An unusual warm-up to a competition day

This morning, for reasons known only to my deepest subconscious I decided to give my shower a deep clean which is an unusual start to a competition day to say the least.

My shower has not been cleaned since I returned from Namibia which is an embarrassing number of weeks ago and along with ever more sluggish clearance of water in the shower tray, there was a certain malodorous scent given off every time I opened the shower cubicle door. The legacy of a pea trap blocked, I expect, by the reams of long hair which seem to vacate my head every time I step under the shower. I really should invest in Mr Muscle drain block shares because I suspect that by the regularity with which I use it, I am keeping the company in profit single-handed.

I had not intended to clean the shower. I had been wandering about, packing my kit bag and generally thinking about the race ahead, all done stark-bollock-naked (if that’s possible for a woman) when the sight of the tray and the thought of steeping my feet once again in something the colour of irish bog water got the better of me. I was down stairs rooting through the under-sink cupboard before I knew what I was doing and miscellaneous detergents, unctions and anti-bacterial wipes in hand later, I found myself on my knees spraying away and scrubbing with the zest of a cleaning convert.

Now we all know it is a mistake to start taking things apart when we really don’t have the time or, in fact the competence, but I found myself leaning across the shower tray and peering down into the hole where the water drains away into the sump. This was where the smell was coming from. Pocking my fingers down between the struts of the plug I removed it so that I could get a better look and attached to it came six inches of what was obviously (at some point) human hair but which had, over a period of time longer than I cared to consider, developed into some strange and amorphous alien organism which appeared to be moving of its own accord. But I know Dettol kills 99.9% of household germs – or at least that’s what it says on the bottle – so liberally dousing the walls, the tray and door in the stuff, I left it to do it’s business whilst I retired to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and eat a chocolate biscuit.

The joys of exercise

Laying in bed at 07:00 this morning, having hit the snooze button on my alarm so many times even I was getting embarrassed, I came to the realisation, perhaps belatedly, that early mornings and me just do not get along. A part of my alter ego - in fact a very large part of my alter ego - is a pizza scoffing, beer imbibing, exercise loathing slobett with the best of them. Luckily for me I was born with enough vanity to overcome my natural inclination to vegetate in front of the TV/PC/biscuit tin and to put sufficient effort into maintaining a physical image that doesn’t make small children scream when they see me.

I was musing on this constant battle to hold back the course of nature as I ran on the treadmill in the gym having managed to drag myself out of the arms of Morpheous and stagger banana in hand to my car where I had sat already exhausted with the effort. As I attemped to overcome the resistance to dragging myself away from the joys of slumber at some unearthly hour the usual two way conversation was running through my head.  It went something like this:

Devil: you could go back to bed, it’ll still be warm, you can go to the gym later.

Angel: you’re up, you’re in the car, start the engine, let’s get going.

Devil: but it’s so much effort. Just open the door, slide out, really, the bed will still be warm, you don’t need to go to the gym, you went yesterday.

Angel: once you get there you’ll enjoy it, you always do. And if you don’t go you’ll hate yourself and because you hate yourself you’ll eat an extra chocolate brownie and that’s 300 hundred calories more you’ll have to burn off next time.

Devil: that’s just another 20 minutes on the treadmill, it’s nothing. Just think, you can close the curtains and slip back under those covers and slide into oblivion for another hour. It’s important you have sleep when you’re training hard, your coach told you so.

Angel: Ok it’s like that is it? Well no more Mr Nice Guy for me. Hey you, get your fat-belly gut-bucket into gear and on the road or next time you look in the mirror I’ll make sure everything has gone south by at least three inches.

That usually works even if I shift the car into gear with a certain resigned sigh and a promise to break the angel’s knees when I meet him.

A snapshot of life ....... looking through a different lens

Think about the last time you met someone new. It might have been in work, through a club or society or introduced through a friend at a social function. How did you decide whether or not you liked that person? How did you get to know them? Did you bother to get to know them? Just dwell on that for a moment. Think about the first things that came into your mind – if they were tall or short, attractive or unattractive, well turned out, wearing expensive jewellery, driving a nice car. I bet that nearly everything that went through your mind was in some shape or form a judgment based on material effects. I know when I arrived at my photography seminar and we went around the room and introduced ourselves it became very evident who had the best or worse camera. Mine was way down at the bottom end of the range and do you know, when that was pointed out to me, it drained a bit of positive feeling from how I was felt about being there. I learned during that introduction that you could tell the value of someone’s lens by the colour of the rim – it was either silver (cheapest, the one I have), gold or red (the most expensive, better glass apparently). And do you know, I’d really rather have been left in the dark(room) because it made me doubt the quality of the equipment I had and its performance even though, for me, it had cost what seemed like an awful lot of money. And by association, it made me judgmental about the equipment other people had and the corollary of which is that you start to place a credit against their personal worth or value. Perhaps a bit immature I know, but its human nature and I am in no doubt that we were all doing the same. Yet the youngsters on the Namibia project didn’t seem to care about someone’s background, what clothes they were wearing or how expensive their sunglasses were, they just wanted to flock, like birds, and that created a sense of fun and inclusion for them. The adults on the project, that’s me and about five others, just didn’t gel in the same way, none of us. We did our stuff, ate our meals together because that’s what happened and then after some polite conversation and a passable amount of time retired into our own little worlds, whether that meant reading a book, going to our room or just a bit of solitary wandering around the place. And the kids, well they were off smoking, drinking and generally making their trip a trip of a lifetime, whether it was or not. So that leads onto another thought. Maybe when you get older you have so many more things to compare against each other that it’s easy to become jaundiced and stop just enjoying things for what they are. We stop making the best of a situation and jump to thinking about all the reasons why something isn’t ideal or perfect rather than the things that do hit the mark. We stop finding fun and enjoyment in everything that life has to offer and that’s a bummer actually because, bloody hell, life’s pretty short when you think about it - remember the 254,360 useable hours in the Not Quite Back in the Zone post on page 3. So, readers, next time you are in a situation of meeting someone new, engage with them like you are eighteen again and go beyond the external props and find out instead about the real them. Then who knows, smoking, drinking and partying might ensue. Metaphorically speaking of course.

A snapshot of life.....exposed

Who knows where Wennington is without checking Google Earth? Not me. But as it happens it is a small and idyllic looking village somewhere a bit beyond Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire. I left my house on Saturday morning a smidge after 8.30am and headed towards the A14 which involved going through Corby so as a precaution I locked all my doors and double-checked the locking wheelnuts on my alloys. To be fair, Corby has brushed up its image alot in the last few years with the help of funding following the government's Urban Regeneration White Paper and it now boasts a Costa Coffee, a TK Maxx and a Dotty P’s along with, and this is the most important thing in my book, a new 50m Olympic-standard swimming pool which is due to open sometime in 2009. In fact the design of this pool is really quite beautiful – a somehow merging of 1950’s and space age architecture and design, if that can be at all possible. Anyway, having a 50m pool on my doorstep gets my vote any day and I am sure the rumour that it has been built too short is just, well, a rumour.

I made it safely through Corby and enjoyed the sensation of being out in my car on a beautifully sunny day driving - once I got off the A14 - through picturesque and archetypal English countryside, the kind which you’d want to show off to your American cousins when they came to stay. Some of the crops had been harvested already and old fashioned bales of straw were artistically scattered and stacked in the fields. Following the directions quite carefully as the roads got narrower and the junctions more easily missed, I arrived on time in Wennington at the location of the seminar which was taking place in what looked like one of a number of business units converted from old farm buildings. The car park was almost full which surprised me as for some reason I hadn’t expected the seminar to be that well attended but locking up the car I picked up my camera and went in to meet the other participants. The course which had the snappy title of Understanding your digital EOS Part 1 – basic overrides, is the starter for ten of the range and array of seminars and courses run by Experience Seminars and is dedicated to Canon EOS cameras. The coffee area which was bright and modern with a kind of urban café feel held a bunch of Canon newbies of both sexes and of various ages, sizes and shapes. The walls of the café were a well presented gallery of A3 prints of photographs of big cats, birds and other things that I can’t quite remember because what was really interesting me is that nobody was talking to each other and everybody more or less stood or sat in clearly demarcated territories of almost equal space like little human batteries of opposing polar fields. I queued up for a free-vend coffee and as I did so I observed this strange phenomena. Having recently come back from a volunteering project abroad (see posts in pages 1 – 5) which attracted mainly gap year students the difference between how young people handle unfamiliar social situations and new people is quite different from how older adults behave. You would think that our maturer years and life experience would equip us with skills to handle these kind of situations in a much more relaxed and easy going manner but does it heck. Stick 20 youngsters maybe in their late teens or early twenties together in a non-familiar environment and within 15 minutes it’s like they’ve met up by surprise with a bunch of long lost acquaintances from their home town and they are ready to party. I saw this time and time again as people left the Namibia project and new people arrived and I really envied them this easy familiarity and, I think, lack of criticality and judgment about their peers. I wonder why adults don't seem to be able to do the same.

A snapshot of life

Along with the purchase of my Canon 450D EOS (apparently named for the Greek Goddess of Dawn but changed in the marketing literature to mean Electro-Optical System by some classics philistine at Canon.  So what if she ate her children, this is Greek mythology for goodness sake.) came a whole bunch of software which beautifully and competently screwed up my Outlook Express. Luckily that’s not what this post is about but as I still haven’t managed to sort it out I thought I would momentarily vent my spleen. Ah, that’s better. Out with anger........in with love.

Software aside, the documentation also included information on Canon accredited courses to help you learn how to use your camera and software properly and by way of incentive you got a £30 discount voucher. Now, as an SLR virgin and general photographic numpty who really just wanted to drop into John Lewis and buy the first DSLR on offer, I am also a Virgo and as everyone knows, we Virgo’s like to do things properly. This meant I bought a selection of digital SLR magazines and spent an unnecessary amount of time neglecting my work and instead reading the ‘best buy’ sections to try and ascertain the optimum value/quality/functionality ratio. I am glad to say that I did not quite resort to plotting a scatter diagram in an attempt to be more scientific in my decision-making, but it came alarmingly close. I finally made a choice on which-make which-model two days before my volunteering trip to Namibia and tripped into John Lewis, light on my feet with the glory of having made a decision, only to find they didn’t have the one I wanted. Nor did Jessops and nor did Youngs. As a consequence I retraced my steps to see the cheery and knowledgeable young man back at JL who didn’t seem at all surprised when I returned and bought ..... the first DSLR on offer - the aforementioned Canon 450D EOS. This quandry of indecision and procrastination bought me the dubious delight of unpacking the camera the day before my holiday, loading the software onto my laptop the morning of my holiday and reading the user manual on the flight. As you can imagine reading a camera user-manual does a very fine job indeed in sending you off to sleep far more readily and deeply than the pre-requisite on-board gin and tonic.

 

Having come back from Namibia with some passably good shots taken only using the Auto PIC modes I was keen to find out if using the creative modes (P, Tv, Av, M, A-DEP) would have made any difference. In order to do that, and having failed miserably to absorb with any permanence the instructions from the manual (I needed Eos, it all seemed Greek to me...), I decided it was time to cash in my discount voucher and join the geeks on a course at Experience Seminars http://www.experience-seminars.co.uk/.