Monday 25 June 2012

They’ve closed half of London!

London hosts the Olympics this summer and one might expect some disruption, but I wasn’t prepared for what they’ve done to St James' Park.

This is my regular route to work - Trafalgar Square, under Admiralty Arch, into the Mall and then left along Horse Guards Road around the top of St James’ Park into Birdcage Walk.

I got quite a shock on Tuesday when I found traffic being blocked from going through Admiralty Arch. There was a truck loaded with barriers in front of me, so I thought the passageway was closed to allow unloading. I got off my bike and walked/scooted through the arch, but they have installed barriers all along The Mall - it is completely closed (and enclosed). You can’t drive along it and you can’t cross it on foot.

It’s the same with Horse Guards Road, which is closed the full length and The Mall is shut from Admiralty Arch to the roundabout in front of Buckingham Palace.

Everything was shut, so I had to go up Pall Mall and cut through into Green Park (with a fair bit of bike carrying), walk through Green Park to Buckingham Palace and then back on my bike.

Next day, I went along Whitehall and then cut across by the Churchill War Rooms, along the pavement to Birdcage Walk. Basically, all traffic is being funnelled along Whitehall into Parliament Square, which is no fun at all on a bicycle!

St James Park is closed on two sides and the SE corner is completely full of tents and marquees. I presume all this is because they are staging beach volleyball in Horse Guards Parade, which sounded like great fun, but now seems absolutely stupid. Lord knows why they have to close so many roads and put a big chunk of St James Park over to a tent town. Why do they need so much stuff - it’s only beach volleyball.

They’re taking the fun out of London with all this fencing; there’s also talk of special limo lanes which will be banned of all traffic except Olympic athletes and officials. I hope there are none of those on my route to work.

Finally, the Olympic organisers are now advising people to stay away from Hyde Park Corner which is where they earlier said it would be a great place to watch the cycling and marathon - the two free events that all Londoners could see. The latest advice comes after the Jubilee weekend when weight of crowds caused problems at certain pinch-points, including Hyde Park Corner.

Saturday 23 June 2012

I don’t like my profile picture

At work, we’ve just upgraded to Outlook 2010 (yes, I know it’s 2012 now) and one of the new features is that you can upload a profile picture which is displayed on your e-mail message and also at the bottom of the viewing pane, so you can see images of all the people copied into message.

It’s caused a bit of a shock, suddenly seeing images of your colleagues, although some departments (including commercial) have not been included yet. Davina called IT to find out if we were going to be ‘done’ or whether we could upload our own images. They said that we would be done, but they were now busy dealing with complaints from people whose images had been uploaded, but who didn’t like them.

IT has uploaded the images from our works passes and they’re often taken up against a wall by some chap from facilities who might be changing a lightbulb or unblocking a sink the next minute (so not a trained photographer). No time to fix your make-up, sort out your hair or to have six pictures done so you can choose the one you like.

There have been some hilarious pictures which clearly no-one has worried too much about until now because they are never seen by anyone and just sit in your pocket or purse. I quite like my pass picture, which was taken about 10 years ago, so I still have colour in my hair and look much younger, while Davina is always properly made up and is one of those people who can strike a pose and never takes a bad photo.

I’m not sure what will happen now. This is supposed to be a security issue, so that we can trust that the e-mail comes from who they say it’s from. Cue Photoshopped security passes!


Footnote: there were so many complaints that IT had to take down all the photos from London (although Howden is still in place). Apparently it was the girls in Features who threatened to walk out if their photos were not taken down!

Thursday 21 June 2012

Striking doctors and teachers


Sam has been on strike today because the government is altering the terms of doctors pensions - they'll eventually have to work until they're 68 and the scheme is moving from a final-salary scheme to a career average scheme. It's the first time doctors have been on strike in almost 40 years.


Max was on strike for one day last year, but refused to join in and worked normally when a second strike was called this year. He said he didn't feel that the pension offer was that bad and he didn't want to leave his A-level group without lessons that day.


He'd had some flack from a couple of the more militant NUT members, including one guy who won't speak to him any more. I think he's a bit irked by their reaction, but there's no-one more passionate and unreasonable than a middle-class leftie. 


Tom was almost caught up in some industrial action last week when AP journalists were planning to strike, also about pensions. The dispute was called off at the last minute. Tom isn't in the uniion and, of course, hadn't had an opportunity to vote on action.


It seems all disputes these days are about pension provision, especially in the public sector, which is the last bastion of defined-benefit schemes, rather than money-purchase schemes. The disputes are all around detail - retirement age, revised contributions and benefits (career average v final salary benefit). The problem (although it's a nice problem) is that people are living longer and that pension funds can't provide the money to sustain 30 years retirement when, only a few years ago, most men lasted only about 10 years after retirement.


Private companies have to find the money, most can't so they've closed defined benefit schemes. Public sector schemes are often funded by taxpayers and only now has the government grasped the nettle and said that they are unaffordable.


As a taxpayer in the private sector, whose pension fund is £80 million in deficit, I don't have much sympathy and I don't see why I should pay for others to have a better pension scheme than I've been able to get (and mine is very good compared to what I'd get these days).


Pensions really have to be sorted out and the government has made only a small start. Expect thousands more disgruntled public sector workers in the next decade.


People of my age (or close by) have been hit by the state pension retirement age rising. My sister Margaret was able to retire at 60, but my wife Margaret (less than four years younger) has to wait until she's 64 and some months. That's saved the government (and cost me) around £25,000.


A friend of mine, in the police, was able to retire at 50 on 60 per cent of final salary. He'd started as a PC and finished as a deputy chief constable. He's a classic reason why final salary (rather than career-average) pensions are expensive. He might have spent 32 years climbing the ladder earning a fairly modest wage for the first 15 and really big money in the last five. Yet his pension is based on his final salary which rose steeply late in his career. To susteain a pension of £60,000, you'd need to have around £1.2 million in your pension pot. There's no way he's made that level of contibutions when for 20 years, he's been paying in around £2,000 per annum. The difference, in this case, is made up by the taxpayer of course.


If he had been on a career average, rather than a final salary, he'd have accrued a contribution each year based on his salary that year. It would have increased each year by inflation, but it wouldn't be anywhere near the final salary amount.


It's this change that's irking doctors and teachers, along with an increase in contributions and in the retirement age.


In the private sector, the issue is more about the closure of defined benefit schemes and the introduction of money-purchase schemes. In a defined benefit scheme, you get a guaranteed amount. It might be based on your final salary or on a career average, but you know what you're getting and that's a big advantage. The money to finance this comes from your contributions plus contributions from your employer. The pension fund is managed by trustees and benefits paid out of the fund. There's a liability on employers to make up a shortfall in the fund which, in our case, is pushing £80 million.


We're in deficit because the Labour government removed tax concessions, so investments earn less (there's less money to pay pensions and to accrue) and also because the stock market has performed so badly during the past 15 years, with virtually no growth. It's been a grim time and has come at the same time as life expectancy has increased dramatically.


Our final salary scheme closed three years ago and we're all on money-purchase schemes now. With a money-purchase scheme, you and your employer pay into a fund, but instead of going into a pot, it goes into a personal fund, which you build up over the years. You might pay five per cent of your salary and the employer match that, so you could have £3,000 per year going into your pot. It's invested and so will grow, but 30 years work on an average salary might see you with a pot of £150,000. When you retire, you can take part of the pot as a lump sum (25%) and the rest has to be used to purchase an annuity. An annuity paying £5,000 per annum and inex linked would cost you around £120,000. A lot of people in the private sector will be lucky to get that, so you can see why they are envious of public sector final salary schemes (or would be if they paused to think about it).


My own pension provision is made up of a final-salary scheme with Northcliffe, a final-salary scheme with PA and a money-purchase scheme with PA. It's a complicated business, pensions! In reality, I'll draw my final salary pension from two former employers and take my money-purchase pension as a lump sum.


The government could do a lot to make pensions more straightforward and easy to understand. People's eyes glaze over when you start talking about money-purchase schemes and annuities. People might be encouraged to save more, but the trouble with private pension provision is that you're not allowed to do what you want with your money. Some might be taken as a lump sum, but the rest has to be used to buy an annuity and they are shocking value for money. You could work to 65, spend £250,000 on an annuity and then die two years later. None of your dependents would get a penny.


I've preferred to put my spare money (and there's been precious little of that) into ISAs. I don't get a tax break when the money goes in, but it is tax free when it comes out. I've also got control of my money.

Tom and Hannah go continental


Big news this week is that Hannah, who works for the FSA (our financial industry regulator and watchdog) has been offered a secondment to the EU for a period of time. It will mean them moving to Brussels in September.


I'm excited for them, it's a great opportunity, although I'm not sure what work Tom will be able to get out there. It might be an opportunity for him to finish his book and nonsense poems.


I'm also a bit sad that it won't be as easy to see them as it has been. Tom and Hannah lived with us for a short period of time after they'd finished university and Hannah had completed her law certificate at Guildford; and I've seen a lot of them since they moved to London, especially since I've been working in London.


I've had a regular (pretty much weekly) trip to watch bike racing during the season and it's been really nice to see them so often and to share that interest with Tom. Now, I might even have to fork out for a Sky box and subscription!

Monday 18 June 2012

How Grand Prix racing has changed


It was a brilliant MotoGP round in Silverstone this weekend. Tom and I had talked about going, but we delayed a decision to see what the weather would be like and then I discovered that ticket prices were £80 each (without a grandstand seat).

The weather forecast wasn't too bad as it turned out, but the £80 ticket put us off.
In Moto2, Scott Redding rode a terrific race, including a real last-lap battle with Marc Marquez to take second place, Bradley Smith has his best finish of the season in seventh. In MotoGP, Cal Crutchlow had crashed in qualifying warm-up on Saturday and had broken his left ankle. There was a big doubt that he'd ride, but he did so and, after starting from the back of the grid having missed qualifying, he managed to come right through the field to take sixth place (one of the all-time gutsy rides).

Finally, Danny Kent was well in contention in Moto3 and finished sixth.

On Saturday morning, I'd been reading Classic Bike, catching up on some older editions that I'd not read. In the March edition, there was a very good article by Mike Nicks about grand prix racing in the 1960s, focusing on former racer Ollie Howe's experiences.

On MotoGP weekend, it made an interesting read and highlighted the contrasts between today's championship and 50 years ago. It's not only the name - MotoGP - that's changed.

This is the article in full. I scanned it, saved as a PDF and ran it through an OCR programme, so apologies if there are any odd characters:

Article by Mike Nicks from Classic Bike March 2012 edition

Ollie Howe in the 1960s - looking
like Max Biaggi's dad
"I’ll show you something," Ollie Howe says, beckoning me towards the door of his lounge. He leads the way into the kitchen and opens a cupboard. There, looking incongruous in this domestic environment, hangs a primitive set of leathers, black (in those days all leathers were black) with thin reinforcements at elbows and knees, no back protector, not even a maker's label inside the neck. A fading card inside a transparent plastic holder shows Ollie's blood group.

"They were made by a little old boy in Lancashire called Frank Barker, who made leathers and boots for most of the riders in the '50s and '60s," Ollie remembers. "He used to work in a room at the back of his house. I got those from him in 1965. They've got a few patches now."
How many? I ask. "Two, three, four - there's another little one there, six ... " Ollie stops counting at 14. He wore those leathers through five seasons of racing from 1965-69, on a brace of 350 and 500cc Manx Nortons, in what was known as the "Continental Circus".

In the 1950s and 1960s every motorcycle fan fantasised about joining the Continental Circus. There was no Easyjet-to-everywhere then, people endured damp holidays in Britain, food was meat and-two-veg and when you got home you ate tea, not dinner. So the image of a world where people frolicked in the sun in swimsuits, drank wine with exotic food and enjoyed the allegedly easy virtue of Continental women, while racing Manx Nortons, Matchless G50s and AJS 7Rs at the weekend, was the stuff of dreams.

"The Continental Circus was a hard core of 20 to 30 people who toured from country to country, circuit to circuit, racing, putting on a show," Ollie explains. "Precarious? Yes, in every sense of the word. There was no guarantee you would live another week, no guarantee you would get paid or even survive. But it was a group of young people doing what they loved best and having opportunities that 99 per cent of the population didn't have."

They were vagabonds; racing for food, living for the moment, out of contact with home for long periods (no e-mail, mobiles or Facebook then). It was the epitome of existential and hedonistic living: every petrol-head wanted to be there, but only a few had the guts to do it.

"In 1954 1 was doing my National Service in the RAF at Hullavington, in Wiltshire, close to Castle Combe circuit," Ollie says. "I had a 350cc BSA B31 and went to the track to take a look. Someone was going around on a Manx Norton, and my friend said, 'that's John Surtees.'
"Surtees was tyre-testing with Avon, and you could hear this Manx all around the circuit. He had a beautiful style, sweeping through the bends, and I thought, 'I'd like to do that.' I started racing on a BSA Gold Star in 1961 after I'd emigrated to Canada."

Back in England Ollie decided to join the Continental Circus. "Start money ranged from £25 a race, so with two bikes you had fifty quid. probably £100 once you got a bit known," he remembers. "Prize-money usually only went to the first three. but if you got into the first three you walked away with another £50 or £100."

Fifty pounds sounds a pitiful sum for maintaining two racing motorcycles and paying for travel and for two people if a rider's wife or girlfriend was with him to live on, So how did they manage? "Quite easily, actually," Ollie says. "We used to get free fuel at the bigger meetings when the oil companies turned up. And it was the same fuel that you ran in your van, so we would scrounge enough to get us to the next meeting. We had no accommodation expenses because we lived in the van or in a caravan, If you did the Grands Prix you could get free tyres from Dunlop, and a rear would last four or five meetings. So you can't relate it to today's racing at all."
Ollie remembers Mike Hailwood flinging his 500cc Honda into the trees in a downpour at the 1967 Finnish GP, while Agostini won on the MV, from John Hartle on a Matchless G50 and Billie Nelson (who was killed at Opatija in Yugoslavia in 1974) on a Manx Norton.

"Many riders pulled in because of the conditions, but I finished about tenth," Ollie says. "The organisers said 'you carried on' and paid me double. I probably made £100 that weekend."
Ollie also rode in hillclimbs on courses much longer than Britain's 1,000-yarders because they paid pretty good money.

"They were dangerous, because you only got two practice runs, yet Mont Ventoux
in France was about 14 miles long and had hundreds of corners.

"In my first year I travelled on my own, with everything packed into a Ford Thames van," he says. "In the second year I took my wife Bobbie (who died of cancer a few years ago), so I had a caravan. It was a 14-footer with just beds and a cooker. There was no shower, toilet or heating."

A Thames van was almost ubiquitous transport for racers in the 1960s. It had a 1700cc engine and just 5.1 square metres of space. Racers could four-wheel-drift corners at 70mph on public roads in a Thames loaded with bikes and kit in a way that would summon screaming sirens these days, but towing a caravan limited them to 50mph plods around Europe.

Tool- and die-maker Ollie worked in England in winter and fettled his bikes for a new season.
"Most people started the season at Le Mans in April and finished at the end of September, when you might get a couple of rides in Eastern-bloc countries," Ollie says. "We'd get a meeting just about every weekend, so that meant about 25 events in a year. At Easter we managed to do two meetings, one at Tubbergen (5.5 miles) in Holland and the other at Chimay (6.5 miles) in Belgium, four or five hours away.

"You'd practice in Holland on the Friday, dash to Chimay for practice and racing on
the Saturday, then dash back to Holland to race on the Sunday."

Travel arrangements could be Bohemian: "In 1967 we drove 1,500 miles from the
Freiburg hillclimb in Bavaria to the Finnish GP at Imatra the following weekend. We
'came by' a 45-gallon drum of petrol and put it in the back of one of the vans. We
left the women and the caravans in a campsite at Hanover, threw the bikes - three Manxes, a 250 Bultaco and an early 250cc Kawasaki racer - in the back of Eric Hinton's van, and drove to Kiel in north Germany, then got ferries to Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

"Eric was a clever man who had quick bikes, but he lived in a mess. He travelled with his wife and two children, and the van was packed with junk. Toys and tents were chucked in the back, and underneath it you'd find an engine or a box of spares."

Circus runners were always looking for ways to cut costs: "There were five of us in the van, but at ferry crossings two of us would bury ourselves under the junk so we only had to buy three tickets."

Ollie on the Manx Norton riding the Curva Grande
at Monza in the Italian Grand Prix
Ollie looks at a photo hanging on his wall of himself on his 500 Manx in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in 1967. "That was the Curva Grande, a long right-hander," he reflects. "You had to work on it to get through there flat-out at about 140mph on the 500. I used to ask myself, 'Will you have the balls to go round it chin-on-the-tank?' One year Rex Butcher was right behind me and Mike Hailwood rode round the outside of us on the Honda four, wriggling and shaking all over the place. That Honda was so hairy."

The circuits in those days were killers. Today Brno (3.36 miles) in the Czech Republic is like any other Grand Prix circuit - wide and safe. But in those days (8.66 miles), there was a section where there was a rock face on one side of the road and railings on the other.

"At the East German Grand Prix at the Sachsenring (now 2.28 miles, then 5.35), there was a row of bricks round the inside of some corners. We kept the wheels away from them because they were like cobblestones. At Opatija (3.7 miles) in Yugoslavia I was scraping my head on a rock face. At Spa (now 4.3 miles, then 8.76) there were telegraph poles protected by a straw bale where you were doing 150mph. At Assen (now 2.8 miles, then 4.79) in the Netherlands the road was cambered each side and lined by ditches. Every circuit was a mini Isle of Man."

At Imatra in Finland in 1967 Ollie was dicing with John Cooper, but went into a slow corner too fast. "I took the slip road, but it was a gravel track and they'd put a barrier across it, so I had to grab the front brake at 60mph, go down on the gravel, and slide under the barrier.

"At Mettet (4.99 miles) in Belgium in 1967 I was nearly involved in the biggest crash I ever experienced. I was third behind Tom Dickie, who was leading, and John Hartle, when I noticed a rider stationary on the outside of a long left-hander. I'm behind Hartle, looking at his back, and I felt a brush on my right leg. When I came around the next time there was chaos. A French rider on a Metisse had ploughed into the guy on the outside.

"This was 120mph stuff, the crash snapped the front end right off, and the bike flew into the crowd. A spectator was killed. There were only straw bales between the track and the crowd. The two riders were killed, and behind us an English rider, John Denty, careered into the carnage and died a week later.

"They slowed us, but never stopped the race, and when I finished there was blood all over my fairing. John Blanchard won that race, from Tom and John and me."

In his photos Ollie is wearing a Bell J-style helmet: "I never wore a pudding basin because they killed more people than they saved," he claims. "They had a had a band right round the rim, and that's what damaged the head. At Le Mans on the bottom-gear right-hander at the end of the Mulsanne Straight, a rider fell in front of me, banged his head in a simple fall and died. I remember at Wunstorf in Germany, a Dutch guy came off, banged his head, got up and staggered off the circuit, but died of head injuries afterwards."

Attitudes to safety were primitive in other ways too: "In Austria I was practising on my 500 Manx, and there was a Dutch guy on a 50cc bike in the same session. I even saw sidecars and solos out in the same session in Germany."

Given the dangers of the circuits, riders had to crash less in order to stay alive.

"I reckoned to fall off about three times year," Ollie says. Valentino Rossi suffered a personal record of 12 crashes in 2011 on his Ducati Desmosedici in MotoGP, but normally falls only four or five times per season. The Czech MotoGP rider Karel Abraham lobbed it an incredible 22 times last year, the Brit newcomer Cal
Crutchlow went down 12 times, and even world champion Casey Stoner stepped off on seven occasions.



"I was fortunate. The worst injury I had on the Continent was when I gashed my left leg in the 1968 Czech GP at Brno. It was raining and I was following Jack Findlay, who was about fifth. I'd been missing this manhole cover, but on one lap, I ran over it, hit the kerb and felt an incredible impact on my left leg. They laid me on a stretcher and took me into the hallway of a cottage. I was lying there dazed, with blood pouring out of my leg, until the end of the race. Bobbie went to the organiser to ask where I was, and he said 'he's kaput!' She said 'you mean he's dead?' The guy just repeated 'kaput!'

"An ambulance took me to the medical centre where they cleaned me up and stitched me. Bobbie went to collect the start money, but they said: 'No start money - he didn't finish the race.' Then Phil Read walked in and saw what was happening and five minutes later he handed Bobbie the money."

The Manx was uncomplicated compared to today's multi-adjustable, electronically-
monitored machines and the obsessional quest for the perfect set-up. The Manx was a single-cylinder racing workhorse, built to withstand a life on the road.

"Between races you would clean the bike - the Manx was notorious for chucking oil everywhere, check the tappet clearances and drain the oil. Every winter you would rebuild the engine or send it to a tuner such as Ray Petty. I used to build my own engines, but I gave the crankshaft to Ray to replace the big end. Then halfway through the year you would lift the head and check everything was okay.

"One year at Le Mans a valve dropped on my 350 and mangled the head and valve seats. I thought the engine was wrecked, but at big German meetings they used to have these things, which was a bus turned into a workshop with lathes and milling machines. At the Nurburgring they cleaned up the damage on the head, replaced the valve seats and valves, and Eric Hinton rebuilt the shaft-and-bevel camshaft drive."

Riders weren't cosseted with a rev-limiter, so they were responsible for preserving their bike's engine during a race. "The 500 Manx was red-lined at 7,200rpm and the 350 at 8,500rpm," Ollie says. "When you had the opportunity you took a quick glance at the rev counter, but most of the time you knew what it was revving at by the sound of it.

"If you over-revved the engine you could destroy it, depending on how quickly you
got the clutch in. The valve drops in and immediately breaks the head and the valve
seats, and can damage the cam box and piston and possibly the barrel, because you've got a valve head rattling around inside the barrel. You took things like valves, pistons, big ends and main bearings on the road - anything that would wear out. But I never changed the Girling rear shocks on my 500 Manx in six years! Everyone had the same Dunlop triangular tyres, and you used the same ones in the wet or the dry. That was the same for the works bikes, including the MVs and Hondas.

"The Manx was a very cammy motor - it didn't like anything below 5,000rpm. Hairpin bends were a nightmare because you had to slip the clutch a lot, and when it bit on a wet track it could kick the back wheel away from you. But it was basically a good handling bike and you couldn't do a lot to it anyway to improve it."

Ollie is now 76 and lives with his wife Tressa in Banbury, Oxfordshire.

Having just come back from the Isle of Man, I've had a taste of what racing on road circuits like Spa or Assen would have been like back then and I can remember watching motorcycle racing in the late 1960s when I was a 14/15-year-old, desperate for a motorcycle of my own and riding my racing bike to Oulton Park to watch the racing.

I don't remember Ollie Howe, but names of his contempories - John 'Moon Eyes' Cooper, Phil Read, Mike Hailwood, Bill Ivy - were familiar. Hailwood and Read were most revered of all. We watched at Old Hall Corner at Oulton Park, sitting on the bank with the near 90-degree corner in front of us. We chose to watch there and anyone crashing would plough into the tyre wall and bank in front of us. We felt no sense of danger. Indeed, it was the ability to watch racing at such close quarters, to be able to smell the Castrol R and to feel the impact of the noise of a Manx Norton on your chest cavity, that so impressed me.

Paddocks were always open and you could wander round and watch the bikes being prepared. At bigger meetings - the later Anglo-American series where they raced Triumph Rocket 3 machines - for example, you'd have to buy a paddock pass, but you still had freedom to roam.

Later still, when Tom and I started watching bike racing, the fans were further back, fences started to appear and everything became a little more arm's length. At some tracks - the Bus Stop at Mallory, for example - you could still get very close, but that was the exception rather than the rule.

I think that's why I enjoyed the TT so much. You could get close to the racing. You could walk around the paddock without a pass and see (even talk to) the riders. It's an anachronism in more ways than one, but long may that continue.



See other posts:









Sunday 17 June 2012

The Way Through the Woods

Tom has been doing quite a lot of work in his garden, which is very overgrown and has been for years. He's created a small patio by the back door and a path at the edge of the garden leading to some steps. 


The garden slopes very steeply and Tom found some old steps, which he's restored and was going to create a new level and then put more steps right down to the bottom.


By happy fortune, he's been working in the garden this weekend and has found a set of old steps (pictured below) which had been completely covered by a layer of soil and ivy. He's cleared the soil and there's quite a staircase uncovered.


The steps look really old and brought to mind a poem by Rudyard Kipling:


The Way through the Woods

THEY shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees. 

It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.


Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.



Old steps uncovered in Tom's garden and 
(below) how it used to look






Saturday 16 June 2012

Mad Sunday T-shirts banned

The Mad Sunday T-shirt
I feel a bit guilty this morning …

Tom told Faz about me grumbling that the Isle of Man Tourist Board was selling Mad Sunday T-shirts and he ran the story in MCN.

The IoM government has now decided to withdraw the T-shirts from sale. According to Faz they denied they were irresponsible but said the message could be “misinterpreted”.

The last thing I was to do is cast myself as a Mary Whitehouse for bikers and, to be honest, I wouldn’t think a T-shirt has a massive effect on your riding style.

However, the whole concept of a skull-headed creature riding a motorcycle at speed, surrounded by flames, is (frankly) very strange. “Mad Sunday - Ride to Live” was the slogan. I’d prefer a map of the TT course, the date and a slogan saying: “I rode the TT course”.

Why a skull-headed motorcyclist and why the flames? Is he leaking petrol, has his engine overheated and caught fire. I guess it’s a development of the whole hell’s angel theme.

But, in general, motorcycle T-shirts are often ill-thought or downright incongruous. When we left the Queen’s Arms in Pimlico the other lunch time, there was a chap coming in and we met at the door. He had a Mad Dog T-shirt on (from the Ogri range) and I beckoned him to come through. “No, after you,” he said most politely and held the door open for us. Not much very mad about that dog!

Someone (can’t remember who) bought me a T-shirt that said “I fear you have mistaken me for someone who gives a shit”. I only ever wore it as a vest.

My all-time favourite was the rough-looking chap at Snetterton one year, who has a shirt with the message: “cover me in honey and throw me to the lesbians.” I just don’t think people think things through. Presumably, this was intended to convey some sexual fantasy about being licked all over by a pack of sexy women. It completely overlooks the fact that:

  • Honey is very sticky - it would be most uncomfortable.
  • Licking would not be a very efficient way of cleaning it off - much better to shower.
  • Lesbians, being lesbians, would not want to lick a man (even for the free honey).
  • The lesbians I know tend to be quite chunky, have cropped hair and wear dungarees. You wouldn’t want them licking you, even to get rid of the sticky honey.

Wednesday 13 June 2012

Pedalling my Boris bike

Bikes lined up in their docks
London Mayor Boris Johnson, champion
of the cycle hire scheme
I have joined the Boris bikers. I tried them once or twice last summer, when I bought day membership on my credit card and it was a somewhat mixed experience. The main problems were a lack of bikes where and when I needed them and then problems with the pay stations not taking my credit card. It was also a faff having to enter my card and get a code every time I wanted to use one.
Availability seems to have improved quite a lot and the tube has been really crowded (and likely to be more so during the Olympics in a few weeks time).
Anyway, I decided to buy annual membership, which costs £45 plus £3 for a key, which is actually an electronic stick which has your details encoded. When you want to use a bike, you push your key in, wait until the light goes green on the docking station and you can then withdraw your key and pull out the bike. You can use the bike for up to half an hour without paying anything more and when you’ve finished you just push the bike into an empty docking station and that’s it.
If you use the bike for longer, I think it costs £1 for the next half hour. It’s designed for short journeys around town and is perfect for that. There’s also a website where you can check which journeys you’ve made and see the times taken.
So I’ve been using the bikes between King’s Cross and Victoria and it takes me around 20 minutes to cycle the three miles, so I don’t pay anything extra. With a tube journey costing me £2 each way, I only have to make 24 journeys and the annual membership has been paid for. I have to say that I rather enjoy the journey and, despite the really wet start to summer, I’ve made good use of the bikes with probably around 10 trips already clocked up (the scheme has just recorded 11 million journeys in the two years it’s been running).
I certainly feel as if I’ve done some exercise by the time I get to Victoria and once I’ve built up some stamina, I’ll start to use the bikes both ways (I’m a bit worried about missing my train in the evening).
The bays at King’s Cross are quite busy, but in the morning there are half a dozen men bringing new bikes out of a nearby garage and pushing them into bays. In the evening, the reverse happens, with a similar number pulling bikes out and taking them into store, so there’s somewhere for you to dock.
I have had a few minor issues. The bells never seem to work and with pedestrians apt to just wander in front of you, I’m always ready to shout “look out”. The other common fault is that the gears are often a bit dodgy. They don’t go in smoothly and often jump out of top gear and down a cog. The bikes are quite low geared, so if it does that, you can suddenly find yourself pedalling furiously.
A week or so ago, I jumped on a bike at King’s Cross and was soon puffing like a train. I couldn’t work out what the problem was, then a chap came past me on another bike and told me my tyre was almost flat. I docked it in Cartwright Gardens and pressed the fault button so no-one else would use it. However, you can’t dock a bike and immediately get another out, so I was stranded on two feet. I walked across Russell Square and got on another bike from the bay by the British Museum. I’ve made a point of checking the tyre pressure before undocking the bike since then.
This Monday, my bike had a badly buckled front wheel which gave it a bit of wobbly handling, but nothing to worry about really. Considering the hammering and abuse the bikes must get, it’s surprising they’re not in a worse condition.
My journey goes through the back streets alongside Euston Road. I start in Belgrove Street, then cut across to Argyle Street, Whidborne Street, Judd Street, Leigh Street and Marchmont Street. It sounds complicated and there are a lot of one-way streets and dead ends, which means that there are not many cars. In the one-way sections, there are bike lanes, so it works quite well. I go through Russell Square and round the side of the British Museum, then across Bloomsbury and down into High Holborn. I then turn left into Shaftesbury Avenue and then sharp left again down St Martin’s Lane past The Coliseum and into Trafalgar Square in front of St Martin’s in the Field. I then go through Admiralty Arch into the Mall and turn left into Horse Guards Road and Birdcage Walk around the perimeter of St James’ Park, into Buckingham Gate and then Bressenden Place to park up alongside Westminster Cathedral (not Abbey) which is the Catholic cathedral.
There’s not too much traffic except in Russell Square and Trafalgar Square and it can get a bit busy in Bressenden Place. It’s really nice being in the open and cycling through Bloomsbury and Covent Garden is a pleasure. On a couple of days, I’ve cycled past a troop of cavalry horses returning along Birdcage Walk from their morning exercise to Wellington Barracks. There’s one rider holding two loose horses. They hold up all the cars as they queue up to go through the barracks gates, but I can cycle past quite easily.

Thursday 7 June 2012

Taking in the TT


Rick Broadbent of The Times says: "The most astonishing events I've witnessed as a sports writer are Usain Bolt's head-wrecking 100 metres in 2008, Liverpool's impossible come-back against AC Milan in 2005 and the TT every year."

Tom and I have been talking about going to the Isle of Man TT races for years, well this year, we did it. Just got back a couple of nights ago and it's the usual early start for work this morning, but this is my TT diary from the five-day trip.

This was the weekend of the Queen's diamond jubilee and so we had a later Whitsuntide bank holiday (or spring bank holiday as it is now called) plus an extra bank holiday for the jubilee. It meant I could book one day off work and, combined with weekend and bank holidays, see two race days, Mad Sunday, a practice day and have a day spare in case any racing was postponed.
We flew across from Gatwick on Thursday night, courtesy of FlyBe, one of the budget airlines. It flies from Gatwick to Ronaldsway, about 10 miles south of Douglas, the main town on the Isle of Man. It's quite a small plane, holding about 100 people and with twin turbo-prop engines, rather than jets. It takes about an hour, so we were landing in the Isle of Man at about 8.45pm and then had a half-hour taxi ride to our first hotel, the Empress.
It's on the seafront at Douglas and was quite a nice place. There were lots of steps up and down the place as part of the design and people obviously fell over a lot because there were "Mind the Step" signs everywhere. We dumped our bags and headed down to the other end of the seafront to get some food and a drink in the Bushy's beer tent. There are bikes everywhere during TT fortnight, all types and from all over Europe. Lots of French and Germans, plenty of Italians, but also Fins, Spanish, Hungarians and Dutch.
Douglas seafront has a fairground and a couple of beer tents from the two breweries on the island - Bushy's and Okells. We had a pizza in an OK Italian place on the seafront and then crosssed over to the Bushy's tent for a couple of pints before bed. It was fairly busy, but a pleasant night so people were able to stand outside and watch the bikes going up and down the promenade.
Next day was the last day of practice and qualifying and that started at around 6.15pm. We had decided to watch from Quarterbridge, the first sharp corner on the track and one that comes at the bottom of a fairly steep hill (there are a lot of hills in Douglas, never mind the whole island). 
The Isle of Man TT is an odd form of racing, called a time trial, although TT stands for Tourist Trophy, not time trial. For safety reasons, the bikes don't all start together where the first one past the line wins like a normal race - it would be carnage on these roads - so riders start at 10-second intervals and each one is timed as they go round. There are commentary points, but it is useful to have a radio, so you can tune in to the commentary and know who is where on the track and in the standings. Tom was going to bring his radio but had forgotten to pack it so first job was to try to find a cheap radio. One shop had them for £2.50, but I couldn't get any stations either on FM or MW when I tried it. The woman in the shop assured me they were very good and said her husband used one. I thought it was worth a try at £2.50 and even felt I was ripping her off when she threw in four batteries. Outside, the radio didn't seem any better - hum-hum.
Next stop was a walk up to the pits and paddock. They don't race along the seafront, but on the main road just half a mile up from the front and when I say up, I mean up a steep hill. We walked through St Ninian's churchyard, a popular viewing point, and then along to the pits. It's a very relaxed atmosphere at the TT. Riders and mechanics just wander about and you can look at and into their worshops and see the bikes being prepared. We saw John McGuinness and Karl Harris and also had a look into a few workshops including Guy Martin's. 
Mechanics working on Guy Martin's bikes
Manx Radio also had a stand there, so I popped in to check what frequencies they were broadcasting on. I tuned the radio again and bingo! - it had great reception and a really strong speaker.
Tom knew that his old MCN colleague Adam Child (Chad) was racing in the lightweight class. It was his first TT and he'd already done a 100mph lap, which was pretty impressive. We stumbled across his workshop by accident but it was interesting to have a chat with him about the racing. He was worried about qualifying and had to be within 15 per cent of the leader's best lap time and to have completed eight laps. His bike, like all the other lightweights, was a 650cc twin and you're allowed to change anything you like on bike or engine except the crankshaft. Most riders use parallel twins from the Kawasaki Versys street bike and Chad was using that engine. The chassis was made up of various bits from other sports bikes and his brother (who works in a breaker's yard) was his mechanic. His bike makes about 80bhp and would reach 140mph. He said the faster ones has some really trick parts and would get 15mph more than that. Chad is flat out around long sections of the course and can't afford to shut off or he'll lose precious speed that he'll never get back.
Chad's lightweight racer in his pit
He was really worried about qualifying as the session the night before had been red-flagged when a rider crashed and broke an arm badly. Chad's 100mph lap would qualify on speed as the best guys were doing 115mph, but he needed one extra lap to complete the eight needed.
It was a lovely day, warm and sunny and, mid afternoon, we decided to get some food for the evening session, so it was a trudge back to town. Bushey's beer tent was a magnet and we had a happy hour in there watching the bikes go by. We tried a new beer called Shuttleworth Snap which was immediately declared the beer to drink. Like meeting the perfect girl, we both knew it was the one.
In the Bushy's beer tent
We had to pull ourselves away to walk up to Quarterbridge and it seemed like a long haul on a hot day. Because the roads were closing, we had to take a route off the main road and circle around from the back. Quarterbridge is a 90-degree bend around two mini-roundabouts if you're on the road, but one quick line clipping the apex if you're racing. It's called Quarterbridge because there's a bridge and four roads converge there. We'd call it Broken Cross in Cheshire. It's a tricky corner because riders come down a hill and have to brake hard to take the tight bend. It's the first tight corner on the circuit and the first hard-braking area. Bikes are also unsettled by the changing camber riding through a junction where there are four roads joining and two mini-roundabouts. People like to watch from there because there's a steep grass bank and also a pub.
We sat on the bank, ate our sandwiches and drank some wine. We'd got two plastic glasses full of wine, sealed with a plastic top (which I'd carried carefully from Douglas) plus a bottle of wine with a screw top. It was really hot in the evening sun and I was glad I'd bought some sun-screen.
First out were the sidecars and they really take the bend in a series of bites. The TT is a bit of a one-off and sidecar racers are a one-off in a one-off, whatever that is. I gave Tom a little lecture about the dynamics of riding (or driving) a motorcycle and sidecar, which I think he enjoyed. Next up were the 600 Supersport machines and the Lightweights. We saw Chad go through, nice line and right on it, but a little while later the red flag came out. One of the Supersports had an engine blow and had spread oil on the track. There wasn't time to clean it up and get a full session in so they packed it in for the night. Poor Chad still hadn't got in his crucial eighth lap.
Both Tom and I were pretty footsore. I think we must have trudged 10 miles that day, much of it up and down hills.
Saturday was the first race day, where we'd see the Superbike TT and the first Sidecar TT. Racing starts at 11am, but we needed an early start because we were changing accommodation. We had booked things quite late and couldn't get a hotel for the whole five nights, so we were two days at The Empress and two days at The Palace, with nowhere to stay on Saturday night. In the last week, Tom had been able to get us a place with a chap who was trying out the Homeshare scheme for the first time. This is where locals rent out spare rooms through the IOM tourist board. We'd had to pay £200 for the one night, but it was better than sleeping rough, especially as it rained heavily all night. Anyway, he'd agreed to pick us up from The Empress in his car and get us sorted out before racing started. His house was 15 minutes walk from the bottom of Bray Hill. He was a nice chap and had a nice house, so I think we fell on our feet.
Bray Hill is a residential road coming out of Douglas, it's a long downhill stretch with ever such a gentle bend with crossroads at bottom, before the road goes uphill again over Ago's leap and down again, braking hard for Quarterbridge. We were watching from the crossroads, literally a few feet from the bikes. There was a little stand made out of scaffolding in a front garden, but we were standing leaning on the railings they'd used to close the road. John McGuinness was first off. From our position, we were able to hear the commentator say he'd started and we heard the noise of the start over the tannoy, then we heard it again as the sound travelled down towards us, followed by the bike rapidly accelerating up through the gears. Within seconds the rider is in view, coming down the hill with the bike's bars flapping over the bumpy surface. He comes past us perhaps 10 feet away doing 150mph and, when he crosses the camber at the crossroads and hits the bottom of the hill, the suspension is fully compressed and there's a crash and blast of road dust in the kerb as he uses all the road. McGuinness starts like a rocket, you can't believe the speed - there's almost a violence about it as he fights to keep the bike under control. Before you have time to get your breath, another rider is coming down. He's not as fast as McGuinness, clearly getting the measure of things, then Guy Martin comes down absolutely flat out. How the hell does he keep that up for 37 miles x six laps? 
After a little while, all the riders have started and it's quiet and you can listen to their progress around the course. Within minutes of the last ones passing - they are doing a mile every 30 seconds on average - the first ones are back again. This time it's more spread out and the race starts to take shape. It's a battle between McGuinness and Australian Cameron Donald with Guy Martin being dropped in third. McGuinness controls the race, every time Donald gets close, he pulls it out again and the final pit stop is brilliantly fast, putting McGuinness in a commanding position that he never lets slip. Guy Martin can't get his rear tyre off due to a problem with the wheel spindle and has to do four laps on it rather than two. It's McGuinness' 18th TT win and it was a privilege to watch him do it. We're pleased he's won, but the TT is not like any other race. No matter how partisan the fan, they cheer the winner. If you win the TT - you deserve to!
After the Superbike race, we walked up to St Ninian's Church where there were some refreshments and toilets and we watched the sidecars for a while, then walked up to the return lane and stood there as they came in. Sidecar race was won by Dave Molyneux and Patrick Farrance - a polular win as Molyneux is a Manxman. He looks so happy. Some of the pairs are so drained they seem to struggle to ride back to the pits, others are pumped and high-fiving the crowd as they ride past. I see more than one pairing give each other a gentle pat as they head back, not a celebration, more relief and gratitude.
There was time for a pint of Okells (nice, but not as good as a Shuttleworth Snap) and then we walked back down to Bray Hill to see the evening practice session. This was Chad's chance to get his eighth lap and we saw him go through, so fingers crossed.
We really were tired today after being on our feet all day. It was a bit of a trudge back to the house, but Steve (our landlord) and his partner Plum (not sure if that was her name or his pet name for her) were preparing their tea. He made us a gin and tonic, which was very nice and then suggested some places to eat. We were ready as I'd had nothing but a slice of cake since breakfast. More walking, but we found an Italian place on the front that was busy, but we were able to have a beer upstairs until a table came free and then we were taken briskly down.
Dinner wasn't rushed and I had a nice chicken risotto, but we were attended to immediately and as soon as we got up to pay, there was a waiter clearing our table and when he turned round to leave, there were two people sitting there ordering their food. Our after-dinner plan was a visit to the Bushy's beer tent, but it was rammed and not a great deal of fun. It was cold and a little blowy, so we couldn't stand outside and drink in comfort, also the Miss Wet T-Shirt competition was due to start right next to where we were standing, so we left and walked down to the Villa marina where there was a stunt show being prepared.
It was a triumph of hype over substance with the commentator Christian laying on the Californian cool. The warm up act was a team of supermoto riders making a lot of noise and pulling a lot of wheelies, but the hilarious idea of a scooter/supermoto relay race didn't work at any level. I knew what was coming because I'd been stood next to the chap who was running the team at Bray Hill earlier in the day and he'd told me all about the show - at great length! Next up was a trials rider doing the usual stuff (technical and not much of a spectacle) and a stunt rider pulling the usual wheelies and stoppies. All the time Christian was giving it large:
"Wow man that is rad.
"Awesome
"Sick - that's so sick, it's hepatitis B."
There were three dolly girls in short pleated skirts, but their quilted anoraks rather spoiled the sex-bomb image. One even had her hood up, but I can't blame her - so did I.
The big event of the night was the Moto X stunt team. A couple of Frenchmen that got the full build up from Christian.
"Man these guys are crazy, they just love to jump moto-sickles, they are only happy when they're 60 feet off the ground."
Well it turned out that they weren't crazy at all. After one test jump, they said the sidewind was too strong and they couldn't do it. Christian did his best to spin up the danger, the risk, the disasters that could befall and how much stronger the winds were just 30 feet off the ground.
That just left the stunt rider pulling some "rad" (which I've just realised is short for "radical") wheelies so we wandered off for another beer. The tents were too full and the prospect of meeting Miss Bushy's Wet T-Shirt, Saturday, June 2nd, was too awful so we steered clear and wandered back towards the guest house finding an Okells' pub called The Prospect a little way up the hill. It was warm, dry and they served beer out of glass glasses. What's more, I managed to find a seat near a TV screen and they were showing highlights from the BSB races at Snetterton. We'd watched those earlier in the week, but it was good to see the highlights again. We were looking out for somewhere to watch the MotoGP on the Sunday, so we thought this might be a good bet.
Back at the house, Steve and Plum had retired, so we crept into our rooms and settled down for the night. As soon as I was in bed, the rain which had been light and blowing, turned into a downpour lashing against the window. I was pleased that we'd managed to find a roof over our heads for this night. Plan B, which was a tent on a campsite at the other side of the island, didn't look at all attractive.
Mad Sunday was stormy Sunday. This is
 the prom at Douglas
Sunday is called Mad Sunday because everyone who comes on a motorcycle rides the TT course. It's a day of traffic accidents and death where people with little or no idea how to ride a motorcycle, get on machines which are much too powerful for their skills and do their best to kill themselves and anyone else unfortunate enough to be nearby. Mad Sunday is well named. The Isle of Man authorities made the TT course one way a few years back after some German riders got too excited and forgot which country they were in. Riding on the wrong side of the road takes even Mad Sunday antics to unacceptable levels. Well, Mad Sunday morning wasn't mad at all, it was soaking wet, blowing a gale and the Germans were being uncharacteristically wimpish. We got up quite late, being in no hurry to vacate our accommodation and found Steve pottering about. He made us a cup of tea and had recorded the TT action from ITV4 the previous night, so we were able to watch the Superbike race from the day before. He then cooked us a very nice breakfast before running us down to The Palace hotel where we were staying for the last two nights.
Steve works in banking for Lloyds and Plum was either a radiographer or worked in X-ray at the hospital. He was probably pushing 40, she was around 30. They were a nice couple and made us very welcome. It was like staying with friends rather than being a couple of lodgers.
The Palace's claim to fame was that it was a casino. Back in the 1950s, the Isle of Man had more relaxed gambling laws than the rest of the UK and had done very well - Las Vegas style, if not scale - by catering for tourists who wanted to experience the thrill of a casino. Nowadays, there are plenty of casinos on the mainland, so there's no need to fly or sail to Douglas. There's still a casino, but glamorous it isn't and a good chunk of it has been converted to a health club, which doesn't look as if it's doing much better than the casino.
In any event, we had a nice room (a suite with a sea-view because that's all that we could book) but we couldn't check in on Sunday morning because we were too early. The plan was to find a pub and watch the MotoGP from Catalunya, but Tom had forgotten to leave the key at Steve's and so we had to walk back to deliver that, which we did via a stormy promenade where the waves were crashing over the railings. We then tried to go to The Prospect (last night's plan) and bumped into a former colleague of Tom's from MCN - the editor's secretary, who had been made redundant, but who now seemed to be doing quite well in bike PR and working for a website called bikesportnews.com. She was really pleased to see him and we had a nice chat walking up the shopping street behind the promenade.
The Prospect was shut and so we walked back into town and found a rough-looking pub that was actually rather nice. In one room, we managed to get the TV turned up and arrange ourselves in rows - bar stools, table stools and sitting on the floor - so we had tiered seating to watch the racing. We had the comfort of table stools in the middle row and it was a good race, won by Jorge Lorenzo. Nice to watch it among so many fellow enthusiasts.
The question was: where would we watch the TT racing from tomorrow? Tom was keen to try Hillberry and Chad had said that the riders were so close there that they could high five the crowd as they rode past (well they could if they weren't doing 150mph and just about to tip into a gentle right-hander). I'd bought a large-scale map of the island and so we set off to walk to Hillberry and perhaps Creg Na Barr to scope it out for the morning. It's just over three miles from Douglas to Hillberry and it looked a good spot, with a small stand, chairs on the raised verge and some tea shops and a toilet. We started out for Creg, but about half a mile up the road, we could see the route  ahead and there didn't seem much point going on at that stage and just adding five miles to a seven-mile walk. We decided to watch the race from Hillberry and resolved to set off before 8am to get there for 9am. If Hillberry was busy, we'd hike on to Creg. On the way back, we got ourselves a picnic for next day - cheddar cheese, crackers, strawberries, a bottle of Burgundy (with a screw top) and some Pringles. We got it from SureSave, the IOM equivalent of Tesco. It was billed as the supermarket where the riders do their shopping and there were pictures outside of John McGuinness with a shopping trolley. It was quite a good supermarket, but had some funny ideas. Some of the produce was unbranded, some was from Waitrose and the freezer section was from Iceland. Tom liked the idea, he said the middle class could sneak some frozen crispy pancakes into their bag and the chavs might accidentally buy houmous and find they liked it. I guess on a place as small as the Isle of Man, there's no room for class division.
Back in town we were both quite hungry and decided to try an Indian meal. Tom likes those as they always have plenty of vegetarian choices. We got an OK place - Tom said his meal was lovely, but mine sat a bit heavy and I was ready to stretch my legs to help it go down. As we were walking along the promenade past The Sefton, Tom's ex-colleague spotted us and knocked on the window to come in. She was with her partner, Gary Pinchin, who is MCN's BSB reporter and who was there covering the TT. We had a nice chat and picked up some inside info. Chad had suffered a bit of a scary lap in that final practice. Just after he'd gone past us at Bray Hill on the previous day, his fuel filler had sprung up and he'd been showered with petrol. He'd panicked (not surprisingly) and had almost crashed at Quarterbridge. He'd managed to pull over, get the filler back on, wipe his visor and complete the lap. He managed a 90mph lap, which wasn't very fast, but it did count as a lap and therefore completed his eight laps to qualify.
We also heard that Michael Rutter had made an uncharacteristic mistake at the start of the Superbike TT on Saturday. He'd been on the start line thinking he was in first gear, but the bike was actually in neutral. When he dumped the clutch, it didn't go anywhere. He realised his mistake, but instead of letting the revs die down and then putting it into gear, he slammed it into first while it was still revving. Gary said you could hear the gearbox disintegrating. Rutter did get going, but he pulled in after a lap.
After that, we stopped off at the Okells' beer tent and had a pint there while we watched the evening's stunt show. Christian was in "rad" form, the dolly girls looked as cold as the previous night and there was a new host who we'd not heard much from the night before, called Sally Stardust. She was basically there to agree with everything Christian said - agree enthusiastically. The best part of the evening was when she started to do some audience interviews and kept picking foreigners who couldn't speak English. We had the Supermoto/Scooter relay, except that we almost didn't because someone called Kevin Blackstock had the keys for one of the scooters in his pocket - what a shower! Kevin was located after several appeals and a 10-minute delay, but guess what - it was again too windy for the stunt guys to perform.
The view up the course from Hillberry
Sunday had been a bit wet and stormy, but Monday dawned bright and sunny. I couldn't face much breakfast (that Indian was still lying on my stomach) but we got off in good time and were soon at Hillberry. There was plenty of room, so Tom paid for seats and I bought some tea. We were in place just after 9am and were expecting racing to start at 11am, but there was an announcement of the radio that a motorcyclist had been killed on the course and the police had closed the road for investigations to take place. Racing was suspended indefinitely.
The biker would possibly have been one of many we saw setting off for an early lap of the course in the morning sunshine. A lot of people might have tried to get a quick lap in before the roads were closed for the races, having been rained off on Mad Sunday. We heard later from Andy Downes of MCN that he'd overtaken a car on double white lines and been hit a glancing blow by a car coming in the opposite direction. He'd lost control and had gone under a BMW 4x4 coming in the opposite direction. He'd died instantly.
Enjoying a glass of Burgundy trackside
That was the fifth rider to be killed on the roads in a week. We'd seen plenty of examples of careless and stupid riding. On the way to Hillberry, we'd seen a rider having to brake so hard he pulled a stoppie having ridden out in front of another bike at a roundabout. Earlier, we'd seen someone try to do a burn-out and almost ride into a line a moving traffic when the rear tyre gripped instead of spinning. Bikers need encouragement to be sensible, they need training, but they're often just encouraged to be stupid. 
A good example is the T-shirt pictured here. It's a commemorative T-shirt for Mad Sunday 2012 and it clearly doesn't depict sensible riding. It's not a good message at any level, but this T-shirt is for sale at the Isle of Man tourist information office. Now, I might be labelled a killjoy, but that almost seems like official government endorsement to ride like a complete maniac.
Not the best road safety message is it?
Racing got underway at around 1pm and we saw Bruce Anstey win the first Supersport TT of the week and John McGuinness win the Superstock. The Supersport was the second closest result in TT history with just 0.77 of a second separating first and second. McGuinness' win was his 19th TT win.
The roads didn't open again until about 8.30pm, so we had a bit of a frustrating time stood waiting so we could walk back to Douglas. We got back in time for a drink with two MCN lads - Andy Downes and Steve Farrell (Faz).
That was our racing done. We had Tuesday as a spare day in case the weather interfered and racing was postponed. As it happened, race days had good weather and the storms came in between. And Tuesday was another wet day. We thought it might be nice to get a coach trip around the course, so we got one of the horse-dawn trams along the promenade to the tourist information centre which is near the ferry dock. The trams are a tourist feature and are pulled by a single horse. All the horses have name tags and we'd been playing a game of horse-tram spotting all week. The horse pulls a tram with 30 people on board pretty easily and trots along at a fair old lick.
We couldn't get a coach trip, apparently they don't do them during TT fortnight, which seems a little silly, but then the road does get closed quite a lot so perhaps it does make sense. We had a wander around the harbour in the rain and then spent a couple of hours in the museum (which was doing a roaring trade). Guess where we spent our last hour on the island - Bushy's beer tent, of course.
I'd arranged a ride back to the airport with Dave, our friendly taxi driver from the journey in. He told us a really good story:
He lives in a house in Peel, overlooking the sea. One summer morning, he couldn't sleep and got up and looked out of the window. There in the bay was a submarine on the surface. He'd never seen one before and so was quite surprised. As he watched, he saw a rubber dingy launched and sail towards the harbour. A little while later, it returned and was brought back on board and the submarine sailed away on the surface.
He was at the yacht club that evening and was telling his mates the story. They were pulling his leg and saying he'd had a dream, but the harbourmaster had been listening and afterwards, he came up to him and asked him if he had seen a submarine because, if he had and it had landed a boat, Peel harbour was entitled to a docking fee and for a submarine, it would be a substantial sum. Dave said he definitely had and he'd seen a boat leave the sub and return some time later. He didn't see the boat land, but he saw it sail into the harbour.
A few days later, the harbourmaster phoned him up and asked if he could come round to talk to him. He said the Royal Navy had said it had no submarines operating in the Irish Sea that day, but could he show him some silhouettes of submarines to see if he could identify it. Dave said there were several sheets, but he was sure he could positively identify one particular sub that was an American vessel.
The harbourmaster thanked him and said he'd make some further enquiries. Of course, the US denied having any submarines in the area and the harbourmaster said the police hadn't reported anything. Dave was a bit grumpy because it looked as if he was telling a story, so he started making his own enquiries. He was quite smart because he worked out who might have been awake or about at the time. First place he asked was the old folk's home down the road and he found two night staff who had seen it. He also got a dustman and, in the end, 15 people were able to corroborate his story. Some had seen the boat land, pick up a person from the quay and sail back to the submarine.
It didn't cut any ice with the US Navy, they maintained their denial and the harbourmaster never got his big fat landing fee.
Dave reckoned they were probably picking up a crew member who'd been unable to join the sub when it had sailed and so they'd flown him out to a quiet spot to pick him up. Nice story to end our time on the island.


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