, given the reason for our trip to the seaside (and presence in our flat of a variety of family members) is the long awaited graduation of J from her Masters. I'll be welling up in my chair, if I'm not snoring and dribbling down the shoulder of the person next to me. Go J! Woot!

Back in Blighty

Woot! Am back from my travels. Now halfway through my hols, preparing for the imminent arrival of J's sister tomorrow and my mum on Wednesday - it's 'the graduation' on Friday.

Sicily was absolutely amazing - I beseech everyone who reads this to visit. I'm not skillful enough with the written word to convey everything we experienced, but I will try over the next few days. But then, it's a bit like the photos we took - whilst they give a flavour of what it was like, they don't compare to actually being there. Like everything in life - you've gotta actually do it to experience it.

Since getting back we've been at the itunes festival to see La Roux, who was quite good, although Dan Black, the support act, impressed us more. Funny - you could tell it was being filmed for telly - the whole thing was slicker than just about any gig I've been to before despite only being in front of a couple of hundred people. It's on ITV2 on Thursday if you fancy catching it.

Will be back presently to fill you in on endless photos and the type of chat you normally only get subjected to on a packed tube around the South Kensington area ("oh, you simply must visit this delightful farmhouse in the mountains en route to Catania - it's delightful"). Just to warn you - one of our hosts insisted on us having dinner with them (including olive oil and figs that they grew themselves) and invited their next door neighbours - a 70-something couple who spoke only traditional Sicilian. Yep, I'm gonna be that smug. Not intentionally, you understand. It just happened.

The red eye beckons

As does the linguine, Peroni and volcano.

Yep, back at that "should be asleep by now" moment - our carriage awaits on the 4.08am Clapham-Gatwick express.

This time tomorrow we will no doubt be sleeping fitfully in the heat of a Palermo night. Whether it's any less fitful than the recent days in London remains to be seen, although I believe they have discovered air conditioning in residential areas over there.

Will catch up on our return - would hazard a guess that you won't even notice I'm gone.

Ciao, etc.