cache for questions

Here's a map of a short walk we did with some friends when we went up to Leicestershire to visit them for New Year. We had, collectively, five kids with us, so a twenty-mile route march was out and in any case would have cut unacceptably into drinking time. We ended up performing a slightly complex set of manouevres involving a car in order to ensure that smaller people who didn't want to do the whole walk and might potentially get a bit whingy and risk PISSING ME OFF had an opt-out and in the end it was only three of us (me, Jim and Nia) who did the whole route (around five miles) on foot. 

No claim will be made by me here that this was the most exciting or challenging walk ever, therefore, but I offer it up nonetheless to illustrate that if you're interested in what goes on around you you can find quite a bit to interest and intrigue even on a short, low-level walk such as this.

Start and end point was at our friends' house in Stathern, which I have obfuscated the exact location of just in case anyone decides to go and burgle it. We then walked along the road towards the neighbouring village of Harby before heading north just after the old railway bridge and linking up with the towpath of a disused canal before making our way into Harby, where we had a couple of pints in the pub and then headed back via the more direct on-road route.

Some points of interest along the way: firstly the old railway bridge and the railway it used to carry. This was the slightly cumbersomely-named Great Northern and London and North Western Joint Railway which meandered its way around Leicestershire in a mainly north-south direction. Its main business was goods but there were passenger services (ending pre-Beeching in 1953), and there was a station serving both villages called, imaginatively, Harby and Stathern, whose approximate location is marked by the purple star on the map. As with any station designed to serve two communities, it was roughly equidistant from each and conveniently accessible from neither. 

As if that were not interesting enough, Nia reminded me to have a look at my geocaching app and see if there was anything in the vicinity. I discovered not only that there was, but that there was one right under the railway bridge - cue a lot of scrambling around until we eventually found it under a log by the side of the northern bridge abutment.

I see I've mentioned geocaching a few times on Twitter before but the only mention on this blog seems to be in this post from 2008 wherein I was a bit sniffy about it. Well, all I can say is that was pre-kids and it's a lot of fun hunting them out with the kids and gives them a little bit of extra impetus to agree to outdoor activities. The link earlier in this paragraph includes details of the app, of which there is a free version more than good enough to facilitate some entertaining hunting; give it a go. Top tip: take a pen with you as quite a lot of them have log books and only the really lavishly-appointed ones have an accompanying pen, still less one that works.

some more fun #geocaching up in #Wentwood woods at the weekend. Alys was very chuffed that her sharp eyes spotted this one before her sister did. also a bit weird that all the Wentwood geocaches have Papa Lazarou in them barking HELLO DAVE at me pic.twitter.com/1k14TDjjat

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) August 27, 2020

So then there's the canal - this is the old Grantham Canal which ran from, you've guessed it, Grantham, to West Bridgford on the southern outskirts of Nottingham (and where I went to school for a couple of years in the early 1980s - I mean, not in the canal specifically) where it joined the River Trent. It's pretty reedy and silty and overgrown these days though still just about recognisable as a waterway. 

Finally, once we'd squelched along the muddy towpath to Harby we called into the Nag's Head for a couple of reviving pints. They'd evidently done their research and knew we were coming, as they'd facilitated a nice home-from-home vibe by having Brains SA on tap, and very nice too. Needless to say we lingered a while longer then we'd originally planned, so when everyone else piled into the car to head home the remaining three of us had to stumble back along the road in the dark. Luckily the roadside verges were fairly wide and my phone flashlight was just about up to the job of helping us see where we were going and avoid getting killed by occasional speeding cars. While we're on the subject of pubs we also called into the Montero Lounge in Melton Mowbray on New Year's Day for lunch. 

Finally, my mention of Melton Mowbray there reminds me to remind you that if you're visiting the area you will be in the middle of both Melton Mowbray pork pie country and Stilton cheese country, so make sure you eat some. I'm not big on blue cheese but I did ensure I ate a pie while I was there. 

appealing daintiness is assured

We've all seen those hilarious adverts from the 1950s for "intimate hygiene" products, and had a good old chuckle at the hilariously stilted language, the pictures and the ludicrously outdated view of gender relations and sex. Here's one:

For best results you have to read the text in the style of Harry Enfield's Mr. Cholmondeley-Warner. Now that's all very amusing, and one of the reasons that it's amusing is that we've moved on - after the various liberation and consciousness-raising movements of the 1960s and 1970s women are free to be confident and open about sexual matters, and not be spending hours hosing out their front bottoms with neat bleach for fear that hubby might catch a whiff of something a bit too biological and come over all faint. No, we're all open and groovy enough these days to know that a vagina smells like a vagina, and so much the better for that. If, on the other hand, yours smells like a dead badger in a herring and gorgonzola warehouse, you might want to get yourself checked out by a medical professional.

The change wasn't instant, of course - teen magazines were still pushing these products sufficiently hard in the early 1970s for Monty Python to deem it worth satirising in one of their comedy books:

But, come on, it's the 21st century now. Except it turns out we haven't come that far after all. Now I have clearly been living in an ivory tower of obliviousness to the latest developments in vagina-shaming, as it appears that even in the 21st century there are still people making it their business to make young girls terrorised and paranoid that their genitals are giving off some sort of toxic radiation that needs to be bleached and perfumed into submission.

Amusingly, Femfresh recently started a Facebook page, as lots of companies do, and stuck a load of the sort of teeth-grindingly twee and infantile language above on the banner, at which point the sisterhood rose magnificently as one and comment-bombed the page into submission, so much so that the page was eventually taken down, but not before this rather marvellous screen-shot had been captured.

If Femfresh isn't right up your alley, so to speak, why not try the pads advertised in this Malaysian commercial. Basically the message here is: your minge stinks of dead fish and durian, and these pads will make it smell of green tea instead. Which will be better, and not at all weird. Or, if you don't fancy that, how about a vagina mint?

Just in case us blokes feel left out, though, you can now get individually-wrapped pre-packaged cock wipes. You know, when you're with a proper classy bird, one whose fanny smells like PG Tips and Polos and that, wiping the old chap on the curtains just won't cut it. What you want is a dedicated penile hygiene maintenance solution for the 21st century, packed with made-up sciencey ingredients, at the bargain price of £1.99 for a box of eight. Or you could just have a shower, like normal people.

Next week: arse lemons.

mmmmm......fattening

We went to the Cowbridge Food Festival today, always a reliable source of tempting yet expensive gourmet items. Today's haul (pictured below) included:

• Some cheddar from the Blaenafon Cheddar Company - this particular one has Brains SA and chillies in it
• Some more cheddar from the Snowdonia Cheese Company - one garlic and herb one and a cranberry one
• Some elephant garlic from the Garlic Farm on the Isle of Wight
• A beef and stilton pie from the Wessex Pantry
• Some venison haunch steaks from Venison in the Vale
• Some assorted chocolate brownies from the Chocolate Brownie Company
• Some Calabrian sausages from Gorno's

We also popped into the Vale Of Glamorgan Inn as they were running a real ale festival. I had a couple of quite decent pints, which is always nice at a real ale festival where you're generally required to choose from a list of a dozen or so you've never heard of, but more importantly in order to get to the bar for the second of them I had to step around none other than legendary Wales and British Lions full-back JPR Williams. Given that the 17-month driving ban he picked up for a drink-driving incident in March 2010 will have expired only a couple of months ago I trust he had made alternative arrangements for getting home, seeing as how he was tucking into a pint with some gusto.

no whey

You'll recall that back in the halcyon days of cheese racing, when we were featured in Kerrang! and harboured crazy dreams of one day becoming a proper viral internet sport thing like extreme ironing, Andy and I did a couple of radio interviews on a couple of regional radio stations to promote the sport. Well, things have gone a bit quieter of late, but there seems to have been a recent resurgence of interest in the noble sport. Maybe people can't afford to swan off to Magaluf any more and are having to staycation in Bognor or Rhyl instead, and need to liven up the long wet summer evenings with some outdoor activity, and keep warm at the same time.


Anyway, whatever the reason, Andy appeared on Gold Radio this very morning to big up cheese racing, just in time for the start of the summer season. If you click on this link to Paul Coyte's breakfast show and navigate to about 1:41 or so you'll hear a brief interview spreading the good news to a whole new generation of cheese racers. The powers that be decided to exclude Andy's normal radio sidekick from the airwaves; I can only assume I was deemed too radical, too subversive, too downright dangerous for public consumption first thing in the morning. You don't want to be having a nice bowl of Sugar Puffs and a cup of tea and have some maniac bellowing PISS out of the radio at you, I suppose.

Textbook YouTube cheeseracing action can be seen here, here, here (in a toaster oven!) and here.

cheeses H Christ

Our cheese racing exploits in Swanage were of the sadly disappointing variety, caused - I reckon - in the main by the sub-standard quality of the disposable barbecues we used. They were struggling to cook the meat, so there was precious little heat left to incinerate cheese with. In addition to that we'd bought a wide variety of experimental cheese products (as pictured on the left), which may have muddied the cheesy waters a bit.

So it's nice to see that there's some really textbook cheese racing video footage out there on YouTube. Check out some of these:

• Some crazy Americans in a field - this one is already available directly from the website, I think. Excellent deployment of the official Cheese Racing apron, a bit too much focus on the whooping participants and not enough cheese footage in the early stages, but it gets more cheese-centric after a minute or so. And the interviews with the participants are excellent: "Why do you cheese race, Joanie?" "Because I'm from Wisconsin."
• Some very good footage, apparently from Manchester. Barbecue looks, if anything, a bit too hot, but there's some textbook inflation, plus some excellent pulsating of the victorious cheese at the end.
• This is an interesting new departure - cheese racing in a toaster oven. But there's no arguing with the results - and the dramatic music (Phantom Of The Opera, I think) adds an extra frisson of tension to the whole thing.

mogzarella

The more observant among you will have noticed a few cosmetic changes of late: I've finally got round to sticking an image up in the banner area, and I've also finally got round to rejigging the links list. Have a browse around, it all comes with my personal recommendation, though obviously no liability for any injury or offence or extreme sexual arousal incurred while viewing the websites in question. One of which is of course the great and noble sport of cheese racing. Just to get you in the mood for what I feel confident will be a great summer of cheesy mayhem, here's a picture of a cat with a cheese slice on its head. Unfortunately the heat given off by the average domestic cat isn't sufficient to melt a cheese slice to the degree required. Try a barbecue instead.

in-car micturition splash-avoidance product of the day

So you're in the car, at a rock festival, maybe at the theatre or in a job interview, or picking up an MBE from the Queen - anywhere where it's really not convenient or possible to just nip out for a piss. But, the thing is, you really really need one.

Well, help is at hand. No longer do you have to contort yourself in order to piss into a bottle, a process that has a number of drawbacks - for a start it's practically impossible if you're a girl, and you do also have to remember not to wake up some hours later with a raging thirst and greedily guzzle down the lot before remembering. It's no joke, I can tell you. Anyway, now you simply unroll your TravelJohn disposable urinal pouch, deploy the funnel attachment appropriate to your gender, and away you go, quite literally. They are available, along with numerous other useful travel gadgets, from the lavishly stocked Roaming Fox website. There is also an instructional video, for those in any way unclear about how the whole "pissing in a bag" process works. I clicked the link with a certain amount of trepidation, but actually it's all quite clean, no actual piss is involved. It's claimed that each pouch can soak up 28 fluid ounces of liquid, which I calculate to be just under a pint and a half - not bad, but realistically you'd probably have to be quite desperate before pissing in a bag started to seem like a good idea, and, well, you know how it is, once you start you can't stop.

I'm conscious of having said "piss" quite a lot over the course of the last couple of paragraphs; not that I'm apologising as that is essentially what those two paragraphs were about. But it just reminded me of a very minor claim to fame that I have, which is that I am one of a select group of people who have been told off for saying "piss" on BBC Radio. If the dates in the Cheeseracing News page are to be believed (and I'm sure they are) then it was May 2003 when Andy and I appeared on Bob Fischer and Mark Drury's Gobstopper show on BBC Radio Cleveland. Obviously you get a brief pep-talk before you go on, you know, keep it light, no swearing, etc. etc. Anyway, bearing this in mind, I waited until about the third or fourth word I uttered before saying "piss". They took it very well, though, and didn't cut us off or anything.

And while we're on the subject of cheeseracing - it's barbecue season, so get racing! And buy more thongs!

the triumph of democracy over apathy

....is a slightly grandiose title for a blog post, but there it is. I'm referring to the results of the first round of the French presidential election yesterday. It seems that either the French voting public was genuinely engaged and energised by the candidates on offer this time round, or that they were keen to avoid the debacle of 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen qualified for the second round of voting at the expense of the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin.

Whatever the reason, voter turnout was a startling 84.6% compared with 71.6% in 2002, and what most neutral-ish observers would consider the "right" pair of candidates, Nicloas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, qualified for the run-off on 6th May. At least this way there'll be a meaningful second round, unlike last time where Jacques Chirac was guaranteed a landslide victory as soon as Le Pen qualified alongside him.

It'll be interesting to see where the unsuccessful candidates' votes go in the second round; you would assume that the Le Pen vote will largely gravitate to Sarkozy, despite the two men's mutual personal loathing. Where the Bayrou vote might go is a bit trickier. Not to mention the significant numbers (16% of the turnout) who voted for the various other candidates, including José Bové and his comedy moustache. Here's a picture (above) so you can compare it with Dick Strawbridge's from a few posts back. I think his startling resemblance to Asterix (also above) might have won him a few votes, as well.

Personally I hope Ségolène Royal wins, just because it would give the chauvinistic conservative status quo an almighty hoof in the family jewels, which would be quite amusing. There may be an element of me quite fancying her, in a quintessentially French older woman kind of way, as well, but I'm not prepared to comment on that.

This might be a good moment, also, to revive the hoary old quote which I've just looked up and seen attributed to Gore Vidal: "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so." Or, for French consumption: "N'importe quel français qui est disposé à courir pour le président devrait automatiquement, par définition, être éliminé de faire jamais ainsi." Well, "courir pour le président" probably isn't the right idiom, but it'll have to do. Sarkozy really really wants to be president; you can see it in his eyes. Some people might find this a bit alarming.

It's instructive to contrast the turnout with the turnout at the last two UK general elections - 61.3% in 2005 and 59.2% in 2001. That's what you get in a system (i.e. the French one) where every person casting a vote knows that their vote is going to count. Admittedly electing 650 MPs is a bit more complex than electing a single President, but the same principles apply. More here, if you want it.

On a completely unrelated note, this is my 147th blog post, and the World Snooker Championship started this week. Spooky, huh?

attention indoor cheese racers

....think about what you're doing! Racing of cheese in a confined indoor space can have serious and messy consequences. Just look at this:

Word to the wise: do it outside.

Actually these aren't post-cheese-slice-explosion photos: no, this is yer actual art. They are part of a series (entitled, would you believe, "Cheese") of everyday household objects (of varying sizes up to and including, as pictured here, pretty much the entire household) covered in stringy cheese. Looks like mozzarella to me, but it's hard to be sure. And I've no idea how the artist got it to melt so evenly - one of those hot-air paint-removing guns, perhaps? Anyway, his name is Cosimo Cavallaro, and he's in the news at the moment for making a giant naked chocolate Jesus, to all-too-predictable gibbering howls of outrage from middle America. Quite why they're so offended is hard to work out - the image doesn't appear to mock or caricature in any way, so it must either be the nudity or the medium (i.e. the chocolate). Then again if the idea of a representation of Christ in edible form is so offensive, someone's evidently not been paying attention during the Holy Communion ritual.....so I guess it is the big chocolate cock that's the problem, after all. Anyway, his website has some pictures of the sculpture in question, as well as more melted cheesy pics, and a couple of slightly more worrying categories called "shit" and "death" which I haven't felt a need to investigate, but, hey, knock yourselves out. The ones depicting several pounds of ham on a bed are slightly disturbing, as well.