Dom Davis (The Blog)

Like many other parts of the country Norwich was covered in quite a good layer of snow. It was only an inch or so deep (what London would classify as a category 4 disaster rather than a full blown category 5) but it made the river walk to work quite pleasant in a fairly cold type of way. I even took some pictures which, depending on whether or not my blogging software plays ball, I may share with you below.

Of course yesterday was a Monday and we all know that Mondays exist purely to be evil. A picturesque walk into work is not Mondays style. No, it had something planned.

Work sucked as only work can on a Monday, but that wasn’t it. Work always sucks on a Monday. For everyone. It’s one if those universal constants. No, there was something else.

As I left work there it was, Mondays plan laid out in all its glory. The snow, so pretty and white in the early morning sun had been transformed. Throughout the day Monday had directed other unfortunates to go receive whatever punishment it had in store for them causing them to walk on and compact the snow. Meanwhile the sun, sapped of warmth by Monday, melted this compacted snow ever so slightly. Come home time and the sun had given up and buggered off. Temperatures plummeted and everything froze. Thus my walk home was to be made gingerly over great tracts of uneven ice which was poised, ready to send my feet out from under me at the slightest mistake. A truly diabolical plan and one that could still be affecting me days down the line. Only Monday can turn a nice walk into a booby trap for the rest of the week. Thankfully Tuesday is a benign day.

It’s cold. Like seriously cold. Like I’ve turned the heating to full cold. It’s also trying to do some weird sleet, snow hail and rain thing all at once. Anyway, bottom line is I’m not taking my hands out of my gloves on the walk to work. This, unfortunately, bodes for the length and quality of this post.

So why, I hear you ask, don’t I spend my train journey time writing like I normally do? A good question, however, it’s a busy week for me. I’ve got a code freeze to enforce, a mutiny to organise and a regime to overthrow. These things don’t just happen you know. There are demands to be listed, deadlines to create by which time the demands must be met and lines in the sand to be drawn. All by 10am today. I want to get the drop of the day and do some of this on the train. It’s the sign of a good despot.

Instead I shall leave you with a question: regardless of whether you knew you were going to be spending 15 minutes on Ingatestone station platform on the morning following one of the coldest nights ever or not, what on earth would posses you to go out overnight wearing nothing but a tshirt? It’s not like the temperature plummeted from the high 30s the night before to whatever it was in the morning. You’re going to step out of the house and go “gosh, it’s a bit nippy”, go back inside, get more layers and try again… surely?

The Zozo has her work Christmas do tonight which involves a meal at the zoo followed by heading out and getting raucous in Cromer, in so far as it’s possible to get raucous in Cromer. I understand karaoke may be involved. Knowing the people involved there will be much giggling and laughing involved too. I’d be willing to put money on the phrase “fwiend” being used once a few drinks are had. I will not be going. Instead The Zozo suggested I head into London for a night out there. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my wife very much and I love spending as much time as possible with her but she’s going out tonight, is working tomorrow and has handed me a late pass for free. Not something I, or indeed any sane man, is going to turn down

So I’m going to London. Train to Norwich, train to London, tube to destination, dance, tube to Liverpool Street, train to Norwich, train home. Simple, right? Wrong. This is England. At the weekend. On NXEA trains. No, we have to do the following:

Get the train an hour early to Norwich. Change at Norwich for a train to Ingatestone. Get off the train at Ingatestone where I get on a bus that takes me to Newbury Park where I then ‘transfer’ to London Liverpool Street. Transfer in this context means getting a central line tube which gets me to Liverpool Street, according to the TFL website, 1 minute later that NXEA said it would. Personally I trust (for a given value of trust) TFL more than I do NXEA so I’m going to go with thier estimate. What time I arrive, give or take a few minutes, isn’t so much of an issue as it’s a walk to Moorgate, tube to Angel and done and it doesn’t really matter what time I arrive.

Getting home, on the other hand, is going to be a laugh. It’s going to be early on a Sunday and NXEA tell me that I need to ‘transfer’ from Liverpool Street Station at 07:23 to arrive at 07:55 whereupon I get a bus that leaves at… 07:55. I’m thinking giving myself 0 minutes to get out of a tube station, find a bus, get on bus and head onwards is not exactly a sensible proposition.

So what time do I need to leave Liverpool Street? According to the TFL website I need to depart at 07:20 to get to Newbury Park at 07:44. So either NXEA are lying about the departure time, journey time or arrival time. Or all three. So I realistically need to arrive at Liverpool Street at 07:15 so I can get to the Central Line platform. This isn’t going to happen on a tube, there being no Northern Line trains at this time in the morning. It could happen by bus, but I tend to avoid those where possible in London given, historically, the timetable has been more of a serving suggestion than anything they’ve stuck to. No, I’m going to take the only form of transport that’s reliable, available to me and cheap. I’m walking. Leave at 06:45, should get to Liverpool Street for before 07:15 allowing me to get the tube to arrive at Newbury Park in time to get my bus.

The bus then arrives at Ingatestone with a good 11 minutes to spare so I’m hoping that, this time, I won’t be getting to the station to watch the train pull off and strand me there for an hour making me late and buggering up my connections. Spending an hour at Colchester station last time was dull enough. An hour at Ingatestone will be torture.

Assuming all is well I get on the train to Norwich which has to arrive on time as I have 7 minutes to transfer to my train to Cromer. NXEA do not have a good track record of making tight connections to Cromer, although my experience is generally on a Friday evening with the train having come all the way from London not further down the line and a Sunday morning. It’s this bit that is causing me the most stress. If I miss that train I am stuck in Norwich for two (2) hours. Bearing in mind that, at this stage, I will have been awake for well over 24 hours my mood will not be such that I will accept this with good grace, or indeed any grace at all. I will be using those two hours to prize whatever compensation I can out NXEA for the grief and inconvenience caused.

So there you go. A simple 6 hour round trip is going to take over 8 hours, involve many transfers and much stress and could take over 10 hours and much shouting. It should be so simple and yet it isn’t. And this, this is why I hate the trains. Still going though

The Zozo, it would appear, has been bitten by the tarantula bug. While much less painful that being bitten by an actual tarantula it is slightly more expensive. If I am reading her latest Facebook status correctly I’m not just buying her Sooty for Christmas, but two, possibly larger friends.

I really shouldn’t be surprised, the Zozo loves animals, especially ones that others tend to shun¹ (spiders, leeches… not wasps though, everyone hates wasps). The other hint I should have picked up on was the forums she’s been visiting. The vast majority talk about their tarantulas plural. Owning just 1 seems to be the exception rather than the norm and it would appear many people have quite a few of varying sizes.

As I’ve stated before I can’t say no to my wife, however, I’m not a carpet either. ‘Yes’ can come with strings and conditions. ‘Yes’ can buy brownie points which, despite their short half life, can be redeemed for things I want. Time to find out what 3 tarantulas is worth

¹ My working theory is that’s why she married me given she is waaaay out of my league

Technology is a marvellous thing. 10 years ago my mobile phone could do voice and SMS. If did so on a two line monochrome LCD display with chunky big pixels.

Today my mobile phone can, completely wirelessly, log onto a secure network from anywhere in the country that has phone signal and remotely log into and control my computer in a completely different part of the country, or indeed world. This is done on an ultra high resolution full colour touchscreen display. It can so this while playing tunes from a vast library stored in it’s memory and allowing me to seamlessly switch back to my game when I’m done. This is just one of a million functions it can perform.

…

Technology is a bitch. 10 years ago if work contacted me in the morning (assuming they even could as I was often underground on the tube) all I could do is offer a ‘few top of my head’ suggestions and tell them I’d fix it when I got in. Entertainment was via a newspaper but at least it was free

Today, when work contact me in the morning, it interrupts my game and involves me spending more of my precious data allowance logging in remotely and trying to fix the problem on a screen that’s 6 times smaller than my screen at work and also has to double as mouse and keyboard (effectively making it 12 times smaller during input).

If you read the tales of Shelob you’ll have worked out that I am not overly fond of spiders. Small spiders (a few millimetres total leg span) I can cope with, any bigger and we’re entering phobia territory. Shelob had, at a guess, a body that was a quarter to half an inch big and then legs that gave it an overall size of 2-3 inches. A monster… for this country.

The Zozo is not afraid of spiders (or leeches, or, indeed many things). In a previous job she had to look after a Mexican Red Knee (the ones they always use in films) which is, apparently, one of the more docile tarantulas and about as deadly as a bee¹. Recently her current workplace also acquired one of these eight legged beasties and her previous experience means she is best placed to look after it. The problem is her job means she can’t spend much time with Felix² and that means she’d like a pet tarantula of her own. At home. Where I live.

I should perhaps explain a few things at this juncture. The first bring that I cannot say “no” to my wife³ so if she wants a tarantula for Christmas then she shall jolly well have a tarantula for Christmas, phobias be damned! Secondly there is a very big difference between Shelob, a wild, giant, fast, unpredictable spider lurking in our house, waiting, lurking; and a docile pet tarantula living in a locked enclosure made from toughened, bullet proof glass surrounded by laser motion sensors coupled to an alarm system and a fully documented containment strategy complete with “Hammerdown” protocol⁴.

Despite being ostensibly for Christmas I know very little about Tarantulas and their upkeep so me going out and buying everything, setting it up, wrapping it up and putting it under the tree wasn’t going to work. For starters there are 900 different types of tarantula ranging from the merely big to the insanely large (25-30cm!), the docile and slow to the mean and fast. There are arboreal ones, terrestrial ones, old world ones, new world ones, ones from arid climes, ones from humid areas and there’s a rainbow of colour schemes to choose from. No, this was something The Zozo was going to have to pick out herself.

After much deliberation she settled on a Brazilian black. This is supposed to be the most docile tarantula, slow growing, long lived and ideal for beginners. As the name implies they’re jet black and quite attractive in a “keep that thing away from me” kind of way. As fully grown specimens are incredibly hard to come by The Zozo chose a “grown on spiderling” which arrived yesterday.

Sooty⁵ is only about an inch big but already his body size is the same size as Shelobs. In toughly 5 years time, when Sooty is fully grown, he will be 6 inches across and Shelob will be but a snack to him. At that size spiders can just look at the business end of a Dyson and laugh. The Zozo seems to think that, in time, I may become brave enough to handle Sooty. I suspect this is her being overly optimistic. One thing is for sure though, I am secretly looking forward to photographing him

¹ i.e. not very… unless you’re allergic to them so best get yourself down to hospital just in case, but you’ll probably be fine.

² Yes, Felix. Hard to take a beastie seriously, no matter how large and how many legs, when they’re called Felix.

³ This is, of course, unless I’m answering a question that’s starts with the words “Did you remember to…” in which case the answer is invariably “no” said in a small voice with downcast head.

⁴ The exact security arrangements are yet to be thrashed out. It would seem various non-proliferation treaties stop me from using a nuclear Hammerdown option despite it being a well known fact that taking off and nuking the site from orbit is invariably the best option (c.f. Aliens, Cloverfield and point 1 from yesterday’s post if you don’t know what I’m talking about)

⁵ Yes, Sooty. Sooty the Brazilian black tarantula.

So after reading about, and getting excited about¹ the release of iOS 4.2 for my iPhone I promptly went home and forgot all about it. I was reminded this morning by Goron after reading his Facebook status² and thought it would be a fantastic idea to update my phone before heading to work.

Heading upstairs I booted up the big mac, kicked off the update and headed to the shower³. Shaved and showered I headed back into the bedroom to get dressed and check on the progress. Still downloading. Hmmm…

Dressed and with 8 minutes to go on the download I headed downstairs to pack my bag, say goodbye to my wife⁴ and generally finish getting ready for work. Back upstairs… updating firmware with a slowly updating progress bar. Oh, and an alert for it being bin day.

Bins emptied and put out I headed back upstairs. Still updating firmware. Well that’s OK, I still have, oooh, 45 seconds before I need to go. Hmmm…

Coat on. Bag ready, 1 minute past leaving time⁵. Still updating firmware, but very nearly done…

…nearly…

…done. Restarting phone. Great… Hurry up! I’m now 2 minutes late and missing the train is awkward… Hmmm, another progress bar. Now what? At least this one is going faster…

3 minutes late, progress bar is gone… syncing? You’ve just sunk! [sic] Come on, come on, comeoncomeoncomeon! …Done!

Grab phone, shout goodbyes to The Zozo, run out of door, sprint to station, jump on train with about 60 seconds to spare.

So what does iOS 4.2 give me over 4.1? Not sure really. Nothing that I’m going to use before I get home tonight. So why did I nearly make myself miss the train to install it? See point 1 below

¹ Hello, geek
² See point 1, and yes, my friends have geek tendencies.
³ Yes, geeks shower. You’re confusing us with the socially awkward Nerd. Very different beast.
⁴ See. Geek, not nerd.
⁵ No, I couldn’t just leave without my phone. See point 1.

One of the main reasons I joined the gum I did is because it has a pool. I love swimming and even if I tire of plodding away on the machines or shifting heavy bits of metal I’m not sure I’ll ever get tired of swimming regularly. There’s even a sauna and jacuzzi for a little but of a relax afterwards. During the off season I often get the whole gym and pool area to myself which is great. The only downside is the pool is 18m long which, for someone as anally retentive as me, is a pain because I can’t do nice round numbers of meters during my swim. I want to swim 1Km, not 1.008!

Anyway, the pool doesn’t always have a lifeguard so it is festooned with signs. Not the old multiple warning “no running, jumping, bombing or heavy petting” ones I remember from public pools in my youth, but individual ones telling us that outdoor shoes cannot be worn in the pool area; there is no running; no diving (about 5 times); no photography with permission (please switch off camera phones); please shower before entering the pool (and after leaving the sauna and steam room); no changing by the poolside; no under 16s in the sauna, steam room or jacuzzi; two huge signs with lots of information about the risks of using the sauna and the steam room; a sign explaining the layout if the jacuzzi and how to enter it; a sign telling us to limit jacuzzi sessions to 10 minutes, a sign indicating that non swimmers are not allowed beyond this point and a sign indicating that non swimmers are not allowed beyond this point. There are also a bunch of informational signs but it’s the last two warning signs I’d like to concentrate on.

Swimming from the shallow end you hit the no non swimmers allowed beyond this point sign. There is an arrow clearly demarcating the part of the pool non swimmers may occupy and the part reserved for swimmers only. Fair enough.

Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that we can swim but we prefer the aid of armbands. We can press on, striving for the deep end… for all of 10cm. We’ve now encountered the 2nd sign forbidding armbands beyond this point. This time, however there is no arrow so no indication of where, exactly, the point is. You may have an extra 10cm of pool to use, maybe 15, or possibly a whole 20. You’d think with all the signs it would be clear, but no, utter chaos. Or at least I imagine it would be if I wasn’t in the pool bit by myself enjoying my 10 minute spell in the jacuzzi pondering all the signs.

The shoes I wear to the gym (and the occasional game of squash) are now over 2 years old. Probably nearer 3. They are, to put it mildly, falling to bits. Since I’m now regularly back at the gym I figured it was time to treat myself to some new shoes. As I do intend to play squash again I decided court shoes were in order (I never wear my gym shoes outside) so it was off to the Internet to the best purveyor of sporting goods I know: John Lewis. I very quickly found a pair of snazzy looking Nike Air which I made a note of and took with me to the actual shop, my track record with shoe shopping online not being great. There I was served by a maths genius who told me they were 10% off in the sale so were now £40 not £50. Not one to pass up an extra £5 off I grabbed them and ran.

Today is the first day I’ve worn them to the gym and I’m pleased to announce my performance with my jazzy new shoes is… worse! 22 minutes into my normal 30 minute cross trainer workout I had to bail and hit the cooldown button. I’m also only attempting 20 minutes on the bike. To be fair last week I dialled the strength down on the machines a bit to ease myself back into it but I hadn’t realised I was that out of shape. I’m also a bit worried about the pins and needles I get on the bike after 10 minutes or so.

The good news is that, despite last weeks diet of lard, I lost a lb… or my shoes are a lb lighter.

The 17:45 to Sheringham usually departs from platform 4. On occasion it goes from platform 5 and, rarely, it goes from 6. Yesterday initially claimed to be a normal day. The departure screen said 4, the usual suspects were stood at 4, so I went and stood in my usual spot.

At this juncture it helps to understand that I have the type of headphone you screw into your ears. It means I can play my music at half the volume and hear it well as it blocks out the outside world. It also means I can’t hear a thing except my music so I’m oblivious to announcements. This in itself is not a huge problem, I just keep an eye on others.

Yesterday I noted people suddenly looking confused, a little bit of wondering about and some checking of the departure screens. Sensing trouble I pulled one earphone out and went to go investigate the departure boards myself. They said 4. A man walking up the platform said 6a. He looked like a rail employee (or more likely subcontractor) so I figured he may know. I headed to platform 6.

As I wondered round a ruddy great big intercity parked at platform 4. This confirmed that we wouldn’t be leaving from there and the presence of a train on platform 6 made me think I’d been told correctly. The indicator board still said 4, but what did it know?

I, and many others piled on the train with much “Is this the Sheringham train?”. This was met with answers ranging from the positive “yes”, the worried “I hope so” and the contradictory “No, this is the Yarmouth train”. Oh.

Given more than one person believed it was the Yarmouth train we adopted the commuter trait of standing in the door. This allows us to see the boards (Sheringham platform 4, Yarmouth platform 6) and listen to announcements, which took that moment to proclaim that the 17:45 Sheringham service was now leaving from platform 6.

Yarmouth people off, Sheringham people on, Yarmouth people now looking very confused.

Finally the train driver piped up, this wasn’t the Sheringham train, it was the Yarmouth train, the Sheringham train would leave from platform 6a. He also helpfully pointed out that despite the fact that we were next to platform 5a this was platform 6b and we should get on the train that would pull up in front of this one.

Right, Sheringham people off, Yarmouth people on, Sheringham people up the the further extremities of platform 6. Given we were beyond the roofed area of the platform there were no more indicator screens to look at, but we were regularly told over the tannoy that the 17:45 train for Sheringham would leave from platform 6. Not 6a, 6. No mention of the Yarmouth train.

In the end it fell to the train drivers who, when both trains were in, clearly stated which train the one you were on was and directed wayward and lost people to the other train. If it weren’t for them I suspect there would be a lot of angry people heading back into Norwich to start their journey again, this time on the correct train.