Blind faith...

There's nothing worse than blind faith in anything, particularly 'ideology' but on a day-to-day level, technology, note how both words end with 'logy', never a good sign. I encounter the latter on a daily basis, normally when I've jumped off a train and found myself in a crowd of people edging ever closer to the automated ticket barriers. In the good old days there were ticket collectors, far better, and often I would encounter some real characters like the bloke on the barriers at Victoria station back in the late seventies, or possibly even the early eighties, I can't recall exactly. I was on my home after a hard day in the office and I asked him something like, "Is that the Carshalton train, platform 11?" His response was actually very funny, mainly because it was so unexpected. "I don't fucking know!" The humour was in the fact that he should have known, that was his job, to be helpful to 'customers', we were no longer passengers but customers, but that never rang true as there was no choice, we had to be on the train and British Rail was the only provider of the service. I used that phrase a lot, still do, but always in jest, and most people get it.

I have, of course, digressed. I was talking about blind faith and while I suppose you could say that I was putting all my faith in getting a proper answer from the man at the barrier and that, in a sense, I had blind faith in his ability to provide me with an answer, the real reason behind my sudden interest in 'blind faith' is that, last week, I was moving forward very slowly towards the barriers at Redhill station in Surrey and when I was just one person away from placing my ticket into the automated machine that would ultimately free me from the station, the man in front produced his smart phone and placed it on the clear glass protecting (I'm guessing) the scanner underneath it, but guess what? It wasn't working and the man in question was now holding everybody up with his blind faith in technology. In the end he had to give up and approach the one person supervising the situation who handed the man what looked like a normal ticket for him to place in the machine's aperture and gain his freedom. I just find people with blind faith in technology really irritating when it's plainly obvious that the analogue way of doing things works best. I hate going to restaurants where they have blind faith in technology for a reason: to save money on waiting staff. I was in Wagamama the other day just outside of Battersea Park Power Station (now a shopping mall) and the man who would ultimately lose his job to high tech was pointing out how I could order my meal and pay for it online by simply scanning the QR code on the table. I already knew that I wouldn't be doing that, but humoured him nonetheless with a smile and then ordered in the human way when prompted.

I remember once leaving the house unknowingly without my debit card and not realising until I needed it. I know how this situation arose: normally, if I break with routine, something will go wrong; in this case I'd either changed wallets or stopped putting my debit and credit cards in the wallet that carries my smart phone. Result? I've left the card in the house on the console table in the hall. For a short while my day was ruined. In fact, I thought at the time, I might as well have stayed in bed all day, but then I remembered that I had my debit card on my iphone, which ultimately saved the day. For a short while after that incident I too started using my phone to buy things until, very quickly, the novelty wore off and went back to using the real debit card, once I'd accustomed myself to having a wallet AND the wallet that now only contained my smart phone. The moral of the story? Never break with routine.

What's been happening, you may well ask, and I would have to say 'not much'. I've tried to keep up the cycling and I've started riding over to Sutton on a Sunday morning to see mum. On Saturdays I try to ride to Oxted. I've also been walking a fair bit. Last week I managed two walks home from Purley to where I live (around two miles) and the week prior (and possibly the week before that also) I was putting in seven miles a day if I walked to and from the station AND had a walk at lunch time. The extreme heat has put an end to the lunch time walks but the walk home from the station, largely in the shade, has been good as has the morning walk to the station in the relatively cool morning air. But let's make no mistake, it's been hot, very hot, 35 degrees hot and the nights have been long and uncomfortable. It's cooled a little bit. As I write this, it's almost 0600hrs on a Friday and the reason I'm here at such an ungodly hour is simple: I woke up around 0330hrs or 0400hrs, I can't remember exactly when, and found that as the light seeped into the room I was wide awake, so I jumped out of bed, made myself a cup of tea and some marmalade on toast and here I am in the living room, nobody else about.

The whole blind faith thing has been on my mind for a few days now, ever since I found myself in the queue at the barriers and was temporarily held up by the man who had put all his faith in his iphone. Actually, I remember another incident where blind faith in technology let me down. I was at a European airport, I think it was Helsinki, but it might have been anywhere in the world and it could have been further way, I can't remember. For some reason I had my boarding pass on my smart phone. Normally I have a paper boarding pass. I was at the gate with my smart phone ready to show the woman at the gate and guess what? My phone ran out of power. Typical, I thought, as she hastily produced a paper version for me.

My dad, God rest his soul, had blind faith in the government and this was probably because he spent his life in the civil service and at one point worked inside No.10. I never once heard him question the motives of the politicians he worked for or in any way show distrust of them and if he was alive today I'm sure that would still be the case.

I don't believe in blind faith in anything, least of all the government. There are, in fact, very few people you can really trust in this world and if you think otherwise then you're a fool.

My left foot (revisited)

Things just happen, that's the way of the world, and often there's no way of telling if there might have been a reason, cause and effect and all that jazz. Sometimes, like back in October 2017, I awoke with my head spinning as soon as I jumped out of bed. That threw me, I can tell you. I gave up drinking and now, eight years later, I'm still on the wagon and have no intention of going back, even if it was simply an inner ear infection. In many ways, good things come out of bad.

My left foot is not a newcomer to this blog. If you go to the search bar at the top left of the page and key in 'my left foot' you'll get a few posts about it. I can't think of what triggered it. Last Thursday, after a swim, I went to a gym induction and was shown various pieces of gym equipment including a piece of machinery that looked as if it could dislocate my shoulder, now there's something I don't want, a dislocated shoulder. My brother suffered from one after using my Bullworker back in the seventies and, if I recall, he was dogged with problems for years and, I think, he had an operation to fix it. Once, I remember, he disclocated his shoulder whilst swimming in the sea and was a long way off the coast. Fortunately, all was fine. But listen, I don't want these problems. If I suffer any kind of injury linked to doing a specific sport, then I'm stopping immediately. I don't want to be put under for anything and would rather switch my sport to something a little safer.

Now I know there's no such thing as safe and that problems can arise from anything, like cycling, but that's not what I mean. I don't want to indulge in any sport that inherently has a specific injury attached to it. With cycling, yes, you can fall off, yes, you can be hit by a car and yes you can get injured, but there's nothing inherently problematic with cycling, your joints are supported, like they are with swimming (by the water) and by rowing and those are the sports I'd rather engage with; yes, I might be hit by a car, I might fall off, but such incidents are not directly the fault of the activity. Cycling, in other words, if you keep your wits about you, is pretty safe even if you cannot legislate against the activities of other road users or, indeed, your own negligence (like when I came off through nobody's fault but my own, ie I was riding too fast into a left turn. Not the bike's fault, not cycling's fault but my fault. I don't want to be engaged in a sport where the slightest wrong turn or twist will mean surgery. Count me out. I'm not a professional sportsman, I don't earn money from my exercise because that's all it is, exercise. I get paid for doing something unconnected with keeping fit, like most people.

So how the hell did I find myself unable to walk for most of the week? Your guess is as good as mine. Was it swimming? I doubt it. No, I put it down to foolishly 'trying out' the leg press and, as I say, fortunately, I haven't damaged my shoulders; again, I'm not a professional athlete, I don't earn my money from keeping fit, it's purely me doing my best to maintain a reasonable level of fitness, but the parameters seemed to have changed a little bit, forcing me and countless others to fret about not getting enough exercise.

While I have always rode a bike throughout my life, as a kid and an adult, my sport of choice used to be swimming and back in the day I was always told that 20 minutes of exercise, three times a week, was all I needed to keep fit. I swam between two and three times a week, normally with two half-milers and then a mile on a Saturday morning (God, I felt good after the Saturday swim), but that was it. Outside of my two to three swims I was happy and I didn't think of exercise in a fretful way. But over the years, in the same way that marketing people convinced us all that we ought to be drinking litre upon litre of water daily and people started buying those plastic or steel water bottles - I knew people who bought huge canisters and probably drank well over what they should have been drinking - the same has happened with exercise. In fact, I can almost remember the day that somebody upped the ante on exercise, claiming that it's a daily thing, at least 20 minutes, not just three times a week (which was more than enough) but seven days a week, no let-up and so 'going to the gym' became something that people started doing and of course people, businessmen, got rich out of people's obsession with being ripped or whatever it might be, but the gyms were full, people were making money and now if we take a day off we fret and worry about it and vow to double up the following week.

It's the same with a lot of things and we can draw many parallels. So let's see if we can break a few myths. First, I'm going to stick my neck out and say exercise three times a week is absolutely fine. At present I manage one swim and two rides per week. I'm thinking of adding a second swim or a third ride, but that's all. I don't need (and don't want) to be in the gym every morning, on a treadmill watching breakfast television, don't want it, don't need it. I'm happy with my two rides and yes, if I don't do them (like this week) then I get a little irritable as I don't like breaking the routine and missing out. I do believe in exercise and I enjoy it. I'd hate to be one of those people who go everywhere by car, even down to the corner shop to get a newspaper.

But let's get back, briefly, to those parallels. Phones. I used to have a Nokia 3310. I did it's job perfectly and the battery lasted forever. It was a phone, people called me, I answered, we talked, we hung up. I don't need a smartphone. I never use half of the apps and, if I'm honest, I hardly use the phone element of it. There was a time when people were always calling me, now not so much. I've often thought about buying another 3310 and ditching the iphone but I probably won't because I like to record my rides on Strava, I can do so much with it to be fair. That said, data is another one. Who needs it? Do I need to record my distances? Who for? Who's counting? Nobody. In the old days I used to go cycling and that was it. Keeping data on the rides is pointless and, of course, it leads to fretting, unless I can get paid for the number of rides I'm doing, in which case I'd better monitor them. There was a time recently when, if my phone was low on power I'd delay the ride so I could record my distance even though I knew my distance, my destination and roughly how long it took me without switching on the app. Now, if my phone is low on gas and I'm not meeting anybody who might call me en route, I don't bother charging it, I just go and come back on time and get on with my day. The key is to reduce the amount of fretting that takes place constantly. I've got enough of that with work.

There's no real knowing what I did to my foot. I went online and started reading up on what it could have been; tendonitis? Well, that's what I went to the doctor with and there's nothing a doctor likes more than having the words put in his or her mouth. "Yes, it looks like it," he said, and that's it I was labelled as somebody with tendonitis. Except that I wasn't happy with that. The last time I had something similar (a swollen and discoloured foot and a lot of pain and unable to walk) I found out later that I had cellulitis and was given a load of antibiotics to take for around a fortnight. So I booked another appointment with a different doctor. I told him about the many different times that my left foot had caused problems and he wanted to know why. So he sent me to my local GP hub for blood tests and an X-ray. On the former, no problems. In fact he later said it wasn't an infection but an inflammation. Fine, that was good to know. I'm awaiting the X-ray results. It has got better. I haven't taken any Nurofen since Thursday (today's Sunday) and I'm kind of walking again, albeit with a hobble in my step. I'll probably take the bike round the block (six miles) just to get some exercise, which I've missed this week, but it's good to take it easy once in a while and I've been sitting here all morning writing this, drinking tea and listening to Stomu Yamash'ta (currently In Zen Music Vol.1 and a track called Drizzly Step – kind of appropriate don't you think?). Yamash'ta is where it's at. I would recommend that you listen to him urgently. I plan to listen to him a lot more. I heard him first on Night Tracks on BBC Radio 3 and it's the most chilled you'll ever get.

I need to get back to writing and riding and swimming. This enforced break through injury is a little annoying especially when I look out the window and realise that spring is here. I've just noticed that the clocks have gone forward and that means that summer is once again upon us. Hopefully it will be bring plenty of bike rides and happy times.