Yesterday I got to Marseille, but it wasn’t easy. It was a bit of a shambles actually – I hope all travelling days aren’t going to be this bad.

I got up early, breakfasted and left for the station. I was really feeling the weight of my bags, so I waited 20 minutes for a bus which was full to the brim. Being you’re laden down is the perfect reason for catching a bus, but it makes you feel uncomfortable getting on a bus with 2 large bags, as a foreigner, squeezing in amongst everyone else and getting in their way. You just have to avoid eye contact, I guess.

I couldn’t wait to get off the bus, which I did at a stop in town and went to hang out on the Place de Victor Hugo – the French really like that guy, don’t they? I used some open Wi-Fi for a bit – mostly to check my emails – and then I went in search of postcards to send home. But for some reason, despite being a really nice place that would look great on a postcard, I couldn’t find any. It was only then that I noticed the time, and I rushed to the railway station with a couple of minutes to spare before my train left. Good job I didn’t find any postcards.

The train to Valence Ville was pleasant. The weather cloudy most of the way and unfortunately I wasn’t next to a window. I was sitting at a table, but there was a boy in the window seat opposite me who crutches, and I wanted to respect his leg room. That said, there was no one next to me so I still had a clear view out of the window.

What did annoy me, though, was that my ticket was not looked at once on the journey to Valence. An InterRail ticket like mine is provided with 8 little boxes, and you have to fill in the dates that you’re going to be travelling. You’re supposed to validate it before you get on the train, else face a fine. My ticket is valid for travel on 8 separate days, and as required I diligently wrote “12/5″ in my next clear box. I’ve used two of them now. But on this journey no one came to check that I had a valid ticket, and I feel like they should have done. Otherwise – it feels like I’ve just ‘wasted’ one day’s travel, if you see what I mean. Yes, I know I was being honest. But fuck that. It makes me feel like an idiot.

I arrived at Valence, left the station and then followed signs to the tourist office – but when I got there it seemed totally commercialised. I want to go to a tourist to find stuff out, not to be sold a load of shit. So I just went to the nearby park to hang out. The air temperature was fairly cool, but the Sun felt hot when it shone. Valence was a nice town, and the park was nice too but I really needed a piss – but the toilets were out of order! Typical. I ate some dried apricots and some brownies whilst I held in my piss and listened to the audiobook version of Starship Troopers. I texted Mum.

I eventually found some toilets in the park and I relieved myself – much to my relief. Afterwards I found a different part of the park and went and laid down on the grass. There were some guys out cutting the grass, but I chose a patch which was uncut so that I could make a daisy chain. Which I did.

I had looked up timetables earlier, and knew that there was a train from Valence Ville to Marseille at 12h30. That wouldn’t have given me very long at all in Valence, so I had decided to wait until the train at about 2h30. It turns out: that was a bad idea. Well, it was a good idea, but a decision that unfortunately led to a lot of stress, and through no fault of my own.

I got to the station with plenty of time to spare for the half past two train. Except it didn’t show up… but instead there was a different (unscheduled) train which the boards said was going to Mirimas only, will a little extra bit of information saying something like “correspondance Marseille en car”. That was confusing. It now know that is means “connection to Marseille by coach”, but why would I want to go to Marseille by bus? I have a train ticket, which I spent a lot of money on, and I’ve already validated it for today so I’m going to use it, but hook or by crook.

Why was the regularly scheduled train nowhere to be seen, and why instead was there a train only going to Mirimas which would require a bus to get to Marseille? I went to the information booth at the station and he told me that if I wanted to go to Marseille today, I needed to get to the TGV station. The TGVs use different lines from the slower, normal trains. He said there weren’t any trains to Marseille. That’s not what the timetable said, but okay. Maybe something had changed. I didn’t get round to asking him what the “correspondance Marseille en car” meant, as he didn’t speak English and by this point my French was really being stretched thin. Next I went to the booking office, and asked to reserve a seat on a TGV from Valence TGV to Marseille. Nope! They’re all full! Okay then, fine. Which regional (slower, non-TGV trains, “TER“) could I get? There was one getting in at 7 and one at 11! Much later than I had hoped to arrive at Marseille, but that’ll have to do. I received a printout of these times, and walked back to the park. I bought some postcards on the way and wrote them when I was sitting in the park – one to Grandma, and one to Mike – and then I posted them.

Soon it was time for the first scheduled TER, and a storm was rolling in as I headed for the station. Real big clouds.

The rain held until I reached the station. But the train wasn’t going to Marseille. By this point I wasn’t going to be surprised by anything, but I’d still get annoyed – and worried, because I had nowhere to stay in Valence. I needed to get to Marseille by the end of the day. Instead, the train was only going as far as Avignon! I went to the booking office again, and asked a man why the train scheduled to go to Marseille was terminating at Avignon. He had no idea and was really confused, but eventually found me some connections from Avignon to Marseille. (I also tried to reserve my Bordeaux – La Rochelle leg for later in the month, but it turns out that it wasn’t possible – reservations are not necessary on that route).

At that very point, the lights inside the station went off for a second – the storm had arrived! Lightning! I went to the platform to wait for Avignon train (which the monitors now said was 15 minutes late). A bit later, after hearing the rain pounding the roof and watching the flashes of lightning, there was an announcement on the public address system. I knew it was about Marseille, but what with the business of the station and the raging storm, I didn’t catch most of the message. No one could help me – and train announcements are hard enough to hear, even in English and on a clear day!

Photo of Valence Ville station by Practise:

I somehow found an official SNCF woman and she told me the news: we had to go to Valence TGV then get the TGV to Marseille. I asked if I needed a reservation – usually travelling on a TGV without a reservation gets you a penalty, and I had already found out that there was no reservations available. No, she said. Special circumstances. Screw the reservations (she didn’t say that). She pointed me across the platforms to the right train. I headed over and looked for another member of staff to tell me the deal before boarding the train – you can never be too skeptical, especially in a foreign country like France. You definitely don’t want to end up on the wrong train. That’s worse than not being on any train. I found a man and asked him what was going on. Same story – giving the reason that the Avignon train was too late to make its connection to Marseille.

I got on the train with maybe 30 seconds to spare, and saw 3 French guys who I’d seen earlier in the booking office. They asked what I’d managed to find out, and I told them that the booking office hadn’t been very helpful. We still didn’t know the root problem, but being French, I guess they had understood the announcement. It was fortunate that I made these friends, and that they spoke English, as several times over the next couple of hours I needed to ask for their help with language and knowing what to do.

The rain was ridiculous. At Valence TGV it was absolutely pouring down… and the station was really busy. The noticeboards said that the TGV to was 10 minutes late, but having waited this long already to get back to Marseille, I didn’t care. I like hanging around train station, anyway. As the arrival time drew nearer, we were permitted to walk down to the platforms. At Valence TGV, the station concourse is raised, and there are lifts and escalators down to the platforms below. Have a look at some of these photos that I found online: the whole station, a double train boarding, and again.

Photo of Valence TGV station by franxk:

Photo of train arriving at Valence TGV station by reallyboring:

In about 30 minutes of waiting on the platform, several TGVs passed through the station on the central lines at huge speeds. (When in the station, the passing trains are separated from the platform lines by a fence, probably to reduce noise and terror, so you can only ever see those them when they were just entering or leaving the station, not right up close). Honestly, if you’ve been scared or surprised by a fast train passing you by, close up, you’d be absolutely terrified in France. The trains are loud, and fucking fast. Maximum speeds are almost 200mph, compared to a very maximum of 125mph on normal British lines. And what’s even more impressive is that the trains had very short headways. After one train passed, another one might pass in the same direction in what seem likes barely a minute.

The French guys that I’d met starting smoking something which smelled like weed. It was unusual to me, as people aren’t allowed to smoke on British platforms any longer. Our train arrived as predicted (wow), and it was comprised of two TGV Sud-Est trains. That meant that there were 16 (=2*8) coachess. The French sure like their train travel. And yet… the train was packed to fuck! There were loads of SNCF staff onboard, but thankfully they seemed to know the situation with all of us non-reserved people heading to Marseille. I didn’t have any hassle from them, at least, and so I went a whole day without showing my ticket. What a waste.

I had to stand with my bags until Avignon, at which point we had escaped the storm and it was sunny. There were beautiful views, with the railway line taking on impressively steep gradients, and the sky was filled huge clouds. Unfortunately, with the stress of everything, I didn’t take any photos. I briefly got a seat at Avignon when someone left the train, but I was quickly turfed out as someone go on to claim their reserved seat. Never mind. I feel sorry for all of the long-booked passengers who had their journey spoiled by a flood of scumbags joining the train without a reservation, cramping the whole train and taking your seat. It’s happened to me before. Thankfully, I didn’t have to stand for long. Marseille was a surprisingly short trip away from Avignon, and after going through lots of tunnels, I was delighted to arrive in Marseille.

Marseille is weird. That’s how I feel about it at the moment.

Vertigo Centre (which is the hostel I’m staying at whilst I’m in Marseille) was very close to the station – handy – and I found it easily. It’s a nice place, but I can’t be bothered writing much about it. It’s quaint – obviously adapted from several old houses to become this hostel. My bedroom is in a sort of outhouse, which sleeps 6 or 8 and has its own bathroom. Whilst sorting through my stuff in my room, I met an Aussie called Jimmy. We chatted for a bit and he gave me a book that he’s finished with, called This Bleeding City by Alex Preston. I only just now realise that maybe he was expecting me to give him one of my finished books in return. Well, I didn’t. I had a shower (not bad) and went to checked out the hostel and use the Wi-Fi – which didn’t work.

Once I was satisfied with the place, I just my stuff on my bed (I had to be trusting, there was no place else for it) and I went for a little walk around Marseille. I am sick and tired of beggers. Fuck. Off. Most of the people around the hostel were not white French, instead there were a lot of people dressed in Muslim garb and a lot of African-looking people. I bought a 6-pack of Kronenbourgh 1664 and some water from a local shop.

Marseille is a total melting-pot of cultures, but I was disappointed by what was available locally – I couldn’t find authentic food, no food stalls, no quaint or cool restaurants serving local food. Instead it was all just the typical greasy spoon type place, serving kebabs and burgers. There were also about a million “Internet + Taxiphone” shops. The French sure must like surfing the web and riding in taxis.

I headed back to the hostel for the night, where I used the internet, drank some beer whilst reading some articles in Instapaper, and then I went to bed.

Today, which is Thursday, I woke up at 7:30am. From some reason I’d been dreaming of a girl I used to know at primary school. Why? Weird. At one point I had dreamt that I was going to going to be going to Inverness Uni (really) to study biology. Laughable. I also dreamt that my St Andrews accommodation application (for standard self-catered housing) was granted. LOL.

Did I note that there were loads of beautiful girls on the TGV yesterday? Well, there were a lot.

I spent quite a while playing with my iPod in bed – the internet is now working on it.

I got up, checked how much tickets to Nîmes would cost (€19, about what I was expecting) and then I headed to Notre-Dame de la Garde, via Vieux Port (the old port). Finally it was really sunny, but the air was still cold – maybe 16ºC. After listening to an episode of PadPundit with Scott Bourne, I carried on listening to Starship Troopers.

I was amazed by fish market at the old port – there were so many types: big and small, red, pink and white, lobsters and even octopus.

I passed a Lidl store but it wasn’t open – I’m not sure why not, there’s probably some sort of public holiday going on. Instead I went to a different place and stocked up on groceries. I bought some Babybell, plums, chorizo, orange juice, mackerel fillets, yoghurts, and possibly something else. It came to under €10.

I ate some of it in a park where I texted Mum (I texted Dad when I was on the TGV yesterday, moaning of my troubles) and then I carried on to Notre-Dame de la Garde, which has amazing views over the whole city and the sea.

I bought and wrote some postcards (to Poppy, Dad, and Mum), then I got to work writing this entry which has taken a while. I’m slightly worried that my arms have become quite sunburnt, despite the copious amounts of sum cream that I’m wearing.

I’m going to continue walking around the city now, I’ll maybe head to the coast before walking back to the hostel in evening. Maybe I’ll eat out tonight – I really want to try authentic local bouillabaisse. And I need to send these postcards, too. I’m hungry.

Bye for now.

My final exam of first year (Great Ideas 2) was on Monday, the 23rd. It didn’t go very well, but I was so relieved to be finished. That was in the afternoon, and I spent the evening in the common room with Mike, watching films and drinking gin and tonic. I got drunk.

I don’t remember what I did on Tuesday, but by the evening I realised that I wasn’t interested in whatever events were on that night. I got the seed of an idea for an early Wednesday start, and fell asleep at around 10 with my alarm set for 3:30am. I’ve never set my alarm that early before, and I don’t think I’ll ever do it again.

The view as I left my house in Albany Park at 3:50am:

Sunrise for Wednesday was at 4:40am. By waking up so early, I gave myself plenty of time to walk and see the best of the sunrise. Some of the most vivid colours and lights in a sunrise occur a while before the Sun actually breaks the horizon, which is roughly the quoted sunrise time¹. By midsummer, the sun was rising as early as 04:21am.

It’s really weird walking around that early – before 4am – and being able to see properly, in full colour. I often get to walk around a deserted place at night when it’s dark, but when it’s light – even just twilight – the quietness feels different. Really serene. I love feeling serene.

Why did I want to go to West Sands to watch the sunrise? Because it is one of my favourite places during the world – especially at low tide. And the tide was low. Then, it’s an amazing expanse of almost-level sand by the (usually) gentle sea. Perfect to compliment and reflect the colours of the rising Sun.

And, it’s quiet out there. I get a wonderful feeling of isolation, but not the kind of isolation that makes you feel lonely. It’s the kind of isolation which makes you ultra-thoughtful, and which connects you to the vastness of nature and the Cosmos. Yeah I just said that. I like that feeling too.

I want to talk a little bit about the music I was listening to that morning. Yes, I was listening to ambient. Yes, it was Brian Eno. Yes, it was on repeat. I know, but I love it: and it was this week which cast that love in stone.

Are you familiar with Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks album? I am. Throughout the morning I was listening to it, and it was the perfect accompaniment. 3 of my favourite tracks from it are An Ending (Ascent), Drift and Weightless.

Here are YouTube links to the tracks: An Ending, Drift, Weightless. Play one (or all) of them whilst you read the rest of this post, if you want; you’ll probably recognise them from films or TV, as they have been reused extensively.

With my headphones on, music playing, I stood part-way down West Sands for half and hour, relaxed, and enjoyed the show (don’t worry there’s more story after the photos):

Once I’d had enough and got too cold standing around, I headed back to East Sands where I put the rest of my crazy plan into action. In my bag I had packed a towel, and underneath my clothes I was wearing swimshorts. I got in position, and looked around to see if I was alone. It was 5am, but surprisingly there were other people up and about. On the bench by the coastguard station 3 people were sitting, looking out to sea. Being sober and self conscious, I decided that I would not skinny dip. I stripped down to my shorts, flopped into the water, and swam for about 20 seconds until all feeling had left my extremities. It was the coldest thing I have ever done, and as quickly as I could I threw a towel round me and headed the 2 minute walk back to my house.

On my way back to warmth and safety, I bumped into the people who had been on the bench: they were my friends Nigel, Bella, and a mystery guy who seemed very much into Bella. Bastards, ruining my chance at a skinny dip! I’ll try again sometime, probably with alcohol for courage.

I showered to get rid of the salt and sand and to warm me up, and knowing me I probably ate again. But despite my best efforts, and even though it was still very early in the morning and I was tired, I couldn’t fall back to sleep. This fucked me up badly for the rest of the week.

I can’t remember how I spent the rest of Wednesday. Despite there being a beautiful sunrise, the Sun quickly headed into cloud where it remained all day. I probably spent it in my room, reading and packing up my belongings for the summer.

On Thursday, after lunch, I remembered that the BBC would be in St Andrews filming an episode of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. Contrary to the belief of many, it’s not always an awful programme. With the vague hope of seeing something interesting, and the more realistic hope of appearing on television, my future housemate (Adam) and I set off to the main University quad, where the show was being filmed.

We arrived at about 4:30pm, and Fiona Bruce was just leaving. She had filmed all of her spots, and most of the visitors had already had their artifacts valued. But the day wasn’t over: after looking at everything, the experts then decide which pieces to film properly, to make it into the final show.

Adam and I stuck around for the filming of the first few of these, hoping to see something interesting and to appear on TV. But as the evening progressed and the weather became duller and colder, most of the visitors left, leaving a very small audience to provide a convincing background. And so, we were roped by the producers into staying until the very end, watching about 8 pieces being filmed until 6 or 7pm.

Let me just say that basically everything you see on Antiques Roadshow is staged – the original valuations most likely weren’t filmed, and even if they were, they are run through several times more before a good enough take has been recorded. TELEVISION IS LIES. Remember that.

The episode at St Andrews finally aired at the end of February, 9 months later. There is another part to it (which will most likely feature me, too) and it will air during the next series. That’ll probably be next year. Here of some of the screenshots.

In this one you can see me at the back, grinning:

A little smirk on my face this time:

And again, a smile:

Afterwards, we headed straight back to Albany Park. The Albany end of year party was being held that evening in the Vic. The theme was the 80s. Lacking sleep and having just spent ages standing in the cold for television, I was not up for it. At all. However, I visited the common room where the Warden and her assistants had put on a ‘drinks and nibbles’ event, and after 30 minutes of wine, chatting with Martyna, I left with the rest of the wine bottle I’d been drinking (and which I promptly finished) and I was definitely in a partying mood.

In my stupidest mistake ever, I decided that there was no time for food. To this day, that was the only occasion on which lunch was ever my final food of the day. Yet even forgoing food, I still managed to arrive at the party late, missing much of the fun. But at least I was drunk, and ready to party.

And it was a really fun party… until about 10pm. Now, looking back, I think about all the ways that could have happened differently, all of the choices that I might have made differently, to stop me from going to that party. But I went, and I met – for the first proper time, at least – a girl called Emily.

We started talking, and from then on neither of us cared about the party. We spent the next couple of hours chatting, drunkenly getting to know each other right there in the middle of the party.

Now she’s my girlfriend, and we’ve been together for nearly 9 months. Every time I listen to the Brian Eno album I wrote about above, I’m brought back to this time in my life. I love listening to it; I’ve been listening as I wrote this. It connects with with my memories.

In just a few weeks, it will have been a year since we became friends. Once again, I’ve had a year which was completely unlike any of my previous years. I’m happier than I’ve ever been. May has long been my favourite month. I think it’s going to stay that way.

1. Precisely, sunrise is given as the time when the centre of the Sun moves above the horizon. The fact that the Sun is not a point source of light causes many odd phenomena in our daily lives.

Hey, did I mention I bought a Kindle? This is it:

It’s a Wi-Fi Kindle 3, the type released back in the summer of 2010 (it’s now known as the Kindle Keyboard, but I think that’s a clumsy name which I prefer not to use). This is the one I got. I forwent the 3G because I can live without it and would rather spend the ~£70 premium on something more fun instead.

But hang on a second Wilf, you say. If you’ve just bought a Kindle, why didn’t you get the current version? Indeed, Marco recommends the Kindle 4 as the best e-reader to buy, and he’s a pretty clued-up guy. Why not go for that?

Choosing my Kindle

Alright, let me get something straight before I continue. I didn’t just buy it, gosh. I bought it almost 2 months ago, at the end of November.

But no, it’s a good question and one that I pondered myself for a considerable time before purchasing my Kindle 3. Amazon’s Kindles first came onto my radar through listening to This Week in Tech podcasts back in 2009 and 2010. Steve Gibson, the host of Security Now!, has always been keen on Kindles, especially the Kindle DX. I vividly remember one moment of my month-long French holiday, walking up the hill to my hostel in Nice for the first time, listening as Steve excitedly described the potential of the large-screened DX to be a native PDF viewer. Thrilling stuff.

As it happens, I saw my first ever Kindle in the wild at the end of that French holiday in 2010. It was a white Kindle 2 at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle railway station whilst I was waiting for my Eurostar back to London. A man sitting opposite me in the waiting room pulled what I thought was an e-reader out of his bag, clad in a leather case, and started reading. I thought it was a Kindle and was interested to see one, so I went over to ask him about it. He confirmed my hunch and gave me a little demonstration as to how it worked. I was impressed, and knew that one day I would own one¹.

I was also put onto the Kindle by Murray, a loyal devotee to the written word, by Marco Arment (the host of the podcast Build and Analyze, and the guy behind Instapaper – more on that later) and more recently by my girlfriend, who purchased a Wi-Fi Kindle 3 during the summer and whose testimony and encouragement finally pushed me over the edge of my Kindle indecisiveness. If she loves her Kindle, heck, there’s gotta be something good behind this funny contraption.

When the Kindle 3 was released, I felt that whilst it was a good device, I wasn’t ready for it yet. I’d wait for the next version. In particular, I wanted a Kindle with a touchscreen. The keyboard on the Kindle 3 takes up space unnecessarily, and anyway, after having my life changed by my iPod touch and iOS 3 years previously, I wasn’t about to start buying new gadgets that relied on a keyboard and D-pad for navigation. No, this was 2010. This was the future.

Then, a few months ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle 4, Kindle Fire, and Kindle Touch. The Fire is a tablet computer with an LCD screen – not an e-reader – and I’m sure you know what the Kindle 4 is. It’s the newer version of the Kindle 3, most notably lacking a keyboard. The Touch is the one I had been eagerly anticipating, but I was disappointed. For a higher price, the Touch is sluggish (although the responsiveness has since been improved in a software update this week), and in some ways a touch screen may be worse for an e-reader than dedicated buttons (you can’t rest your fingers on the screen whilst reading in the same way you can on hardware buttons, meaning you have to move your fingers a considerable distance every page turn). And worse: the Kindle Touch is not even available outside of the US.

Fuck that.

Let me tell you how I chose my Kindle over the Kindle 4. For starters, it’s refurbished and hence was the cheapest option available (refurbished Kindle 4s are not available). And for £10 less than the Kindle 4, you get a whole lot more: double the battery life (2 months vs. 1 month), double the storage (4GB vs. 2 GB), built-in text-to-speech and speakers, and a screen which isn’t as ghosty. (The Kindle 4 only does a full ‘blink’ every 6 page turns, so by the 5th turn a non-negligible amount of residue remains from the previous pages. You know what I mean). Those advantages aside, the Kindle 3 sports the same software and same quality screen, and having been around for much longer, the availability, selection and price of covers and cases is much better.

My Kindle also sports a keyboard, which the Kindle 4s do not. Initially I thought that a keyboard might piss me off, being all flimsy and adding a lot of size to the device. Whilst I rarely use the keyboard for anything lengthier than entering my password, I find it doesn’t bother me. I ignore it most of the time, and I even think that a Kindle without the extra height might feel too small in my hand. I prefer the look of the Kindle 3 as well: the 4s look to be of a lower build quality and worse colour. I like mine best.

What Do I Think Of It?

The refurbishment left my Kindle looking and feeling as good as new. There is no deficiency or defect that I can identify, and I would buy a refurbished product from Amazon again in a heartbeat. When I removed it from its charming frustration-free packaging, it felt like new. You can still buy a refurbished Kindle from Amazon at this link. One thing of note: you don’t have any choice in colour – whilst in America there was a white version of the 3G Kindle 3 (the previous Kindles were all white, I think), this was never sold elsewhere. I’d have gone for the graphite version, anyway.

I’m sure everyone reading this knows all about Kindles so I’m not going to cover everything, but heck, why should I limit myself? Out of respect for your time? Nah.

When I un-boxed my Kindle, my housemate Adam was sitting next to me at the kitchen table and was as impressed as I was by the e-ink, and it took quite a few moments for him to be convinced that the image on the screen was not an overlay but was, in fact, being displayed by the Kindle itself. I like to describe e-ink to people by saying that it’s like an Etch A Sketch. The Kindle does work (and hence requires energy) when it comes to changing the screen’s imagine, but once it’s done: it’s here to stay. The shaking to clear bit doesn’t factor into my simile.

I think it’s awesome. Sure, the Kindle’s screen does not have a very high resolution (though perhaps it will in the future), and you can make out ‘pixels’ if you look closely enough. But I commend the person or company who persisted with the development of e-ink despite the predominance of LCD screens in computing. I’ve never had a problem with headaches for reading on my iPod’s screen for hours (and hours and hours), but once you go e-ink, you don’t go back. The lack of colour in  the screen is not a problem either, at least for the books that I read, which mostly lack any illustrations let alone colourful ones. Maybe one day there will be colour e-ink Kindles, too. But for me the biggest benefit is the ability to read outside in daylight without being overrun by glare. It’s great for reading outside, which is something I’ll be doing more and more of as the days get warmer. Here’s my view from where I was reading on a bench in St Andrews last week:

It’s a nice way to read.

One bad habit which I have noticed about my Kindle is that the screen is very slow to refresh and update when it’s cold. On Saturday I was sitting at Dundee station for almost an hour, waiting for my train to Perth. It was a cold day, and furthermore my Kindle had spent the night in my bag in a cold room. The result was that a page turn took somewhere around about 2 seconds, rather than the usual fraction of a second. I meant that rather than being a fluid motion as it usually is, I was unable to keep the flow of reading going during a page turn. Those 2 seconds were everything. For a while I thought my Kindle was dying, but after poking around in some search results revealed that this is just the nature of e-ink. After being at home for a while, my Kindle had a chance to warm up and it returned to its usual chirpy self. Oh well, I can live with that.

The battery life isn’t as great as I had expected, either. Over the Christmas holiday I was away, so for about 6 days I had no way of charging my Kindle. I thought I would be fine, but by the end of the trip my battery level was down to perhaps 15% or so. Yes, I’d been using it to read a lot of books and articles, but my Wi-Fi was off the whole time and I was getting anxious that it would indeed run out. By the way, the refurbished Kindle 3 (and indeed all new Kindle 4s) is sold without a wall charger. But I am happy to charge via my computer, and I suspect that I would be able to plug the Kindle’s USB cable into my iPod’s wall charger and use that instead.

Another problem is that the Kindle does not support the 802.1X authentication standard that my university uses to secure its Wi-Fi networks, so I have no way to connect to the internet with my Kindle at my halls of residence. It’s an annoyance for sure, but not a deal breaker. As I only own and use one Kindle reading device, it’s not important for me to sync my reading progress with Amazon’s servers very often so that’s not too bad. I would mostly be using Wi-Fi to download new Instapaper bundles (to be described later) or to archive articles, which I can work around. What I have to do then is to connect my Kindle to my computer via its supplied USB cable (amply long – I was impressed) and unlock it. I found a really cool icon somewhere online which I use to represent my Kindle’s storage drive on my desktop which you can see to the left.

Isn’t that cool? When the kindle is connected you can copy over any unprotected MOBI files or other documents that the Kindle can handle.

Apart from those few described problems: I think it’s great. I use my Kindle all the time now, far more than I expected that I would, so much so that I told my Mum that yes, in fact I wouldn’t mind receiving a case as a Christmas present. My girlfriend uses a silicone case for her Kindle, something a bit like this, on sale at Amazon, except in a nice yellow colour. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I would find the lack of rigidity in the cover distracting – it’s just a preference. It’s bad feng shui.

I took to Amazon and purchased a black leather case instead. This is it:

(And this is what it is possibly copying.)

It’s cheap and it works. I cost £4.99 plus £3.29 for shipping. I had been happy using my Kindle without a case, but it started squeaking when I held and squeezed it in a particular way, and the screen got a bit scratched in my bag one time, so I took the plunge. I’m glad I did, I like the extra weight and thickness of the case, and the feel of the leather in my hand. I looks classier than a bare Kindle, too, and it identifies it as mine. Initially I found it weird that the magnetic latch closes on the rear of the case, but that makes sense. If it was located on the front as you might naturally expect, that would mean that it was stitched onto the back, and when opened, the magnetic flappy bit would obscure the Kindle’s screen. It could only be that way.

By the way, Amazon has a good reputation for customer service (as all successful companies seem to have). Check out Murray’s customer service success story:

Amazon support are awesome. Even though accidental damage is not covered under the one year warranty, I’m getting a new Kindle in the post for only £47, roughly a third of the cost of buying a brand new one. It was a case of literally typing my mobile number into amazon.co.uk and five minutes later a cool French dude had agreed to send me a new Kindle.

That’s excellent. I use my Kindle safe in the knowledge that even if my case does fail me and permit damage, Amazon will be on my side.

What Do I Read On My Kindle?

All sorts.

The first big thing I read was part project, part enjoyment. I read Murray’s blog, and in one post he recommended a trip report on the FlyerTalk Forums by a member called “Seat 2A“. The report was entitled “6 Trains on 6 Continents ~ Connected by 44 Flights on 14 Airlines“. (Part 2). If you hadn’t guessed it already, it’s a first-person account of a man flying around the world (in style, I might add) in order to travel on 6 world-famous railways, each on a different continent. The report had been sitting in my Instapaper unread queue for a long, long time, for it was too lengthy and hence daunting to ever consider tackling. However, I had read enough one day to know that I did want to finish it eventually. With a Kindle, I had my chance.

I would turn it into an e-book.

It was easier than I’d expected, but it took a lot longer. Perhaps I will detail the process in a separate post one day, but today I’ll just cover it briefly. I copied the source HTML of each part of the report, got rid of all the unnecessary junk, added the necessary markup for an e-book reader to interpret page breaks and chapters, and used Calibre to convert the resultant HTML document into a MOBI file. Kindles like MOBI files. The final result was about 15MB, filled with images and a chapter for every new post that Seat 2A had made in the thread for his report.

I devoured that trip report like nobody’s business, and earned the satisfaction of knowing that I can now make e-books. It was fantastic. If you have even a passing interest in travelling, I suggest you read the trip report too.

I could have saved myself a whole lot of time and used Instapaper’s Kindle support to read the report instead – that is, if the pictures weren’t such an integral part of the report. Instapaper is a free reading service developed by (the previously mentioned) Marco Arment, who is the host of the programming podcast “Build and Analyze” from 5by5 studios. I follow his writings and podcast and I have a lot of respect for the guy. I’ve used Instapaper for years, the free app since 2009 and I bought the paid version in 2010 soon after the price dropped to $5 in the App Store (permanently, down from $10).

How does it work? Basically, if you’re reading an article on the web, and you decide you don’t have time or don’t want to read it at the moment, you can click a button in your browser which will save the article into your Instapaper account. You can then read the article later at your leisure through Instapaper, either online, through the iOS app on your iPhone/iPad/iPod touch, or… on your Kindle! (Although images doesn’t usually survive the Kindle conversion). I add roughly 5-10 articles to my Instapaper queue every daily, mostly found by going through my subscribed RSS feeds or Twitter, and if I wanted I could have them automatically sent to my Kindle every day.

David Smith recently wrote the post that I had long intended this post to be, about how to easily read your articles on your Kindle. So instead of writing the same thing, I here refer you to his article, “Instapaper on the Kindle“, to learn all about it:

Getting an $80 Kindle 4 and pairing it with [Instapaper] will revolutionize your reading of web content. There is nothing more peaceful, when looking at a backlit LCD panel all day, than heading home and picking up an e-ink display to read all your favorite authors.

Read the whole thing if you can, honestly. It’s worth it. Back in December (before that article was written), not long after I first started using Instapaper on my Kindle, Marco greatly improved the service, and those improvements are reflected in David’s post. I sent Marco a brief note thanking him for the recent changes, and he was nice enough to reply.

Instapaper is my favourite iOS app and I have used the service daily for years.

I spend perhaps a third to a half of my Kindle time reading articles via Instapaper. For the first month or so that I had my Kindle it was more – I stormed through a backlog of hundreds of unread articles in my Instapaper queue, some of which had been sitting unread since 2010. My unread queue now stands empty most days, although in separate other folders I do have perhaps a hundred or so other articles to get through eventually (generally longer-form pieces such as New Yorker profiles and the like). It was such a relief to finally get through my queue, which is what I spent a lot of time doing over the festive period.

The rest of the time I read… books. Of course I do. Here at the books that I have bought from Amazon’s Kindle Store:

• Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets by David Simon
• The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
• Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz
• The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures
• QI: The Book of General Ignorance
• QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance
• Do You Think You’re Clever? by John Farndon
• Breakfast With Socrates by Robert Rowland Smith
• Professor Stewart’s Hoard of Mathematical Treasures by Ian Stewart [Recommended by Murray]

Amazon’s not bad, you know. Each one of these books cost me around about 99 pence: either from the Kindle Daily Deal or Amazon’s 12 Days of Christmas sale. That’s a bargain. Usually books are more expensive though, similarly priced to the paperback version. Another thing that I like is that you can read a free sample of any book from the Kindle Store before you decide to buy it. It’s a better way of trying out a book than reading a blurb, that’s for sure.

How’s the reading experience? Yeah, it’s pretty good. There’s decent control over margin size, typeface style (serif, sans serif, condensed), font size, screen orientation, that kind of thing. I really enjoy reading on my Kindle, and as a result I find myself reading a lot more. It’s easy on the eyes, with nicely proportioned text, a good sized device, and whilst the software is nothing special, it performs its duty well. I really like knowing how far through a book I am, percentage wise, and how close I am to the next chapter (thanks to the progress bar at the bottom). It turns reading into a meta-game, trying to crank up the numbers and reach the next chapter.

Another benefit of the Kindle and something that makes me read more: it’s cool to read on it. It feels like more of an adventure than reading a paper book, at least in my experience.

By the way: in the column to the right-hand side of my blog is a list of those books which I am currently reading, which is linked to my Goodreads profile. I use Goodreads to keep track of progress with currently reading books, to record when I’ve read books, and to read every book I complete. I like the social aspect of it too. I recommend it. I also have a page on my website which lists all the books which I have read recently.

I love my Kindle.

1. I’m pretty sure that guy was gay.

All week the sea had been rough, but to begin with it was accompanied by high winds and low, rainy clouds. It’s no coincidence that the most dramatic aspects of nature are often the most inhospitable ones. The conditions weren’t good for sitting out and appreciating the waves – but yesterday everything was perfect. The sea was just as violent, yet the weather had cleared to one of those beautifully sunny autumn days that I always hope for.

I leave the maths building at 1pm on Wednesdays, but yesterday I wasn’t home until 3. I headed to the pier and marvelled at the awesome combination of rough sea, high tide, and sunshine. It was incredible.

After leaving the pier, I bumped into my housemate Adam who was sitting on a bench overlooking East Sands. I joined him. We sat together watching the sea for well over an hour, the surfers and the canoeists and the pier jumpers, a smile permanently fixed to our faces.

How could you not smile?

Then I went and cooked with my girlfriend.

The sea was calm today.

As far as I’m concerned, a nerd is simply someone who cares about something more than most other people. And you say nerds are nerdy about that particular thing.

You can be nerdy about computers, of course. You can be nerdy about roleplaying games. Obviously. But I also think you can be nerdy about trains and aeroplanes, about television, about music, about beer, about cider, about coffee, about cinema, about books. About just about anything.

I’m a huge nerd. It stems from the sort of personality I have (or the sort of personality that I am, if you like to think of things that way). I care about things. If somethings worth doing, it’s worth caring about doing it right. If I enjoy something, I want to get optimal enjoyment, so I find out the best way to do that. I care.

Nerds are the best kind of people.

I like it when my friends start blogging, but few of them ever stick at it. Good luck Craig.

So far, my second year at St Andrews has been very different from my first.

I’m now doing only maths modules; the maths is harder and there’s more of it. This semester I’m doing modules entirely in pure mathematics, which I think is great. Next semester will be more applied, but pure is where my heart is. I’m currently taking 3 modules: a 2nd year one called Algebra & Analysis, a 3rd year one about Linear Algebra and another 3rd year one, Complex Analysis. Good stuff.

I’m not sure which one is my favourite. I tend to attempt my real analysis tutorial sheets first, but that’s probably because those are the easiest. Complex analysis is probably my least favourite but it’s not overly complicated. I’m just not that keen on complex numbers and complex functions. That’s how it is.

Almost all of my sentences so far have begun with the word “I”, or something like it. I’m so self-centred. Well, fuck. I don’t care.

My class hours are much better this year too. In first year I had a lecture at 9am every day, and my final lecture would end at either 12/2pm in first semester, or 1/2pm in the second semester. This year I have only 2 lectures each day, and they’re back to back (in the same lecture theatre, no less). The first one of the day is at 11am, and the last is at 12pm. This year I can sleep in longer, but still finish by the same time in the afternoon. Boom.

I also have 5 other hours of classes each week (mainly tutorials) which I carefully scheduled for maximum coolness. That’s 15 hours of teaching per week, an average of 3 per day. That’s manageable. Homework takes much longer than that, of course. And not only is the work harder this year, there’s more of it too.

As a result of my maths work and other things, I’m much busier. I spend far less time on my own doing whatever the hell I want.

For instance: I’m writing less on my blog. I’ve not been keeping in touch with my family as much as I’d like. And I’ve been walking a lot less. This one’s a real shame. And because I’ve been out and about less, I haven’t been taking as many photos.

I now manage the photography group at Albany Park, my halls of residence. It currently doesn’t mean a lot but I’m hoping to get people to come out and go on photo walks with me and I’ll get them excited about seeing and photographing awesome and beautiful things. Then we’ll see what happens. The first thing is on Saturday at 2pm.

This year I’m living with my friends. This is so much better than last year. I can watch The Sopranos with Adam whenever we want (although we’ve only managed to watch 7 episodes and 1 film in the month that we’ve been back. We’ve been busy.) We have one more episode to go until we’re on season 4. I love the Sopranos.

And I have a girlfriend.

Oh yeah, that. Pretty important part of my life right now. A+++++++ girl. She’s been the The Top Idea in My Mind for a while now. That’s why I’ve not blogged about anything serious for a long time. Usually when I write, it’s about the thing which has been dominating my thoughts. It gets to the point that I feel a need to express myself, and I can do that through writing. Writing as therapy. It clears my head. A bit like a memory dump. And at the same time I try to make it as entertaining as possible.

But the thing that I’m spending all my time thinking about nowadays is a person. It’s private. What’s more: she might well read this. Knowing that anyone at all might read my blog makes me self-conscious, especially when I’m writing about something personal. Doubly so now. So I’d better not say the wrong thing. Or something I’ll regret. Or something overly sentimental. Or something all teenage-angsty. Because I’m not a teenager I’M IN MY TWENTIES ffs:

Jeez.

And I’d better not start drunk blogging.

There’s not much I want to share with you at the moment. I have a question but it seems emo-ish so I’ll save it for another time. Or never. Anyway, I’m so happy to be experiencing and sharing this part of my life with someone. Especially with someone as awesome as she is and who I’m starting to think of as a best friend. I never expected that.

I’m a lucky guy.

Anyway, some things this year are just the same: I’m spending lots of money on food, I’m boozing, I’m leaving laundry later than I should, and I’ve not been reading even slightly as much as I want to (zero books so far).

Next post will be less bullshitty.

Honestly.

Don’t judge.

I haven’t been this excited in years.

Just over a month ago I caught podcast fever like I’ve never experienced before. Having listened to Andy Ihnatko recommending the show for years on MacBreak Weekly, and more recently having my good friend and future housemate Mr Adam Kesby recommend it, when an episode of This American Life was mentioned on one of my favourite blogs, I took notice.

I decided to check it out, and I loved what I found.

Do you love watching documentaries? Do you like learning things and finding things out? Do you enjoy feeling cultured and having a wide view of things? Do you want to get inspired? Yeah? Then you’ll love This American Life. It gives me the same enthusiasm that the best television and film documentaries do, and you can listen to it whilst walking. Or eating. Or gardening. Or shitting. It’s up to you.

Episodes of This American Life are always an hour long, and are usually split into several “acts”, unified by a single theme. Each act is a different segment of the show and could be anything, but it’s usually documentary style. It could be personal, factual, funny, moving, or interesting. The About Us page puts it this way:

There’s a theme to each episode, and a variety of stories on that theme. It’s mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always. There’s lots more to the show, but it’s sort of hard to describe.

They do have a longer guide, if you’d like.

Episode #441, “When Patents Attack!“, was the first episode of the show that I ever listened to, sitting in Coach D of the northbound Highland Chieftain on 26th July. I was returning to Perth after a short stay in London, during which time episode #441 was released. In the previous months, there had been much bother in the ‘tech community’ about the morality of software patents and the existence of patent trolls. Of particular concern was a company called Lodsys, which was suing iOS developers over their use of In-App Purchase techniques.

Basically: it’s all a load of evil bullshit, and so This American Life decided to cover it. All of the tech blogs of course linked to it, with a strong recommendation to listen. This time I followed the advice. Really, you should listen to the episodes if you’re at all interested in the issues of software patents and patent trolls. It’s very good (although not quite one of the best).

The next episode I listened to was #438, called “Father’s Day 2011“. It was even better than “When Patents Attack!”, and the stories it contained stick in my mind. Moving. I listened to it whilst gazing out the window at the passing coastlines of Northumberland and East Lothian. It was a decent journey.

441 is a large number of episodes, yet as I write this entry in early September even more episodes have been broadcast. 444 in total. The first episode “New Beginnings” was broadcast in November 1995, when the show was called Your Radio Playhouse. Read the Wikipedia article if you’d like some history. The lack of polish and new-ness of the show is obvious in the first episode, but the promise is already there. For you number-lovers out there keeping track, there have only been about enough episodes for a new one every fortnight. Whilst an episode is aired every week on radio stations in America, roughly half of the time a rerun of an episode from the archives will be aired, rather than a new one. That’s fine by me.

The show is also distributed as a podcast. The most recently broadcast episode is always available for download from the feed, without commercial breaks. The available episode is therefore not necessarily the most up-to-date one. As explained on the TAL podcast page, however, all of the episodes are available to stream for free or to download for a dollar¹. You can browse the archives, and listen, on the website.

The host of almost all 444 episodes has been Ira Glass. He’s a journalist by trade and the creator of the show, and he’s wonderful. Here is a video of Ira that I’ve seen linked to by some creative types. It’s actually pretty interesting – watch it:

I think he’s right.

He’s got a weird voice, but I quickly grew used to it and started to like it. He seems like a really funny, sometimes playful, all-round decent sort of guy. Really endearing.

Perhaps my favourite thing about This American Life is that there is such a huge back catalogue. The About Us page says:

Probably the best way to understand the show is to start at our favorites page

That’s probably a good idea. Many of my favourite episodes coincide with their favourites, so if this post has interested you in the show and you want to know where to start, I have some ideas. I’ve listened to about 70 episodes so far, much less than a quarter of the total. Here are the ones that I can recommend to get you started:

• #168: The Fix Is In
• The story which led to the movie “The Informant” about a guy informing about a price-fixing ring. The website describes it: “The whole program is devoted to one story, in which we go inside the back rooms of one multinational corporation and hear the intricate workings—recorded on tape—of how they put the fix in”. It’s enthralling.
• #396: #1 Party School
• This episode’s about the drinking culture at Penn State University in America. I listened to this whilst walking 6 miles from my brother’s place through central London to St Pancras station about 2 weeks ago.
• #419: Petty Tyrant
• The story of a corrupt maintenance man’s rein of terror in Schenectady, NY.
• #430: Very Tough Love
• Have you ever heard of ‘drug court’? It’s this American thing which is about getting treatment for drug offenders rather than prison time. This episode is about one drug court judge who seems to be a total bitch.
• #436: The Psychopath Test
• This one’s about psychopathy. Are you a psychopath? Probably not. But would you know if someone else was?
• And I don’t know why but I strangely find Chana Joffe-Walt’s voice to be really really… nice? So pretty much: any episode with her in it (yes, I’ve listened to them all).

Something I’ve noticed about my favourite episodes: they tend to be composed of just a single ‘act’. A single story. Most episodes aren’t so focused on just one story, which I’m glad of. I love the more varied episodes, but my very favourite episodes mainly seem to be those which cover just one main story. Maybe I like the depth of insight which they give me. Maybe it’s something else.

I’ve not listened to an episode for over a week, but that says more about my current emotional state than it does about my enthusiasm for the show. I just have other things to think about. Because that’s what the show makes you do: think. And laugh. And maybe cry. I’ve not had that happen, yet, but I’ve barely got started listening…

Further Reading:

• This American Life’s “About Us” page.
• Their “About Our Radio Show” page, more extensive.
• Their favourite episodes lists.
• The podcast’s RSS feed.

1. Although anyone with some technical know-how can easily find the URL to the mp3s which the flash player uses to stream past episodes. They don’t make it hard to find, but remember the show needs money to survive.

A few weeks ago, in the middle of August, I was taking the train down south. As usual I took the Highland Chieftain¹ but on this day it was delayed for 10 minutes before being allowed to enter Perth station. By the time I’d got on and travelled to York, we’d lost even more time and I missed my onward connection. Instead of catching my reserved direct train to Grantham, I would have to make alternative arrangements. Fortunately I’d prepared for such a possibility, and I knew that I could wait about 20 minutes and catch a train to Newark, and from there I could make my way to Grantham.

York station:

Without a reserved seat on these trains I would have to be quick about getting myself a seat. On the train from Newark I was the only one in my whole HST coach, but from York the 225 was packed. I found a seat in Coach H² – an aisle seat of an airline-style pair (no table).

There was a very peculiar man across the aisle, a few rows ahead of me.

He was in the aisle seat of another airline-style pair, and he was facing me. We weren’t face to face but I could see him clearly. If the direction he was facing was 12 o’clock, I could see him from 2 o’clock. I didn’t get a picture (too weird), but I wanted to. Let me try to describe to you what I saw:

• This man was in his forties.
• He was white, looked British.
• He didn’t look retarded.
• His face was boney.
• He wore a royal blue jumper.
• On the left breast of that jumper was embroidered a 3-inch diameter picture of a black and white cat.
• He wore typical blue-jeans coloured jeans, mostly likely Tesco Value.
• He wore hiking boots – fabric-type, not leather.
• He had very bad teeth: discoloured, misaligned, pointed.
• He had an awful grin semi-permanently fixed on his face, revealing his very bad teeth and a lot of gum.
• His hairline was considerably receded, so he had shaved his head, leaving a short stubble of hair where it still grew.
• His face was clean shaven, totally.
• He wore sunglasses that looked like the wrap-around goggles that you wear at the orthodontist to shield your eyes from ultraviolet radiation used to set your brace cement. The CSI team wear similar ones. Like this, expect in black. Honestly.
• He had a really creepy vibe.

Sitting behind me was a mother with her little toddler daughter. This girl was being annoying, wandering in the aisle and touching stuff. At one point this girl touched me, and reflexively I recoiled from it. The man I’ve just described was watching and when he saw this scene unfold, he laughed. He laughed. His face cracked with glee and he let out an almost silent chuckle that lasted a good 10 seconds.

He’s the most peculiar person I’ve seen in a while.

1. The Highland Chieftain is the only train from Perth which goes to Edinburgh and then directly onto the ECML and London. I like it because it means I don’t have to change, and I get to travel on an HST.
2. Half of which was the train shop.

[Side note: read up about the city on Wikipedia, if you'd like. It's a beautiful one and I'd love to return]

Wow, it’s been ages since I updated! Although it’s only Tuesday. Because I’m writing texts and emails to people about the same stuff, it feels like I’ve already written this.

The last bit of the TGV ride from Paris was really slow. At some times we were going barely 20mph, and one time we stopped. So much for being “sans arret jusqu’a Grenoble“. Maybe we were stuck behind a slow train… a very slow train. I don’t know. I don’t care.

We arrived about 15 minutes late, which wasn’t a problem. I got off the train and was surprised at how easy it was to exit the station. I’m used to stations where there are one or two specific exits, with everything else fenced or walled off. Here, everything was open, like you see sometimes in the movies, when the station is in the wilderness. Except this was a city. I wandered around the area confused for a while, with that feeling of not having ‘one’s bearings’ that usually accompanies arrival my in a new place.

Then I returned to the station to go to the ticket office, because I wanted to book a seat on a Lyon-Marseille TGV for Wednesday. Lyon is one of the largest cities in France, and it lies on the main TGV route to the south coast. If you want to go south quickly from Grenoble, you must first go to Lyon.

“Full”, the man behind the counter said.

Yeah, right. Anyway, it’s worked out okay. Lyon is a bit out of the way from Marseille anyway, so I’ll be getting there (more directly but more slowly) by regional train (ter), changing once at Valence and having a stop there for a few hours. It’s a chance to see another town.

I left the station and wandered to the river. There were lots of cars driving on the roads around there, and 2 dodgy people started lurking so I abandoned my riverside hangout and ended up at Place de Victor Hugo (I thought I had been much further west). It started raining heavily, so I sat on a bench under one of the trees there and ate some yoghurt and chorizo. Yeah, nice mix. After a while the rain hadn’t stopped, so I went and found the right bus (No. 1) and took it to Quinzaine, the stop for the hostel. A single ticket cost €1.40.

To my delight I saw a Lidl two stops away from the hostel!

I got to the hostel and… wow, what a difference from Paris. It’s really modern and clean. I think I confused the receptionist – it was my fault, I wasn’t being clear – but then Julian (who I think is the owner? Not sure.) came along. He was friendly and spoke very good English. I put my stuff in my room and then checked out the hostel – it’s nice. What’s cool is that your Youth Hostel card is used as your dorm key! I ate some of my food in the kitchen, and then I ended up at the bar. I had some €1 ‘happy hour’ half pints of Kronenbourg (draught) and then a €2 local beer which the guys persuaded me to try (it was called Mandrin or something? I dunno. It was good, anyway). I fancied being even more French so I asked for a glass of red wine, but it was completely shit and so they didn’t make me pay for it (the bar man agreed with me). I didn’t drink it of course. Then I played some €2 pool. The people around were friendly – we mainly joked about our language differences and my attempts to speak French.

Afterwards I went on the internet for a bit (this might have been when I ate actually, just before using the internet – I don’t remember). I used the free WiFi with my iPod for browsing and I also used their resident iMac G3 to write some emails. What a throwback, in 2010. Those things are ancient, and slow, but nostalgic. I found the AZERTY keyboard unbearable, however. Jesus fuck. They’re close enough to QWERTY keyboards that it really fucks with your mind. The A and the Q are switched, for instance. Fair enough. But there are some weird things too – you need to use the shift key to get a full stop, and to type a number too. Seriously, check it out. Be warned: keyboards in France are not as friendly as they look.

Then I went to bed.

I got up early – I was awake before 7. Breakfast was decent. Coco Pops, an apple, some bread and nutella, and tea. And orange juice (I think it was squash). The views from the breakfast hall were good, including some of the mountains. Afterwards I went on the internet again. I finished and sent an email to Mum that I had started to compose the previous night.

I decided that I would spend the day walking to La Bastille, following a few sights from a map. And that’s what I did.

As soon as I had left the flatness of the city and started to climb… it started to rain.

I’d been listening to The Pleasure of Finding Things Out until it my iPod had a little crash when I was in city centre, and I lost my place and gave up. Then PadPundit. At the top I took shelter, and the view was amazing, although much was obscured by the rain clouds and rain. The views were spectacular, that’s all I can say, especially when I caught a glimpse of lightning across the city and in the Alpine mountains. Being up that hill in the middle of a thunderstorm was one of the most awesome experiences that I’ve ever had.

I waited for the rain to give in, but it didn’t, so I headed down the hill wrapped up with my hat, hoodie and Berghaus waterproof jacket. It did the trick and kept most of the rain off me. Very cosy. On the way down I was listening to Starship Troopers (verdict: better and written in a more modern style than I’d expected).

When I was back in the town I came across a free museum about Grenoble’s history, so I went in. They receptionists encouraged me to get a French audioguide (it was free, but in French). I did, giving my provisional driving licence as a deposit. All of the labels in the museum were in French but I understood it well enough to find it interesting… to a point. After I’d seen everything I left for Grenoble’s Natural History Museum. This one wasn’t free, and the receptionist wouldn’t accept my €20 note! I’ll admit that’s understandable as was the ticket was only €1.10, but at Lidl on Monday they rejected my €20 even though I was buying something closer to €10. When will I get a chance to get rid of my twenties?

Museum was great. Highlight: eagle owl.

I walked back to the hostel, stopping at Lidl for some groceries. When I entered the stop the security guard started to follow me, and after some confusion and misunderstanding, I realised that he wanted to keep my backpack whilst I was in the shop! Ridiculous. Presumably they think I’m going to steal from them. They’re not very trusting in France, and it’s not nice to be considered a thief.

Dicks.

The views of the mountains on my way back, and from the hostel, were amazing.

I used the Internet at the hostel and then ate my salmon and some chocolate dessert things. I watched a bit of dubbed House – it was hilarious seeing the characters talking in French, the words not properly matching up with their moving mouths. I went back to the room, tidied my stuff, did some washing, had a shower, wrote this, and now I’m going to bed.

In the morning I’m getting the 10:38 train. I’ll either bus or walk there, but I want to get postcards before I leave. It’s a lovely place.

Last year I grew strawberries seriously for the first time, and I wrote about the experience at length, here on my blog. In the concluding sentences, I wrote:

Finally, what will I do with these 100+ strawberry plants? I’ve not decided. I think I may be able to find room for another 20 in the front garden, but the rest will need to be planted elsewhere. Yet I can’t bring myself to throw them away – as I’ve said, I’d much rather have strawberries than no strawberries, and I’m happy to do the work to make that so.

As it turns out, I did put in the work to make it so. For much of my spare time in August and early September, I set to work. I put new runners into pots, and once they had established I found a spot for each one in the front garden, pushed aside the gravel and then cut through the ground sheet in order to plant the runner into the ground, well fed with compost. By the end of summer, I had well over a hundred new plants in my front garden.

I went to university, and whilst I was away: they grew. But not straight away. Once again, the leaves died back, and once again came a harsh winter. The whole garden was covered in several inches of snow for at least a month.

Yet despite the cold, once the snow had gone and the days started to get longer, they started to grow again. In early March when I visited for the weekend, I saw the first few signs of new growth:

Not much, but enough for optimism.

The next time I was in Perth was at the end of April, on the weekend of the Royal Wedding. My plants had come on amazingly well by that time: they were reaching up to the Sun, a bright green colour to the leaves, and many plants were already flowering.

I like to think that Theo’s wave helped them along¹:

The next time I was home was when I moved back from university at the end of May and many of the flowers had turned into berries that were close to ripening. Last year I picked my first berry half way through June, on the 18th. But this year, with my front garden plants better established, I had my first sample around about the 2nd, more than two weeks earlier than before.

The birds were wise to the ripening too, and I lost many of my early berries to blackbirds. Bastards. Like last year, I again tried to protect my ripening berries with clear plastic bottles, which seemed to be effective (although I didn’t have nearly enough bottles to protect them all).

Here is my first significant picking session, from the 6th June:

As you can see I was a bit impatient, and they could have done with an extra day or two to ripen on the plants. However: fuck that, and anyway, the birds might eat them if I wait. Picking berries a day too early was a recurring problem for me for a while, as under the bright direct sunlight of the afternoon the colours are exaggerated and it makes the berries look riper than they actually are. I eventually learned to wait longer before picking a ‘ripe’ berry.

OK, the numbers. This is what happened last year:

The total yield was approximately 4.5 kilograms, equivalent to 10 supermarket punnets – about £20 worth!

And my prediction was:

What with my more mature plants, as well as the new ones I’ll plant, I predict I’ll grow at least 10 kilograms.

Heh. Yep, I beat that prediction. I grew 34kg. THIRTY FOUR FUCKING KILOGRAMS. That’s equivalent to £170 worth of the 400g punnets that Tesco sell for £2 at the height of the season, except it’s not equivalent as mine would surely be Tesco Finest and far more expensive.

I was amazed I grew so many.

This year’s graph:

I made last year’s chart in Google spreadsheets, but this time I used Numbers on my Mac. I don’t know how to use it properly but it does the trick, sort of. It’s not meant to be precise, hence my use of curved lines and and crappy scales².

Look at the data. Absorb the data. Feel the data. Yeah, go on. Touch it.

You can see that I start picking (seriously, at least, and recording it) on 6th June in the front garden, and the yield after that increases dramatically, with the highest output being around the middle of the month (by which point last year the harvest was only just starting!). The back garden’s output was insignificant in comparison and pretty poor.

Last year I wrote:

Through the rest of June, I picked a steady 100 grams every day; this was the front garden in maximum production mode. Next year I would expect this portion of the graph to be level at at least 200 grams, as the plants will be much better established.

Not even slightly accurate. My plants were producing several punnets worth of strawberries every day. Several. Heck, I already miss it, but the amount of sugar that I ate mustn’t have been healthy for me. Strawberries are very sweet.

Here’s some more stats:

• I picked 34kg of edible strawberries in total, 31.5kg of which came from the front garden and 2.5kg from the back garden. I didn’t weight the wasted ones.
• The peak day for picking was 14th June, when I picked 1570g from the front garden. I had picked on the previous day, too.
• The day when I brought the most berries into the house was 18th June when I picked 2670g from front garden. However, I had not picked the previous day so this is the production of two days, not one.
• The first day of picking from front was 6th June and the first day from back was 4th July – 4 weeks later
• The last significant pickings from front were on 20th July, with the back 2 days later.
• Subjectively, the largest and tastiest berries came in the final week of June, which happens to coincides with the summer solstice.
• Oh my God, the berries that week were so good. If you think you don’t like strawberries, number 1: fuck you, and number 2: try mine at the end of June. You have to try them fresh from the plant. Strawberries from supermarkets have been picked days ago, and are not at their best. Mine are no where near their best even just 2 days after being picked. Seriously, you’ve got to try mine.

Here are some of those big juicy delicious end-of-June ones that I’m on about. They’re SO good:

That’s about all that I have to say. Before I go, though, I’ll just lay out some of the problems I encountered:

• Picking too soon. I just need more patience.
• Rain collecting in bottles. It rained a lot this summer. When water collects in the bottles (as water tends to), if the berries are sitting in this water then they will go bad, wasted. Some even rotted and went mouldy.
• Birds. I just have to accept that I’ll lose some to the local wildlife. I’ve got plenty to go around.
• Clumsiness. I often break my plants whilst I’m picking. I’ve probably lost a couple of kilograms through my carelessness this year.
• Growing too many to eat. Overdoing the berries can make you feel a bit off, I’ve found. First world problem.
• The berries go off quickly. It’s best to leave picking them until right when you need them.
• Washing the berries makes them worse. I think the cold water makes them harder and removes some nice scent from them too.

I’ve not mentioned the back garden much. It was pathetic. The plants there are old, producing smallish, hard, deformed berries. The plants are mostly leaf and almost no berry. What’s more, they get much less sunlight than the front, and they’ve slowly become overrun by slugs. And even earwigs. Eww.

So: I’m getting rid of of them. In the next few weeks I’ll dig them up and put them in the brown-lidded bin. I have enough plants in the front garden. The back is just a waste of time, now.

A positive thing that I’ve learnt: you know you’re going to eat a delicious strawberry when you hold it up and it shines. Shiny ones are the best, and you rarely see that in supermarkets. They have to be very fresh. I think the shininess comes from the berry being laden with water/juice, which stretches the skin from the inside. Beautiful.

Another thing that I’ve learnt: contrary to previous reports, I don’t prefer refrigerated strawberries. My very favourite berries are those large juicy ones at the height of summer, picked and eaten within seconds. Unwashed, warm from the sunlight, juicy and amazing. And shiny.

This year, when the berries finished, the runners once again went mad:

What have I done with all the runners this year? Most I’ve destroyed, and with some of the others I’ll replant the worse-performing plants from this year. But the rest? I’m sending them down south. I spent some time last week and most of Monday digging a strawberry patch in my Dad’s garden. Diversification, baby. Here it is:

I’m still sore from digging it. Roll on next June.

1. Theo’s my nephew.
2. Furthermore, I’ve adjusted my data so that if I’ve skipped a day of picking, I share the pickings of the subsequent day between the two days, rather than having loads of zeroes all over the place.

This post is one of the most difficult that I’ve written, and I want to explain why before I dive in. For a while it has laid untouched as a collection of rough notes and photos, gathering dust in my drafts folder. I was unsure where to take it or whether to continue at all.

This post is about my troubles and annoyances living with my first-year housemates. In the past I’ve not had a problem writing harshly about people I know, but this feels a little different. I’ve lived with these guys. You see, had they not been housemates but perhaps neighbours, I would have considered my so-called house”mates” (now ex-housemates) as being decent people. They’re not generally noisy, they’re not violent or into hard drugs, and they seem to be quite bright. But you see a different side to people when you live with them, and it doesn’t seem to be their best side.

By the end of first year I was anxious to be leaving them – domestic life was not fun, and at times frustrating and disgusting.

I was going to write this when I was still living with them. Although I don’t deliberately publicise this website, and few people that I know actually read it, I didn’t want to risk having them find out during the semester. I was still spending the majority of my time in the same house as them, and that would have made things awkward, more awkward than I could handle. You can’t avoid someone when you share a house (try as they might – more on that later), especially a house that only has one shower and one kitchen.

Now, first year is over and we’re all home for the summer. I’m not living with any of my housemates next year (only 1 will even be living in the same Halls of Residence, and he’ll be in a different house from me), and I’m not friends with any of them on Facebook. I was friends with one of them for a while, but I de-friended him late in the second semester after he started locking his door all the time – more on this later. Yup, I’m that kind of guy. I have a pending friend request from another of them, but I’m ignoring it. Permanently.

Therefore my ties with my housemates are now mostly broken,, and whilst I still don’t want them to find out (I won’t use their real names, instead I’ll just use offensive nicknames!), I feel it’s the right time to let the world know of the suffering I endured.

Future housemates and people that I will live with: take this as a warning. The behaviour I am about to document is not cool, and if you piss me off you too may be at risk of a swift de-friending.

Let me introduce you to my first-year house. It was my home for 9 months: House 11 of Albany Park, in sexy St Andrews. This is a picture that I took of it on the day I moved in, 18th September 2010:

It was a good day for many reasons. It was the day I first moved away from home, and the day when I met many of (what I hope will be) my friends for life. And it was a sunny day. The aesthetics of my house, however, was not one of those reasons.

It doesn’t look too bad on a sunny day like that Saturday. In the cold dead grey of winter… not so much. But I don’t care what it looks like on the outside, I’m more interested about the inside, and about my housemates in particular.

There were 6 of us, all male. I lived in room 6, clearly the best room in any normal Albany house. 3 bedrooms (rooms 1-3), the kitchen and the shower room were on the ground floor, and the other three bedrooms (rooms 4-6), the living room/common room and an additional toilet were upstairs. As an aside: here is a picture which I took of my room on the day I moved in:

The 6 of us never had any chemistry, not as a house. We never once all went out together. We never had a meal together, either in town or at home. We never hosted any parties, we never just spent a day hanging out.

That’s a real shame, and I take as much blame for it as anyone else. We had little in common except for the attribute of being fairly quiet people – pro tip: when applying for accommodation, don’t describe yourself as a quiet person.

Of the 6 of us, there was a sole Scottish guy, which is probably a representative proportion of the university population at large. He studies theology. There were two Chinese students, here as international students. One of them, studying mathematics, could not understand whatever version of English it is that I speak and this made any sort of conversation with him impossible. He must have been able to speak English to have been accepted into the university, but for whatever reason there was a language barrier there that I couldn’t seem to breach. The other studied economics. There were two English guys too, one a Muslim medic, the other an atheistic chemist. And then there was yours truly.

Quite a mix, don’t you think?

Our main source of problems was simply a lack of communication. There was no way to speak to everyone at once. No house meetings. No just hanging around with people when you could bring something up. I remember all 6 of us being in the same room together only twice. The first time was a couple of days into our tenancy, when we met in the kitchen to sort out how life together would work. I don’t remember the other time.

We devised a cleaning rota, well, I did, but we did all agree to it. There were 6 of us and we identified 4 tasks that needed doing every week: the kitchen, the upstairs bathroom, the downstairs bathroom, and the corridors and stairs. Every week we’d either clean one of those things or have the week off. We’d be responsible for cleaning our own rooms, of course. That way we’d clean for 2 weekends and then have a weekend off, with a rota that repeated every 6 weeks. Simple? I thought so. Unfortunately a lack of accountability, oversight, and a reluctance to confront each other rendered it useless at times and led to a disgusting house. We also made a list of items which we’d need. Cleaning supplies, a toaster, a bath mat, that kind of thing. I bought it all and collected £3 each for my troubles (I did not profit from this). This went surprisingly well.

Alright, who am I kidding, this is boring. I’m just going to list the things that pissed me off.

Let’s start in the kitchen, the main source of friction in the house. After my bedroom, it was the place I spent the majority of my time in St Andrews.

The fridge situation. There was one fridge between the 6 of us. This would’ve been at least workable if there were 6 shelves. Unfortunately there were only 5 shelves. Now, I enjoy to cook, and was by far the most prolific and adventurous cook of the house (this is something they said to me, I’m not making it up), so I took permanent control of one of the shelves, and I kept it full of my stuff. I took good care of my shelf, keeping it clean and using everything, so nothing went off or smelly or disgusting.

The others weren’t so careful. One time this spring, after the fridge had been smelling progressively worse and worse for a month or so, I finally went through everything to find the culprit. Amongst months-old packs of chicken, and eggs, and bags of carrots that had become frothy and smelly, I found a packet of beef burgers in the fridge that had been in there for months. What’s more: they were frozen burgers. To be kept in the freezer. At -22ºC. Not in the fridge at +4ºC where it turns out that meat will go white and juicy and frothy and mouldy and incredibly smelly after a few months. That was possibly the worst thing I’ve ever held in my hands and I am amazed I didn’t spew.

Our fridge. Rotten milk? Check. Rotten bacon? Check. Rotten broccoli? Check. Rotten carrots? Check. Rotten chicken? Check. Rotten eggs? Check. Rotten ready meals? Check. Crazy unidentified Chinese food and ingredients that had clearly gone off? Check. Rotten burgers? Check check CHECK.

We had it all, and none of it was me.

The Chemist was partial to drinking milk that was more than 2 weeks past its use by date.

And by the way, if you move my food around the fridge? Straight on my enemies list you go.

The freezer situation. For the first couple of months, the smallness of the freezer was not an issue. This was because people hadn’t noticed it, I think, and so I could basically dominate the top drawer with my Ben & Jerry’s, frozen prawns, frozen pizzas, fish fingers, and frozen portions of the food that I cook, like curries. I am used to cooking for a large number of people, and that’s what I do, so when it’s just me eating the rest has to be frozen if it’s not to be wasted.

However, after a while things began to change, and the Economist told me that we’d need to have a talk about fair use of the freezer. Fair enough. I made room for him. But others? Huge packs of frozen chinese dumplings. 8 packs of bacon. Oven chips. Oven chips. Scampi. Oven chips. More oven chips. Loads of ice cream. Pizzas. My problem with most of this is that it was completely unnecessary – most of the food stayed frozen all year and was never touched until we all moved out, when I took home the goodies (including 6 packs of bacon that had been in there since January). So, I was economising space and freezing less stuff so that my housemates could waste the freezer on food that they would never even eat.

This next thing ties in with both the fridge and the freezer situation. A couple of the guys weren’t the biggest fans of exercise and shopping, so they’d do their shopping by Tesco direct. Or, in the case of the Chemist, their Mum would place and pay for a Tesco direct order. The problem with this is that it makes most sense when doing this to place a large order all at once, whereas when shopping in person you just buy a little at a time. A small fridge/freezer can not accommodate your £110 Tesco direct order which will last you a few weeks, sorry mate. Please stop.

I had a quite lot of food in at once but that was because it was fresh and I like to cook and eat fresh food. The turnaround time for my shelf was very quick. I would also cook for other people (friends, not housemates) and so I used my space. Still, I never had nearly as much food as what came in with a Tesco direct order. That would dominate the fridge.

It got to the point where I would leave non-perishable foods on my fridge shelf whilst I was away to save my space, and return home a couple of days before the end of a holiday so that I could restock my part of the fridge and claim a spot for my milk carton before everyone else returned home and swamped the place with their frivolous and over-large purchases. Yes, I really was that guy. I’m sorry. But I don’t feel that I was taking more than my fair share, only guaranteeing it.

Next year I have a similarly sized fridge but with only 3 other housemates. You can’t believe how excited I am about this. What’s more, I’m on good terms with all 3 of them.

Washing up. One particular housemate, the Theologian, had an awful diet that made me cringe. He was fat, and probably still is. He had oven pie and chips or similar every day with some boiled frozen vegetables, or maybe he’d sometimes fry something. He didn’t know how to cook properly, and afterwards food was burnt or otherwise stuck onto the communal pots and pans, which he’d then just dump in the kitchen sink… and leave there, usually until dinner time the next day, when he’d wash and use them again. Afterwards? He’d just dump them straight back in the sink.

This is not cool for a number of reasons. Firstly, this was communal stuff, provided to the house, and so we should have been able to use it. We could have used it if we really wanted, but that would have involved us cleaning all his ridiculous amounts of shit off it, and then cleaning it afterwards ourselves because we’re decent people, people who clean up after ourselves.

Secondly, this blocks up the sink. How can we do our own washing up when the sink is full of his shit? We could wash his stuff up first – no way – or we could move his shit away to somewhere else in the kitchen. This is what I ended up doing, but it was always filthy, and touching it was disgusting.

Sponge-fest, also known as washing-up liquid fest. Yes, we didn’t share sponges. I, for one, because I didn’t trust the hygiene of my housemates. So, we’d have 6 kitchen sponges by the sink? Wrong. We had about 15 sponges by the sink, because people would forget which sponge is their own, or simply just start using a new one without throwing away the old one.

We each had our own washing-up liquid too. What annoyed me about the Theologian is that his Fairy liquid ran out about 2 months before the end of the year, and yet he didn’t get any new stuff. If I was in the kitchen when he was washing up, I would see him squirting his empty bottle into the sink, but I bet he stole other people’s stuff when I wasn’t there. I bet.

For what it’s worth: I kept my sponge in my cupboard. Washing-up liquid too. Weird, I know, but I have issues myself too.

One time I left my washing-up liquid out by the sink, and to my horror the Medic used it right in front of my eyes. The horror.

Drying rack. One thing that really fucking pissed me off was use of the drying rack. Do you know what a drying rack is? It’s the plastic holder thing where you put your wet dishes etc once you’ve washed them, for them to dry.

My housemates loved leaving their stuff in there permanently, leaving little room for actual use.

And what’s worse: a couple of my housemates clearly didn’t know how to use it properly. You know those little slats that you get in them to stand up your plates? Yeah? Well, you would think that you slot your plate into those slats wouldn’t you? That’s not what my housemates would do. They preferred perpendicular stowage, rendering the 15 plate capacity of the rack only capable of holding about 3 things. For example, see the bowl in the above photo. This happened every day.

The cooker. On the whole, the standard of cleanliness in the kitchen was poor, but the cooker top was especially bad. Every single cleaning inspection would note the poor state of the rings. This is a picture of it after one of my housemates had cleaned it.

I just want to point out that the Chinese housemates who fried like crazy didn’t give a fucking shit about keeping the cooker top clean. They were happy to just let all of the spillages and bits of oil that spit everywhere just accumulate and bake on and harden for ages. When it came time to clean the top, I was the only one whose cleaning ever seemed to have any effect (I used bleach), and it was 100 times more difficult than sorting out the problem as it happened. Learning how to cook and avoiding messing up in the first place would have been better.

I even saw people spilling stuff directly onto the rings… and they’d just leave it. Mother fuckers. Once I saw it happen and told the guy, the Chemist, to clean it up. To his face. He got a wet cloth and put it straight on the hot ring. Of course, the cloth burnt onto the ring and left fabric residue that would slowly burn off over the next few days. He actually thought he’d done a good job, when it fact it was worse than before. That really surprised me as I thought he was a clean guy.

If you’d just clean up any mess that you make after you make it, it’s so much easier than letting it accumulate. You’re living with other people guys, it’s not your own place so it’s not for you to fuck it up. Selfish.

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m no clean freak. But there should be standards.

One time I came down from my bedroom to find that one of the rings had been left on for ages. Note the mess also:

Once, the Economist’s rice cooker (don’t get me started on rice cookers) overflowed and he cleaned that up very poorly. There was starchy water everywhere.

Tap water. I discovered that my Chinese housemates never drank the tap water. Apparently, despite being soft water that leaves little to no residue on the kettle’s heating element, it was ‘too minerally’ for them, and they couldn’t stand to drink it. Weird.

This ties in with boiling the kettle. I never worked this out. Often my Chinese housemates would boil the kettle before bed, fill up a container with the water, and take it to their rooms. But if they weren’t drinking it, what were they doing?

More often than not, someone (I don’t know who) would fill up the kettle full (way over the maximum line), boil it, and just leave it. What a waste. That concludes my kettle rant.

Recycling box. Oh fuck. Firstly my housemates can’t read signs. After living in the same place for 9 months and each of us (at least supposedly) taking the recycling out every 6 weeks, you would have thought that we’d all learn what is acceptable for recycling and what is not. Nope.

The worst problem was milk cartons. Milk cartons are fine to recycle, but only if they’ve been rinsed out and had their lids removed, as the instructions say on the skip. But that’s just common sense. If you leave a milk carton out in the open in the recycling box, lid on, with the last tiny bits of milk in the bottle: that milk will rot and ferment and smell DISGUSTING. It will literally turn to cheese.

As well as that, I’d find all sort of things in the box which aren’t supposed to be there (notably tetra-packs which aren’t recyclable in Fife) like weird plastics and shit, and loads of recyclables in the bin – like empty tins of tuna and loads of cardboard.

The kitchen bin. This was a delight. The bin was supposed to be emptied every week by whoever was due to clean the kitchen. The problem is that the bin filled up more quickly than every week, and sometimes people wouldn’t clean the kitchen. This meant that the bin was almost always full, and that caused problems.

What would you do if the bin was full? Cram it all down? Yeah, fine, if there’s still cramming space. Just dump it on top? In and on and around the lid? Sure, why not, thought my housemates. And so the bin became one of the most disgusting things in the house. Food and crap all around the bin and the floor near it, and it smelled bad.

The worst occasion was once when we’d run out of bin-liners. One of my housemates used the bin regardless. I saw him throwing raw egg shells into a bin without a liner. And he knew it. Not cool.

I’m getting quite bored of writing this. That’s enough about the kitchen.

How about the bathroom? I once made this note:

“The smells are FUCKING AWFUL. Today: it’s like being in a sewer in the bathroom. Piss smell everywhere. Also eugh. Upstairs bathroom is shit too.”

Do you remember the bathmat that I bought? That quickly went mouldy and was always so soaking wet that it was worse than having nothing there. When it was removed, the floor outside the shower door was always wet and filthy.

My housemates were filthy when it came to toilet use, some of them at least. On a couple of occasions the Theologian blocked the toilet with his shit. Pro tip: check if you’ve blocked the toilet if you’re prone to it. That’s not too the worst thing. What is bad is leaving the toilet in a state like this:

These were both soon after being cleaned too. Disgusting. I think a couple of my housemates never cleaned the toilets.

Also, the Mathematician smelled so bad. Whenever he’d been in the bathroom and I walked by the open door of it a while later… I felt ill.

My housemates were shit at getting things fixed too. When something breaks, you’re supposed to alert management so that they can get it sorted, which they do very promptly. Everyone knows this, and knows how to do it. To give you an idea of the situation, read this email which I sent to one of my dear friends:

“Throughout the year I’ve been the one to report problems with the house – except once when [the Chemist] couldn’t work the oven, and I ordered him to report it. Every other time, when the light broke in the upstairs toilet, when I discovered that there should be a working light above the cooker but that ours didn’t work, when the showerhead fell off the wall when I was showering, when the kettle stopped working… all of these times I’ve sent an email off to Albany and got it fixed. And they fixed it.

(Note: the instructions for what to do in case of a fault are printed on a laminated piece of paper on the kitchen wall; I just followed them)

This all came to a head back in March [2 months before] when one of the lights in the downstairs bathroom stopped working. There are two lights in the bathroom, so it’s still possible to shower with one broken, just with much more difficulty, using only reflected light. This time, not being urgent, I thought I’d give the others a chance to get it fixed. Because, maybe they’re not completely lazy fuckholes after all  – perhaps I was always too quick to take the initiative myself and they never had a chance to do the bit. Maybe they’re not clueless. Maybe they aren’t awful people. Maybe they do care.

So, I stepped back and didn’t report the fault. This, finally, could be their hour to shine. Their finest hour.

Do me proud, housemates.

I sat back and I waited. And waited. And waited some more.

Today, I finally gave up. At about 1am I sent an email to the Albany reception, and by 10am it was fixed.”

That just frustrated me and it sums up my housemates quite well.

My housemates were experts at avoidance. For a while I hadn’t realised this, but eventually it dawned on me. Whenever I was in the kitchen, almost always, no one would enter for the entire time. Even if I was in there for hours just cooking. And then, when I’d leave and they’d hear me entering my room, right then I’d hear someone going into the kitchen. This kind of thing happened all the fucking time, people clearly deliberately avoiding each other. Creepy.

It was annoying with the shower in the morning too. I would get up at 7.30 for my 9 o’clock lecture and go straight into the shower. Afterwards I’d get out and make my breakfast and then eat it in my room. I would be in my room about 5 minutes after leaving the shower. One of my other housemates also had 9 o’clock lectures, and he showered after me, but he wouldn’t go into the shower straight away. When I was in the kitchen making breakfast, the shower lay empty. Instead, he’d wait until I was back in my own room before leaving his. Hmm.

Another thing which annoyed me was the Theologian, again. Part way through the year he started to lock his door every single time he went into his room. It really creeped me out. What was he up to? Does he have trust issues? Does he really so mistrust us that he thinks he’s safer behind a locked door? It’s just a really creepy thing to do, and for this I defriended him. I can’t be friends with someone like that. I thought about raising the issue with him but the chance never occurred.

This guy also regularly got out of bed at 5pm at weekends and on some weekdays, though not during holidays. He didn’t even drink much. Whenever there was some time off, he’d always go straight home: from the first possible opportunity to leave and returning at the very last moment. He’d take his suitcases to his final lecture and leave straight from there, returning either the night before or the actual morning of class restarting. So anti-social.

He also doesn’t keep any of his own soap in the bathroom, and when I confronted him about this (how does he wash his hands?), he told me that he keeps soap in his room and brings it with him whenever he goes to the toilet. So weird!

Here is another moaning email which I sent to the same friend once:

“The other day, I had just finished cooking, and was in the kitchen, plates etc in hand, walking toward the sink to wash up. At that moment, who else but [the Theologian] entered the kitchen and dived straight to the sink area to wash up his stuff. Clearly I was already on my way there – I even had my pink rubber gloves on – but he just didn’t care.

P.S. He’s just entered his room again and locked the door.”

One time the same guy, who does very smelly poos, didn’t clean the corridors and stairs during a snowy week when the floors had got very dirty. I always was due to clean the week after he did his cleaning, which meant that if he skipped his cleaning, I had to bear the brunt of it. I told the story to my friend in an email like this:

“I asked [the Theologian] why he hadn’t cleaned the floors last week: ‘Because of the snow and ice. It was just going to get messy again’. I wasn’t happy with that and told him off for not letting me know. We could have worked something out, you know. Instead I end up doing 2 weeks of the worst floor cleaning.”

Dick. He often would skip his cleaning, clearly, but when I confronted him about it he always lied to my face. What can I do about that?

Moving out. This was a tricky time. After all of my housemates independently told me that they’d be moving out in Saturday 28th May, the final day they could and the same day as me – it turned out that this wasn’t true. The first to leave, of course, was the Theologian, leaving almost a week before me. Not only did he do ZERO cleaning, he did not even say goodbye to a single one of us.

Slowly the 2 chinese students left, again having cleaned only their own rooms. This left 3 of us to do the cleaning of the whole house. I ended up doing the bulk of it because I said I’d clean the kitchen – it was in a horrific state, especially the fridge. Oh God. I don’t want to think about it. The thing is we risked a cleaning fine if the house was not up to scratch, and the way that it was, a fine was definitely justified. So we cleaned it, begrudgingly. And avoided a fine.

A bonus then: seeing as I live close to St Andrews, I was able take stuff home all abandoned stuff from the freezer. Which, as you might expect, was a shitload of stuff, including 6 packs of bacon from the Theologian.

On the final morning, I did have a nice goodbye chat with both the Medic and the Chemist. That was cool. Just to be clear, most of the problems through the year were down to one guy (Theologian).

The worst thing of all? I found my housemates boring. Sorry guys, it’s nothing personal. We just weren’t right for each other

That’s enough for one post.

P.S. The Economist asked me on one of the final nights of the year if I wanted to go to the New Inn to eat dinner with him. I was actually touched by that but I said no – I’d made plans with Adam¹ already. The Economist was, on the whole, a good guy, as were most of my housemates. Unfortunately their habits weren’t always agreeable.

P.P.S. This is my house next year, and a general shot of the bike shed:

I love you.

1. The recipient of those emails.

I’ve lived close to the RAF station at Leuchars during the 9 months that I’ve been at university.

Leuchars is about 6 miles from St Andrews by road, but it’s much closer as the crow flies – according to Wikipedia, “Leuchars [is] about 3.3 miles North West of St Andrews town centre”. The eastern end of the runway, where landings and take-offs mostly happen, is barely a kilometre away from my favourite place in St Andrews, the far end of West Sands¹. And take my word for it: the runway is close enough that I’ve been woken by several reheat take-offs.

I’ve grown fond of it, and my interest in aeroplanes (especially military jets) has greatly increased² with my time spent watching it.

In February I wrote a minimalist entry about RAF Leuchars, starting with the line: “I hope it stays”. I ended the entry with the sentence: “More on this later”. Later is now, and the more is this entry.

Even before I moved to St Andrews, unbeknownst to me, doubts over the future of RAF Leuchars had already been circulating in the media. The BBC referenced the “background of uncertainty over the future of Scotland’s three RAF bases” in a news item about the 2010 airshow³ that I recently discovered.

Once I’d settled into St Andrews life and enjoyed the planes a bit, I read up on the base and soon encountered the fears over its future.

There are 3 RAF bases in Scotland. RAF Leuchars which is in Fife, and RAF Lossiemouth and RAF Kinloss in Moray, neighbouring bases on the northern coast, to the east of Inverness.

• RAF Leuchars is primarily an air defence station of fighter jets, home to 6 Squadron⁴ which provides Quick Reaction Alert⁵ for the northern part of the UK. Some of its Typhoons were deployed to Libya, and they recently returned safely.
• RAF Lossiemouth is a large base which is home to several Tornado GR4 squadrons, ground-attack aircraft, some of which are currently in service in Afghanistan and Libya.
• RAF Kinloss had flown Nimrod MR2s until their retirement, and was due to be the home of the Nimrod MRA4⁶, a newer “maritime patrol and attack aircraft”.

After the general election in 2010, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed their coalition government and very quickly commissioned the “Strategic Defence and Security Review“, also known as the SDSR. The report was published on 19th October 2010, and the immediate casualty was RAF Kinloss. The Nimrod MRA4 programme was cancelled in the review, “at which point it was £789 million over-budget and over nine years late”, according to Wikipedia. With no aircraft to operate, the air base was no longer required⁷:

RAF Kinloss is set to close after ministers cancelled orders for the new Nimrod as part of the UK government’s defence review.

Nine of the MRA4 surveillance aircraft were due to be based in Moray.

RAF Kinloss station commander Group Captain James Johnston said there had been disbelief when the announcement was made.

Kinloss is out in the middle of nowhere, and the RAF is a large employer and the base a significant contributor to the local economy. Whilst nearby RAF Lossiemouth was unaffected by the announcements, the impact on the region of the job losses will still be great.

The same article also says:

The future of nearby RAF Lossiemouth, home to Tornado squadrons, remains uncertain.

It has been feared that the Tornado aircraft currently based at RAF Lossiemouth could be transferred to RAF Marham.

Kinloss wasn’t the limit of the SDSR on the RAF. See: Future of the RAF. The Navy’s and RAF’s fleet of Harriers was completely withdrawn as well, despite being in active service in Afghanistan and the only plane suitable for use on aircraft carriers and with VTOL capability.

What’s more, the SDSR did not include all of the cuts to the RAF. The MOD has a budget deficit, and either more funds needed to be raised or the services need to be cut in order to balance the books. The government decided that they want to close the gap, and they decided to do it by cutting the armed forces.

It was clear that more jobs would be cut (“Personnel will be reduced by 5,000 to 33,000“) with changes to the structure of the RAF, and hence more squadrons would be disbanded and more bases closed. The word on the street⁸ is that, in addition to the closure of Kinloss, the battle for survival between bases would be between RAF Leuchars, Lossiemouth and Marham. RAF Marham is a base quite similar to Lossiemouth situated in East Anglia.

That decision, however, has not been forthcoming. The BBC posted an article back in November of 2010 titled “No RAF Lossiemouth decision ‘until 2011′“. Not only was the decision not made in “the new year”, but The Courier reported earlier in 2011 that the decision wouldn’t be announced until after the Scottish parliamentary elections in May, presumably so as not to influence the outcome⁹. When May came, a final deadline was given for the announcement of the decision: the end of the parliamentary session, on 19th July. Now it’s July, and news reports say that a decision was made last weekend, with the result expected to be announced within the next week – although it has been slightly delayed by the News of the World scandal.

In further cuts in March, the government announced that XIII squadron and 14 squadron, operating Tornado GR4s at RAF Marham and RAF Lossiemouth respectively, would be disbanded, and a month or two later they stopped flying. “It will affect about 150 personnel but the MoD insists no final decision has been taken on closures”, said the article. There are now 5 Tornado GR4 squadrons, down from 7.

The RAF also got rid of a third of trainee pilots and stopped recruiting any more.

However, it’s the issue of base closures, especially that of RAF Leuchars, which most concerns me at present.

I spend most of my time in close proximity to RAF Leuchars, and I enjoy watching the planes flying (and especially taking off) there. Of course I want it to remain an active RAF flying station. I’m not going to provide an unbiased opinion of why it should stay. Maybe it should be closed. In an ideal world there would be no need for a military and no need for a Royal Air Force, but there is no such thing.

To put the base’s situation in context, let me give some history. RAF Leuchars has gone through a lot of change in recent years. It’s been a fighter base for a long time, having flown Lightnings, Phantoms, Tornado F3s and now Typhoons in the last 40 or 50 years. Fighter jets are those which exist to intercept and destroy airborne targets such as other jets, rather than ground targets like bombers. QRA duty, the main responsibility of RAF Leuchars, requires fighter jets and is still the main task for RAF Leuchars.

When I arrived at St Andrews last September, the sole fighter squadron at Leuchars was 111 Squadron (pronounced ‘treble one’ squadron, commonly known as ‘The Tremblers’) which flew the Tornado F3¹⁰ and it was due to disband in March 2011 – although it was a long-planned withdrawal of the Tornado F3 at the end of its life, not a result of the SDSR. The disbandment went ahead as planned¹¹. Leuchars’ other two Tornado F3 squadrons had similarly disbanded in previous years.

The replacement for the Tornado F3 was the new Eurofighter Typhoon¹², and the first Typhoon squadron for RAF Leuchars, 6 Squadron, arrived in October shortly after I started at St Andrews. For a while it co-existed with 111 Squadron, but since its disbandment 6 Squadron has been the only fighter squadron at Leuchars, performing QRA duty for the northern part of the UK. According to the RAF’s website, 6 Squadron is only “the first of three Typhoon squadrons planned to be based at RAF Leuchars“. Due to the SDSR however, can I really look forward to a brighter future for Leuchars as the RAF fully equips with Typhoons? Maybe those 2 other squadrons will never arrive.

RAF Leuchars is still at threat of closure.

I’ve been following the news about Leuchars and Lossiemouth, and I’m going to let you know what I like about the base and some of its strengths, and tell a bit of the story about the build-up to the imminent closure announcement.

According to almost all of the rumours, one out of RAF Leuchars, Lossiemouth and Marham is expected to close. Please beware whilst reading this that the MOD and government have been very tight-lipped (officially) about the whole matter, but certain rumours (such as this one) are generally accepted as being true. Of course, nothing is for sure until the final decision is announced, and I’m not going to claim anything ridiculous.

Early on it became clear that RAF Marham was safe from closure, either for political reasons (the area is a Tory stronghold, making the government unlikely to close it) or more likely for economic reasons (with the costs to relocate Marham’s assets too high).

The decision would be between Leuchars and Lossiemouth.

Moray too seemed safe, to me at least, as it had already lost RAF Kinloss to closure. It seemed unlikely that the RAF would further decimate the economy of the region by closing RAF Lossiemouth. What’s more, RAF Lossiemouth is a much larger and widely-used air base than Leuchars. Leuchars, which has fewer staff and only 1 active squadron, could be fairly easily relocated the 100 or so miles north to Lossiemouth, I suppose¹³. It felt to me that saving Leuchars over Lossiemouth would be like Tesco closing an Extra store to save a Metro store – it’s not going to happen when far more people use the Extra store, a store that is apparently far more capable.

And that’s what I’ve been thinking for almost my whole first year at university. That Leuchars is in its final months. Recently, however, in this past week, rumours in the news and reflections on the base’s utility have given me some slight hope that Leuchars will continue to be an RAF flying station, with one of the other bases closing instead – or even none at all.

I’d been intending to write about all these cutbacks previously, but thinking about it for too long was much too depressing to bother with. It felt like what always seems to happen when something fun and special enters your life¹⁴: it gets taken away as soon as you start to appreciate it¹⁵.

Now that I have that slight optimism I’m writing about it, still with a pre-announcement perspective. I’m going to dive straight in, using the 30 or so articles on the matters that I’ve saved over the past months as a guide.

The initial news after the SDSR was published in October was very pessimistic and spelled bad news for Scotland. “New Fears For Future Of Lossiemouth After Suggestions Tornadoes Could Be Moved“, said one article:

[Lossiemouth's] Tornado aircraft could be transferred to Norfolk.

The defence review, which earlier this week delivered the verdict on RAF Kinloss, also announced that another two RAF bases across Britain were no longer needed.

However, Mr Robertson said the document he saw seemed to suggest thinking at the Ministry of Defence was that the fleet would be “centralised” at RAF Marham, in Norfolk, by the end of next October. The document also suggested RAF Kinloss would be placed into “care and maintenance” as soon as March next year.

Note that the MOD was looking to close 2 bases, rather than the 1 that I had been assuming. I had forgotten about that and I’m not sure what the current official position is.

With no talk of Leuchars, this would move Lossiemouth’s Tornado GR4s to Marham, leaving no need for the base.

The campaign to save Lossiemouth since has been loud and well organised, keen to see the base retained – with good reason, too. A base closure would be awful for any region, but especially for one as remote as Moray, with surely no possible way of replacing the £150m effect that the RAF has on the local economy – 16% of the total – and 5700 jobs from the 2 bases there. RAF Leuchars, if you’re interested, contributes £60m or so to Fife, and 1900 jobs.

By December, the feeling among the media had changed, suggesting Lossiemouth would be retained after absorbing Leuchars. Such an article from the time is this one from the Telegraph, entitled “RAF Lossiemouth to be saved at expense of Leuchars“, from which I will quote liberally:

After a significant public campaign to keep the Moray base open, the MoD has decided to rebase its Eurofighter Typoon fighters in Lossiemouth which will become Scotland’s sole RAF airfield.

This is an important part of the situation too. Scotland has 3 RAF bases, Kinloss which is closed or closing, and Lossiemouth and Leuchars. Closing either of them would result in there being only one air base in Scotland, a country 60% as large England. Surely such a large area – much of it uninhabited – is the perfect place to locate planes and train pilots. The population of Scotland may only be 10% of that of England, and perhaps that is a proportional and fair number, but somehow I don’t think so, judging by this Wikipedia entry. In any case, 1 air base for the whole of Scotland doesn’t feel like enough.

The move will come as a blow to the air force and civilian personnel at Leuchars which was thought to have been safe from the axe as Typhoons had already deployed there.

With a brand new squadron just moving to the base, it felt like the base was safe and had a secure future. But despite recent investment in Leuchars – spending £3m since November on improvements to accommodate the new Typhoons – that’s no guarantee from closure by the MOD. The runway has also been recently upgraded at a cost of £20m, or even £25m depending on who you believe.

But growing opposition to Lossiemouth’s closure, with pressure coming from Scottish politicians and celebrities, led the MoD to reconsider its position, defence officials told The Daily Telegraph.

I really doubt whether a campaign by locals will have had any effect on the final decision whatsoever. And celebrities? Ha.

“The base has fought a ferocious public campaign and it also makes sense as it has better facilities for the Typhoon than Leuchars.”

The Quick Reaction Alert jets, launched to deal with intruders into UK air space, will be moved to the base from Leuchars. Another factor in the Lossiemouth’s favour was that its Tornado facilities would have been very expensive to move.

If true, these are good points in favour of Lossiemouth.

The decision was also prompted by economic concerns as the removal of the new Nimrod MR4 fleet means near RAF Kinloss will close with the loss of 2,300 jobs worth £68 million to the local economy.

The nearby base at Lossiemouth supports a further 3,370 jobs and contributes £90 million annually. Ministers feared that closing both would cause mass unemployment in the area.

This too is a relevant and serious concern.

However, RAF Leuchars, which has 1,400 RAF personnel, will be closed despite “last minute pleas” from Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, and Sir Menzies Campbell, the former Liberal Democrat leader and local MP.

Good news for Lossiemouth, it seems, means bad news for Leuchars.

There has been speculation it could be turned into an international airport to replace or work alongside the commercial one at Dundee as part of a review of the UK’s military airbases.

Leuchars is certainly a larger and more flexible site than Dundee airport, but is there really a need for another large airport in Scotland, this far north, especially as Edinburgh is less than an hour away? How much money can rich golfers have, seriously?

Still, some aeroplane activity would be better than none from my perspective.

The decision also means that RAF Marham in Norfolk will remain open because it has the only RAF Tornado servicing facility.

This would explain why Marham is saved.

An MOD spokesman said: “The Strategic Defence and Security Review means that RAF Kinloss and two other bases will not be required by the RAF. No decisions have been made on which bases, or any future use.”

It turned out that no such announcement as the article claimed was made, and the campaign to save Lossiemouth and the other bases continued¹⁶. For me and I’m sure many other people, however, it felt like a done deal, and that such a decision was inevitable. The arguments seemed to make sense financially.

The uncertainty dragged on, and when it was announced that 13 and 14 squadrons would disband in March, it served to further confirm my thoughts. They wouldn’t disband squadrons from a base if they were then going to close the base down completely a few months later, would they?

The news started saying that the closed base would be used to station army troops who are being moved back to the UK from Germany. Instead of hangars there would be barracks. This renders arguments to the economic impact of an RAF enclosure somewhat redundant: jobs would not be lost so much as changed (although how true this is, and how many jobs would be needed for the army, I have no idea).

Amid other worrying articles such as “Liam Fox’s emphasis on Moray only adds to fears for RAF Leuchars“, there was some more sensible news, such as “RAF Leuchars campaigners urge Westminster to takes its time on closure decision“.

It seems that Westminster did take its time, only reaching a decision last weekend. And, what’s more, it seems like that time has paid off for Leuchars, despite leaving thousands of people in a seemingly endless limbo. The word on the street now is that “RAF Leuchars soars ahead of rival Lossiemouth in battle for survival“:

LEUCHARS could be saved as an RAF base after a late change of heart in the Ministry of Defence’s review of its base closures.

It is understood that, while a final decision has yet to be taken, pro-Leuchars factions in the RAF have made the case that its closure would leave a strategic gap in the UK’s defences.

“It works well with Coningsby (in Lincolnshire) with the Typhoons and, while they could go to Lossiemouth, the extra distance is a problem.”

One of the reasons Leuchars had been favourite to close as an RAF base was because soldiers are due to quit Germany and move into disused RAF premises, and the army would prefer to move to Fife rather than Moray.

But the source said: “Fortunately, the army don’t make the decisions.”

This is, of course, by no means definitive, and it perhaps means absolutely nothing. Maybe even completely wrong. It’s a load of ‘coulds’ and ‘woulds’, with few if any facts. Still, it got my hopes up, helped along by articles such as “Meeting with Michael Moore leaves Residents Action Force Leuchars spokesman buoyant” and “Prime Minister David Cameron’s comments give hope for RAF Leuchars’ future“. The tide seems to be turning – or perhaps it is just desperation.

Further on in the article:

But SNP MP Angus Robertson, who represents Moray – which has already lost RAF Kinloss – said the strategic case for Lossiemouth has been acknowledged, with both an RAF and MoD departmental recommendation for retention.

He said: “In addition to the unbeatable strategic arguments, there is the unique key factor of unprecedented economic damage were there to be a second RAF base closure in Moray. No part of the UK is as defence-dependent as Moray, and a double closure would be unthinkable and totally unacceptable.”

The RAF recommended late last year that Lossiemouth should kept in preference to Leuchars. One reason was the Moray base dovetailed better with the Norwegian air force in protecting the northern access routes.

So it probably was just desperation, on both my own and The Courier’s part. That section seems totally damning of Leuchars, and yet, why had a decision still not been made until so longer afterwards? I’d like to see both Leuchars and Lossiemouth retained, but I don’t foresee that happening.

And just for interest:

Originally, Leuchars was not included in the review, but concerns over Moray meant it became an option. A third option, RAF Marham in Norfolk, has been all but ruled out as it is too expensive to move engineering facilities. Now the pro-Leuchars case may prevail for strategic reasons and due to concerns by some in the RAF about the lack of infrastructure in Moray.

If Lossiemouth were to close, it would almost certainly be combined with Kinloss to house many of the troops coming back from Germany.

That explains why Leuchars was not seen as being at danger to begin with, then.

There are some particular points in favour of RAF Leuchars, specifically its location. Read this article in The Courier, entitled “Terrorist threat could see RAF Leuchars spared“:

The ability of the Fife base to quickly intercept any 9/11-type airborne terrorist attacks could be key to securing the base’s future. Fast jets could, for example, be at Grangemouth oil refinery in a matter of seconds. Typhoons from Leuchars could reach the Torness nuclear power station in under one and half minutes.

With RAF Lossiemouth in Moray also under threat, senior officials are thought to be attaching great significance to Leuchars’ geographical advantage.

While campaigners insist both Scottish bases should be saved, it has been suggested the pendulum could be swinging in favour of Leuchars.

“The current terrorism threat facing the UK is severe,” a source close to the UK Government told The Courier. “That means an attack is highly likely and thought is being given to the location of ‘tier one’ risk targets. Many of those in the northern half of Britain are within a very few minutes’ flying time of Leuchars.”

Also included is an interesting diagram which I recommend that you look at, showing the proximity of important northern locations to RAF Leuchars, and hence the effectiveness of the protection afforded by the station.

Lossiemouth is about 80 miles away from Leuchars, pretty much due north, and so it’s much further away from most of the important places in Scotland. The diagram is not entirely honest – yes, a Typhoon could reach Edinburgh in 75 seconds if it was flying at full speed, but it takes quite a while for a jet to taxi to the end of the runway and take off and increase its speed. It doesn’t reach Mach 2 instantly. A more accurate time would be perhaps 5 minutes after the first alarm.

One final, less important note, is the weather at RAF Leuchars. An article on Sir Menzies Campbell’s website, entitled “Case for RAF Leuchars Bolstered by Fine Weather for Flying“, states:

Figures released by the MOD to North East Fife MP Sir Menzies Campbell show that RAF Leuchars has one of the best records for available flying days among the UK bases.

Records for the last three years show that only 7 flying days were lost at RAF Leuchars which were due to adverse weather conditions. The average number of flying days lost at the RAF bases for which figures are available was around 25 per year.

Ming continues:

“Geographically, RAF Leuchars is in the ideal position. People living in Fife may be surprised to learn this but rainfall is on a par with the South East of England meaning visibility is very good for flying operations, and winters usually pass without significant snowfall. Added to this, RAF Leuchars’ location means its aircraft can be overhead Edinburgh or Glasgow within a matter of minutes and also able to reach easily the population centres of northern England.

This is surprisingly true. St Andrews (and hence Leuchars) has some lovely weather, and most of the time too – except the wind can be annoying sometimes. Leuchars has more sunshine than Greenwich, according to the Met Office, and similar rainfall levels too. Available flying days are extremely important for an air defence station, such as Leuchars, which exists to scramble jets at any time of the day.

For further context, an STV article, “RAF Leuchars figures show base should be kept, says MP“, says:

Since 2008 the Fife airbase has lost just seven flying days due solely to weather conditions.

Other UK air bases for which figures were available lost on average 25 flying days due to all factors. RAF Lossiemouth in Moray – also under threat – lost 21 flying days due to weather.

Leuchars is better than Lossiemouth then in this regard, then¹⁷. It can reach targets faster and it can reach targets more often. Surely then, if the MOD is concerned primarily about defence, Leuchars is the base to keep with the RAF, and Lossiemouth would then serve as an army base for barracks.

Either Marham or Leuchars could take over the flying of Lossiemouth’s Tornado GR4s. I for one would certainly welcome some more activity around my neck of the woods.

Overall though, I still expect this week that the government will announce that RAF Leuchars will be closed, with Marham and Lossiemouth remaining largely as they are, and Lossiemouth inheriting QRA duties. Leuchars would eventually be used to house army troops returning from Germany. Despite being a nice little base in a good location, working well and entertaining me, it just seems to be the way of the world.

I will be massively disappointed if that does happen. I love watching the jets in my spare time at St Andrews. They’re just so cool. Loud and ferocious and impressive and inspiring. I sometimes feel that having an air force would be worth it even if there were never any more wars, just because of how awesome they are to watch, and to display our technology. How expensive can it be, anyway?

I’ve been able to enjoy it for a year, at least. I’ll always have that. I just hope for more.

1. You’ll often find me on that beach during term-time.
2. Yes Murray, I like planes too! And trains.
3. It was a really good airshow. Tornado F3s, Typhoons, Tornado GR4s, Gripen, F-16s, Harrier, Vulcan, Red Arrows… Wow.
4. Flying Eurofighter Typhoon FGR4s.
5. Intercepting unidentified/unauthorised/enemy planes from the UK’s airspace, and responding to a 9/11-style attack.
6. It’s an interesting aircraft and I encourage you to read up about it.
7. Although David Cameron didn’t directly acknowledge this when announcing the cancellation of the MRA4.
8. I say that as I’m not sure how this became common knowledge and what the official line is.
9. Not that it stopped the SNP winning a massive victory…
10. The fighter/interceptor variant of the Tornado, as opposed to the GR4 for ground attack.
11. I’ll write about this and my sadness to see the F3s go another time.
12. OK, not that new.
13. Though I’m only guessing.
14. For me here, getting to live close to an air base.
15. OK, I might be going slightly over-the-top.
16. Again, the MOD were still looking to close two bases. Maybe they still are.
17. The ’25 flying days’ is unclear: one article says per year, the other implies since 2008. Oh well.