Dunwich Dynamo

Yes, we did it! Here we are at London Fields enjoying a preparatory pint before setting off into the night. Check out Nick's old-school arm-warmers. Must be a Belgian thing.We're off! After picking up a copy of the route, we hit the road at around 8.30pm, slightly earlier than scheduled. After some confusion getting out of Hackney we were on our way. I'd expected us to be among the older of the riders but there were plenty of silver cyclists with at least 10 years on us, some even older. The range of bikes was pretty diverse too - lots of fixed wheel single gear jobs as well as tandems, recumbents and fold-up bromptons. Some riders were better prepared than others: I donated one of my rear lights to a girl who was riding with no illumination whatsoever. It wasn't clear why she hadn't realised lights might be useful on an overnight ride!

Once we got into the Essex countryside proper and the street lights ended, the sight of the line of red lights snaking ahead was really inspiring but didn't stop the weather doing its best to dampen spirits. The rain had started as we left London and didn't let up until 5am, so the camera had to be stashed away to stop it getting wet, thus no pictures from stage 1 of the journey. I'm not sure if they would have conveyed the full extent of the grimness of the ordeal anyway. We made good progress but the rain made it hard work. We reached the halfway point just outside Sudbury at 2am, where hot food was on offer in a village hall. The queue stretched out of the hall into the rain and we stood shivering for an hour for cuppasoup, then spent another hour wringing out our socks and warming up, then fixed Nick's flat tyre and got back on the road. This was the hardest part of the ride. Being freezing cold, soaking wet and on a bike at 4am with a 60 mile ride ahead of you is nobody's idea of fun, least of all mine, and it was pretty hard to get going. Not exactly what I'd expected when I first heard about this moonlit night ride in the middle of summer!The darkest hour was indeed just before dawn. Eventually we warmed up again and got back into our stride, as the first glimpses of daylight began to appear. Nick's socks were from Sainsbury's - in fact they were carrier bags.As we pedalled further into Suffolk, the places we went through started to become increasingly familiar: Cretingham - I've been to the pub here! Kettleburgh - my first band did a gig at the village hall! Framlingham - my mum was at school here! We were getting there.The sun came out at around 7 and we rolled into Dunwich at around 8.30. Not bad going considering the rain and the fact that we stopped at the halfway point for two hours. We were greeted by a reception commitee of my folks, my brother, his wife and their kids, which was a real boost, especially as we were able to load the bikes up into my brother's van and be whisked back to my parents' house in Yoxford for scrambled eggs and a hot bath.Nick got a train back to London and Marc flew back to Holland from Norwich. I stayed in Suffolk and clocked up another 30 miles yesterday, extending my tour of memory lane and stopping in Dennington, where I spent my first 7 years, for lunch and a pint, kept company by the pub cat.
All in all a really tough ride, mostly due to the weather, though the number of hills also came as a bit of an unexpected surprise, even to a local boy like me. None of them were individually that bad but cumulatively they really started to take their toll after a while. The one at Castle Hedingham stands out as particularly cruel and unusual punishment; hats off to the riders on single gear bikes. Nick and Marc did a brilliant job of keeping spirits up through the toughest parts of the ride, as did the bloke on the recumbent eating chips off a tray on his lap, who unwittingly provided us with amusement for several miles, along with the cyclist known only as 'duck-legs'.

Would I do it again? Yes, I'm already thinking about next year, but not if the weather forecast is the same as this year. Top tip for anyone considering the ride next year: take your own cuppa soup and avoid the queue for food at the halfway point!

Le Grand Depart

It's been a week of honing the badger calves in preparation for the Dunwich Dynamo tonight. For the unitiated, this is an annual overnight cycle from Hackney to Dunwich in Suffolk - a distance of a mere 120 miles. My brother in law and cycling partner Marc flew in from the Netherlands earlier this week and we have been busy pedalling around London, fine-tuning our bikes, watching the depressing unfolding of events of this year's Tour and fuelling ourselves on fine foods and real ales: no need for blood-doping or extra testosterone! As a result of the increased physical activity, and in spite of the extra boozing, my blood sugar has been reasonably well behaved this week, which is good news after the double figures that were starting to become worryingly regular over the past couple of months. Fellow Devo aficionado, father of four and semi Belgian Nick Smith is coming up from Hernia Bay to join us, along with an anticipated 700 or so others. Should be fun if the weather and the legs hold out. Allez! Wish us luck!

A Parliament of Owls

This weekend I have been mostly playing with dB at the Lambeth Country Show, getting to know some Owls with Michael, and doing a spot of punk rock disc-jockeying with T-Lo at the Macbeth, where the excellent Wave Pictures played a terrific live set.

The week in pictures

Back on the bike and riding with no particular destination in mind, which means I keep finding myself in scary bits of suburbia like Bexleyheath, a place which holds a special terror for some of us. Here's the much more welcoming Aylesbury Estate, where I lived for a while, just next to Burgesss Park, which was holding a Vietnamese festival at the weekend.

Shelly's animation night was a great success and raised £215 for Resonance. The films went down really well, with 'Panic Au Village' being the popular favourite of the night and deservedly so, for truly it is a work of great genius and extremely funny to boot. However, the dark profanity of the last two films - 'Who I am and what I want' and Episode 1 of 'The Christies', may have alienated some of the audience a little bit. In our enthusiasm for these two films we perhaps forgot that they're not everyone's hot beverage, but fortunately the collection boxes had already gone round in the interval and no-one asked for their money back. Michael marshalled the whole evening with great aplomb and plenty of references to crack cocaine and bodily function. Mercifully he didn't carry out his threat to tell his Michael Jackson joke.



Rehearsed with the Bentleys last night for our three(!) sets at the Lambeth Country Fair this weekend (rain permitting!). Ric was very impressively soldiering on with his thousand instruments in spite of a suspected fractured rib sustained in a go-kart accident. As if that wasn't challenging enough, we were also in a particularly smelly room. It seems that one downside of the smoking ban is that the rank odours lurking within rehearsal studios once concealed by the sweet aroma of fag ash have now been given free reign to rise to the surface. Yuk.

Animation Night

Tomorrow, Wednesday 18th July, at the Roxy on Borough High Street, to raise funds for Resonance.

Shelly's put together an amazing collection of short animated films. Highlights inlcude Phil Mulloy's fantastic 'The Christies' (as previously mentioned on this blog), Chris Shepherd and David Shrigley's brilliant 'Who I am and what I want', Lizzy Hobbs's wonderful 'The Old, Old, Very Old Man', (which I helped out with on the sound), as well as a fantastic Finnish film about Karaoke, the adventures of a French Cowboy and Indian who play ping pong and live with a horse, Vladimir Leschiov's superb ice-fishing film, and many other animated delights. We get to see a LOT of animation in our house, and this really is the cream of the crop!

Not only that, but Resonance's very own Terry Wogan, Mr Michael Garrad, will be comparing the evening. He hasn't told us what he'll be comparing it to, but it's certain to be enlightening.

Come down and throw some cash in the Resonance bucket!

The Long and Short of it.

Remember Bao Xishun, the world's tallest man who specialises in retrieving objects from the throats of stricken dolphins? Here he is shaking hands with the splendidly named He Pingping, who is applying for the Guinness world record as the world's shortest man. Turns out they both come from the same region of Inner Mongolia. Small world, eh? Though obviously smaller for Bao Xishun than it is for He Pingping.

Italia

Buona Sera and sorry about the lack of blogging activity for a while. There was simply too much to do in Italy and not enough time to do it, so trips to the internet cafe were few and far between. Stage 1 was Rome. We came. We saw. We did a lot of walking. It turns out the city has quite a bit of history, so two days was nowhere near enough. Saw lots of ace, er, Roman stuff, including this truly amazing 2000 year old bronze of a boxer, and a prototype Zardoz mosaic.
I was also quite taken with the Goethe monument in the Borghese gardens. Didn't really get up to speed on the food front in Rome though. Disastrously we somehow ended up having lunch at the zoo - twice! Never mind, we had a good view of the giraffes. We then drove up to Emilia Romana (where Bertolucci set 'Novecento'), for the main event of the trip: the wedding of our friend Gianni, the Italian Bruce Springsteen. His bride Paola rather fantastically comes from the same town and has the same surname as him - hardly any need to get married at all really! We arrived in the 'Sagra' season whereby each small town has a festival which was once centred on the church but these days mainly involves the celebration of food and raising funds for the local football team. We went to a town specialising in tortelloni - this was the Zucca (pumpkin) variety and was very very good indeed.
From there on in the food was amazing. The sheer volume to be consumed at an Italian wedding is literally quite staggering. Anyway, here's me and Shelly in all our finery. We had assumed that everyone at an Italian wedding would be dressed up to the nines so we did our best to do likewise, only to discover a church full of people in shorts and t-shirts. Much more pragmatic, given the sweltering heat. Thankfully at least the bride and groom had made an effort so we weren't the most overdressed people there.

Giannni's band played a great set of rock and roll party classics and we all quaffed prosecco into the small hours. Brilliant fun, fantastic people, amazing food. Say what you like about the Italians, but they certainly know how to throw a wedding party, and not a vol-au-vent in sight.
Next stop was Verrucola in the hills of Lunigiana, to recover for a few days. We stayed in an old water mill across the road from a mediaeval castle inhabited by a rich sculptor. I finally managed to finish reading 'The Brothers Karamazov', which is an excellent tome, even if if it did take me over six months to get through. It's worth sticking with it through the heavy stuff and the bewildering passages of religious philosophising - I wanted to start again from the beginning as soon as I finished reading it. I didn't though, as I also had a Tommy Cooper biography demanding my attention. An ideal pair of companion volumes, as it turns out, which throw up some interesting points of comparison. Yes, really. Anyway, yes, Lunigiana: peace, quiet, lovely people, fantastic and cheap food, big flying june bug things and mini-scorpions. What more could you ask for?




Finally, here's the Duomo in Pisa, which everyone ignores as they make a beeline for the leaning tower. What looks like a tai-chi session is actually everyone trying to construct hilarious photographs of themselves appearing to be holding the tower up.

And yes, predictably enough, the combination of vast quantities of pasta with minimal amounts of exercise took their toll on the blood sugar readings, which rarely fell into single figures for the whole trip. I didn't quite reach the anticipated girth of Pavarotti, but made some progress to rivalling the weight of a lesser tenor. I came back full of resolve to get back on my bike immediately but the nearest I got today was watching Bradley Wiggins OBE heroically out on his own in front of the peloton for most of today's stage of the Tour de France. Tomorrow is another day though and I shall be out on the silver machine to start training again for the run to Suffolk in a couple of weeks. Andiamo!

Simon Rattle

Having spent the weekend lazing around rehearsal and recording studios and pubs rather than pedalling around sizeable Dutch lakes, the old blood sugar has somewhat predictably taken a bit of a hike. After registering a hefty 15.4 this morning, I decided that this might finally be the moment to hit the metformin. So I'm now popping four pills a day including the other medication, and am feeling like Johnny Cash, without the fun. Or the jail, so it's not so bad. I was told that one side effect of metformin is that it can cause weight gain because it makes you feel hungry, and right enough I've been starving all afternoon. It can't work that quick, can it? We're off to Italy for 10 days tomorrow, so if the side effects really are kicking in, I could be coming back looking decidedly Pavarotti.

Croppery

The Crops lumbered back into action for the first time in 2007 with a rehearsal on Friday, which mostly served as a preamble to the far more pressing task of recreating the bridge of the Starship Enterprise with beer mats. mobile phones and sunglasses in the Kings Arms. This was followed in turn by a visit to the Moat yesterday, where we recorded two songs, which went very well indeed. Clearly it pays to rehearse as little as possible. Very good to work with Toby again, a fellow diabetic and a man with astonishingly good ears and vast reserves of patience. He even made us lunch - I bet you don't get that from Steve Albini!