Noo year

Merry pagan winter festival to all, and a happy 2007.

Here in the globally warmed Sweden, winter is still not present, sadly. Just watched my brother spreading his wisdom from the morning TV news show sofa. He's an expert on the Somalian conflict, which has recently flared up again.

We're preparing for a visit from a large band of Brits out to experience a proper white Christmas with sleigh rides and reindeer wandering the streets. Instead they'll be greeted by a November evening in Skegness.

On the home front we heard back from the insurers, who unsurprisingly said that unfortunately they will have nothing whatsoever to do with us, given the unjustifiable risk we represent. It really is amusing in a sad sort of way. We got sent lots of forms to explain and expand on our life style. The questions they ask betray a worrying lack of understanding. Statistically, the most risky thing that we do is driving a car. Second most risky thing, off-piste skiing for me, and horse riding for Sarah, distantly followed by climbing and diving. They didn't even ask about skiing. It's well-known that climbing is to insurers what the red rag is to a bull. This is curious, since the accident statistics presumably can be read by the insurers, as well as me.

Spin doctor

Although it's been hard for an England supporter to drum up much enthusiasm for the current Ashes series, one thing must be said.

Shane Warne is a freak. A one-off. The Johnny Mac of Cricket.

Such effortless mastery is unusual in any sport, but the guy's slightly overweight, 37, fond of a R&R life style, and yet.. seeing his delivery to Monty Panesar in the third test just blew me (and Monty) away. A Warne spin delivery is indistinguishable from magic. That slow, short run up. The gentle curve of the slow ball. The confidence of the batsman stepping out to meet it. The swing of the bat - and the ball's no longer there. It has seemingly picked up speed on the bounce, and turned almost 90 degrees and whacked into the stumps. The confused batsman looking around - where the hell did it go? Of course, Monty - aka The Sikh Tweaker - should have known better, seeing that he's a dab hand at the spin delivery himself.

Warney is set to retire from international cricket after the current whitewash of the Ashes. He goes out on top, very probably with the best wicket-taking record in cricket history.

You made cricket cool, dude.

Sjöwall Wahlöö

Been working my way through the Sjöwall-Wahlöö canon of crime novels in audio book form to whittle away the commute in the mornings. They're probably the first internationally renowned crime writers to come out of Sweden, and their influence on everyone ever since cannot be overestimated. The first thing that is striking is the wonderful portrait of Sweden in the sixties and seventies, and the overt social criticism, if not political activism, that runs like a red thread through all of the books. The Swedish cradle-2-grave wellfare state had just begun being dismantled, and S&W are not afraid to spell out the consequences that this had for many people at the time. Mostly, the criminals are treated as victims of society, and the central quartet of policemen at the 'Riksmordskommissionen' (National Murder Squad) are generally sensible, humane and oppose the carrying of side arms much for the same reason as the UK police force. The Swedish secret services are pictured as complete useless morons, and the uniformed police as either violent psychopaths or Nazis. Or both.

For me, what makes the books particularly enjoyable is that it feels like 'real' police work. These are no genius super-sleuths along the lines of Holmes or Morse. The main character, Martin Beck, frequently touches on the point that murders are more often than not solved by coincidences - a car pulled over due to a broken tail light or something. The job of the Police is toö make sure that the net of potential coincidences is as tight as possible.

The books do paint a pretty sordid picture of Sweden, but it is interesting how many of the accusations levelled are equally relevant today. Or, to put it another way, things that seem wrong in today's society were already broken 30 years ago. I frequently snigger to myself at the descriptions of corruption and incompetence that could have been taken from yesterday's papers.

The original books have all been filmed, and the characters are now franchised into a long-running series of new material not written by the original authors (Per Wahlöö has passed away). Swedish film maker Bo Widerberg made the middle book - Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle - into a wonderful film in 1976, but the newer fayre is of varying quality.

The series of books have influenced everyone from Mankell, Larsson and Nesser, especially Mankell with his equally thinly veiled social commentary.

Head hunters

So there I was, just back in the office after a long day of interviews for the development team. Phone goes. Female voice:

"Is that Mr Karma Police?"

I say that it is indeed, thinking it'd be the guys from HR who've helped me with recruiting. It isn't.

"We have a role for the technical lead for a large publishing company, lots of money, big budget to run the on line department's development arm, you interested?"

I am now very confused, seeing that she's just described my current position, all six weeks of it. I throw my boss next to me a sneaky look, thinking that he's started to look for my replacement already. He shakes his head, vigorously. I ask the lady who she's hiring for, and if she's sure that it's not my job she's trying to recruit me for. She's now confused. I ask how the hell she managed to get hold of my number, seeing that I don't actually know it myself yet.

"Sorry, that's confidential, but we want to do phone interviews tomorrow if you're interested"

I start laughing.

"I'm flattered, but as I've only been in this job for one paycheck so far, I think I should stick it out a bit longer.."

So, anyone wanting to shed some light on this? Maybe the competition is really that brash. Or, which is more likely, I really am incredibly talented :)

Random observation: whilst typing these words I'm watching the British Comedy Awards on telly. Seeing Sacha Baron Cohen out of character is kind of freaky. Borat couldn't make it, as he was doing the key note at the Holocaust Deniers' Conference, apparently.

The insurance comedy is on-going. Big forms arrived with questions written by people who don't understand what climbing means, and certainly aren't remotely qualified in assessing the risks involved. Statistically, cragging is incredibly safe. My sole injury even remotely associated with climbing in the last 10 years is a broken leg, slipping on a rock on the beach, walking in to a route at Portland. Oh, and tennis elbow.

Pinochet

Chilean butcher Pinochet has finally joined the Fletcher Memorial Home for Incurable Tyrants and Kings. And not a day too early - missed only by Maggie Thatcher. On the home front, BBC's Sports Personality of the Year gong went to Zarah Phillips for her world and Euro titles in eventing. Not wanting to diminish her achievement, but the sports personalities have been a bit thin on the ground the last year. One thing seemed certain though - the England rugby union squad was unlikely to be in contention.

Ouch!

This has gotta hurt

F6c+

Sarah completed her F6c+ project down the wall the other night in smooth style. I will now have to watch my back as she's climbed every route I have climbed so far this year. Very worrying trend indeed. We also completed our mortgage application with the usual fun and games when it comes to insurance.

"Oh, you climb? No problem. Do you climb harder than Severe, or on routes not protected by bolts?"

Please. Severe? My 3yo niece can climb Severe.

"Eeh, oh well, we'll have to consult further. At least you never climb unroped?"

Very tempting to pull out that picture of Sarah astride "The Hunk" in Bishop.

"Skiing, diving, horse riding?"

He'll get back to us, he said.

On the home front we're celebrating Maud's birthday today. Big up to you, and see you soon. It is indeed incredible that Christmas is upon us again.

Top 2%

According to that beacon of information accuracy, Slashdot, two percent of the world's population accounts for half the world's wealth. At the same time, the UK is planning to spend £20 billion on new nuclear missiles and associated subs. That's a lot of greenbacks in anyone's book. Now, I've never quite managed to get my head around the UK's need for a nuclear deterrent, especially since it's not even independent. For a launch, the UK has to ask, cap in hand, the US for the codes. The French, on the other hand, can nuke anyone they want, no questions asked. But back to the confusion - in a post cold war world, Empire days well and truly over - is this really the best way to spend £20bn of taxpayers' money?

Swimming lesson

I'm a rubbish swimmer. I can't do front crawl, at least not whilst breathing. Sarah's in contrast a paragon of grace and style in the pool, and she arranged for me to attend a Front Crawl Clinic at the university pool. At first this was pretty daunting, given that everybody was expertly crawling up and down, bar me. I was thrashing my way half way up the pool, and to add insult to injury, was captured on video for later analysis. The lady running the clinic kindly gave me a pair of flippers which (obviously) made an enormous difference. Suddenly I could actually take on board some of the teaching when I didn't have to fight so hard just to stay afloat and move forwards. Towards the end of the hour I was videoed again, and with a bit of imagination one could see some improvement.

Vote Bill

BillG for prez

Henke

Henke Larsson on loan to ManU? Fergie is obviously serious in wanting to win the league..

Greetings, sport fans

Greetings, sport fans. The rumor about my demise is greatly exaggerated.

I'm back in gainful employment which is a bit of a shock to the system, as you can imagine. Still. A very different experience from my last place of work. Bigger, better funded, but in a state of flux. Should be fun. Managed to mislay my first pay packet, too. Was this close to start blaming - out of habit - HSBC, but it turns out it was someone else's fault. Mine.

The last few days in Sweden saw us take in Mozart's painfully beautiful Requiem at Berwaldshallen in Stockholm. One of my oldest and best friends is seeing one of the first violinists in the orchestra and managed to get us tickets. It's a pretty awesome experience, a full orchestra and chorus.

Anyway. England's much of the same. We're back down the wall, and met up with our fellow travellers Bruno and Jenny. We've managed to sell our house, and find ourself a new little dream property in Clifton. Trying to keep our expectations in check, given the archaic messy turd that is house buying and selling in the UK.

I can't believe it's almost christmas. Nor can I believe England's Rugby Union side. And don't even start on the cricket..

NK Update

Pyonyang says that sanctions imposed as a consequence of its recent nuclear test represents a declaration of war. Ho hum. Next step, a nuke-tipped missile destined for Seuol or Tokyo? Or at least, a second test to rattle the cage a bit further.

Say what you may about Kim, but he has got balls the size of Gibraltar Rock.

A New World Order

Remember this day; the day the world stood still. North Korea has set off a nuke. Good for Bush's War on Terror, bad for the world.

Stuff from the Wires

PhD bad for business? Well, we all knew that, really. Top 10 Geek Business Myths.

The Abyss

"If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you", a well-known German thinker stated many years ago. The US appears to have been staring into the abyss of the so called "War on Terror", and basically legalised torture. When fighting an evil, one must take great care not to become that which one fights. There is no good coming from trading hard-won freedoms for an illusion of security. The Bush administration is fond of saying that the terrorists hate those that love freedom. Well, freedom just took a beating. The terrorist agenda has always been aiming at curtailing freedom. Andreas Baader wanted to bring about a revolution by forcing a revolt against a police state that would come about by the government removing one freedom after the other in response to random acts of terror. Twisted thinking, sure, but they came quite close to the police state, and Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof was allegedly murdered by the police in their cells to avoid the messy rule of law.

So now the CIA is free to detain indefinitely without trial terrorist suspects. They can torture them, provided that they are not raped or that no biological experiments are conducted on them. Does this sound like the laws of a nation that values freedom and the rule of law?

Whilest the founding fathers are turning in their graves, I'm sure Andreas Baader is nodding approvingly in his.

Espania

Just back from a week in southern Spain, at the family Hacienda, meeting up with Chris and Nana from the UK. The climate is very nice this time of year; warm without being oppressive. Went running along the beach with Chris a couple of times, around 8k. He could have left me in the dust, but was polite enough to stick to my pace. Just uploaded my data from the Polar watch and it confirmed I'd been in the red zone for 85% of my runs.. no wonder I was feeling warm.

Anyway, the area is a bit chav-heavy, but with a large, walled garden complete with pool, it was a pretty relaxing stay. Sadly, the Hacienda is now up for sale for reasons harking back to my father's death, so it was probably the last visit.

The morning after the night before

This is good for Sweden. Perhaps work will pay again. Perhaps people can get to decide more about how they want their health and child care, education and business conducted, instead of having the government dictate it to them. Hopfefully the more obnoxious, unfair taxes, such as property and wealth tax, will now be abolished. A small government dealing only in such matters which a government should deal with, and not meddling in matters concerning the individual.

A regime change right in the middle of a period of economic growth is unprecedented, and a serious vote of no confidence for the previous ruling elite which had become too accustomed to the seats of power.

Let freedom ring.

The Dawning of A New Era

23.00: Moderaterna has declared themselves the victors of this election. It's extraordinary. Biggest increase since the dawn of time, for any party, 10.5%. Persson is giving his concession speech as we speak. He's resigning the leadership.

The Social Democrats have ruled for 88 of the last 100 years.

The future starts here.

Election night

21.40: Current prediction at 173 MPs for the Dark Side and 176 for the Democratic Alliance. A New Hope. Will The Empire Strike Back?

Chief of Design, Apple

Interesting article about Jonathan Ive, Apple's design guru.

Anyway. Tomorrow is election day. My prediction is a regime change, and not a day too early.

eMusic gets it

eMusic has launched in Europe. Is this the first example of an e-tailer that 'gets it'? Here's the rub: I can order CDs from Amazon, say I take advantage of the current 3 CDs for £15 offer - for the sake of argument Keane's Hopes & Fears, the seminal remastered Live at Leeds, with The Who and maybe Weezer's Weezer, and rip to non-DRMed MP3 and listen to the choons on a variety of devices: home stereo, car, iPod, laptop whatever. Alternatively, I can download the same tunes from the iTunes Music Store and (a) pay more, (b) get lousy quality rips and (c) get data that's laden with DRM restrictions meaning I can only use it on a limited number of devices.

Tricky choice. Not.

Let's be realistic. All music is already available, for free, on line from the various P2P nets. However, some people actually want to pay for their digital data. What they don't want to pay for are artificially imposed restrictions that limit how they can use their purchases, especially since these restrictions just wouldn't be present had they purchased the same music on a CD.

It's so obvious it hurts.

So, if I could buy music losslessly encoded, or high-bitrate lossy without DRM (lossless sort of implies non-DRM), it would be the same rights for me as the customer as if I had purchased the CD. Given that there's no manufacturing, or distribution costs involved I'd expect that the price would be a quarter or less without anyone making any less money. Would we pay for it? Sure, I would - fair rights, fair price. Would I purchase music or films from the iTunes music store, or Napster (rife with even more ridiculous DRM concepts) or any other DRM-ridden fayre?

No way.

Now though, eMusic has launched. They sell MP3s without restrictions. Download to your heart's content for a monthly fee. After you've downloaded a track you own it, and can do with it whatever you like. Hey presto, they get it! Of course, the big boys aren't happy and thus eMusic's catalogue is somewhat wanting. But still - if I was Apple or Microsoft, I'd worry. Customers vote with their wallets. DRM is a solution in search for a problem. Why should we accept it if it makes things harder for us to use digital data than it was before? The explosion in the P2P traffic is a direct consequence of the old-skool thinking in the boardrooms of the big media companies.

The whole market is there for the taking for the first Big Media Company that understands this.

Jobs

Sarah's been busy sorting out her CV. She uploaded it last night, with a "no one will ever employ me" sigh. Today the phones haven't stopped ringing. Work for my company! No, MINE! Work in Cardiff, it's almost Bristol! They started ringing at 6 this morning. I put it down to my killer-CV format :)

Running

Long run last night, nearly 15k. One hour fifteen, not exactly a world record, but probably the longest distance I've run since last year's half marathon. Had expected to be crippled this morning, but feeling OK. I see from my training log that that run took me over a weekly 45k, a personal record, at least since I got my Polar watch to keep track of these things for me. Think I'll restrict today's exercise to a leisurly Power Yoga session this afternoon.

Summer, just

So the summer has returned for one last spell before the Swedish eternal darkness descends for good. Last week saw rain almost every day, and running in the evenings means returning in darkness. I've started running in long trousers now. Amazing how quickly the summer goes. But the sun's out today, at least. The Swedish General Election is drawing closer, and the child-like bickering is most amusing. I guess the 'problem' is that there isn't really that much to argue about in this country. Most amusing of all the the much shouted about Folkpartiet-gate, where apparently one of the parties hacked into one of the others network, supposedly stealing electoral secrets. Well, I say 'hacked' where in fact it was one of the users' password that was the same as his name. Very secure. Is it immoral to exploit others stupidity? Apparently it's illegal, but come on!

Steve Irwin

So Steve 'Croc Hunter' Irwin finally met his match, in the shape of a sting ray. Ironically, being killed by a sting ray is very rare indeed - apparently only one other recorded case in Oz. I learnt the hard - or sharp, shall we say - way why they're called sting rays when diving off the coast of Belize a few years back. One swish of the tail, and a very bleeding hand.

Steve himself had a loyal following all around the world, it would seem. Even Slashdot covered the story, which is about as far away from its normal fayre one can get. We actually passed by his Australia Zoo when we travelled up the east coast of Oz in January, but we never went in.

Vaseline

One of my biggest problems when running any sort of reasonable distance is, ahem, an element of chafing. A quick trawl through running related web resources soon reveals that I am not alone in this. Chris recommended to try firstly a pair of cycling shorts to keep all in its place, and if that didn't work, liberal amounts of vaseline applied in strategic places around big Jim and the twins. Apparently, during his London Marathon, St John's Ambulance had personnel out, wearing latex gloves handing out fistfuls of the stuff along the course. The cycling shorts helped a bit, but I soon realised that for any run exceeding 30 mins I'd need to try the vaseline treatment. In Tesco they sell poxy little tins the size of 50p coins that would hardly coat anything worthwhile. I headed for the big Boots out at Cribb's Causeway. I wander aimlessly about for a while, before asking an attendant. She directs me towards the tiny tins. I whisper that I'm on the market for something slightly more man-sized. She looks at me with a strange expression, and says that the industrial sized vats are kept in the mother & baby section, but that I might want to consider alternative products for 'intimate purposes'. I open my mouth to vigorously defend my honour, but soon realise that there's nothing I can say to rectify the situation. I skulk over to the mother and baby section and grab a tub..

..which works great, when liberally applied.

Thanks for the tip, Chris.

Free, limitless energy

Yep. No more oil dependency or global warming. Limitless, clean energy out of thin air. We laugh in the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Buy your shares now! Eat sand Saudis, the Irish will rule the world.

Steorn

King Kong (E1 5b), Wintour's Leap

King Kong (E1 5b), Wintour's Leap
Originally uploaded by hvs.

Just back from a lightning visit to The Crag of Dreams (Wintour's Leap). Paul and I climbed the classic 'King Kong', which was pretty sustained for the grade. This is actually my first bit of proper climbing this year so far, disturbingly, what with broken legs etc. Paul's part of the guidebook effort for the crag, so we moved on to investigate one of his remaining routes probably outside his comfort zone, La Folie, at a respectable E4 6a. We worked it in an ethically dubious manner, and to both of our surprises managed to do it. One to return to.

Martin Crocker has been responsible for BMC's general tidy-up of much of Wintour's, and boy have they done an amazing job. It's like a whole new crag with vegetation cut back, rotten, dangerous rock removed and crumbling pegs replaced with shiny Petzl and Fixe expansion bolts. Some sections have been designated pure 'sport', and not a day too early, I say. Some of the more fundamentalist old guard are grumbling, but it's all done with the blessing of the BMC and in some cases with the express wishes of the land owners in order for them to grant access. Wintour's now sports a 100m+, 3 pitch, three star clip-up rated F7a. I'm sure that will have constant queues for a while.

Slackers

Some bold Brit slacking the Napes Needle:

Living Legends

Watching the European Track & Field Championships from Gothenburgh. Merlene Ottey has just advanced through the qualification stages. She has 35 major championship medals, and is 46 years old. 46! She still managed the 4th fastest time of the day. Speaking of legends, Carolina Kluft's only 23, but has already won everything that's worth winning, and pundits are already saying that she ought to quit the heptathlon and try some other discipline where she might encounter some opposition. She's leisurly cruising towards another championship gold. They say she's beaten the national tripple jump record in training, eventhough she's never done it competitively, and that she's clearing 3.8m in pole vault. The complete Athlete?

The Swedish high jumpers are also doing well with both Stefan and Linus qualifying rather effortlessly. Watched in disbelief Stefan Holm cissoring 2.10 in warmup. That's higher than the female world record.

New panels

They've reopened the gym and climbing wall after a month long outage when the place was rebuilt. Didn't think that they were going to do much to the wall, but they've reset every single route, thrown away - thank God - the useless EP featured panels and replaced them with plain ones, at least on the lead wall, and made the boulder wall 40cm higher. Now, had they only installed a kick panel on the boulder wall, and removed the top ropes it would have been an ace facility instead of merely a good one.

We've been focused on running lately. I love running, even if it doesn't come naturally to me - I lose running fitness quickly and take ages to build it up again. Add to that two recent leg breaks and two different orthopaedic surgeons saying that I'll never run again, I'm seriously addicted. The doctors are sort of right though - the first 500 metres of every run is agony, but after that my ankle starts limbering up a bit and the rest of the run usually goes without incident. The day after a run I struggle to walk on my left foot in the morning. In the forest here there's a 2.5k loop, but getting any sort of reasonable mileage out of that gets a bit repetitive, so we recently ferreted out a 10k run that although still encompasses one lap of the loop doesn't repeat itself (too much). We try to run about 10k every other day. A while back we got ourselves some Polar heart-rate monitors with a foot pod thingy to measure running speed, pace and distance. It's revolutionised the way I train and run. I've always found it difficult not to go balls to the wall when I run, and then only lasting about 5k before I'm spent. It's actually quite hard to judge when you're running say 75% and when you're running 90% of your max, but with the monitor I can see that if my heart rate falls between 160 and 170 I can keep up the run pretty much indefinitely. Sure, I won't beat any speed records, but for me running is about the distance. I did do the Bristol Half Marathon last year, foolishly undertrained, and although I completed it, every step was agony after about 8 miles. I'd like to get to a point where running 13 miles is not a once a year occurrence, but something one can do on a regular basis without being crippled for a week afterwards. The Lingontega run on Gräsö is a wonderful 10k run, too. Chris did that in an astonishing 42:50 this summer, nearly a full minute off my every kilometre. I don't aspire to run those sort of times, but being solid under 50 would be nice.

Of course, there's a natural extension to run to the ferry port and back, which would make that run 16k..eh, about 10 miles or so.

Sarah's now nearly half way through her level 4 Swedish course with Folkuniversitetet. They're working her hard, but the progress she's made is extraordinary. She's keeping up day to day regular conversations, and the amount of English we speak has dropped way down. I can't help but reflect on my school French, and the embarressingly modest return of investment those 6 years of study has given me. Sarah's two months of courses here has sent her so far beyond my French level that it is truly shameful on my behalf. It's also made me realise how much of my once solid Swedish formal grammar I've lost. Those of you who know Sarah know how she insists on understanding everything completely before moving on to the next issue, refusing to take anything as given. A natural academic streak.

"But why?" anyone?

But she's certainly learning fast.

On the culture front, me and my brother sat through the epic masterpiece "Ultraviolet" the other night, a sort of vampire-stroke-kung-fu tale with the easy on the eye Milla Jovovovovovich in the lead. Lots of guns and Matrix-style fighting. It's quite possibly the best film ever made.

Almost.

Bud. Light

What kind of beer personality are you? Interesting question regarding one of my favourite past times, I thought.

Turns out I am a... wait for it.. Bud Light. Not exactly what I had in mind.

You can all laugh now.

The State of the Art

I've been an avid SciFi nut for as long as I can remember. I've just finished Peter Hamilton's latest brick, "Judas Unchained", the final installment of the Commonwealth Saga, and it made me think. It's peculiar that with one or two rare exceptions, all worthwhile scifi written over the last 20 years or so appears to be British. Iain Banks. Neal Asher. Richard Morgan. Alastair Raynolds. Peter Hamilton - they all share that peculiar blend of truly imaginative space 'opera', ultra violence, believable hypertech, but with a strong political undercurrent, nearly always socialist. Canadian William Gibson arguably invented the genre, but since his earlier masterpieces he's shunned away from the harder stuff, concentrating on less elaborate, near future writing instead. American Greg Bear who certainly inspired Hamilton with the books Queen of Angels and Blood Music seems to have disappeared beyond the event horizon of his own black hole. I've found his latest books unreadable and dull.

So, without further ado, here's the Karma Police list of indispensible modern, British SciFi

Iain M. Banks - Excession

Banks' Culture universe is one of the most richly imagined, hugely entertaining and sometimes satirical. Excession is in my view the finest example, if nothing else for the ships' names alone.

Peter F. Hamilton - Night's Dawn Trilogy

A nightmare scenario, vivid universe building, extreme tech and mercurial characters makes this a must read. The 3000+ pages might put off occasional readers though.

Richard Morgan - Altered Carbon

Reads like a 'noir' thriller, with an unlikely antihero at its centre. A few other books feature Kovacs, but this is the best. The whole brain digital backup thing is similar to that proposed by Hamilton.

Richard Morgan - Market Forces

This one blew me away in its audacity, in a sort of Mad Max meets tomorrow's Financial Times kind of way.

Alastair Raynolds - Revelation Space

Hard SciFi of the finest pedigree, with all the right components - tech, space, digital warfare, alien artefacts. A remarkable debut.

Peter F. Hamilton - Commonwealth Saga (Pandora's Star, Judas Unchained)

A new universe of the same vast scope as his Night's Dawn works, but at the same time totally different. The man has a limitless imagination, it would seem. This universe is more benign, and humanity appears to have sorted itself out. Until..

Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games

Not for the squeamish. Another novel about the Marxist utopia 'The Culture'.

World Cup

..Rugby, of course.

Boy wonder himself, Jonny W has worked out that, and I quote: "England needs some big wins to get back on track for a successful defence of the World Cup".

No shit, Sherlock.

The other World Cup has finally completed, with Zidane's excellent header in extra time. What a brilliant way to bow out of the beautiful game.

Rescue Diver

Over the weekend before last, Sarah and I completed the practical parts of the Rescue Diver course, and also the Drysuit Speciality course. We drove out to Kapellskar in the spectacular Norrtalje archipelago on the Friday lunch time aiming to get the drysuit course out of the way that day, ready for the main event over Saturday and Sunday. You have to have the drysuit proof of competency in order to hire drysuit equipment, and no wetsuits are available for hire. I've dived drysuit a few times way back when, but it was so long ago that essentially both of us started from scratch. Of course, this particular day, a drysuit was the last thing you wanted to be wearing, in a 30 degree heat. Still, we shedded our shorts and donned thermals, mid-layer and thick fleece and squirmed into the 7mm neoprene drysuits. We were cooking. Mats, our instructor, took about two minutes to get into his, and he had to jump in to cool off, as he was starting to look decidedly well-done whilst Sarah and I tried to get ourselves ready. The dive gear was different from what we're used to. First stage has a DIN conection to the tank instead of the for us more familiar yoke. There is an extra low pressure hose for connecting the suit, and the tank is made from steel rather than aluminium, and take 300 bars of compressed air rather than the 200 we've been using. The reason for this is that a drysuit gives so much more buoyancy, so to avoid having to carry 20kgs of lead on a belt, the heavier tank helps.

On our first dive we got to practice the basics, and it was amazing how weird it felt in the beginning. After we started to get the hang of the basic buoyancy control we had to practice the 'getting out of uncontrolled feet first ascent' manouver. If you over-fill a drysuit and the air for some reason gets too far down your legs, you might start to drift to the surface feet first. As you move up, the air expands further, compounding the problem. As there are no air vents around the ankles, things can get troublesome. We tried the tuck-roll move to get out of such a predicament.

After some lunch on the pier we were back in the water for more of a dive. As soon as we got deeper than a few metres I realised that I was struggling to equalise my sinuses. I normally have no such problems and I was not suffering from a cold as far as I was aware. To make matters worse, a few metres more and I felt what can only be described as an angry elephant working a sledgehammer on my teeth in my mouth. A most extraordinary pain that seemed to eminate from one of my upper back teeth and radiate out through my jaw bone. I'd recently had a filling about there, so I figured I was experiencing tooth-squeeze first hand. I always thought it was a bit of a myth, but apparently not. A tiny pocket of air is trapped in the filling, or between the filling and the tooth that contracts or expands depending on the changing surrounding pressure as you go up or down. I came very close to abandoning the dive, but once we reached our intended depth and just swam along it wasn't too bad for a while. I cursed my Bristol dentist.

As we finished the dive my sinuses made themselves known again. I knew what to expect as I took off my mask. I rinsed out all the bloody mucus - at least my sinuses should now be clean.. Back in the hut we filled out the paperwork, and we were now certified drysuit 'specialists'. I took some decongestants and headed for bed, not relishing having to do battle with tooth-squeeze for two pretty much whole days in the water. Fortunately, on the Rescue course there is very little actual diving as it were. Most of what you do is either on or near the surface, or quick jaunts to the bottom to pick something - or someone - up.

The rest of the people turned up for breakfast the next day. Our aim today was to practice the skills necessary for getting injured, panicing or unconcious divers up to the surface if they're below, and to land or boat if they're on the surface. But once in the water the first thing we got to do was to practice self-rescue - releasing cramp, out of air etc. Very useful indeed, as probably most divers haven't had to do anyhthing like that since they qualified. Then we tried various towing techniques, and trying to give rescue breaths whilst in the water. Very difficult. Raising an unconciuous diver from the bottom to the surface. Lifting an unconcious diver in various ways, also hard, especially if you and your diving buddy are of different sizes and weights. Me lifting Sarah out of the water was difficult enough; her lifting me out a virtual impossibility, which is food for thought if nothing else.

We also practiced search patterns looking for sunken treasures in the shape of sand filled drinks bottles that Mats kept chucking in, and diving equipment that us lot kept dropping when removing an 'unconcious' diver's gear.. Pretty difficult in the one metre visibility caused by six divers kicking up silt for a whole day. We retreated to the hut to eat and to lick our wounds - everybody was pretty knackered, but we suffered through the England game. Mats prepared a grand Indonesian pork curry and after a beer or two Sarah and I went to bed. At least I hadn't noticed any tooth squeeze - in fact, I think that the whole filling has blown, which is super-irritating as I now have to revisit the dentist.

The Sunday saw us diving the rescue 'scenarios', and this is the meat of the course if you like. Mats would take one or two divers aside - the designated victims - and cook up some surprise. The rest of the divers were told very little about what to expect, typically that they're out diving for pleasure when they encounter a diver with some unspecified problem which they are to try to rectify in the appropriate way. Whereas yesterday had felt like practice, suddenly it all felt very real. Sarah and I had to attend to a diver on the bottom who indicated that he'd hurt his leg. Suddenly, he signalled out of air. Sarah reacted quickly and gave him her spare, and we helped him to the surface. As we breached, he suddenly started to panic. In another scenario, Sarah was the panicing victim and won praise for her authentic portrayal, climbing on top of her would-be rescuers.

The rescue diver course, which had started a bit dull in the classroom had developed into what is easily the most fun and useful of the PADI courses I've taken. As this course has a more serious flavour than the others, I'm glad that we did it here, in cold waters with low visibility and all the extra considerations that drysuit diving entails.

Happy Birthday

Today, this blog is one year old.

Sun's out today, and set to stay out for the next week or so, which bodes well for the annual gathering of relatives out at Tallören. Less so for the practical part of the Rescue Diver course that starts on Friday. Sarah and I are simultaneously doing the Dry Suit Diver speciality course, and the combination of dry suit and mediterranean heat is not ideal. At least we both scored full pot on the oh-so difficult Rescue Diver theory final exam. Part of PADI's business model seems to be to make sure that no one ever fails their courses, which is good for PADI's bottom line but perhaps less so for the diving community. Saying that, sport diving in Sweden has an exemplary safety record, with the number of deaths per year countable on one or two fingers. It is not considered a 'risk activity' in insurance terms here, whereas it was the most expensive component in our BMC travel insurance.

Slowly working my way back into climbing, too. No convenient crags nearby, but a reasonable Entreprises-style indoor wall, which is super-steep - and top-rope only. The idiocy of this should be apparent to anyone who's ever climbed anything, but it's a product of some misguided safety thinking. One at least has time to reflect on life, the universe and everything as one embarks on yet another massive swing brushing the opposite wall, all in the name of safety. Big signs reinforce this by stating that no leading is allowed (it's so dangerous), and that all those lovely bolts are there only for show, not for use.

France

There is a World Cup going on, in case you hadn't noticed. Watched the Spain-France game last night and couldn't help being struck by the sheer quality of play from both sides, especially in the first half. So different from the dull, uninventive football produced by Sweden and even England. Eriksson's England would have been absolutely shredded by either side last night. Brazil is next for France, and that game is likely to be another celebration of footy joy. I wouldn't like to gamble on the outcome.

Allie

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Allie felt the cold, and dressed accordingly

John

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Mr Porter

Stillness

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Sarah and the sea still as a mirror in the evening

Sue

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Mrs Porter gazing into the distance

The sunset

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M, K and the sunset..

Pikey

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Karen seemed to be the only one with any fishing prowess

Zoe

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My niece, Zoe, doing the 'loser' sign..

Mathias

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My younger brother

Sarah and the sea

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Sarah trying her luck with the rod

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Nothing so refreshing as the Baltic in May..

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All of us!

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Nana dressed for winter..

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A few trees needed taking down. Chris insisted it be done by axe, rather than by chainsaw.

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The lads in the tub

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Nikki and Cath in the tub

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The boys..

Freddie

God bless Freddie Ljungberg for keeping us in the tourney. That said, I find football-the-phenomenon more interesting than football-the-game. I forgive the upbeat revellers for keeping me awake most of last night through their sheer unabashed joy. And my three year old niece Zoe for waking us up at 6am, too, out of sheer excitement of greeting another day. Sarah's completed her first Swedish course and are making progress in leaps and bounds. Next course set to start in a few weeks' time, before which we're doing the PADI Rescue Diver course. It's busy work being unemployed, I say.

Otherwise, a new-found interest is Tai Chi which during the summer months is being run in a nearby park, two evenings a week. I have trained various martial arts in the past, but nothing as pure as this. Very rewarding, and I'll certainly look to carry on if I can. If you get a chance to try it, it's a very different, but useful complement to any other sports you may do.

Our friends came and went, and good times were had out at the island. The lads (and some of the lasses, too, no less) got busy chopping down a few trees and recovering with beers in the sauna and chilling dips in the sea. Good food, drink and company

Last week we entertained Sarah's parents here in Sweden for a week; their first visit to Scandinavia. We walked around the prettier parts of town, saw the capital and spent four days at the island, all in glorious summer weather. Hopefully they came away with some positive experiences.

Sarah and the chain saw

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A couple of trees had not survived the winter storms, and Sarah volunteered to chop them up into more manageable pieces.

A room with a view

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We've been out at Tallören, the family summer house, opening it for the summer season. May is one of the nicest months here, sometimes spectacularly warm, but not yet mozzie infested. The water was a spine-chilling 9 degrees this day. A bunch of good friends are flying over from the UK for a weekend of fun and frolics on the island in a couple of weeks' time.

Du gamla, du fria

So, back in the land of the midnight fun for a spell. After having lived for the last 15 years in the UK, the culture shocks are suprisingly many. The streets are clean. Town on a Saturday night is not a war zone. Public transport works. Speed limits are adhered to. The sun is shining. Hell, even the banks work. I went in to open a bank account and get a Swedish credit card today - and ended up having a near religious experience. Anything bank-related in England is reminicent of root canal work. Talk to your bank manager? Fat chance, redirect to Bangalore. New credit card after the bank canceled the old one for no apparent reason? Sure, twelve banking days, sir. Here's what I experienced today. I have an old bank account with some money in it. This is a special trading account that can hold stocks and shares as well as cash in various currencies. Not ideal for personal banking. I roll up, shorts and a baseball cap emblazoned with "Kiwi Kayaks", saying that I believe I hold an account with this bank. I am just about to dig out the account number when I'm asked for my ID card, and my account details are scrolling in full technicolor glory on the screen in front of me. ID cards rock. Account numbers are just so last century. New account? No problem. Credit card? Tick, and we'll throw in a 100k (SEK) credit line, just for you, sir. This one also doubles as a cash point card such that you can take cash out without being charged interest. Want to pay your own bills, or have the balance DDed? DD, please. Internet banking? Just one moment (man walks off and returns with a credit card sized device which is a one-time pad for secure logins. Telebanking? Why not. Transfer the balance from old account to newly created one? Better leave some shrapnel in the old one just in case. Oh, and some spending money, sir, while you wait for your card? Yes please.

Twenty minutes after walking in I walk out with a new bank account, working internet and telephone banking, fully set up, a secure pad, and new cards delivered in three days. Extraordinary.

Anyway. We've joined the student union gym, primarily as they have an indoor climbing wall, but as it turns out, the place is brand spanking new with facilities to match any commercial outfit I've been to. They do all sorts of weird and wonderful exercise classes (belly aerobics anyone? That's belly dancing workout for those in the know - I'll pass on that one). We're mostly interested in doing spinning and yoga in addition to the climbing whilst we're here, but who knows. We visited the local pool the other day so that Sarah could get her laps in (she dit 80 to my measly 50..), and cycled about 30km to get our bearings bike-wise.

It feels very extravagant to be able to do little else than exercise.

Microsoft and Internet Explorer

Dvorak has some interesting things to say about The Great Microsoft Blunder

Apple kernels

Some interesting speculation on where Apple might be heading - a native Win32 API implementation in a new kernel? One can sure see how this would piss off Microsoft. Customers would be delighted, of course.

Lisa E8

Lisa Rands recently climbed 'Gaia' (E8), Johnny Dawes' Black Rocks grit masterpiece. You may recall the heart-stopping opening sequence from the film 'Hard Grit', where JMTT falls from the top of it and is very lucky to walk away reasonably unscathed. That's Lisa's second E8 after the other JD masterpiece, 'End of the Affair' at Curbar. She's the only woman in the world operating at this level on God's own rock.

Chris & Nana

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Originally uploaded by hvs.

Vara vanner Chris och Nana ska gifta sig! Chris tog modet till sig och friade pa ett Walesiskt berg under en MTB-tripp. Vi ar overlyckliga for dem - vara varmaste gratulationer!

Manchester Passion

Tim Booth as Jesus doing Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'? Brilliant. Followed by Smith's 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now'. Genius.

The Gospel According to Madchester.

Ship to billing address only

For some incomprehensible reason, certain on-line retailers appear to have started to only ship to the billing address. This is supposedly due to some security concerns. To me, this makes on-line shipping worse than useless. If I have to take a day off work, hypothetically speaking, to sit and wait for a delivery specified as 'between 8am and 6pm' the cost to me can easily double, and negates the convenience of on-line shopping. If I can't take the time off, I have to go to some central depot to collect the item myself.

If that's the case, I'd rather take the day off, go to town and visit actual shops, handle the merchandise and shop the traditional way. The attraction of on-line shopping is that one can have the product sent to wherever one happens to be.

Look, eXpansys, Dabs, Watford Electronics etc etc -- can you really afford to reject custom like this?

EFR

Today we completed an EFR course - Emergency First Response. This is a jazzed up (or dumbed down, depending on your viewpoint) first aid qualification, designed by PADI primarily to be able to do their own first aid courses which form a prerequisite for certain dive qualifications. We intend to take the Rescue Diver course whilst we're out in Sweden for six months.

I've done first aid courses before, notably through my 'military' service many, many years ago. Just like with any other skill you don't maintain or use, it fades quickly. CPR has been simplified a lot from back in those days. Many people, even those who are trained to give CPR, frequently hesitate in a sharp situation, afraid that they will not get it right and make the situation worse, rather than better. Our instructor reinforced the point that if someone's suffering a cardiac arrest, they're tecnically dead, or 'in the worst possible state of health'. Whatever you do, you can only make the situation better. You can't be deader than dead. Imperfect CPR is infinitely better than perfect CPR witheld.

Lafaille

The Observer recently published an excellent article on the life and death of Jean-Christoph Lafaille.

A truly inspirational character, and the mountaineering world is a lesser place without him.

Jump

Just witnessed Paul Anka do a 'swing' version of Van Halen's 'Jump' on Parkinson.

Very disturbing. Aren't there laws against this sort of thing?

Walk like an Egyptian

Saw the nice people at Fracture Clinic again yesterday. The consesus is that my leg wasn't broken. Probably. Either way, I'm free to walk, if I can. Basically, the general idea is that if it hurts when I do 'this', don't do it. I can sort of walk without crutches, in a slow, hobbling kind of way, and the doctor guesstimated that it would probably be at least a month before I can start trying to run again. Nevermind.

I got a new laptop, by the way. As a die-hard Microsoft free Zone, I've taken the plunge and got a wintel machine. Why? Well, after a few days of aquainting myself with the machine, I ask myself the same question. Don't get me wrong, the machine itself is a model of lovliness as all Sonys tend to be, but compared to the sleek, good looking efficiency of Apple's OS/X, or the industrial bullet-proofness of Solaris or the clean minimalist lines of FreeBSD, Microsoft's latest OS is just dire. Just dreadful. Why do people accept such brokenness in software that they would never dream of accepting in other engineering disciplins? Of course, I used windows at work for a long time, as a developer when I was forced to, but I had hoped that as a home machine it would be acceptable, but it just isn't.

I can live with its ugliness. I can probably learn to cope with its long-windedness in getting anything set up, and the constant reboots (why in this day and age of modular kernels do people accept this?). Possibly, I can overlook the constant 'handholding', the 'are you sure' and 'do you know what you are doing' pop-ups. What I can't live with are the little broken details, how things just not quite want to play together. Why do I need a mega-application (Norton Internet Security came pre-installed) just to stop the box from getting hacked, 0wn3d or overrun by spyware? Well, *I* don't, as I know how to secure a machine, primarily by not using any application written by Microsoft, ever. Why should one trust a software company that expects you to run a 'live update' such that they can install a constant stream of patches to correct bugs and software insecurities?

I'm itching to put a proper OS on this box.

Culinaria

We went for a meal to mark Sarah's 29th yesterday, at Culinaria on Chandos road, very close to where we're staying this week with Henk. I know that the term is frequently abused by the Guardian set, but this is a real 'foodie' restaurant. Blissfully short menue that changes every week. Simple, but fabulous dishes cooked to perfection using only the best quality ingredients. Culinaria is run by Stephen and Jude Markwick who for the last 13 years or so have run one of Bristol's absolute best high end restaurants, Markwick's, down on Corn Street. Culinaria is less 'noveau' and more, eh, foodie. Rumor has it that they haven't had an empty seat any night since the day they opened, which is quite impressive indeed, given its non-centre location. Needless to say, booking is essential, and I can only add my voice to the list of people recommending this place. I had Poulet au Riz Basquaise - a pot-roasted chicken dish, and Sarah went for the Grilled Fillet of Dover Sole. Both were sublime, and although not cheap, certainly not by any stretch of imagination the most expensive meal I've had in Bristol. Mains coming in at between £11 and £14 felt like a steal for the quality. Sarah then indulged in a Warm Chocholate Brownie with hot chocholate sauce and vanilla icecream whereas I tried the British cheese selection. Service was competent but understated, like it should be.

A great addition to the restaurant scene in Bristol.

Legs

Went to Fracture Clinic at Frenchay today. I'm continually amazed by the quality of care available through the frequently picked on NHS. Seen one day after I saw my GP, the French xrays were dismissed as unusable as the clarity and quality were below par. New ones were shot, and the conclusion is that my leg is in fact not broken at all. Cheers all around. However, my leg is 'messy' since the last break and umpteen operations, so the French doctors are not to be berated for playing it safe, given the medival xray gear they had at their disposal. I had the cast sawn off, and my foot prodded. It's still a bit sore, blue and battered, and the doctor was a bit reluctant to have me start running around on it, so I'm now sporting a fancy brace attached with various Velcro contraptions. It's removable, which means that having a shower becomes less of a hassle, so I'll be smelling better in the process. Due to revisit in a week's time for a reassessment, and hopefully to start my rehabilitation properly.

Three cheers for the NHS. And for not breaking my leg.

Stef up at the Byron Bay lighthouse

Stef up at the Byron Bay lighthouse
Originally uploaded by hvs.

Australia is warmer than the UK. And drier.

A Sort of Homecoming

So, the story ends here, sort of. We're back in the land of warm beer, constant rain, rolling green hills and BBC Radio 4, and very nice it is, too. We flew back courtesy of CheesyJet, which in combination with a million other skiers at Geneva Airport was a rather underwhelming experience. So, dear CheesyJet, here are a few elementary hints on how to make the Geneva Airport experience a smidgen more pleasant.

1. A strict no checkin prior to 2h before departure means more, not less chaos in a place where all people arrive at the same times. Busses arrive from the bigger resorts only a few times a day so many people have to wait around for hours before being allowed to check in. With the bulky luggage involved in skiing, this means that the people who ARE allowed to check in struggle to do so due to all the others in the way. This is too obviously stupid. A numpty could work out the consequences. Spoke to a very nice gentleman who'd bust his knee - first injury in 40 years of skiing. He skies every year in Zermatt for a week, and - until now - always flies BA. However, this time the BA flight had meant a very early start so against his better judgement decided to fly CheesyJet on the homeward bound leg. He was caught up in the melee, too, and vowed never to peruse their services again.

2. Your system of forcing all people to use the checkin machines first will only save time if they actually work. If they don't work, or constantly crash, as was the case at Geneva, this means that queues get longer and tempers more frayed. Incomprehensibly, your checkin staff does not appear to have the option of checking in people at the desk, which rather amusingly led to your staff continuously having to leave their desk and queue up infront of the few working machines in the hall to try to fix the issues of people not getting their boarding passes or baggage tags.

3. When the machines break, and frustrated passengers ask your staff what to do, if the member of staff then says to line up in front of the handicap checkin, the frustrated passengers will be more, not less frustrated when they reach the front of the queue and get turned away because they actually don't need special boarding assistance. Maybe educating your staff such that they all agree on the procedure might be in order?

4. Some people do need special assistance - like me. If multiple seats have been booked, and payed for, to ease the pain of a broken leg, say, then maybe your staff need not query this to try to get the passenger to go back to a single seat just because the flight is overbooked. Not all crippled passengers have the advantage of a Sarah to argue their case. If I pay for three of something in advance, I expect to get three of that something, rather than one, without having to make a scene.

Anyway. Once we got on the plane, the rest of the trip was uneventful. And I really appreciated my three seats.

We'd arranged for a hire car at Bristol Airport such that we could transport ourselves and all our kit down to Sarah's parents in sunny Dorset. They've kindly let us park our cars on their drive way whilst we've been away. Now, Sarah had left her driver's license at home, given that we didn't expect to need it, which presented us with a tasty little problem when it came to picking up our hire car. However, Sarah managed to wangle it beforehand over the phone. She could sell sand to the Arabs, I tell you. She also managed to talk herself past the jobsworth airport security guard to pick me and all the luggage up outside the door.

It is nice to be back, even for a limited time.

We'll head back to Bristol tomorrow so that I can see my doctor. We'll be staying with our good friend Henk who's kindly offered to put us up for a few nights. After all orthopedics have been sorted we'll be coming back down here to Dorset to stay with Sarah's parents for a few weeks to be spoilt with good food and drink, and in Sarah's case - cat therapy. Cats are funny. They seem to prefer laptop keyboards - the moment you sit down and switch your laptop on, they jump up and sit on it.

We're heading out to Sweden after that for an extended period. Sarah's starting an intensive Swedish course on the 8th of May, and we expect to stay out until about October.

The Financing of a Fracture

If you're in France, don't break a leg without a solid insurance. In a ski resort, the business of fixing up the results of accidents is indeed big money. And they bloody don't take credit cards either.

Break A Leg

Dave and Simon have been staying just outside Chamonix for a week and came across to ski with us for the day. They picked the right day for it, gorgeous sunshine and -10, although they probably did underestimate the time it would take them to get across. Sarah and I succumbed to some fast piste cruising before lunch whilst we waited for them to arrive. After skiing primarily gorgeous powder off piste lately, the fear was that pratting about in the pistes would feel like a let down, but with these conditions, it's oh so much fun. The TroubleMakers really bring out the hooligan in me. Simon is a beginner boarder, and wanted to take it easy in his own pace. Dave has skied with us for one or two weeks a year since Meribel '03, and we've seen him progress from first timer to confident intermediate. We'd decided to try to help improve his technique a bit, and picked the gentle slope of the youth Stade De Slalom, a blue, short run. I set off first, with the intention to stop a bit further down to watch. Suddenly my left ski stops completely dead, and with a nasty sound my binding releases, and I find myself careering down the slope on my front, with a searing pain in my foot. Immediately I know that this is almost certainly the end of the trip for me. Sarah picks up my left ski and joins me. I struggle to my feet. Out of the bottom of my ski there is a foot long, centimetre wide gash down the middle, all the way into the core. Putting the ski on almost makes me pass out. Sarah offers to call rescue, but I can't bear the embarressment. I limp my way down on one ski to the restaurant at the bottom of the slope and against the received wisdom remove my boot. It's just typical that it's my left which I've broken badly before. The foot is painful to touch and move, but somehow it seems infeasible to break a bone inside a ski boot - normally when people break legs skiing it's a tib-fib jobbie just above the boot. We have some lunch, and I reluctantly face up to the fact that there's just no way in hell I can make it down to the resort of my own steam. I swallow my pride, and Sarah calls for piste rescue which arrives in the shape of a Skidoo which take me to the medical centre in the resort. Many x-rays later the conclusion is that I've chipped a splinter out of the corner of my tib, and a back slab cast is put on. I hate being immobilised, but at least it's almost the end of the trip anyway, but the idea of prolonging the trip for a few weeks would appear to be out. Nevermind. Shit - as they say - happens. I haven't done too badly, having skied for 30 years and this being the first, and so far only injury I've ever sustained in the process. Having broken my left leg before, I know pretty well what to expect, and hopefully should be able to keep my spirits up a bit better this time around. I am a notoriously bad patient. The doctors here have basically done the emergency patch-up, and relying on the fine orthopedics department at Southmead Hospital in Bristol to do it properly. As I'm here for another week, they're actually putting on a new, full cast on Tuesday which hopefully should mean that this week 'counts' in terms of the number of weeks in plaster game. Two days after the break, I can vouch for that pain hurts, and the first pain killers they gave me were about as effective as pissing in the ocean to make it sweeter. They since switched me onto the curiously named Ixprim which seems to do the job, allowing both me and Sarah to at least get a few hours sleep each night.

We took out a British Mountaineering Council (BMC) annual travel insurance before we set out on this trip. It is a bit more expensive than other alternatives, but I'd recommend this to anyone that does anything more active than frying on the beach on their travels. They know the difference between the various strands of climbing and mountaineering. For example, a competing insurance provider disallow 'unroped climbing' thus in the process also cutting out bouldering. Other insurances also put a depth limit on their diving cover, or disallow off-piste skiing. Apparently, this can mean that if you even put one foot outside the poles marking a run, you are not covered. Not what you want to have to think about when you're skiing. The BMC insurance covers every aspect of climbing, mountaineering, diving and skiing (and other outdoor activities such as kayaking, mountain biking, caving etc etc), no ifs and buts. Any profit is plowed straight back into the good work that the BMC does for its members. And, most importantly, and worth the admission alone, the professionalism and in-depth knowledge on hand when you need assistance is just extraordinary. The piste rescue service kept one of my boots, my poles and my skis and would not release them until their costs were covered (€278 for a 2 min Skidoo ride). The BMC took care of it without a single question. They told me that CheesyJet is notoriously reluctant to fly people with limbs in plaster and arranged for my doctor here to give me a certificate of flying, and also phoned me up to see if I wanted an extra seat on the flight home for the leg. They will cover the repairs to my skis and refund the cost of my ski pass for the eight days of skiing I will have missed.

As a happy member and customer, I think that you're unlikely to find a better travel insurance product when push comes to shove and you really need help. I take my hat off to the BMC, and heartily recommend them to anyone into the outdoors.

Terminal Velocity

Saw someone get really hurt - or worse - a few days ago. Sarah and I were taking advantage of the spectacular conditions to do a classic off-piste run, the Lac Du Lou off the Cimes De Caron gondola. After a magic run we'd nearly reached the end, and stood for a while admiring the views across the frozen lake and up towards the other mega classic off-piste run off the back of La Masse in Les Menuires, which we'd done twice the day before. Gathered atop a snow covered, heavily corniced cliff we see a couple of boarders, peering down. It's seriously steep terrain, a vertical drop off the cliff of at least 10 metres onto a thin tongue of snow between rocks, gradually easing off from vertical to a 40 degree, untouched run down to the lake surface. Suddenly one of the boarders jumps. We can't believe our eyes as he fluffs the jump, picking up a slight forward rotation in the air, briefly striking the snow tongue with the tip of his board some 10 metres below and bouncing his way down the rocky terrain, coming to an improbable stop about 150 metres down, still on seriously steep ground. His mates are still stood on the cliff top unable to believe their eyes. From where we're standing we can see he's not moving, and not responding to the frantic calls - in English - from his mates. They carefully make their way down to him through different routes, but as far as we can see he's still not moving.

We have no way of knowing if the fall was terminal or not, but if he walked away unscathed, it would be a miracle. He might have been the most accomplished of snowboarding cliff jumpers in the world for whom these sort of drops are everyday feats, but from where we were standing it looked obviously suicidal even by the most casual of glances. A modicum of self preservation instinct must surely count as a valuable commodity in freeride skiing. There is nothing we can do, and we complete our run, and head for lunch, still with a sick feeling in our stomachs. We do another run along a slightly different route in the afternoon pausing briefly in the same spot a few hours later, and they've all gone, either rescued, or - hopefully - made it down by own steam.

MORE snow

It's snowing, blowing and zero visibility, so we decided to take the day off. It has in fact snowed pretty much continuously over the last week whilst our good friends Cath and Dave were here. They'd just come back from the Maldives, and the weather was a bit of a shock to the system for them. Still, the snow situation is now well within the seasonal normal, if not above, and it's still going. Sadly, with massive snowfall comes the inevitable avalanche dangers, and several people have been reported dead or missing over the last week across the alps, amongst them some Swedish riders, apparently prompting the Swedish Foreign Ministry to issue a stark warning to skiers heading down to the alps to heed local notices and take extreme care. Obviously, after weather like this, off-piste is a tempting lure, all untouched and powder heavy, that's hard to resist, but still, at a well published 5/5 level of danger it is somewhat unreal to see fresh tracks across snow fields where the avalanche debris is still clearly visible at the bottom from the previous dump. Some people obviously feel immortal.

We've been honing our powder skills, and Cath and Dave threw themselves into the deeps with gusto. Sarah took the tumble of the week, funnily enough on-piste, and she landed heavily on her face, pulling muscles in her shoulder and neck, knocking her goggles clean off the helmet mount in the process. It could easily have ended her trip, but she dusted herself off, gritted her teeth, and carried on, battered and bruised. The goggles left a 2 inch cut down the side of her face (possibly putting further worries in the way of her future modelling career :). Nothing broken, at least, and a day off should help ease the whiplash.

Cath and Dave kindly brought us some badly needed essentials - proper English pyramidal tea bags being most welcome - and couriered an 'entertainment bundle' from another good friend, Da Goose, a spindle of shiny discs with Scrubs, Boston Legal and last but not least, the beginning of season 5 of 24. Jack's back from the dead, and he's not happy. The problem with 24 is that it's too addictive, and we've already exhausted the stash. Still, from what we've seen, this series is already looking better than the last two. Thanks, Cath, Dave and Goose! Cath and Dave also made sure that we actually left the apartment and went out for a change, to sample some of the lovely Savoyard fayre on offer in the restaurants around here.

By the way, Da Goose is coming to VT to ski for a week at the end of the month with friends Oli and Paul, which almost certainly will be a right riot, coinciding as it does with our last week here. Time really does fly when you're having fun.

Anyway, after writing harshly about vomiting Danes, I got my just desserts in the shape of a bunch of Swedish teenagers from some one-horse back water in the middle of the country who moved in next door. What seemed like about 12 lads crowded in an apartment designed to sleep six, we were treated to the whole spectrum of teenage angst, usually at 4 am most mornings, stemming from them evidently not being able to work out the optimal distribution of two sets of keys amongst 12 people after a night on the lash. They appeared to believe that the only way of gaining after hours access is by kicking door with ski boots, and screaming abuse at the top of one's voice. Sarah sorted them out one night clad only in a towel. As this more than likely is the nearest any of them will ever get to a naked woman for the next decade or so, they were lost for words, and apologised profusely after she told them off in that inimitable way that only the English can - with impeccable politeness, yet leaving a lingering after taste of having been told to STFU in no uncertain terms.

Overheard

You pick up the most extraordinary things if you keep your ears open. We were sitting in the lift, gazing desolately at the incredibly bare ground underneath, not long after we arrived. Little Lisa had evidently dropped a ski pole, and daddy was inching his way down a narrow rock-strewn ice streak to retrieve it. It was actually quite steep, and he seemed to realise that him managing to get back up would be a Herculean task indeed. Incredulously, he seemed to think that sending little Lisa, 7, down the neighbouring icy streak would be a better idea:

- You can get down that, darling, and then we only need to scramble over those rocks to get back on the piste below.

Little Lisa tentatively, but bravely, tries to make one plucky snow plough down the 40-degree ice, and promptly falls on her front, proceeding to slide the length of the streak, head first, rapidly picking up speed, shrieking. Needless to say, daddy on the neighbouring streak is to far away to be anything but an apprehensive observer.

Hysterical wife, from the top:

- IAN DOOOOO SOMETHING!

Luckily, Lisa stands up, dusting herself down, unhurt at the bottom of the streak. By the time they started to try to get back on piste, we'd passed. Guess you had to be there, really.

Another day, in the lift queue, we were treated to the following exchange. Livid, middle-aged British woman:

- The stupid bloody woman, skiing right over my bloody skis, and then she just stood there, on my skis, and I just couldn't bloody move, and she didn't even apologise!

The young son, about 7:

- But what do you expect, mum, she was French.

Priceless. Indoctrinate them young to get the old traditional prejudices to stick.

A recent morning, Sarah critically examining her legs:

- I have a lot of scars on my legs from climbing, you know. I'll never make a model now.

Rest Day

After four weeks and two days of skiing (sadly just past the half way mark) we are finally taking a full rest day. We woke up this morning to find Val Thorens in the middle of thick cloud. It's snowing and it is forecast to get worse - a large dump of snow but with 40-60kmph winds. There is poor visibility and my legs are feeling weary so today seemed like a good day to take a break. I also have a very swollen little toe joint. If I could remember hitting it I would suspect it could be broken. Instead it's very swollen and I have no idea why. I just know that it protests alot when I strap it tightly into my ski boot. My boots have never rubbed before so I don't think that's causing it but now it's swollen they certainly are rubbing. Hopefully a day off will give the swelling chance to go down. We've also run out of clean clothes so we need to find the laundrette. Yes, we've been here this long and haven't done any washing yet. Our friends Cath and Dave are coming here on Thursday and we thought they might appreciate it if we smelled nice if we're to live in such close proximity for several days. A rest day also gives us the chance to take our ski boots apart and get them thoroughly dry. Damp boots are not good for keeping the toes warm.

This isn't to say we have been skiing 9-5 every day either. There has been the odd day where we've come back for lunch and the weather has been bad or the pistes have been in such poor condition (when there was little snow) in the afternoon it has been uninviting to venture out again. There has also been more than the odd day where we have retired early to a deck chair and enjoyed a small beer or two in the sunshine.

Since the large amount of snow nearly two weeks ago the skiing has been fantastic. We had several days of powder snow on and off piste. Although it's amazing how quickly this gets tracked out and how quickly the snow disappears. The pistes have been kept in great condition. There is nothing quite like cruising down untouched corduroy snow. I had my skis serviced again last week and new sharp edges are great for the confidence. They don't give an inch even on hard stuff. It's made a surprising difference to my skiing. When I say we have been off piste its mainly been between pisted runs or off piste that can be reached easily from a lift and joins a piste further down. I'm starting to feel more confident skiing off piste and would like to venture further into the back country. This is for two reasons, the opportunity to ski untouched deeper snow and to be somewhere everyone else is not. We could 'go it alone' but we do not know the local area and we don't own avalanche transceivers or a shovel. Transceivers cost around £150-200 which seems expensive but not if you consider it could save your life. I'm thinking that surely not everyone pays the high price for a guide every time they try some new off piste. I'm sure some people don't and some survive on their own. However, there are also stories like the 7 people who died in the three valleys after the large dump of snow a few weeks before we arrived. They were apparently all separate incidents and involved people skiing off piste where they shouldn't have been. Last year we hired a guide in St Anton to take us off piste for the day (when we were somewhat better off than we are now). Although it was one of my most memorable days ever, I remember being rather perturbed on the last run when our guide said several people had died in an avalanche on this run at the start of the season and one of them was never found. They had to wait until the melt at the end of the season. One advantage of hiring a guide is obviously he knows where he's going and he should prevent us from getting lost but secondly he will have knowledge of the snow conditions. This will mean he will hopefully take us to where the skiing is best or where there is a lower risk of avalanches. The downside is that a guide is expensive. To hire one for a day cost €300 (approx. £200). Our best option is to join a group for €70 each (about £50). However, we also need to hire touring skis for the day as there is usually a long walk in. In total it will still be a costly day. We spoke to the mountain guide service yesterday and if there is another large dump of snow he said there is some good off piste to be done from the lifts in Val Thorens so we wouldn't need to hire the touring skis, but I probably wouldn't bother hiring a guide for these anyway. There is one off piste day they do where they walk 1 1/2 hours up to a glacier and then ski for 22 kms into Meribel. Irrespective of cost this may be a must do! He said conditions were good at the moment for people with little off piste experience - about 15cms of snow on top of a hard base making it easier to ski. Now that I'm feeling capable to try such skiing I'm wondering if we've made the most of being here as we haven't skied anything in the back country yet. However, I have to remember that it's only because of the past four weeks of skiing that I have improved enough to feel confident to go and try skiing such things. We'll see..

I guess skiing off piste is like climbing a mountain route. You don't want to set off without knowing the conditions or where you are going. Like I mentioned before there are some off piste runs that can be easily reached from the lifts in Val Thorens and are marked on the piste map. We have tried one of these off La Masse which was great. We knew where we were going and where we'd end up. The avalanche risk was low, it was well tracked out and there were several people ahead of us. Could have been a case of the blind leading the blind of course! These sort of runs I'm happy to try without a guide. I just don't want to set off on a 1 1/2 hour's hike into the unknown back country on my own - I might never be seen again!

On a different note we have both bought helmets since we've been here. They are becoming more prolific amongst skiers and we have been thinking about buying them for a while. Hitting your head on a hard packed piste or a hidden rock off piste could hurt. Something that could be prevented for the cost of a helmet and looking 'uncool'. They recommend the helmet fits perfectly as a helmet that doesn't fit correctly will probably be left on the shelf after a couple of days. It should be tight enough to move the skin on your forehead when you move the helmet but not too tight to hurt. Like clothes there doesn't seem to be a standard for sizes and sizes vary greatly amongst different brands. I could need a small in one but a large in another. Stef apparently has a very large head. After trying several different shops we finally found that a Scott XXL fitted perfectly for the bargain price of €60. As any of you who have had the displeasure of shopping with yours truly before will know, me buying anything is a nightmare. I just couldn't find a helmet that fitted properly. I seemed to have an awkwardly shaped head and always felt like I needed a helmet between two available sizes. I eventually found a Uvex helmet that is adjustable and fits like a glove. It also addresses some other reservations I had. It's so light I forget it's on my head. Being able to adjust the size means I can make it larger if I want to wear a hat/balaclava underneath or smaller if the padding condenses after a while. It also has large vents that can be opened or closed so it shouldn't be cold in bad weather or too hot when it's warmer towards the end of the season. Sadly this of course cost much more than €60! Fortunately the gentleman in the shop was happy to give us discount even though we're not actually working here. I particularly like the sticker inside the helmet that reminds you that a helmet does not make you invincible.

We've had some good news that Rossignol will replace Stef's broken ski. Not his skiing that broke it after all. Unfortunately he's still had to pay for a new pair in the meantime so in true Stef style he now owns two pairs of skis.

Lastly, we've just had a couple of great days skiing with some friends from Bristol. John, who is Lorne's partner who is out here for a season on an instructors course, is out here for a week and two other friends called John and Annabelle have just been here for a long weekend. We all met up for a few days. In true boy's fashion it deteriorated into a who can jump the highest and go the fastest competition. John managed 91kmph through the speed gun. Though this is disputed by the fact there were no other witnesses than Annabelle and previously he'd managed 67kmph! Furthermore, apparently an instructor went though afterwards and it recorded 6kmph. It must have been broken! Earlier, I finally broke the 80 mark and managed 81.33. Not quite Stef's 88. Otherwise much fun was had.

Branding the Outdoors

Saw a guy in the mid-piste bar the other day wearing a Buffalo mountain shirt. From this observation alone one can easily infer that he is British, and almost certainly a climber or mountaineer. Several brands are equally keyed to either niche sports, national identity or both. If someone is wearing 5.10 shoes or prAna clothing, they're almost certainly climbers, or at least somehow aware of the 'scene', as it were. If you see a person wearing a Crux rucksack, they're almost certainly a British mountaineer. A Klattermusen jacket is probably the sign of a Swedish off-piste or ice climbing demon. Helly Hansen used to be a sure sign of a Norwegian, but the brand has now gone pretty global. The excellent Mammut stuff is almost solely worn by Germans. Skiing-related brands are a mish-mash of hard-core, true performance and vanity fashion, and many of the latter pretending to be the former.

Peak Performance is a clothing brand from Sweden that used to make true high-end gear for the cold weather athlete for whom the right clothing is a matter of survival. This market being somewhat limited, and with the costs associated with manufacturing in the reverse tax haven of Sweden, somewhere down the line their finances suffered, and they got bought out by some big shot Euro clothing manufacturer, and they're now firmly rooted in the vanity fashion pretending to be real camp. Judging from its visible proliferation across nationalities here in Val Thorens, it's a stonking success.

The aforementioned Buffalo is arguably one of the best performing bad-weather clothing system ever designed, yet you rarely, if ever, see it outside its British mountaineering core market domain. Sure, no one can accuse Buffalo of being stylish, and its against the market grain quirkyness probably doesn't help. If you ask your average punter how to dress for cold (or wet) weather performance, you'll get the same, well-rehearsed answer that the big manufacturers want you to give: base layer in the form of thermals, mid (or insulating) layer, probably in the shape of a fleece, and then a 'waterproof breathable' membrane laminate jacket made from an expensive corporate fabric probably ending in '-Tex'.

There is no such thing as waterproof and breathable, unless you count the umbrella. You can have either or. If you don't believe me, put on your £500 coat and go for a run in the driving rain. Even the most breathable membrane can't keep up with even a modest level of exertion. Worse, it also assumes a temperature gradient across the fabric. Fine if you're out and about, but step inside for a hot chocolate, and suddenly the fabric is soaking on the inside. The expensive '-Tex' coats are ideal for walking from the front door to the car, and from the car to the entry to Tesco on a Saturday shoppping expedition. The 'Guaranteed to Keep You Dry' tag line is pure marketing genius, but very little to do with real performance.

If you really want to be comfortable whilst active in changeable weather, the first realisation is that true breathability is much more valuable than true waterproofness. Who cares about how many metres of water column the garment can withstand without incursion if you still end up cold and wet due to condensation? Real performance means wicking away moisture from the skin, and not placing a membrane in the way. A manufacturer that understands this (apart from Buffalo) is Paramo. A wicking liner is placed under a wind proof DWR-treated tightly woven microfiber shell. The Durable Water Repellency treatment means that water beads and rolls off the surface of the garment like water off the back of a goose. This DWR coating is infinitely replenishable by the owner using an inwash additive. This means that rain can't penetrate the outer layer, yet moisture passes freely from the inside out. Yet, by the accepted industry norm it is not waterproof. It can't take any size water column at all. Sit in a puddle, and it will soak through. In normal use it will keep an active user bone dry. The Scottish mountain rescue teams, who know a thing or two about bad weather, wear the Paramo Aspira jacket. The disadvantages of the Paramo concept is that the garments tend to feel bulky and heavy, but this is partly offset by the user needing fewer layers underneath.

The Buffalo system is far more minimalist. A Pertex shell is bonded to a pile inner. Pile is the ancestor of fleece. It looks a bit like a kind of short sheep's coat - certainly not fashionable, but with superior insulation qualities and with virtually zero moisture retention. Pertex is a windproof microfibre weave, favoured as a shell material for sleeping bags. It's exceptionally breathable, wind proof, light and if it gets wet the moisture quickly spreads to a large surface area which dries in an instant. Buffalo's approach to waterproofness is: 'being dry is for wimps' - yes, in driving rain you'll eventually get wet, but the pile layer will keep you warm in the wet, and the pile/pertex combination will dry in an instant the moment the rain stops. Buffalo recommends you wearing its garments next to skin, and this has probably contributed to the reputation of the odour of the British mountaineer after a few weeks in the wilderness.

Quirky makes like Buffalo and Paramo survive as purveyors of niche products for people who need real performance in atrocious conditions. These guys will always be big fish in a tiny pond. Some makes from a similar background (amongst others North Face, Patagonia, Arc'teryx, Berghaus) are gradually making the transition into the more profitable 'life style' markets, yet still manage provide the good stuff aswell. Arc'teryx in particular seems to be surviving with their soul intact after being bought out by the Adidas/Salomon mainstream giant.

So, how should you dress for an active life in the hills come rain or shine? The problem with being active is that as long as you're moving you need a lot less clothing than when you're stationary. Walking in to a winter route in the Scottish mountains is a lot more sweaty than the climbing itself. Belaying is cold. Skinning up a mountain side is far more taxing than the long ski descent on the glacier on the other side. Most people over dress, become warm and sweaty, and when they stop they get cold, despite wearing all their clothes. With a traditional layering system, adjusting your temperature becomes an arduous chore, involving taking off multiple layers to remove or add an insulator before putting the outer layers back on. Apart from being time consuming, this process also leaves you exposed to the elements. This usually means that people can't be bothered to adjust to conditions correctly, instead choosing to put up and shut up. A better system is to wear as little clothes as possible for the action, and then layering on top when stopping to rest or belay. Sometimes, perhaps it is sufficient to wear a wicking base layer and a feather weight Pertex windproof, and then a synthetic duvet on top when stopping. Putting on or removing a thin duvet jacket takes five seconds, and the new synthetics, such as PrimaLoft, are almost as warm and compactible as down, yet unlike down stay warm if wet. You will also perform better as your body won't have to spend effort cooling itself down from the heat of overdressing.

True waterproof membrane fabrics have no place in the hills unless you're sitting still in prolonged driving rain - and those days I'd rather stay at home.