Dangerous sport, triathlon

It's good practice to be prepared for various hazards on a triathlon, but I'm glad bears aren't generally a problem in the UK. And there I am getting worried over the odd puncture.

Reading matters

If you've got an unanswered question you know you're perfectly capable of answering, just read it to yourself nine times then forget it and let your subconscious provide the answer. (It's a technique I've used for years.)

From being worried about what reading matter I'd take away this summer, the correct answers popped into my head this morning: Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass', Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road', and Orwell's 'Down and out in Paris and London'. Three simple paperbacks strangely appropriate to hot chaotic cities and long nights on trains, which I can discard as I finish. Perfect. Next stop Waterman's. (You don't buy books like this from Amazon; the ritual of visiting a bookshop makes sure you'll read them.)

Into the valley of debt rode the 600

Both in my PC (mortgage lender client) and on the streets, I today enter the terrifying world of... the sub-prime lending market.

There's a lot of poverty in my patch of southeast London, and the denizens of doorstep lending, pawnbroking, and expensive mortgages find rich pickings in this 'hood. I have nothing against such operators - they fulfill a vital function, servicing people who can't get credit elsewhere. (Having the option of high-interest credit is better than having no options at all.) And this is the free market at work, after all.

But it reminds me, as I pass the MSB on the way to the Tube - with a sign outside that uses an APR of 107% as a selling point (!) - that there are a lot of people out there paying vast sums for credit, who are far less able to afford it than me.

Because while some of the reasons for poor credit ratings may be people's own fault - careless spending, laziness, prioritising a plasma TV over school uniforms - many of the reasons aren't: having poor parents or working a low-paid job is no shame or crime. (I do, though, take offence at the lenders who target people drawing unemployment benefit; that money is so they can buy food, not pay interest.) The Visa card offers I get that charge £70 a year plus an APR of 56.6% aren't aimed at me, but are aimed at people in the same postal district, people I pass on these streets every day.

And it confirms the validity of my only two fears in life. Do anything you can to avoid being poor or getting old.

Lady dead in the water

I KNEW it! M Night Shammalammadingdong's latest film is reportedly another flop.

I swore after 'Signs' I'd never watch his films again. The same well-paced buildup as Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, I was practically exploding with excitement waiting for the expected twist. A twist which turned out to be a complete McGuffin, a shortcut to finish the story without paying off the effort I'd invested watching it for the previous ninety minutes. Awful. I didn't see 'The Village', but it apparently suffered the same fate.

And by giving himself a big role in the film - as a genius but misunderstood writer - he's made his biggest error of all. M's career is now over, and I saw the Signs years ago.

British when the bombs start dropping

A hate-preaching Muslim cleric who renounced his British citizenship tries to board one of the British escape ships in Beirut, showing the British passport he cancelled himself as a protest against 'the way Muslims in Britain are being treated'. You've got to laugh.

An Egypt packing list

Using a tribag just for triathlon is silly: the way these bags unfurl into a flat set of pockets and pouches is perfect for the world's hot and dusty places. Not just multisport, but multipurpose, especially if you customise your packing with some 'fitted luggage' like a concertina'ing washbag selected to slot perfectly into the internal mesh pouch. Here's my gear for a month in North Africa:

In the main bag:

- 1 pair trainers
- 1 pair deck shoes
- Towel
- Sheet sleeping bag
- Pillowcase
- Travel pillow
- DK Eyewitness Egypt guide
- Book, yet to be decided
- 40 brightly coloured pencils (gifts for kids)
- Sunglases
Repurposed wetsuit stuffsack containing:
- 2 sports shirts
- 2 pairs shorts
- 2 tough cotton shirts
- 2 pairs lightweight sports pants
- light stuffable jacket
- 4 pairs underwear
- 4 pairs socks
Eagle Creek hangup washbag containing:
- Toothbrush & toothpaste
- Mach 3 and blades
- E45 shower cream (doubles as shave gel)
- E45 facial cleanser
- E45 SPF30 sunblock
- E45 moisturiser (yes, I like E45 stuff)
- Tissues, wipes, cloth
- Medikit with tweezers, gauze, plasters, bandage, sewing kit, headache & stomach tablets, eyedrops, dental floss, cotton buds
- Matches
- Zipties
- String
- Elastic bands
- Mirror
- Travelwash for laundry
- Clothesline
- Collapsible coathanger
- Copy of passport & insurance
Watertight plastic lunchbox containing:
- Folding knife/fork/spoon
- Titanium travel kettle (doubles as mug)
A4 wallet containing:
- Blank paper (sometimes a PDA's not big enough)
- 1 sheet card (backerboard)

And a paperback-sized hipsack containing:
- Passport
- Credit cards
- XDA Exec (phone, email, web, PDA)
- XDA headphones, charger, converter
- 10 sheets A4 paper, folded
- Pen and pencil
- Silva compass
- Leatherman Wave
- Maglite
- Keys
- Drivers license

... slung on a money belt containing:
- Cash.

Sounds a lot? Packed and zipped, all this gear fits a snug 50 x 34 x 25cm and weighs under 8kg. Just a couple of weeks to go...

Living on a different planet

Proof how detached I am from normal British male preoccupations: I only found out yesterday, by accident, who won the World Cup. (The guy cutting my hair was Italian.) Two things register here: a) I didn't see it in the papers despite reading several a week; and b) I didn't think it important enough to find out.

Looking for a turning point

Another dreamy weekend just passed. Warm and pleasant days around town, life-affirming hours in the gym, literature and opera and lazy somnambulent evenings on the balcony. Which of course, is precisely the problem in my life. It's too good, and it's not pushing me to do more.

The more I think about it, the more I believe my trip next month will be some kind of life-changing event, a pivot in my existence. I've been coasting too long, because coasting is easy when you're healthy, affluent, and satisfied. But there's got to be more to life than these things. I can't just 'stop' here in this comfortable middle-class existence, even though a part of me wants to.

Perhaps I'll find what I'm looking for. Out there in the North African desert.

Who is honey?

Aside from that 'Yo, Blair!' opening from Bush - I can imagine the high five and the jeans hangin' off his ass - and the casual way Bush orders Blair to talk to other leaders, the big question is: who is 'honey' according to Blair (and 'sweet' to Bush?) I think we should be told.

What a trip!

Mobile blogging. Can't beat it. Especially when you're doing it from a cool new phone.

"I'm just going to make it up"

Hmmm... it's always refreshing to hear politicians talking privately without realising there's a live mike nearby, but scary if it wasn't said in jest. "I'm just going to make it up" says Bush in reference to his upcoming speech. But George, that's the whole problem with your presidency...

Moby Memory: remember the name

Sometimes, just sometimes, you buy from a company and everything goes exactly right.

I'm looking to juice up my XDA Exec with enough storage for a month's video, photos, and background music during my travels next month, and found what seems to be the only 4GB SD Card on the market at Moby Memory. 4GB! I can't find anything above a gig on Tottenham Court Rd, and these guys are creating things the size of some hard disks. For less than £70 all in.

It arrived today - no mess, no fuss, just a recorded delivery to my office less than 24 hours after placing my order. What's more, it's a good product. I expected something with corners cut, like a 1GB card I already owned where I had to remove the write protection manually. (That means covering the gap with sellotape, a trick that's worked since the days of cassette tape.) And that 1GB cost £40. But this 4GB from Moby is a genuinely decent bit of hardware, solid little writeprotect switch and none of the flimsy yoghurt-pot feel to it. My XDA read it without hassle, and they threw in a USB adapter so I can load it up from a PC too.

Oh, and human beings answer their phones if you call them.

In short: a very pleasant buying experience, and I'm about to order three more. Well done, Moby Memory. If you're new on the block, you deserve every success.

Parkour: the freedom of the city

It's sneak-out Wednesdays (on a Thursday.) Sat in an empty cinema to watch District 13. High art. I knew Parkour was going to be big.

I saw the first of the free-runners living in Paris at the turn of the century, and the freedom of considering walls or rocks or buildings not as blockages, but as challenges, looked exhilarating. It was long before I discovered the joys of being in the most athletic 1% of the population myself; my first triathlon was years away. And the skateboard scene - more about fashion than fitness - bored me after I turned six. But Parkour, free-running, grokking ways to twist your body and carry your momentum over walls far higher and to floors much lower than seemed feasible, was something really interesting. And now, the original traceur David Belle's made a film about it.

The plot? Stylishly preposterous: French authorities have dealt with Paris's ghettoes by building a wall around them to confine the drug-dealing and violence within them. One athletically-talented man frustrates the dealers by 'napping their stash; he ends up being recruited by a cop who's being deluded into thinking he knows what's going on. It's fast-paced and fun in the 'Taxi' mould. The freerunning sequences are incredible - one move where David Belle heads for a door and flips upwards feet-first through the narrow windowlight over it - needs watching at least four times to check it's real. (In my mind, there wasn't enough freerunning, because freerunning is what this film's all about.) But you're spasming and jerking in the cinema like a martial arts fan, thinking about what it'd be like to have such skills.

But in the end, the comment Parkour makes about Paris is more valid than just jumping over rooftops. Yes, freerunning's a better way to see the world: as an always-interesting environment you can travel through in three dimensions if you're good enough. But what it says about France in particular, and the way that egalitarian nation treats its immigrant communities locked away in the suburbs, is more valid still. Because of course, the solid wall around the Banlieues already exists. In people's minds.

Long and hard: the battle of libido

I've been suffering severe loss of libido for about two weeks now.

Despite the boobs on the Tube in the London heat and being newly single for the first time since 2001, I think my body's in denial about female sexuality. Women seem more art object than sex object. I'm spending whole conversations with female friends without once glancing down from their faces. And in the evenings I'd rather have a cup of tea.

Not sure how to test this out - it's psychological rather than physical I think, although obviously it'd be good to test this out (OTC Viagra? A bit of pornosurfing? What's the usual remedy for problems like this?) What's odd is how strangely comfortable it feels, as if you'd just shed a huge load, sorry I mean burden, and now it's gone you realise what a hassle it was. Hmmm. I'm not so sure I want this to end just yet. It's oddly refreshing.

It's all our fault!!!!

So it looks like Islamofascist tourists have now 'done' India, after Madrid and London. Thinking about this, a realisation dawns: IT'S ALL OUR BLOODY FAULT!!!!

I mean, look at pretty much any world hotspot, pull the line back in history a little, and either Britain or the USA kicked the whole shooting match off.

Timor-Leste! New Guinea partitioned by the British some decades back to avoid hassles from the Dutch; now the world's youngest and bloodiest nation. Africa! Turned to scarred dust by clueless bankers and leaders that grew fat on their loans.

Korea! Chopped in half in the 50s. Cuba! Heroes of the Revolution thanks to American attention. Columbia! A class-A drug economy thanks to the two biggest coke using populations, Britain and the USA. And now Hugo Chavez is bolstering his Bolivarian Revolution with help from Peru and half a dozen other South American nations united only by a common dislike of an overbearing neighbour to the north.

The whole of the Middle East! A region without nations carved up into Western-shaped countries over less than sixty years, now roiling in conflict forever. Saddam Hussein! Our best buddy in the early 80s, taking tea with Donald Rumsfeld and letting the Atlantic cousins have a profitable little proxy war to consume munitions. Osama bin Laden - created by the CIA, when they funded 'promising' Muslims to head into Afghanistan and confound the Soviets. Iran! Isolated in its own region in British-drawn borders, building a bomb to try and get the West to take it seriously. Gadhafi, Noriega, Castro, Mugabe: all either came to power or retained it thanks to something BRITAIN OR AMERICA DID!!!

The world today. Muslims are doing the dirty work, but ultimately IT'S ALL OUR FAULT!

We've got your house, now for your money

Is there nothing these guys won't get their hands on? Last week the Home Office was talking about 'claiming' uninhabited buildings, now all you have to do is leave a bank account alone for three years and they're grabbing that too. One of those laws that's arguably 'right' - wealth isn't wealth unless it's flowing through someone's life, whether an individual's or society's - but just seems so wrong.

ID cards: not with a bang

This is the only way we can beat New Labour. Not by reasoned debate or peaceful protest, but just by relying on their incompetence.

If a civil servant says something can't be done as opposed to starting something then making it last as long as possible, preferably until he draws his index-linked paid-by-taxpayer final-salary pension years earlier than a private sector worker - it means it really won't work. And now the grey men are saying it about ID cards. New Labour's love of complexity may, finally, be the thing that kills off this depraved scheme to build a relational database holding everything on everyone. (The cards, of course, aren't the problem. It's the database, and the minimum-wage guy who holds the key to the server cupboard.)

It's one way of beating New Labour, I suppose: do nothing and let them drown in the glutinous tangles of their own chaos. But with each failed Blair project costing unrecoverable billions - the Child Support Agency, the NHS, Iraq - it's a bloody expensive one.

Airbus delays: let's get creative, EADS

Here's an idea to get EADS' Airbus A380 into profitable service immediately. As usual, the solution is in a creative look at the numbers.

Since the announcement that the A380 won't be in service until 2008, EADS shares have fallen 26% and it projects some E1.5bn of losses due to lateness. That's about seven billion Euros off the balance sheet - ouch. Fortunately, there's a very easy way to solve it.

The delays are apparently due to the wiring requirements of the consumer electronics onboard - seatback TV screen and so on.

Well, what if Airbus simply sacked its wiring guys, launched the planes into service NOW, and just bought every passenger something to play with - up to E500 in value? A free Xbox whenever I travelled longhaul - I'd fly an A380 for that, even allowing for a check-in time where you need a calendar instead of a watch.

Think about it. Estimating 6m lost trips, EADS' red ink already equates to some E1100 per ticket; you can get a Playstation or portable DVD player for far less than that, and with the planes in service you're reducing those losses to E600.

And other opportunities unfold: brand the gadgets with an Airbus logo and you're getting some free advertising too, not to mention how full your planes would be when every traveller gets an automatic going-away gift and the local electronics wholesalers experience a mini-boom. (No need to ask for them back; you're saving money on fuel and servicing every time a passenger takes his own gear home.)

Hey, it beats Air Miles. But if they gave away XDA Execs would you be allowed to use them onboard?

Bomber video: can't he just shut up?

Spiked has a handy article about what's really driving the suicide bombers: a desperate need for attention. Like so many of Britain's chip-on-shoulder ethnics / black underclass / dole-drawing white trash, his only real message is "I am being dissed".

Read the text of both released 7/7 bombers' home videos: it's pompous, overblown, self-dealing bombast that handily denies any hint they might be wrong. It's a common viewpoint among those too feeble-minded to cope with diversity or accept views different to their own: they feel that what they've got to say is very very important and it's absolutely vital that you understand that.

I dunno. Silly little boys who think their beliefs mean something. I blame the parents, actually.

Midweek technofetishism: O2's XDA Exec

A new phone! Three things strike me about O2's XDA Exec. First, what fools Vodafone are for losing me as a customer after five years; all they had to do was offer this device. Second, what an amazing little device it is, replacing a phone, PDA, camera, and at a pinch even a laptop; the thumbboard is as usable as any Blackberry. Second, what a bunch of fools O2's marketing dept are for forcing a ridiculous UI extension onto its users that halves its speed and doubles user frustration.

The hardware is about as good as it gets - if you don't mind small buttons. The main exterior buttons for camera and so on are TINY; anyone less dextrous than normal, or even if it's a cold day, will have serious problems. Conversely, it's a bit too easy to hit the volume control by accident.

But it's amazing just how many things have been packed into a casing the size of a fat phone. Full 3G, GPRS, and triband GSM connectivity, plus a Wifi card! Gratifyingly, the headphone jack and USB connector are standard, 3.5mm and the reduced-USB D-shape, which means I can reuse some cabling when connecting it to a PC. The USB plug's also the charging point, so it trickles the battery just by being plugged into a laptop. I'll barely use the AC adapter, I think.

The screen is a full 640x480; you don't need to resize web pages. The clamshell case swivels like a tablet PC, screen orientation swapping to suit; it can resemble a PDA, or a phone when closed, or a laptop that's shrunk in the wash. The thumbboard is a work of art: hidden under the clamshell, it's got a firm, tactile feel, perfectly adequate for writing emails or editing a Word doc.

The software, by contrast, sucks big-time. It's less than 48 hours since I bought the thing and I've already done a hard reset to scrape off the appalling 'O2 Active' UI overlay. Fortunately manual setup isn't too hard once you've switched to the 'Corporate' option - but users shouldn't have to google for passwords and unlock codes buried in the Exec's firmware, and I think a lot of Execs are going to be returned when users find them unusably slow. There's a 520MHz processor in here yet it seems slower than my jurassic IPAQ from 2001.

On the other hand, Windows Mobile 5.0 isn't too bad. Microsoft have finally got the hang of PDAs and started treating its handheld OS as a handheld OS instead of a stripped-down desktop operating system. Once the O2 gunk is out of the way it's reasonably fast and intuitively functional.

The camera functions are terrific. 1.3 megapixel isn't much these days, and as a camera it's far from great quality. But for snapshots it's fine - 1280 x 960 JPEGs and 320x160 video. There are some clever features like panorama - the XDA stitches a series of shots together for you - and bursts for sport; there's even a tiny torch for low light closeups and a second lens on the front so you can videocall. Fun.

Other media gubbins are all fine: Media Player's as good as any, although you'll need a storage card - 128Mb is a bit stingy if you want to avoid buying an iPod. (A 1GB SD card's gone straight into mine.) And why doesn't Media Player handle MPEG playback when the camera's MP4? A bit of extra software's needed to bring this device fully up to potential.

But the verdict: this is a brilliant PDA - everything I need: calls, calendar, all sorts of messaging, web browsing, MP3 playback, and a camera. Well done O2. Now all I need is the nerve to take it everywhere when it's such pickpocket bait.

The killing heat

London bakes. 31 degrees in the shade and the air's heavy, somehow: suggests thunderstorms.

And in the office of a client, I'm vibing it. A slow constant sweat pooling in the small of my back, metronomic rivulets breaking their surface tension every four minutes. I count 6 computers, two of them heavy-duty servers, in this 3x3m space and each one's pumping out heat. There's no air con in this 1800s building, and only an electric fan to rattle the air's suffocating blanket. But somehow it's ok: I lived in Singapore for three years, after all, in a house where the only air conditioning came from there being no glass in the kitchen windows. 39 degrees in this room. But somehow it's ok.

Far beneath my feet, people are spitroasting in reverse: not with a tube thrust through their innards, but by being thrust onto a Tube, by time and work and economics. 50 degrees has been reported, presumably in a strangled gasp of disbelief. Some trains are cooled these days, but not many: the tunnels are old and there's nowhere for the heat to go. But somehow I dig it.

Because that's London: a city of extremes, of soft places and hard edges, and the seasonal suffocations are just part of the experience of living here. Later I'll sweat out the streets and hit the pool, sluicing away the heat in a few lengths of gentle freestyle. And then I'll head to my house, which being small and boxlike should be stifling, but it never is: air flows nicely between my floors.

And then I'll sleep, while the heat subsides outside and gathers itself for the next morning, when the heat will wake me more surely than any alarm clock. The heat. The endless, killing heat.