running joke

I'm not big on New Year's resolutions, but one that I did make at the start of 2024 (pretty much the only serious one I've ever made, actually, thinking about it) was to get out to the parkrun a bit more often, and since "a bit more often" is unacceptably woolly and just invites weaselling out or retrospective redefinition of the challenge to accommodate laziness, I made it a bit more specific: at least one parkrun every calendar month during 2024. So that means every month of the year has to include a parkrun, no skipping March and doing two in April, for instance; that doesn't count. 

I am a tedious evangelist for parkrun as a thing - all you have to do is register, save your membership barcode in some form (this used to mean some physical format but as of recently includes just having it saved on your phone), turn up, and run five kilometres (a smidge over three miles). That's it; all the timing and collating of results is done for you, including collection and analysis of your own personal stats. It's great, and for the reluctant runner (something I would definitely class myself as) provides just enough structure and accountability to encourage participation while not making the bar to entry too high. Running with a large group of other people of extremely mixed abilities has advantages as well; some find the whole community spirit and post-run chat and coffee thing delightful, while some (like me) don't really go for that but find it helpful and motivating to run in a group including lots of other people who are not conspicuously thinner and fitter than them but who are nonetheless not succumbing to the temptation to walk for a bit or just jack the whole thing in and slope off for a pint and a fag.

My brief parkrun history is as follows: I became aware of it back in the early noughties when some friends from Newbury started going regularly to the Greenham Common one and (as people tend to do) evangelising their ass off about it to all and sundry. No disrespect intended to those people, but I looked at them and thought, well, I could probably do that. This was around the time that parkrun (which started in late 2004 in Bushy Park in west London but only added a handful of events in its early years) really started to take off, and my first one was at Tredegar House (which bagged the Newport parkrun name as it was the first in the area in 2011) in March 2013, at which I ran a perfectly respectable 28:58 (that's me approaching the finish line on the right). I did another in May of that year and then took a brief sabbatical for around five and a half years before doing my next one at Riverfront in central Newport (which had started up in 2017) in September 2018. 

That pattern of occasional dabblings continued until early 2020 when Nia, who'd been a reasonably regular participant at the junior parkrun (two kilometres) decided that she'd like to upgrade to the adult version. We did a couple, the second of which in March 2020 turned out to be the last one before the COVID lockdown regulations prevented large groups of people getting together to breathe heavily and sweat over each other for around eighteen months. We participated in the first one back at Riverfront in August 2021 (and got our picture in the paper!) by which time it was clearly evident to me that I was on borrowed time in terms of finishing in front of Nia, or even keeping up with her for any length of time. 

Even after that participation was a bit patchy, though - having done three in the remainder of 2021 and an excellent nine in the first seven months of 2022 I then did none in the rest of 2022 and not a single one in 2023, for reasons I have no recollection of and therefore must just have been apathy. And so by the end of that year I obviously felt that some structure needed to be imposed.

Anyway, long story short, having done a total of eighteen parkruns up to the start of 2024 I fulfilled the terms of the challenge by doing fourteen in 2024 - double-up months were the nice friendly summer months of June and August, the second one in August being my first proper bit of parkrun tourism as we went to Wycombe Rye and had a minor celebrity encounter as described here. In renewing the challenge for 2025 I added a couple of optional stretch objectives: do more parkruns in total than in 2024, and have a crack at getting to fifty in total by the end of the year. That second one would entail doing eighteen during the year, something I'm here to tell you I achieved by running the new Llanfoist Crossing parkrun in early December. I'm slightly reluctant to make a big thing of it, although it's significant to me, as I personally know people whose tally stands at well over a hundred and the guy I spent most of the December parkrun behind (though I'd like it noted that I had him in the sprint finish) was wearing a 250 T-shirt, and I have seen a few 500s at other parkruns. 

I fully intend to renew the basic one-per-month resolution for 2026, though I'm not sure exceeding eighteen for the year is realistic. 

A few random observations to finish:

• My personal best progression is a bit of an odd one: while some people spend years nibbling off a few seconds here and there I set a target of 26:11 at my first ever Riverfront parkrun in 2018 and didn't improve on it until May 2025 when I ran 25:44. Not wanting to have that stand for another seven years I subsequently lowered it again to its current mark of 25:29 (at Riverfront again) in August.
• The watershed of Nia's PB being faster than mine was crossed in September 2024 when she ran 26:05 at Riverfront and she has remained ahead since (and I'm sure will permanently). Her current PB stands at just over a minute faster than mine at 24:36.
• You'll notice that Riverfront seems to be a PB-friendly course, and so it is. This is highly dependent on gradient and terrain, and Riverfront is pretty flat and on tarmac all the way. The one at Tredegar House, by contrast, is mostly flat but there are roots and rocks and mud to cope with so it's never as fast. The hilliest one I have done is at Belvoir Castle up in Leicestershire. 

river deep, mountain high

More exciting outdoor-adventurousness news as promised, but first a bit of scene-setting: we went on holiday to Scotland at the end of July. It's a long old drive so we stopped off on the way to visit our friends John and Tracey at their home in Silverdale, just south of the Lake District. We were only there for a day or so but did get to do a bit of exploring, in particular the spectacular coastal location at the northern end of Morecambe Bay. 

Morecambe Bay is a vast expanse of estuarial sand and mudflats and fairly notorious for its shifting landscape and dangerous tides, and most famously (in recent times anyway) for the incident where over 20 Chinese cockle-harvesters drowned in 2004. Just to demonstrate the fickle nature of the landscape, there was until recently (properly recently as in a few weeks before we were there) a vast flat expanse of sand extending out from Silverdale Cove to the main channel of the River Kent as it emerged from its mouth a couple of miles to the north, but recent heavy rain had induced a sudden course change and the river had turned south, carved out a great gouge in the sand and created a substantial sand cliff only a couple of hundred yards from the beach, which Alys and Nia kindly posed by for scale and subsequently hilariously pretended to push their little brother off.

Despite the apparent foolhardiness of attempting such a thing, guided walks are periodically available, weather and tide conditions permitting, and a person with the grand title of the Queen's Guide To The Sands (well, presumably King's Guide these days) has the job of scoping out a safe route. As publicly-accessible walking routes go it's probably not as dangerous as the Broomway in Essex - less chance of being maimed by discarded military ordnance, for instance - but definitely not to be trifled with. It is at least still passable, though, unlike the Wadeway in Chichester Harbour where you would now disappear into a canal halfway across.

Anyway, we didn't do any of that, preferring to head home for a refreshing beer and a soak in the hot tub. The following day we headed off to continue our journey north to our destination of Hunter's Quay holiday village near Dunoon on the Cowal peninsula, which I see I mentioned here. I see that I laughingly make reference to there being no point building a bridge across from the mainland (the intervening channel being basically the confluence of Loch Long and the Firth of Clyde) as it wouldn't get much use. That may be true, but more pertinently it's a couple of miles across and would therefore be a fairly major feat of engineering, not to mention one spanning a major shipping lane. Whatever, there isn't one, and so once you've got as far as Gourock (which you do by basically heading north into Glasgow and then turning left) you are obliged to queue for a ferry. Anecdotally, and I'm not saying this justifies the cost of a bridge, the ferry terminals were pretty busy in both directions when we crossed, and by no means everyone got on the first one that showed up.

Anyway, the holiday village was perfectly nice, featuring the usual chalet-slash-static-caravan accommodation and the usual array of food and drink facilities plus some entertainment for the kids. I'm always unavoidably reminded of Hi-De-Hi in places like this but it was actually perfectly nice. More importantly a) Hazel had managed to wangle a super-cheap deal for a short break and b) a shortish drive north (no ferries required this time) takes you to the north end of Loch Lomond and the vicinity of the Arrochar Alps, some of Scotland's most southerly and therefore most easily accessible Munros. Technically the most southerly Munro is Ben Lomond, but from where we started it's rather awkwardly situated on the east side of the loch, and in any case I'd been up it before, back in about 1999.

So, emboldened by everyone's conquering of a rather wet and soggy Pen y Fan for my birthday in February I devised a walk (basically this one) that would bag two Munros and offer the possibility of a crack at The Cobbler, just short of Munro height but an interesting scrambly challenge. I had mentally earmarked that last bit as very unlikely to come off, but it's good for Plan A to be ambitious as long as there's a Plan B you can fall back on. 

There's a car park by the shores of Loch Long just outside the village of Succoth, which I expect you can make up your own jokes about - you know, Elizabeth I visiting and declaring "the mountain view enchanteth most delightfully, but the neighbouring village sucketh most egregiously", that sort of thing - anyway, point is it offers a good starting point for the walk. If you've been paying attention, though, you'll have clocked that Loch Long is a sea loch, and that therefore you are going to be obliged to gain all 3000+ of those Munro feet without a head start. Moreover, if you follow the anticlockwise route I'd devised, the usual route of ascent up Beinn Narnain, the first Munro, is a relentless direct upward slog along the remains of an old cable railway, of which only a few lumps of concrete footing remain. Once you get out of the woods the relentlessness eases off a bit and it's quite pleasant, though challenging. Eventually you arrive at a pretty intimidating wall of rock which you have to find a scrambly way up to get onto the summit plateau and bag the trig point. Beinn Narnain is 926 metres or 3038 feet and (depending which list you use) is around 257th of the 280-odd Munros on the current list.

It's not the Black Cuillin, but it is far from easy - considerably more challenging than a good few of my previous Munros, and I was and am inordinately proud of the kids for giving every impression of enjoying the whole thing and seeming engaged by the idea of coming back and doing some more in future. I should also add a word for Hazel who had sustained a badly bruised ankle in a comedy incident with a shot putt at school sports day a couple of weeks earlier but clearly didn't want to let the side down and struggled up anyway. That constraint did mean that we had to abandon the idea of bagging the day's intended second Munro, Beinn Ime, which was disappointing but which I was half-expecting before we'd even set out. 

The walk out down the valley which separates Beinn Narnain from The Cobbler is a delight, as it's a pretty good path alongside a pretty river and affords excellent views of the Cobbler's knobbly profile in particular. A bit of steep zig-zagging back through the woods and you're back at the car park. After a long and strenuous walk like that a pint is very much in order and I heartily commend to you the Village Inn in Arrochar which has excellent ale from the Fyne Ales brewery. Two things to say about Fyne Ales: firstly haha, you see what they did there, and secondly I'd had them before in a pub in Edinburgh in 2011.

Anyway, the important thing here is that this was the kids' first Munro, and the first time I'd had an opportunity to add one to my list since back before we had kids. We actually did three Scottish trips with our friends Jenny and Jim and on those trips bagged four, four and zero Munros respectively, so this was actually the first one I'd been up since 2010. My personal count now stands at fifteen. 

Route map and altitude profile are below: total distance is about twelve kilometres or seven-and-a-half miles.

Just to cap off the holiday activities, once we came to the end of our stay in Dunoon we headed back across to another quite similar holiday park just east of Edinburgh for a couple of days and spent some time doing the usual tourist-y stuff in Edinburgh including a trip down into Mary King's Close which was very interesting, and a walking tour of locations relating to JK Rowling (a former resident of Edinburgh) and the Harry Potter books. I would describe this as a commendably game attempt to get some tourist mileage out of some incredibly tenuous connections: once you've been to the site of the former cafe where she sat and wrote some of the early books you're reduced to pointing at various knobbly buildings and saying: hey, might this not have been partial inspiration for Hogwarts? Go on, squint a bit. Our tour guide was an engaging enough bloke, though, and it was pretty good fun. We didn't have time to climb Arthur's Seat but we did have time for me and Nia to have a crack at the Meadowmill parkrun on Saturday morning. Anyone fancying a bit of Scottish parkrun tourism should be aware that most if not all of the Scottish ones start at 9:30am rather than 9am. Not sure if this is a daylight thing or just a bit of bolshy being different for the sake of it.

back once again with the hill behaviour

We went for a walk up the Blorenge a couple of weeks ago; broadly similar in route and distance to the two previous walks we'd done - the slightly ill-fated (in terms of the health of my ankle and boots) lockdown one in 2021 and the one with some work colleagues all the way back in 2009. So we're not breaking any new ground here but as always there are some points of interest that are worth mentioning, and it serves as an intro to some other more significant walk stuff that we did earlier in the summer and which I'll get to in another post.

So, anyway, I don't want to rehash the content of earlier posts here but you'll recall that the Blorenge is a smallish mountain (or a largish hill, whatever you like, I'm not getting into an argument about categorisation) just outside Abergavenny, really just the steep end of the largest lobe of a sort of cloverleaf-shaped area of high ground centred just north of Blaenavon. Any walk that wants to qualify as an "ascent" in any meaningful way pretty much has to start somewhere in the vicinity of Llanfoist, and it just so happens that there's a car park at Llanfoist Crossing, at the start point of the cycle path that follows the old railway line from Llanfoist to Merthyr Tydfil along some of the bits that haven't been subsumed by the Heads Of The Valleys Road. The only drawback is that the car park is quite small and heavily used by dog walkers so it can be a bit of a bunfight finding a space. I'm not going to be That Guy and suggest you provide minor botheration to the locals by parking on a residential street as an alternative, but clearly that is a thing you could do if so inclined. 

Anyway, you're an adult, sort your own parking out. Having done that you walk up the path that goes under the old Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal and then smashes straight up the hill through the woods directly towards the summit of the Blorenge. On emerging into the open you can, if you so wish, carry on straight up, but a more scenic and less lung-busting option is to take a left turn and head for the pleasant spot of the Devil's Punchbowl, a small pond in what is presumably some sort of glacial cwm. It's apparently man-made, and surprisingly recent (circa 1960s) - it was previously just a low-lying marshy area. Apparently quite a popular wild swimming spot, although when we were there the water level was quite low and it all looked a bit green and murky.

After the brief respite of the fairly flat (even slightly downhill) walk to the Devil's Punchbowl and maybe a brief respite to take in the scenery and have a drink and a KitKat (other chocolate bars are available) you turn south-west and start uphill again, briefly meeting a minor road before turning north for the proper assault on the hill. You'll notice that the path takes a slightly indirect hook-y route before approaching the summit trig point from the north-east and you might be tempted to say: hell, I'm going to cut that corner off. To that I would say: go for it if you want, but I have done it (partly by accident) and generally found it to be a bit of an arse. I mean, you won't die, but the energy and irritation expended in pathless floundering about probably means taking the main path is a better option. You do you, though.

The summit trig point is by a big pile of rocks (which obscure it until the last second coming from the north-east) and, having bagged it and dropped off the top (we went south as this happened to be the direction that got us out of the wind) for a pork pie and a Granny Smith, the walk then drops off the summit ridge to the north-west and eventually joins up with the route of Hill's Tramroad, which includes an exciting tunnel which the kids had some fun exploring and where they shot a video for Huwie's YouTube channel. That path follows the contours round the hillside until it links back with the path up through the woods which takes you back down to where you started.

I think this is the best of the three slightly different routes: the 2009 walk included an extension to loop round the Foxhunter car park and Keeper's Pond (another popular wild swimming spot), which is all very nice but doesn't really add much apart from some lateral distance, and I think the ascent via the Devil's Punchbowl is better than the route along the canal towpath and then an uphill slog along some roads. The 2021 walk took a similar route up (with a bit of inadvertent pathless floundering as described above) but then a much more direct route down, which is fine if you're in a hurry but less interesting than the route incorporating the tramroad and tunnel.

Overall route distance was just over ten kilometres, or about six-and-a-half miles. Details below: latest in the long and varied series of altitude-graph-generating tools is Strava which my Garmin running watch is linked to: this seems not to have the random starting height discrepancy that the old phone app had, which is nice. 

leaving the parc? I'm in the darc

A couple of unstructured thoughts after returning from a long weekend at Center Parcs with the family.

Firstly that "with the family" is how most people choose to go to Center Parcs; there are doubtless reasons why as a couple or small group of child-free adults you might choose to take a holiday at Center Parcs, but it's not completely clear to me what they are. That is in no way a criticism of either Center Parcs as a place or those people as people, it's just that a lot of the stuff is clearly targeted at people who have kids: the pool with its many exciting slides and rapids, the easy access to various kinds of food, the boating lake with various relatively sedate and low-speed child-friendly boat adventures. Yes, you'll be saying, but you can take the bikes and go and do lots of healthy bike stuff on your bikes. To which I would say, well, sort of. We'll come back to this.

Secondly, a word on spelling: "Center" in the American style with the "er" instead of the "re", and Parcs in the European style with the "c". These things reflect the organisation's Dutch origins, although following a split in 2001 the UK and Ireland operation is now a wholly separate organisation, though (presumably) retaining the spelling for continuity and brand recognition and stuff like that.

Center Parcs is not the only game in town when it comes to village-style experiences with centralised food and entertainment facilities, and we have previously gone (three or four times, I think) to Bluestone, which is over near Narberth in west Wales, and generally had a lovely time each time, If my records are correct the last time we were there was in December 2018, so the kids were a lot smaller then. One thing that affects is the kids' desire for more gnarly pool adventures now they're a bit older, and it must be said that the rapids at Center Parcs are a good deal more adrenaline-fuelled than anything Bluestone has to offer, as nice as the Blue Lagoon is. It should also be said that adults of adult height and weight being cajoled by their kids into traversing the rapids upwards of 30 times over the course of a long weekend will come home with a substantial collection of bruises to ankles, hips, etc. and in my case one ear filled with a lethal cocktail of earwax, pool water, cryptosporidium and child's piss which seems reluctant to unbung itself. I'm sure it'll be fine though. Anyway, more objective analyses of alternatives to Center Parcs, including Bluestone, can be found here. 

One thing I definitely can say about Bluestone is that, as lovely as cycling around the site is, it's also possible to seamlessly incorporate a trip off-site if you want to do a longer ride. I know this because we did it in 2014 as part of our first visit, when we hired a couple of bikes and one of those little trailers which we put Nia in (she'd have been two at the time).

The photo shows me and Nia heading around one of the paths at the northern edge of the resort which eventually leads up into the western end of Canaston Woods and joins the Knights Way. We did a fairly unambitious route up here, over to the bridge by Blackpool Mill and back again, with a few stops for exploring in between, all without at any point having to pass through a gate, an airlock or any other security barrier or being stopped by any sinister uniformed individuals slapping us across the face with a leather gauntlet and demanding to see our papers. The mill, by the way, was pretty much abandoned in 2014 but has since (under Bluestone's management, though it's outside the resort) been transformed into quite a ritzy-looking restaurant.

Anyway, when we planned our Center Parcs trip I noticed that the site (the first UK Center Parcs site, opened in 1987) was right next to the much larger Sherwood Pines Forest Park, a place with lots of cycle trails. Excellent, I thought, since now Nia has graduated from being a two-year-old in a trailer to a terrifyingly fit and active thirteen-year-old with her own bike, we could do with somewhere to go that offers longer rides than the Center Parcs site, which is fairly small. A quick look at an OS map shows that there is a big junction of paths right by the top left corner of the Center Parcs site; surely, you might think, an ingress/egress point for those wanting to do some longer cycling routes. Not so, as it happens, or not that we could find, anyway. Google Maps suggests that there is an egress point along the western boundary of the site but Nia and I cycled out there and had a look without finding it, and taking the route marked in red to the corner of the site doesn't yield an escape route either, there being a high fence on your left all the way round. 

The charitable view here is that this is more about keeping non-residents out than keeping residents in, especially important, one would imagine, at the Longleat site where non-residents who might want to get in include ACTUAL FREAKIN' LIONS, but there is a suspicion that it is a bit of the latter as well. Given that residents are issued with wristbands with some sort of RFID device which controls access to your lodge, swimming pool lockers etc., it's not impossible to imagine some sort of gate system controlled by the same device. Or they could just be less uptight and take the more easy-going approach that Bluestone take; don't signpost the route either internally or externally but make it available for those enterprising enough to want to take it. My personal inclination is to be irritated by cycling down a track that I expected to lead to freedom and adventure and personal autonomy and choice and be confronted with this:

In the end we found plenty to do without getting out into the wider forest area, and it is clearly physically possible to leave the site by the main entrance and loop round back into the Sherwood Pines site, albeit at the cost of 3-4 kilometres of extra distance. The whole thing is a little vexing, though, and does conjure up memories of the delightful public relations disaster that the Center Parcs organisation endured when trying to appear sufficiently reverent in the wake of the Queen's death in 2022. 

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE YOUR LODGE https://t.co/FvuMjS2HRy pic.twitter.com/YVjRaC1fcP

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 14, 2022

A couple of footnotes: firstly anyone planning a visit to Bluestone and noticing its convenient next-door proximity to the Oakwood theme park should be aware that Oakwood has now, as of earlier this year, closed down permanently.

Secondly, this trip was actually my third visit to Center Parcs (all of them to the same Sherwood Forest site), this one and our previous family visit in 2023 but also a trip waaaaaay back in what would have probably been either 1992 or 1993 with my then-girlfriend Posy and her family during the course of which this absolutely splendid photo was taken of me. 

My principal recollection of that trip is of me and Posy's younger sister's boyfriend (who I suppose would have been about 18) spending most of the week leaving the girls to do their own thing and disappearing off to the sports hall for a ferociously-competitive series of bouts of various racket sports, bouts from which I have chosen to recall I emerged triumphant.

smallebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair are my son Huw and 1970s yellow cartoon weirdo Bod. Small skinny-legged person, three-letter name, voluminous upper garment coming down below waist level, profile view that makes them appear to only have one leg.

A bit of context for both halves of the image: the thing Huwie is standing on is a groyne (no, stop it) on Southbourne beach where we were last weekend, and the thing Bod is looking at is, and I quote: "an enormous bowl of strawberries and cream". This is from the episode Bod's Dream which can be seen here. The thing people who grew up in the 1970s forget about Bod is that the animated bit was only the first 4-5 minutes of a 15-minute show, and the rest of it was filled with some stuff-spotting puzzles, random songs and the interminable adventures of Alberto Frog And His Amazing Animal Band, culminating in the impossibly thrilling climax wherein Alberto chose a flavour of milkshake for a reward (for solving some mystery or other) from a shortlist of about three. 

snorklebrity lookeyspikey of the day

Today's pairing features my son Huw, in the pool at our holiday house in Brittany a couple of weeks ago and borrowing some of his big sister's swimming accessories, in particular her face-mounted snorkel, and also the strange underwater artificial dinosaur hybrid submarine that I drew for my school yearbook at Bandung International School in Java in about 1979 (when I would have been about nine). Obviously the shape and positioning of the snorkel is the thing that brought the two together in my mind.

The drawing was accompanied by the following explanatory (well, sort of) text:

It's interesting to unpick all the things that (consciously or unconsciously) influenced both the drawing and the text in my nine-year-old mind:

• The BBRFC on the creature's sleeve, and indeed the rest of the design of the T-shirt the creature is wearing, is a reference to Bandung Barbarians Rugby Football Club, a loosely-organised group of expatriates from various countries (mainly the UK, Australia and New Zealand) for which my father used to turn out. My recollection of the various rugby days out we went to during our time in Java was that they were mainly a pretext for epic beer consumption, probably mainly the product of the Anker brewery with whom the club seemed to have cooked up some sort of endorsement/sponsorship deal, judging by the club T-shirt I am wearing in the images below (probably taken at Pangandaran). The beardy guy piloting the craft is also probably modelled on my Dad, though I should point out he has never smoked a pipe as far as I know.

• The general concept for the creature is clearly adapted/stolen from the Tintin book Red Rackham's Treasure which I read approximately a gazillion times. The smaller shark-based craft there was the brainchild of eccentric genius Professor Calculus. That's his English name, anyway, he was called Tournesol in the original French books. Translations into other languages are available, including, rather marvellously, Welsh; who knows what his name is there. 

• Obviously kids love dinosaurs, and you can see bits from at least three separate dinosaurs in the design of the creature: the head with its distinctive crest is clearly a parasaurolophus, the big fin thing on its back looks as if it's from a dimetrodon, and the spiked tail is a bit like that of a stegosaurus, informally known in slightly tedious paleontological nerd humour circles as a thagomizer. The fins at the rear are presumably a hangover from the fish design I stole the idea from, and I have no idea why the front limbs seem to have their elbows on backwards.

here'th thumbthing interethting

You might recall, if you follow me on Twitter/X, and why in the name of God would you, that I have occasionally - as a twisted means of expressing my love for, and pride in, my kids, though in a typically British oblique and emotionally-repressed way - mentioned some of their fascinating genetic traits, all thankfully on the quirky and endearing side of the dividing line that separates them from the more extreme tentacly Lovecraftian horrors that must be DESTROYED WITH FIRE.

A couple of examples are below:

fascinatingly-named genetic conditions that I exhibit which I have passed on to my eldest daughter: Darwin's tubercle (unilateral), Morton's toe (bilateral, as I think it always is). also, Shatner's bassoon, etc. #genetics

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 13, 2020

the internet is great. I have one of these, as do my father and my eldest daughter. wife and other two kids don't have it. FREAKS! https://t.co/sh0F1C1dwL

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 25, 2019

Another example follows: I'm not sure that we've applied a greater level of scrutiny to the boy in terms of his development after his early arrival and spending the first 91 days of his life in a series of gradually-larger plastic boxes with bleepy machines attached in hospital, but I suppose it's plausible that we might have. Anyway, one thing I've always noticed about Huwie is what I perceive to be his freakishly enormous thumbs. I have always taken this as an indication of future tallness as an adult once the rest of his anatomy catches up with his thumbs - as an aside, although he is currently slightly below average height for his age, the canonical example of teeny prematurity not being a bar to tallness and sporting prowess as an adult is recently-retired cricketer Stuart Broad, born at 28 weeks (Huwie was 27) but eventually a strapping 6 feet 5 inches.

However, it turns out that this may have been en error of perspective - I don't mean that I was accidentally holding the boy's thumbs really close, more that my expectations for appropriate child thumb size will have been influenced by my two daughters. And why not, you might say, except that Nia, who is generally curious about all things and now has a phone with access to the internet, ran into the kitchen the other day excitedly shouting "Dad, I've got toe thumbs!". Sorry, love, you've got what? "Alys has got them too!" Hang on, what?

Well, it turns out that "toe thumbs" are actually a thing, that particular phrase being one of several common colloquial descriptions of a genetic trait more properly called brachydactyly type D. This is the most common form of brachydactyly, supposedly affecting around 2-3% of the population. To illustrate, here is a parade of thumbs:

So you can see that Huwie's thumbnails are almost circular or perhaps even elliptical, with the major axis oriented vertically, whereas Nia's are elliptical(ish) with the major axis oriented horizontally and Alys' thumbnails barely exist at all. We're not fully comparing apples with apples here because Alys (like me) is an inveterate nail-biter while Nia and Huwie are not. Nonetheless there is a stark contrast between Huwie's thumbs, which give a general impression of tapering elegantly, and the girls' thumbs which are squared-off and stubby. No suggestion of any other genetic consequences of having weird thumbs, thankfully, and the only practical consequence is that neither of the girls will be able to play the guitar in the style of Richie Havens. 

So if it's an inheritable genetic trait, Dave, you'll be saying, what do your thumbs look like?

My desk isn't broken, by the way; I had to stitch two images together (badly) owing to a need to have a hand to hold the camera with. It's hard to be objective about something that, after 50+ years of looking at them, implicitly defines my mental image of what a "normal" thumb looks like, but I'd say I occupy a centre ground between Huwie and the girls. My ellipses are definitely horizontal but there's a bit more nail (even allowing for their bitten state) than, say, Alys has. 

Just for completeness, Hazel's are below. She has pretty regular vertical ellipses, so I have to conclude that it's me who is the carrier of the genetic freakery here.

here's summit I prepared earlier

A bit of an end-of-year tidy-up of unblogged stuff here, in particular this photo which I came across when looking at some stuff on Google Photos with the kids. You'll be aware that I've posted a few mountain summit and trig point shots here over the years, but I am pretty confident that this is the one which features the largest group of living individuals (I don't say "people" for reasons that will become obvious shortly).

So this is the culmination of a walk we organised with the members of the NCT group we were part of while in the last stages of expecting Nia in early 2012. Members of the group have been the subject of previous expeditions featured here in the past, but those were mainly Dad-centric expeditions leaving the wives and kids, bless 'em, at home. This time we decided we wanted to do a more inclusive thing and take everyone (or everyone who wanted to come and was available, anyway, which in our household meant me and Nia); that meant some careful planning so as not to go hog-wild and devise some terrifying 15-mile ridge scramble that would take all day and probably result in some deaths. 

Having been given responsibility for route planning, what I came up with was a walk featuring as its centrepiece and highest point Pen Cerrig-calch, the mountain that overlooks Crickhowell, and which also takes in on the way up the Iron Age fort of Crug Hywel which gives the town its name. Route map and altitude profile are below.

It's a fairly simple straight-up-and-down sort of route, and at about six and a half miles probably about right for a group including six adults, five kids (aged between eight and ten) and two dogs - all of whom, if you look carefully, are included in the summit photo at the top of this post.

By my reckoning I'd been up here twice before, once with Huw and his dog Baxter in December 2013 when we did a similar walk which also took in the neighbouring (and slightly higher) peak of Pen Allt-mawr, and once as the first part of my epic 19-mile solo Black Mountains horseshoe walk in April 2010. The one thing almost all walks starting from Crickhowell have in common is that you pop into The Bear for a pint afterwards, something we made sure we adhered to here.

comiclebrity pumpylikey of the day

It struck me during a futile attempt to use it to inflate some tyres on my daughter's bicycle the other day...

Bikeability day at school tomorrow for Nia. great as she's just inherited a new bike from her cousin. better just pump up the tyres AAAAAARRGGH one Schrader and one Presta valve FUUUCCK how will my single pump cope with that #stress

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 27, 2022

...that my electrical tyre-inflating device with its twin illumination beams on the front was a dead ringer for some sort of flying craft that I'd seen somewhere. A bit of further thought dredged up the right answer from the memory banks: the crime-fighting craft used by Nite Owl in Alan Moore's Watchmen. It's far from clear in the book what method of lift and propulsion the craft uses, as it's far from aerodynamic (a sort of stumpy ellipsoid) but we're presumably meant to infer some sort of non-magical propulsion system as it's only Dr. Manhattan who has any "real" superpowers. 

Conversely it's very clear what powers the digital pump: a cable which allows it to be plugged into a car's lighter socket, which is great but does mean you need to be in the vicinity of a car to run it, which prompted a bit of a head-slapping moment when I brought it into the house to pump up the bike tyres with. I suppose I could have carted the bike out to the street and done it there, but it was dark and I couldn't be bothered, so I just used the manual pump in the end, which as it happens was necessary to accommodate the two different valve types anyway. I have subsequently bought one of these gizmos to facilitate in-house automated pumpage.

Anyway, see for yourself:

live well, bat often, field much

It's been delightful, over the past few weekends, as COVID-19 lockdown restrictions ease, to be able to meet up with extended family again. This has been made both easier and more enjoyable by the recent spell of sunny weather, which has made it much more pleasant to hang out outdoors in a responsibly well-ventilated manner.

One of the things you can do with large-ish groups comprising a mixture of adults and (mainly) children is play the venerable old game of French cricket. I have combined my memories of playing the game as a child with my fairly extensive experience of playing it as a parent, mainly with Nia and her cousins and assorted aunts and uncles and the occasional grandparent, and I think I'm ready to present my new all-embracing life philosophy, soon to be available in hardback and motivational DVD form, entitled French Cricket For The Soul: How It's Like A Metaphor For Life And That.

A quick preamble to outline the rules: you need a cricket bat and a tennis ball and a few people; I'd say a minimum of about four to avoid too many gaps in the field and too much faffing about retrieving the ball. Basic rules are as follows:

• The batter stands with his or her feet together and the bat held vertically in front of the shins;
• The fielders throw the ball at the batter's legs;
• The batter is out if the ball hits their legs below the knee, or if they hit the ball with the bat and it is caught by a fielder before it hits the ground;
• The ball must be thrown, underarm, from the point where the fielder picks it up;
• If the batter has hit the ball, they may shuffle their feet round to face the next delivery, if they have time;
• If the batter has not hit the ball, they may not move their feet;
• Play continues, ideally, forever, but more realistically until one of the grown-ups has to go and make tea, someone has a tantrum, or someone thwacks the ball into next door's garden.

That's the basic structure, now here is the Life Philosophy section.

• When you are a child, batting seems like the thing to be doing, and moreover while batting thwacking the ball as hard and as far as you can. But, crucially, there is no way, unless you concoct some additional rules, to actually "score" anything, so all you've done is give yourself a long wait while some poor mug has to go and dig the ball out of the compost heap. Alternatively you can just dead-bat everything into the ground to try to prolong your batting stint as long as possible, but a) this just annoys everyone else and b) can be counter-productive in that it leaves the ball very close to you.
• If the ball does end up very close you you (less than a bat-length away, say) you also have to make a judgment involving balancing the needs of others with your own. There will be a fielder the same distance away, or even a bit closer, if, as fielders tend to do if not closely monitored, they encroach a bit while picking the ball up and if you give it the full Ben Stokes there's every chance that the fielder will get a ball or, worse, the toe-end of the bat, delivered at high speed into their face. So you have to temper your wilder ambitions with a modicum of regard to the welfare of others.
• With age and maturity and mellow life-experience what you eventually realise is that the thing to do while batting is, sure, defend your legs if you can, but, when you can lay bat on ball, give some catching opportunities to the fielders, tailored to their levels of catching prowess. So for Nia's 14-year-old cousin (who is a freakish giant and taller than me) I might try and offer some sharp chances at ankle height, while offering some slightly easier ones to Nia (whose catching is pretty sharp) and the occasional gently lobbed chance for the younger cousins.
• In comparison the fielding seems like a chore when you're a child, as everyone wants to be the centre of attention as the batter. Plus, of course, you're not guaranteed to be involved in every delivery as you are while batting - the person throwing the ball is involved, of course, as is whichever fielder the ball ends up going to. It might be you, but there's no way of knowing in advance. So this means that you have to make an up-front investment (i.e. your full attention on what's going on) without any confident expectation of reward (i.e. the ball might go to someone else). Obviously you could do the cost-benefit analysis and conclude that your time would be better spent daydreaming and going lah-de-dah hullo clouds hullo sky, but then you run the risk of the ball defying the odds and actually coming to you and everyone shouting at you.
• Further to this, there's no value in getting all aerated if you haven't had a bat for a while. Have you been daydreaming in the field? It won't just magically get to be "your turn", you know. Get involved, put yourself about a bit in the field, take a one-handed screamer millimetres from the turf and you shall have not only the awed respect of your peers, but a go with the bat as well.
• There are some calculations you can do to maximise (or minimise, depending on your preferred level of involvement) the chances of your being in line for some fielding or, better still, a catch and the associated unimaginable glory (and, of course, being next up to bat) - generally speaking the imaginary semicircular area in front of the batter is the prime catching area. But, especially when younger players are either batting or throwing, one key spot is directly behind the batsman, as there'll be a lot of slightly misdirected throws, not to mention wild swiping and missing. So someone needs to take one for the team and occupy that spot - a position where you're very unlikely to take a catch unless the batsman gets a very thin edge or does some kind of ambitious Dilscoop over their own head, but where you'll probably get quite a bit of fielding to do nonetheless. On the other hand, having done the unglamorous tidying-up duties, the whole game then turns on its head as you, the backstop, become the bowler and the behind-the-batsman area becomes the prime in-front-of-the-batsman area. And so we see the value of doing the unglamorous grafting groundwork for reaping the glorious rewards later.

So we can see, my young friends, that there is much to be learnt from this seemingly simple game, and that, moreover, he who achieves full mastery of the various physical and mental disciplines involved here will find that more general life challenges will, when confronted with a firm throw towards the upper shin area, fend it back awkwardly off the splice and offer a sharp but catchable chance at around knee height. All you have to do is hold onto it.

that's dentertainment

One of the things that will have been a major factor in determining the specific flavour of your COVID-19 lockdown experience, it seems to me anyway, is whether you have kids or not. Many people have (as part of a generally commendable look-on-the-bright-side attitude) written about how, hey, lockdown is tough and the general loneliness and sense of social dislocation is a mental challenge, but at least it's given them a chance to really get to grips with learning to knit, whittling that scale model of the Taj Mahal, playing the euphonium, and of course baking a bewildering variety of bread products, assuming that they'd panic-bought enough flour and yeast. 

As entertaining as those anecdotes are, my first thought is always: aha, there's someone who doesn't have kids. I mean I'll grant you we did have a half-hearted crack at making bread, but any serious hobbying designed to eat up several consecutive hours is a non-starter. I should add I'm not about to attempt to reach a verdict about whether a child-free or child-rich environment is better/worse/harder/easier in terms of surviving lockdown with sanity mostly intact, I'm just making the point that it would have been two very different experiences. As brilliant and generally delightful as our three kids are I will confess to finding the need to keep them constantly entertained a bit relentless at times, especially when combined with needing to keep up with schoolwork as well.

One of the things I expect a lot of people with kids have done during the period of enforced being-in-the-house is make dens, this being a thing that all kids love doing. I myself recall my parents having a set of rather bizarre brown foam-rubber furniture (probably an absolutely appalling fire hazard by modern standards) when we were kids, whose corner units, when flipped on their side, were perfect building blocks for dens. We don't have any of those, but as you'll see below the kids did manage to come up with some alternatives. Nia, as befits the oldest of the group, was generally chief engineer, with Alys providing labouring muscle and Huwie fulfilling a key quality assurance role by running into things and attempting to break them. 

So here is a pictorial summary of the 2020/2021 den-building season:

Number one is a solo effort from Nia. The legend on the front reads "Nia's umbrella den. Must have permishion." She insisted that she was going to spend the night in it, and subsequently did, commendably bloody-mindedly as it can't have been that comfortable. 

Use of umbrellas as a key element of den construction is going to become a bit of a theme, as you'll see. Luckily we have quite a few of them as Hazel has a stash of white parasol-style ones from her wedding photography supplies. 

The next one is an extension of the original concept to include a couple of extra umbrellas, some towels, a large number of clothes pegs and our pop-up Peppa Pig tent. An increase in the amount of interior room, but as you can imagine it's a bit of a complex labyrinth of umbrella-stalks once you're inside. 

The next one harks back to the original, but increases the headroom somewhat by introducing a couple of kitchen chairs into the mix. This one has a slightly yurt-y look to it, though we were unable to grout it with yak butter in the traditional manner as Asda were out of that as well.

Number four is similar to number two, but the addition of the two upright white parasols in the centre of the structure gives it a vaguely Middle-Eastern feel, or possibly just evokes thoughts of the Mound Stand at Lord's. 

Structural details of this next one are unclear except that it evidently encompassed one of the sofas. Huwie is revelling in the illicit thrill of being somewhere his sisters have probably forbidden him to be. 

A sudden shift of both location and design ethos for the next one as we relocate to the bunks in the girls' bedroom and a stark and simple design in white. There was a version of this which enclosed the top bunk (Nia's) as well via the addition of a couple of my old golf clubs and another couple of sheets, but I don't have a photo of it. I'm not sure whether Huwie is just messing about on the floor or has just been violently ejected from the enclosed lower bunk by the girls.

The next one is more of a pre-fabricated den, in that it's one of my old tents, which the kids insisted on sleeping in out in the garden. The original idea was that we'd put our family enormo-tent up and all sleep in it - what larks! - but tragically there wasn't room so Hazel and I had to take one for the team and sleep in our own bed. 

Those were all from the first half of 2020; what I like to call "denthusiasm" wore off a bit after that, or perhaps it was just my inclination to bother taking photos of them. Anyway, the next couple are from this year after we rediscovered our mojo. Here's one from February which all three of them insisted on spending the night in. You can see that it's basically three adjoining interconnected slumbering podules: Alys on the sofa, Nia in the middle on the floor and Huwie in the Peppa Pig tent. 

Finally, this one from a couple of weeks ago: no thought to sleeping comfort this time, just maximum unsupported internal span thanks to a light bedsheet-based design and use of four kitchen chairs. Once again the boy is taking his quality assurance role very seriously by seeing how many of the clothes pegs he can remove before the whole structure collapses on his head. 

So there you have it. I just get the feeling that we're starting to exhaust the possibilities now, so either we need to start getting back to normal life again or I'll need to start sawing up some furniture.