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A few years back, in another country, in another part of that country (I hope some of you are seeing that first ever Star Wars opening) I told myself that I couldn’t grumble about NHS politics and processes if I hadn’t tried to do it. I put some research time aside for a few years and held the dizzying title of “Clinical Director” of the smallest Directorate of a very big NHS Trust.  I think I held the post for 30 months and we achieved some good things. Within much less than 30 months of giving that up I think most of those good things had been reversed and most of the poor things I thought I had failed to alter continued (and many still do from what I hear). One senior manager who resisted much I tried to do rose like Icarus but went when a long standing and frankly blatant nepotism he operated emerged,  or perhaps it suited someone sufficiently more secure than even him to,  at last,  melt his wax. The Chief Executive who oversaw things went when the overuse of staff postings of positive reports on services on NHS feedback systems emerged.  He did better than his substantive precursor who went,  ostensibly,  for abusing hospitality funds.  I think he heads up a private health care service now.

No, you are wrong,  after torturing me up the “relentless” climb to the Puerto de Ibañeta the bike isn’t called “Chief Executive.” nor “General Manager”, just “Toto” as that meant,  long after this had been true, I could slump off it and say “We’re not in France any more Toto”. In minutes the clouds lifted and Toto and I shot down into Roncevalles,  and  beyond, like a dodgy rocket.

Now when I was trying to be a competent Clinical Director,  which had some similarities with the climbing on an overgeared bike, I worked with a wonderful managerial team. The most senior had already left the NHS in frustration with some things but came back for a bit and,  with our two other great managers,  we did our best.  She,  she knows who she is,  gave me a lot of lifts around that distant galaxy to varyingly excellent or frankly repellent meetings and I learned that when she got a new car (second hand I’m sure actually), she would take some days to divine the car’s name. One rather swish mini was Ethan. (Predictive text made that “Ethanol” – not so!)

Anyway, one very small bit of this story is about the need for human systems,  whether they are food sales with WiFi give away, or health care,  to encourage some idiosyncrasies,  some real, unique personalities in all that work in them and use them. That’s no magic cure for anything, no recipe, perhaps that’s the point, it’s just a basic quality in rich human systems I think we’re eroding at our peril.

Enough. No-one I’ve alluded to in this post is or was basically malignant, but boy we have systems that don’t really bring out the best in people and perhaps encourage us to do very poor things. I’m very lucky to have been able to take some time to ponder things and oh boy,  did Toto and I do OK in tough climbs today!

Is that a fair term to apply?   I don’t know but I think I am a bit clearer. This is my last day in France and I’m in St-Jean-Pied-de-Port: St. John, actually two of them to be safe,  with a foot in the pass.  All about strategic location and some formidable fortifications. This morning was the lowest of the adventure so far, I didn’t want to leave France where I can sometimes understand much of what’s being said and can sometimes make myself understood whereas my Spanish is essentially zero. I knew the day was the first real hills and feared my legs and overgeared bike,  in both senses “overgeared”, might not make the 55km.  I think I also knew that this is a turning point in terms of “pilgrimage”: I could get a “credential” which is a stamp book which you can get stamped at places along the way and geographically this definitely marks a change. The town is quaint but full of rather kitsch tourist shops for “pilgrims” and it’s full of people in hiking gear with wooden staffs and scallop shells.

With a bit of embarrassment I finally fixed my own scallop shell which J had obtained for me in a lovely restaurant during the divertissement week. I had put it on a few days back but it was banging on the front light. I think it and the light are both OK now so I guess that was a bit of a public statement that I am (sort of) “on pilgrimage” or “on the Camino”.

It was a hard 57km with a long 7% gradient that was a shock: the first significant climbing since the North Downs really. It was also the first pretty totally overcast day with even a little rain but then that was perfect,  that climbing in 22 degrees was one think,  had it been 38 it would have been a nightmare.

I have even paid three euros for a credential!

So why am I doing this?

Well one thing that’s been going through my head in the last week is that I know that there’s something wrong with my life and that that needs fixing if I can find a way to do that. Part of that is the huge alienation I’ve been feeling from the NHS in the last few years and I’m fixing that by quitting, more on that in another post. However,  it’s more than just that, it’s a more general disquiet about much more in my, in “our”, i.e. all of our (“Western”) way of life,  a sort of superficiality in connectedness. Being alone for long hours just turning the pedals is on odd way to change that but there are waves,  nods and quick “merci” and “bonjour” as you pass others, particularly but not only fellow cyclists,  that seem less shallow than some much more sustained conversations “back home”.

Today I tried to sort out some of my continuing IT nightmares and the Office de Tourism lady,  the young man and woman in the tiny IT shop,  and Nadia from Montreal in the pilgrim shop,  and her next door neighbour (Maxime?) were all lovely and there was a simplicity in asking people across languages (English,  French, Quebecois French I guess, two who also spoke Basque/Euskera and one who started my Spanish lessons). The two in the IT shop tested things carefully and we fought the laptop to speak to the French keyboard I had bought earlier,  and confirmed what I suspected, that that keyboard,  not just the one on the laptop,  was malfunctioning but that the keyboard controller probably isn’t. They had no solutions but they thought I might find a smaller external keyboard en route,  perhaps in Roncevalles.  They didn’t want money for 20 minutes good humoured work

So here I am picking this out on the tablet in a snack bar with cheap lovely food (magical cheese, ham, saucissons and red wine,  all local) where he has robust Internet/WiFi and I have recognised one simple thing: that I want to come back connecting better, differently. I think I understand a bit more about that, and about how the quality of connectedness I had in clinical work was good, and how much I will miss that, but that will have to wait for another post, or perhaps comments from others as I can’t type like this any more. Oh boy, I do miss a proper keyboard!

One of the things about cycling is that road surface really matters: it’s not just ups and downs over hills (and, to come, frank mountains), its even ups and downs of a matter of centimetres and the quality of the surface that make a difference to how fast, or how fast for the same energy, you can travel.  You really notice this on trip like this.  Having had a semi-moan about strong head winds and cross winds a few days back I’ve been fairly lucky since that which is nice as I’d feared a steady Westerly cross wind down the Atlantic coast might be a hassle but it hasn’t been at all.

For the last two days and for all the rest of the French part of the trip, I’m on the “Voie Verte Velo Atlantique” or VVVA as I affectionately refer to it.  I think it may actually be the “Vélodyssée l’Atlantique à Vélo” http://www.francevelotourisme.com/base-1/itineraires/la-velodyssee-latlantique-a-velo/troncons/arcachon-leon (WordPress doesn’t want to make that an HREF link: sorry readers!)  It’s mostly glorious, like the route I used for a bit on the Loire: either shared with pedestrians or pretty much bikes only, and with some sections shared with only tiny number of cars.  There are two catches: one is that the signposting is dodgy and, hampered by having no online maps yesterday, I ended up losing 30km in two bits where I failed to realise first, that it had simply stopped, and the second time that it was just taking me a beautiful inland lake, fantastic but a complete dead end for me. The other is the actual track. There was an exhiliharating (?spelling?) bit two days ago that, if I get the ‘photos working will get a blog post of its own titled “tightrope cycling” and then there is the wonderful joy of swinging through woodland and dappled sunlight.

Ah but there’s the rub: “tree root ruckling”.  I do respect the capacity plants have to simply destroy concrete and tarmac: always a salutory reminder of the power of what seems so much less strong to rip through our hard materials.  However, I wish they’d give the VVVA a break!  There were a couple of stretches yesterday which were like cycling over a cattlegrid.  Mostly they’re more solitary and one interesting thing is that sometimes it’s hard to see that such a small tree produced such a big ruckle, occasionally it’s clear it’s a tree root but it’s almost impossible to see which of the small shrubs is the offender which clearly intends to grow big and strong.

There was a stretch yesterday where the saintly maintainers of the VVVA were on the job: hundreds of patches of tarmac marked by white (something chemical and nasty that tells trees to put faith in roots in other directions I fantasised) with cuts down into the tarmac clearly made with edge cutters that I suspect presage further work to cut the roots out completely. It’s a huge job of work for someone but trust me, it’s appreciated as is the whole VVV system.

Enough from me.  Tent will be dry as a bone and I must get pedalling.

 

 

OK.  A quick flurry of posts that have been muddling around in my head that I’ll get down now while I seem to have the technology working (and as the tent dries).

In my childhood we used to go for some of most school holidays to my maternal grandparents’ house in Llantwit Major in South Wales, where my parents live now.  There’s a huge tidal rise and fall there, part of why the nearby Swansea is being touted for a UK tidal power station.  That meant that walking along the high tide mark was fascinating and at some point I learned the difference between flotsam and jetsam.  Jetsam is something that has gotten into the sea by human means (originally, from things that were jettisoned from boats I think and perhaps restricted just to them) and flotsam is anything else that gets to the high tide mark by natural processes: dead birds and animals, bits of trees, seeweed, dogfish egg pouches.  I know I occasionally fail to avoid a slow beetle but I think my roadkill is pretty small.

I confess that I watch the roadkill as I travel with my usual insatiable curiosity.  I must have seen hundreds of hedgehogs by now, the occasional lizard, robin, one snake and somethink I’ll come back to later when I’ve done more sleuthing.  In my twenties, cycling north from Toulouse with a previous partner, I remember being almost pathologically excited and also saddened to see a dead Hoopoe (look it up if you don’t know them: sensationally beautiful birds) on a small country road. For years it was the only Hoopoe I’d seen but J reminded me last week that we saw one on holiday just south of the Loire about 20 years ago and, just when I really needed a lift three days back, a live one lifted off from near me as I cycled a particularly challenging farm track in a field.  At first I just thought “black & white wing flash, too small and wrong shape for a magpie = jay” with the sort of daft autothink that even long lapsed birdwatchers have, then, alone with “wow, missed that nasty rut” there was “no, habitat wrong and colour wrong”. Taking my life, OK, some potential bruises, in my hands, I stopped looking at the track and looked at the bird: a hoopoe flying ahead of me for about ten metres before disappearing behind bushes: sensational and thank goodness a live bird and not roadkill.

In a rather diifferent autothink rambling process, ‘ve had some speculations about what a census of roadkill might say about the prevalence of local species and the many sampling issues that would make it a pretty poor estimator of between species variance but perhaps quite a good estimator of between area, within species variance.  Ah, there’s one for a first year science exam question hey?  The things I think about on the road.

OK.  Back to words.  I love that flotsam versus jetsam idea and I have come up with a similar categorisation .  There’s “roadkill” and we all know that noun but I’ve added “roadcrud” (I contemplated less nice terms but this is a family blog): the jetsam of the road, what people throw out.  Hundreds of cans, sometimes of alcoholic original content but mosty not, plastic bottles, used disposable nappies etc. etc.

But then there’s “roadsplat”.  On the week’s divertissement with J our car was covered with splattered insects, so much so that she wanted to put it through a car wash.  It was impressive how many had red blood, I tend to think of roadsplat as black or brown and thought that most insects didn’t have red blood.  Oh dear, there’s another thing I’d sleuth up now if I had time.  Anyway, now a horrible admission: even cyclists do produce roadsplat but I plead that it’s not much: a few poor small (black) insects too small to get away when I’m sweaty.  One of the joys of the shower at the end of the day is giving them a hydroburial.

Oh dear. Unpleasant but true.  On the bright side: 99% of flying insect life seems to me to be able to escape collisions with me though I worry that the tiny minority of butterflies and moths who seem to make actual physical contact will loose too many wing scales to live long.  However, the umpteen glorious dragon flies all seem to avoid contact with complete ease.  Do hope these ramblings amuse some of you, maybe “roadcrud” and “roadsplat” could take off, or maybe someone out there can do better, they do lack something alongside flotsam and jetsam.

OK. That looks as if I’m fuming politely or have flipped but it’s the working characters I have on my laptop at the moment.  No, the carriage return, a.k.a. “enter”, key doesn’t work, neither does the tab key.  You can’t do much with that, the majority of my passwords can’t even be typed with that.

“So how are you typing this?” any kindly readers persisting with this blog will be asking. Courtesy of a ten Euro USB keyboard bought in Auchan (one of the hypermarket chains in France) yesterday a.m.  But it’s a French layout keyboard so I have to avoid looking at the keys and it too has some nasty habits so I’m not sure if the problems with the laptop are just with the keys or with the keyboard controller.

How did it happen: completely my own fault. I was exhausted and not very happy with the campsite a couple of days back and finally settled down with a large glass of water and a coffee to catch up on Emails and the blog.  In my tiredness I managed to knock 90% of the water over the laptop.  I tried to dry it off quickly but should, I know, have switched it off immediately and dried it much more throughly.  However, it seemed fine, I chose it partly as it was supposed to be near military in its robustness (an utterly implausible bit of advertising “puff” of course) and was also supposed to be student proof.  Later it started misfiring as a typed and I realised I had a problem on my hands whihc I hoped would improve if I left it off and encouraged it to dry out.  As it’s roasting heere I thought that would be easy but it travels pretty well wrapped up in waterproof panniers and it got worse over the first 24 hours and has only regained two keys in the last 48 hours.

OK.  I’m admitting defeat on trying to keep up with work (I had only managed to answer key Emails) and I think most of the site, e.g. maps, days, advice, will have to stay as a project for my return but I’ll see if I can bodge things here.

I’m sure this is partly divine judgement on my rather defiant reply to Haroula’s recommendation of a smartphone.  Oh, and that packed up completely for mobile data yesterday, not helping things as Iwas cycling pretty blind as as result.   To be fair, when J and I had sorted out the fact that it’s registered in her name and got me in direct contact with Tesco, they fixed it in about five minutes. It still seems to be very capricious about uploading ‘photos by Dropbox, but that’s a different issue!

OK.  None of this is about life or death and I cycle on getting older, wiser (perhaps) and probably fitter, by the day!

Some of the roots of this trip in my personal history are summer camping trips to France from I think aged 8 to, well, in changing shape, about 16.  My mother was a French teacher and my father had French relations by marriage in Brittany and many years we would visit the French relatives and also head off elsewhere, taking in places of historical interest.  I loved this and I don’t remember my sisters complaining.  I’m sure that actually we all moaned from time to time but the memories have lost that, though I do remember tension infecting things with problems with the cars.  I remember a daffodil yellow Triumph Herald estate and then a light blue Renault 16.  I was rather proud of both as the estate was a bit different and having a French car was a bit unusual.  Did the two do all those years?  Bizarrely, I even remember the registration number of the Triumph: 312 CDU.

OK, rambling, back to the point.  Lots of French main roads are ramrod straight.  Are all of them based on Roman stones or are there later ones that reflect a different geography can history allowing later road builders to carve their routes with such rectitude?  Of course, some of them go up and down and a number of times on the trip so far I’ve found myself on such roads.  The rolling ups and downs are more of a challenge on the bike than in a car, I don’t suppose a modern car would even have to change gear for most of them while I’m going through about half my gear range.  (Ah, I’ll come back to that: gears!)

When I hit such wonderful rolling lines ahead I still find myself saying to myself “slides for cars!”  This was a family saying that we’d sing out as we topped the first such rise and saw the vista of direct ups and downs ahead.  I think it was one of the things that whiled away the hours in the car.  Back then (hm, 1965 to 1973 if I’ve got things right) playground and park slides for kids were all dead straight and shiny so these roads really did seem like “slides for cars” and I think we thought we were sharing some fun with the car, or was it the driver?

On the bike I try to avoid the bigger direct roads as they’re not always comfortable with cars and particularly lorries rushing past.  However, here, from yesterday, is a photo of the sort of view that triggers this memory.

That’s hopeless really but trust me, that light line spearing off to the horizon is the same road (and yes, I went beyond that horizon!)  The trouble with ‘photos like this is that the sun was so bright that I couldn’t see at all what I was catchin on the ‘phone.  These two, in the same spot, catch the “whoosh, whoosh” of the cars, though this wasn’t too busy and French drivers seem very generous to cyclists, passing way over in the road unless there’s a continuous line in the middle of the road (which they obey as if there were CCTV everywhere, which there isn’t).

And here is what was just to my right:

These start a bit north of the Loire as you get hot enough to need the irrigation and already, as time passes and I get further south, more and more are like this one, standing waiting for next year I guess.  There are all manner of magestic spraying systems and very occasionally, only once so far for me, you may want to time your way through a bit of road to avoid or perhaps catch, a shower.  However, generally the farmers seem able to get them to hit just up to the verge and not the road.

I like the funny ways in which I think we’re all partly made up of memories and often of geographically located memories.  Exploring such things seemed useful as as medical student and a doctor (when there was time) even before I found myself in psychiatry and psychology.  Hearing people talk about drinking with Dylan Thomas, and fairly precisely where in London, or others talk about war experiences, their own childhoods, whatever, often seemed to help build a working alliance when they were facing tough things (and I often trying to work out what on earth I had to offer beyond a pair of eyes and ears).  That’s the first time I’ve come close to one of things that I thought would have bubbled up much more so far in my ramblings: mourning and giving respect to 32 years of mental health clinical work, and six years before that of medicine, if I count clinical medical student years.  I think that stuff is bubbling up a bit and will come in more in days to come.  About three weeks to go.  If I’m going to make it, I’d better get on now as most things are packed and tent has had a nice blast of morning sun to air it and bake any condensation or dew out of it.

It takes me back to when our children were young.  Then the reason we not that infrequently found ourselves in McDonalds was that they had reliably clean and usable baby changing facilities when that wasn’t that common.

Tonight I had other dependents’ needs to service and again McDonalds was the answer.  This time instead of the reasonable needs of one or two human “reines bébés” (king/queen baby as we were told the French term their toddlers and youngsters), it was IT “reines bébés”.

Hence I found myself doing a 5km round trip from the campsite to McDonalds, my face burning with embarrassment (OK, that might really have been the sun I’ve absorbed today).

Why you may well ask?  Well, because the wifi here works (but only for one machine at a time and then only if it decides you’ve logged out the first: nothing to do with whether the first was disconnected or not).  To be fair, it doesn’t seem a bad connection here and it’s 24 hours for three Euros, but the crunch was that it seemed to block DropBox uploads and they seem to be the only way I can get ‘photos off my camera.  This came on top of the IT challenge yesterday which was that the system on that campsite was strictly one wifi connection per ticket and clearly logged the MAC address so I stuck with working on this, my touring laptop and didn’t at four Euros per ticket, and with only about six ‘photos from the day and all of the same dolmen, I opted to leave ‘photos.  It hadn’t helped that it had taken two tickets (they didn’t charge for the second) as the password for the first simply didn’t work.

Tonight I didn’t have that many more ‘photos, and it turned out that a lot of them were complete rubbish, but I did want to upload them and see them so … off to McDonalds I went and got a very cheap coffee and well over an hour of fairly fast internet for three devices.

How is it that we seem to have, or certainly I seem to have, put myself in some sort of tortured slave relationship with IT a lot of the time?  It, and oh boy that it, or that IT, covers a multitude or things, so rarely seems to just work, or not to just work, reliably, every time, year in, year out.  When  I started with computers (first year at university, 1975, but in earnest, in my last year of pre-clinical university, 77-78) they were pretty primitive by modern standards but boy if things wouldn’t work, it was always because I’d done something wrong.  The first computer I bought was one of the world’s first “portables”: an Osbourne II weighing 27lbs, i.e. 12.3kg. (Hm, cursory search finds only this about the Osbourne I, I’m sure mine was 27lbs not 24 and I know it had double sided 5.25″ disk drives not the Osbourne I’s single sided: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1.)  I loved that thing and it just worked.  OK, I didn’t switch it on for 24 hours after my sister poured water into it watering my plants but I stood it upside down and the water came out and we put it next to a radiator and it dried out and went on working for some years.  When I finally sold it and unscrewed the case to see what wonders I was selling (to a someone already buying it as a historical but working curio really), I could see the limescale marks on the circuit boards where the water had dried.

I had had it several years and really had just worked.  By then I was learning a lot about stats and programming writing myself a very simple stats package as nothing really existed for such beasts.  I had just encountered SPSS on mainframes at the time.  I was programming in the database package, dBase II, which came with it and for the first time in my life I found a bug in a programme.  I can’t now remember what it was that didn’t work in dBase II but it was unequivocally a bug in it as opposed to the umpteen bugs I kept writing.  (One thing I learned at the time was that I am a very, very mediocre, OK, frankly, a very bad, programmer!)

Oh boy I look back on those times with rose coloured glasses I’m sure, but I do think we have gone up an evolutionary blind alley with our current dependency on IT (and other technology, products and services) that simply aren’t reliable, user friendly or built to last). How we back ourselves out of the blind alley is a hard question: the sort of evolution of human cultural systems doesn’t have the harsh relentless logic of Darwin’s biological evolution nor the relatively simple genetics that underpin his system, though he didn’t know it.  (OK, I accept, it’s not the simple Mendelian genetics I learned at school and med school now we understand more about gene regulation, but the “genetics” of what we buy, what we use, how we choose to communicate etc., is a very different beast.)

Ah well, I got to experience McDonalds for the first time in perhaps 15 years.  Now it’s time to turn this machine off as it’s the strongest bit of light pollution near me on the campsite and I might just, for the third night in a row, see a very faint milky way if I do turn it off and am lucky.  Good night!

A post in a less philosophical vein than some of late.  Yesterday was 61 km and I seemed to have a lot of thinking time, more than I’ve had time to convert to pages or posts but this was one: the wind!

The first 20km were fairly sheltered but then things changed and I found myself dealing with a wind that was rising steadily as the distance ticked on and Garmin seems to be telling me that at the end it was a 27kph wind which feels about right: it was bending branches and sunflower fields.  It was mostly from the SW and so as my route zigzagged mostly south in the way the roads and Google maps dictated, the wind was either in my face, coming across me from the right, or somewhere between.  Relentless headwinds are a bit draining: you don’t have the promise of the downhill pay back that you have when you’re climbing.  However, I felt able to be fairly phlegmatic about it: this is what it is and it’s an privilege to be doing this.  (But I do hope it’s not the same for 90+km I’m currently planning for today!)

It meant I spent a lot of time “in the drops”.  I don’t know how much wind resistance it really cuts when you tuck up tighter with your hands that bit lower but it feels much easier and there’s something quite satisfying about your thighs pretty much touching your abdo if you’re really crouching.

So, I know that some in the touring cycling world don’t like “drops” and sing the praises of “straights”, or favour the more upright butterfly handlebars but I realised that I’d really struggle to buy any bike that didn’t have drops.  Lovely simple design, gives you a huge range of positions you can use which offsets aches and stiffness and oh it felt splendid yesterday to have that hunkered down position available.

Onward!

This is a bit of a digression: I like the idea that my wandering physical route links with wandering thoughts.  It was triggered by a short Email conversation with Craig Fees who runs the excellent Planned Environment Therapy Trust and the TC-OF (Therapeutic Community Open Forum) Email list, one of a number of Email lists I started many years ago.  That reminded me that I needed to declare the copyright on the site and the licensing but it also linked with some thinking I was doing and conversations with my family.

So, one immediate declaration and then some wandering.  The declaration is that, unless it says to the contrary, everything on this site is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.  That means that you can use anything here, and modify it as you wish, provided that you both provide an attribution showing it came from here AND you share whatever you create with my material under the same terms.  That’s nice and simple but it links with some things that are more complicated.

The complication is about confidentiality and rights over being identified.  I started thinking about this on about day three when I started wondering how much to say about my family and other identifiable people.  The issue is one that’s crucial in psychotherapy, so for the 32 years that I was practising psychotherapy I tried to be meticulous about protecting people’s confidentiality and often their identity and rights over how they were described.  The principles involved intersect rather interestingly (to me at least) with what to do here and “confidentiality” and rights over representations of ourselves are actually often complex and fraught and overly simple solutions often problematical.  These issues overlap into the (largely) non-clinical realm of this blog.

The internet, and particularly the web, has given us fascinating new possibilities but brought challenges about ownership and sharing of materials that even the printing press didn’t.  It’s now so easy to share things that it is really near zero cost for both the person publishing things and the person reading them.  It isn’t quite zero cost and that gives privileges over the web realm to those with more money than others but as things stand for now, it sets the wealth bar for entry pretty low, perhaps the power imbalance in favour of the wealthy is lower than it is any other human realm.

This is great if you want to share things and I have been a great enthusiast for sharing some things I’ve done in the (continuing!) academic/research side of my work life so far.  At first I was quite naïve about that and didn’t understand the legalities and the technicalities.  I was lucky with a paper I did years ago which suggested six short forms of a nice questionnaire (the Body Shape Questionnaire, BSQ).  My luck was that the authors behind that questionnaire were also in favour of making such things as freely available as possible.  That was good as my paper was pretty close to a copyright violation in suggesting adapting a copyright material: their full 34 item questionnaire.  There was a win:win outcome as, since 2005, I have used the strength of the internet and my familiarity with the technology, to provide both their full length questionnaire and the short forms for free download (http://www.psyctc.org/tools/bsq/).  That in turn has supported a few translations of the measures.  I don’t log the downloads but I know that over the last 11 years I’ve answered roughly 1,100 Emails about the BSQ, mostly from students in much poorer countries than the UK, seeking confirmation that they are within their rights to use the measures for project work.

Another example of trying to make things near zero cost to use is my biggest real research achievement: the CORE system (http://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk).  We always made the instruments free to reproduce on paper but, as of the 1st of January 2015, we have moved them into the the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/.

So, unlike the CORE instruments, which are free to use but not to change in any way, you can adapt anything I’m putting up here as much as you like as long as you obey those two legally binding conditions: acknowledgement (simplest is to give the URL of the original) and that you too make things available in the same way.  I love the simple way that Creative Commons licences make it easy to do all this, that they look after the legal side (I can sue you if you don’t obey those two conditions: can’t see me doing it but I’d have the right as the material remains my copyright material) and the simple “share-alike” gives the process an inbuilt encouragement to reuse of the licence and the stance as well as the materials.

I like to think that this is in a spirit of sharing that coexists with an individual experience when one goes along a much used pilgrimage route.  There are some confidentiality challenges that I was going to wrap into this blog post too but it’s already too long and I’ve struggle with it, it’s taken nearly a week to do.  OK.  Just press “publish” Chris!

“Why do this?” is nicely ambiguous as I’m trying to write something both about why I’m doing the cycle ride and also about why I’m creating this mix of site and blog. Without the ride there’d be no account so let’s start there.

Why the ride?

I’ve said a bit about autobiographical, personal historical, roots in my first blog post but that doesn’t really unpick the motivations nor does it address the timing which is that doing it on giving up clinical work, a sort of retirement step.  I always planned that it would happen “when I retire” but retiring turns out to be more complex than I’d thought as I’m only retiring from clinical work and very much continuing with my research/academic work.  I do intend to have a bit more of the week for pleasure when I return.  However, my family would say, with some accuracy, “Oh, so you’ll take a day off perhaps some weekends!”  They’re almost right: actually I intend to have at least one week day every week not for work: exhibitions in London are much less crowded on weekdays!

I’m dodging this explaining.  This has always been about an experience that would have a meaning to it.  I always thought it would have something that, for all that I’ve loved my work, working hadn’t.  I’m agnostic: I have never had a clear conviction of religious belief or of there being “other powers” so this isn’t a traditional pilgrimage in the traditions that are strong particularly in Christianity and Islam.  I’m not an atheist: I don’t feel I know that there is no system of belief that might be “right”, I don’t think I can know there is no “other power” and I have a lot of respect for the way religion and strong spiritual belief work for some people and seem to empower them to do good.  However, I also fear and loathe the way that such belief almost as often seems to inspire people to hatred, contempt and rejection of other people and drives them to do horrific things.

So this isn’t a religious pilgrimage but, whereas I don’t have a religion, I have always felt a deep pleasure in both the natural and the creative worlds: I can get a huge mood lift from seeing a heron overhead perhaps while making my way through London traffic, or from a goldfinch coming to the food I put out in our back garden.  Birds are the domain of the natural world I know best: I do know a bit about non-avian European mammals, I can recognise some UK/European trees but there are many I don’t know and I’m pretty hopeless at smaller plants and the entire fish and insect realms.  I was a keen birdwatcher for a few years in my young adolescence. With two friends I went out in the fields and woods around Leamington Spa with trusty binoculars and inconspicuous, dull coloured clothes.  I was never a twitcher: moving far to see a rare bird seemed wrong to me, and to miss the point.  However, I remember an incredible surge of excitement when we saw a waxwing one very cold day.  There was a surge of pleasure in knowing what this exotic thing was, that it was just sitting on a very ordinary field gate but sort of blessing us with its rarity and the fact that it had probably come a long way from somewhere much colder to give us the minutes we had before it flew off.  However, fairly regular sightings had something almost as special a thrill: kingfishers, those wonderful herons, the three main UK woodpeckers, treecreepers, nuthatches.  Even good minutes watching a robin or a wren could be calm and special.

Working hard pretty much from medical student days to now, and living in London for most of that time, I’ve felt I’ve sacrificed the opportunity for much of that simple pleasure in nature and it feels time to get (back) to that.

So part of the logic of this trip has always been about having the time to really savour it as nature rolls by as the speed it does when you’re 59 and pedalling a moderately laden bike.  So far I’ve seen egrets, a peregrine at Canterbury cathedral, buzzards, one very near flying, one equally near sitting imperiously on a fence post by the road, and throughout there have been swooping swallows galore.  However, this isn’t an ornithology trip, it’s just as good to have felt the ground changing, the configuration of woodland and river with the millennia of erosion and human intervention that have shaped them as they are. And there is a huge satisfaction to be moving through all this under my own steam.  Some of that is simple pleasure to have no window between me and what I’m passing, something is the satisfaction that I can still move a bike a fair way in a day but slowly enough to take things in.

Then there’s spiritual pleasure in human creativity: particular foci are the cathedrals and churches and I’m sure part of that is that they have spiritual meaning for people and have had sometimes for over a thousand years.  However, there’s also pleasure in the engineering skill that created the canals and the simple aesthetic touches in even quite small cottages: often in the gables and the moulding: a sort of statement of being able to do something that is pure decoration but in no way detracts from the functionality, the often obviously efficient logic of the building.

Ah but those cathedrals and churches … hm, I’ll move on to them next in the next instalment of “Why do this?”   To be continued.