Bushman Medical Volunteer - Namibia

Photos of the five week trip as a medical volunteer to Namibia can be found in the gallery.  To read all about the experience go to bottom of the page and use the page numbers to navigate to the start of the blog. 

European Masters Swimming Championships 2009 - photographs

Photographs of the swimming and of Cadiz and Seville can be found in the Gallery.  I hope you enjoy them.  Downloading copies should be straightforward but if you get stuck or need a higher res then email me.  Don't forget there is a second page of shots for the swimming. 

European Masters Swimming Championships Cadiz 2009

Having come back back with a free dose of Spanish Flu (or Gripe cerdo - swine flu) everything is a little slow at the moment.  All the Masters photos are downloaded but not resized to make them easy to upload and download from the web.  Bear with me.  They will be there by the end of the week.

Adios Market Harborough, Hola Seville

There are some mornings you wake up and you know that today is going to be a perfect day.  A beautiful sense of peace and tranquillity pervades as you stretch your lithe and rested body out across the crisp white Egyptian cotton bed sheets and trail your fingers lightly across the handmade velvet bedspread.  You swing your legs lightly to the ground and feel your toes disappear into the plushness of the Iranian silk rug picked up for a snip at some Arabian souk  and …… no, I don’t have mornings like this either.  At 01:00 Friday, with less than 12 hours before my ride pitched up to take me to Stansted Airport and my flight out to the European Masters Swimming Championships I was still staring vacantly at my computer screen knowing that the words and colours somehow ought to mean something, but my brain had stopped translating them into anything resembling English some time before.  The luxury of hitting the ‘off’ button and ignoring the consequences until I came back though immensely appealing just wasn’t an option because I had the second of two reports to get finished for the European Commission in Brussels.  With the titles ‘Non-legislative Initiatives on Gender Equality within the UK Workplace I  & II’ you may well have some sympathy with my plight. Four hours into the write-up and frankly I’d stopped caring about equal pay and crèche facilities and any desire to burn my bra was long since past. What I wanted was bed. And to pack.  Ideally in reverse order. But both these things were fast receding as possibilities.  You don’t need to know anymore dear reader other than it was a very late night and an early morning and when I did pack it was with rather more speed than planning and I didn’t remember the stringent Ryanair weight restriction until it was all too late. But,  here we are in Seville (or Sevilla – pronounced Serveeya – we’re going to be educated together over the next few days) fresh from a Ryanair flight which left ten minutes late and arrived twenty minutes early.  The early arrival balanced out the rather low opinion I had of Ryanair brought on by my experience of their on-line booking system.  Now call me shirty, but when you say on the booking form you don’t want travel insurance, doesn’t that mean you DON’T want travel insurance?  And having stated this preference more than once during the booking process wouldn’t you then expect NOT to be charged for it on the final payment screen?  Enough to say that Ryanair drove me to the edge of customer sanity and nearly into the arms of EasyJet which is saying something.  But anyway, here we were in Sevilla, on a balmy evening with the real world behind us and just ready for dumping our bags and heading out for some Iberian adventure.  For the two nights we had in Seville we’d chosen a hotel in the heart of the old quarter, close to the Cathedral which turned out to play a rather larger part in our short stay than we might have expected but more of that later.  We took a taxi from the airport (Spanish for taxi = …. Taxi.  That’s my kind of translation) with no idea of how long the journey to our hotel would take or how much it would cost because that is what happens when you visit a country whose language you speak only in the most rudimentary fashion.  But luckily the journey proved to be uneventful and acceptably priced (Eur 31 for a twenty minute or so taxi ride).  Hotel El Rey Moro was about a five or six minute stroll from our drop-off point at La Plaza Alfaro - a small local square paved with cobbles and flanked by three or four storey townhouses with ornate wrought-iron balconies and trailing geraniums. It all felt very Spanish.   We had a quick look at our rooms (small and orange), signed ourselves into the police register (apparently this is normal, we’re not wanted by Interpol or anything) and headed out on the town.

Like swimming in beef Oxo and going after the wrong buoy -final episode

Now I would like to report that justice was done and I did indeed rise victorious from the water ahead of my rival in truly Ursula Andress style. But truth must prevail and the reality is that I got totally and utterly beat. Now, before I go on and you begin to suspect me of being some pathetic and weedy specimen who needs to invest in some swimming lessons (actually, that last bit might be true), I’d like to conduct a little experiment with you. Shimmy your way over to the store cupboard and run your fingers lightly over your condiment and seasoning section until you come to your stock of Oxo cubes. Select a couple of beef ones. Next, place a full kettle on the hob and bring it nearly to the boil. Crumble the Oxo cubes into your washing up bowl and add the hot water. Stir until the Oxo cubes have dissolved and top up with cold water until you get to a temperature of approximately 18 degrees. Test with your elbow, toe, nose or other suitable protuberance or equipment to make sure the temperature is correct (I don’t want to get a call from casualty followed soon after by a call from your lawyer). Finally having stuck your hair in a plastic carrier bag and secured it well and having donned a pair of swim goggles, snorkel mask (no snorkel) or other equally suitable eye protection you are now ready for the final part of

the experiment. Pivot at the hip, hold your breath and stick your face in the liquid. Open your eyes. THAT is what swimming in the River Tees feels like. (This suggestion is a humourous illustration.  Please DON'T really try this ....)

So, off into the horizon my opponent is swimming - right there in the heart of the pack and up with the kids and there am I treading water, my goggles slowly steaming up but that doesn’t matter really because I can’t see anything once my head is in the water anyway. And as I drag myself around the 3000 metres, being gently coaxed back in the right direction as I oft strike off at some obscure tangent, sometimes even in the wrong direction I imagine I see a glint of sympathy and I hate to say it, pity, from those handsome young men canoeists who less than hour before had played such an active part in my rescue fantasies. As I stalwartly finish the course I quietly reflect on a book called the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Alan Sillitoe, 1959) and feel some affinity for the main character. But I stopped short of stopping short of the finish as happens in the film and consider a silver medal at my first British Open Water Championships more a study in managing not to drown than some heroic record breaking swim. I at least had strength enough to leave the water at the finish with some dignity (though fairly dazed – I wobbled right past my team-mate). But what I really remember when I look at my medal is the face of Ms X, age 46, height 5ft 6ft approximately. And I plot my revenge.