23 Jan 2009

It has been oscillating between rainy and sunny. Often blowing a gale at night, but peaceful in the morning. Britons complain that the grey winteriness gets them down, but happily I've never been prone to SAD (seasonal affective disorder - where one's mood is correlated to the amount of sunlight one is exposed to).

This morning has been one of triumphs. I tackled and overcame what I thought was going to be an intractable problem in getting my brand new modem to work with my Linux-based netbook. I've deposited a foreigh-currency cheque to be put into my brand new Barclays bank account (I'm a real person now), and I've just done a fundamental re-sort-through of my data and am now using Apple's 'Timemachine' to back it all up.

Now, at last, I can get on with work!

Times gone by

Very frequently one sees near the doors of houses in Canterbury (and elsewhere no doubt) installations like those on the right. I presume they are boot scrapers and were useful in the days when the roads and pavements weren't concretised. Except on rare unfortunate occasions, they are nowadays ornamental and a reminder of what life must've been like in another time. The oldness of Canterbury is generally charming, but, for the cyclist, for example, impractical. The roads tends to be too narrow to accommodate a car and a bicycle and thus many cyclists use the pavement. This, however, is not entirely satisfactory either as there is sometimes a) no room to accommodate and bicycle and a pedestrian, b) no pavement either!

To Whitstable

I cycled to Whitstable today. It is about 8 miles from Canterbury and is a hilly cycle which is largely - though not thoroughly - well signed. The weather today was, happily, not icy enough to prevent me from going on what was a longer than I expected expedition. Picture 1 here is at the beginning of the bike ride, looking back over Canterbury, with the Cathedral in the distance.

Upon reaching Whitstable, the first-time rider is left to wonder for a while whether he or she has arrived at all and where to turn next. Predictably, of the two choices I was presented with, I took the wrong one initially.

When you eventually find yourself in Whitstable and have determined that the town is indeed Whitstable, you realise what a pleasant sea-sidey place it is. Fish & Chipperies are well patronised by shivering day-trippers and I looked longingly at paper cones that contained hot chips (though I resisted the urge. After a week here - or is it almost two? - I've not eaten out once!).

Whitstable beach is not a sprawling paradisical thing, but is divided into strips of a few metres by lengths of wood (see picture 2) which I presume serve to retain the pebbles or shale (by which I mean medium-sized shards of rock). Obviously, even if the weather lent itself to it, Whitstable beach wouldn't be a pleasant one to lie on and would be hopeless for building sand-castles on. The only kind of person who could make good of it might be an Irish farmer on holidays. He could probably build a nice miniature property-dividing wall with it. Meanwhile, the sea-water is the hue of milky tea but is probably not suitable for drinking.

But there are plenty of pleasant pubs and shops in town where you can, I'm sure, quench a thirst. These are mainly of the typical tourist-beach-town variety. I, however, was cold and wished I could feel my toes and I was also keen to head back to Canterbury before dark. I left at 3.20pm something, and it was already feeling twilighty. It took me an hour to cycle home, which I did so slowly and fairly exhaustedly.

Prolonged cold and physical exertion meant that my plans to do work this evening shall be largely abandoned. Hot soup and cider are now on the cards.