What Not to Watch In Flight

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Clive Andrews

I’ve just got back from my long-anticipated biking trip to Canada.

I had an amazing time. But I’m still sifting through memories, notes and photos before I can write anything about it that makes sense.

While I’m composing my excitable thoughts, I will just take a moment to pass on my views on a trivial yet hard-to-avoid part of many holiday experiences. One of the first, and last, ingredients in the holiday – The dire mix of films shown during flights.

On my way to and from Vancouver from Heathrow, I had the dubious pleasure of witnessing five films, varying in quality from average to unbelievably bad. Here are my tips:

Shooter – A classic example of the ‘So bad it’s good’ phenomenon. Action thriller with Mark Wahlberg and Danny Glover. Glover is a crooked FBI chief and Wahlberg is a retired military sniper, wronged by the army and living in peaceful retirement. You can probably guess the rest. In fact, to revel in the predictability of the cheesy nonsense, draw up a game of ‘Thriller Bingo”. Place bets with a friend on the likelihood of phrases and situations that are bound to crop up. The smart money is placed on the prediction of phrases like “You’re on your own now, son“, “This goes all the way to the top” and “They say you’re the best. Are you as good as they say?“. And, without wanting to spoil any surprises, who thinks the dog is going to end up with a bullet in the head?

Frequency – Dennis Quaid is a sixties fireman in an intriguing time-travel-related drama. I couldn’t believe that this film is seven years old, so easily did it slip past my awareness thusfar. It begins slowly, then gathers pace and becomes fairly sophisticated, before descending into one of the most ludicrous endings a film has ever had. Enough to really spoil an otherwise passable movie. Try and watch the ending without collapsing into fits of laughter.

Music and Lyrics – It’s a Hugh Grant rom-com, so we all know how the story goes. Foppish Grant repeatedly makes fool of himself with eccentric feisty female – Drew Barrymore this time. Hugely predictable yet, to be fair, enjoyable.

Wild Hogs – Awful. Awful awful awful awful awful. There is a huge gulf between the ideas of ‘So bad, it’s good’ and ‘So bad that everyone involved should be ashamed’. The main offenders in this terrible film are Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy, John Travolta and Tim Allen. Four middle-aged men embark on a motorcycle road-trip in an attempt to reclaim their youth. If that sounds bad, I can assure you this is much much worse than you can imagine. Jokes revolve around comedy crashes, gay policemen, plastic bags of excrement and hen-pecked husbands. Lawrence has a history of terrible films – this is home turf for him. Allen and Travolta should be embarrassed by their involvement, but the real shame rests on the shoulders of William H. Macy. An actor who has been part of great films like Fargo and Boogie Nights should have run a mile from this stinker.

The Time Traveller – To be honest, I fell asleep before half an hour of this film had passed, but I hope it improved after I started snoring and dribbling into my in-flight meal. Guy Pierce was introduced as an eccentric professor with odd social habits and a penchant for time travel calculations. Listening to his English accent is nearly as odd as listening to Mark Addy’s American accent. I quickly grew weary of this contrived set-up and abandoned myself to sleep. By the look of the Wikipedia plot summary, I made the correct choice.

Posted in films | Leave a comment

Birthday – Binary, Bikes and Beer

Posted on June 30, 2007 by Clive Andrews

Friday 29th June 2007 was my 32nd birthday. (When bored the previous evening, it occurred to me that if you were into binary, this would actually be my 100000th. Luckily, I’m not into binary…)

A dreary rainy day at work was followed by a beautiful evening. The clouds parted, the sun broke through and the South Downs beckoned Si, Jim and me up towards Devil’s Dyke, along to Truleigh Hill, down to Southwick and back to Brighton with roaring tailwind.

I’ve been playing with Google Maps a little – Here’s the route we took

Ended up at the Robin Hood pub by Brighton’s Norfolk Square. I’ve only recently discovered this place. A friendly kind of pub with decent beer, excellent post-ride pizza and some fantastic photography on the walls. Apparently, all the pub’s profits go to charity. The three of us sat among Friday night revellers in our sweaty biking gear and were joined by Nic for a few happy pints.

A great birthday evening – a few miles on the hills followed by beers with some of my favourite people.

Posted in Brighton, cycling | Leave a comment

Exif Strategy

Posted on June 26, 2007 by Clive Andrews


If you’re a bit of a geek, one of the wonders of digital photography isn’t just held within the image itself, but in the hidden information which attaches itself to the file and makes its way onto your hard drive along with your photos.

The Exif data held within each file can tell you loads – The type of camera, the date, the shutter speed, aperture and ISO setting are only the beginning.

And this can be useful stuff. Users on sites like Flickr often show the Exif data alongside their photos. Which aperture setting got that amazing depth-of-field? What time of day gave that terrific light? Is that a new camera? EXIF data will tell you.

But is all this information enough? It’s already a tempting option, on Flickr and elsewhere, to plot a photo’s location on a map, adding further to the wealth of available data. But this must be done manually and can be a laborious process – too much so for many Flickr users.

And even with the addition of geographical data I’m still not sure this is quite enough to reconcile some photos with the unique moments they capture.

So I propose three new data fields to be populated by our cameras. I would ask major camera manufacturers to take heed and consider these suggestions:

1. Location – I can’t remember where I was when I took that biking photo. Don’t ask me to remember several days later – do it for me. Add the geographical co-ordinates to each of my photos as I take them by using a GPS within my camera.

Nic and Mark

2. Music – What a night! What a nightclub! What dancing! What on earth were we listening to?
I have no idea. But build an extra gizmo into my camera which listens to the tune being played as I press my shutter release, looks it up on the internet, and then embeds this information as EXIF data. Dexy’s Midnight Runners? Oh dear…


3. Alcohol – Why is that photo so blurred? Why is the subject’s head truncated? Why have I taken 34 photos of the same thing? Am I an adventurous artist or just a drunken buffoon? An in-built breathalyser just beneath the viewfinder will easily allow me to look back at an image with a greater understanding of why I appear to be lying in the floor. “1/60 shutter, f4.5 aperture, 400 ISO and 5 pints of lager: I’m evidently a creative genius!”

Posted in photography | 2 Comments

If You Love Your Language Set it Free…

Posted on June 26, 2007 by Clive Andrews
In the face of the ever-increasing global dominance of English, the French are known for their determined loyalty to their language.

But despite what some would have you believe, they are able to have a laugh with it too.

These adverts for the french railways’ travel website voyages-sncf.com should be read with your best french accent. Which international locations are being advertised with slogan “Luckily, we don’t just do trains”?

Yste-en-Boule, not Constantinople

Nouillorc Nouillorc
Posted in language, travel | Leave a comment

National Bike Week Comes to Brighton

Posted on June 18, 2007 by Clive Andrews

National Bike Week began for me this morning at around 4.45am, in the English Channel.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we will shortly be arriving in Newhaven. Enjoy your stay in England.“

On our way back from a two day road jolly in Normandy, Tom, Kieron, Saul and I clattered down to the car deck of the ferry to retrieve our bikes and cover the final 17km of our 200km journey – the short ride from Newhaven back to Brighton.

All weekend, we had been contentedly sharing immaculately surfaced roads with French motorists, appreciating their wide, careful overtaking, their patience at junctions and the sensation of being able to stop at traffic lights without the feeling that the car behind you is attempting to climb into your back pocket.

After two days of blissful French cycling and fitful night’s waterborne sleep, we rolled off the ferry back onto rainy British roads, resigned to the fact that, back on home turf, we could no longer expect motorists to notice us or respect us as equal road users. We span home along the coast in the rain with cars and trucks passing us at speed.

I returned to Brighton, snatched an hour’s sleep, and then packed my stuff for work, swapped my road bike bike for the usual commuter and set off on my 15 minute ride to work, the sun now shining. Within a minute of leaving the house I was flagged down by a cheerful lady in colourfully branded T-shirt.

She reminded me that, as the first day of National Bike Week, today was the day that Brighton & Hove Council were laying on free breakfasts for cyclists. I was ushered towards a nearby café. Not only was I given a flapjack, some fruit and a cup of tea, but a spare bike light and, bizarrely, some Body Shop foot lotion also made it into my courier bag, courtesy of the council. A lively jazz band was playing while free of charge bike maintenance checks were carried out.


I met Dean Spears, Brighton council’s cycling mastermind, who told me about the new Journey On website and assured me that our local authority is doing all it can to encourage and enable cycling, as the best mode of transport for our crowded city. Facilities for cyclists in Brighton are relatively good, but they could surely be much much better, so I hope his mission is succesful.

Some of the best documenters of the inconsistencies of British cycle facilities is Brightonian Fred Pipes, whose superb Weird Cycle Lanes blog today points out a straightforward Guardian piece by Emily Thornberry MP, picking apart some of the oft-quoted objections to cycle commuting.

As a cyclist, particularly a commuter, it is easy, so easy, to focus on the negative. Inconsiderate driving, poor roads and the commonly-held perception that cycling is solely for eccentrics can make a British cyclist defensive, perhaps too much so. Events like Critical Mass do wonders for awareness of the power imbalance on British roads, but a lot of their energy lies in the implied confrontation between the needs of the cyclist and the needs of the motorist.

The great thing about this morning’s breakfast event, with its music, good food and warm welcome was that it focussed on the positive and it made me smile. It made other cyclists smile, passers by smile and, I hope, motorists smile. Cycling shouldn’t be about making a stand and being different. It should be about feeling able to choose a mode of transport which, for most people, offers so many benefits; not least of which is the valuable chance to arrive at work on a Monday morning with a smile on your face.

Posted in Brighton, cycling | 2 Comments

Return to Liverpool – Part 3 – On The Road

Posted on May 25, 2007 by Clive Andrews

The third day of my visit to Liverpool saw me boarding a train beneath the Mersey to Bebington, to meet Ian.

Ian Tierney was my boss for the two-and-a-half years I spent working at the Liverpool Cycle Centre. He was brought up working with bikes and he taught me most of what I know about cycling. He now runs Cycling Projects, a Manchester-based charity.

We see each other about twice a year, and whenever we meet up we try and find a few spare hours for a bike ride. This is normally off-road, as Ian acknowledges that’s always been my riding of choice, so he climbs aboard his mountain bike and humours me for a couple of hours.

But Ian’s heart lies in the tarmac. He has fun on off-road, but he’s happiest when zipping along on big skinny wheels and drop bars. So imagine the excitement when I arrived on Merseyside accompanied by my new road bike – my first road bike. I arrived at Ian’s house with my shiny new Specialized and found him grinning from ear to ear. Not because he was pleased to see me, but pleased to see me “on a proper bike, for once!”

So we set off through the twisting country lanes of Wirral, as Ian guided me and my new bike through a labyrinth of villages and meadows. Our first stop was my inaugural visit to ‘Two Mills’ café, known to every roadie in the northwest as the definitive place to enjoy a cup of tea and compare handlebars.

Then we made our way to Raby, a village so picturesque you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in rural France, not the suburbs of Liverpool. We enjoyed a couple of pints in the sunshine and reflected on a decade of friendship, ten years of riding together, and the ten years it had taken me to get myself a bike that Ian approved of. It was a great afternoon.


But next time, let’s get back on the mountain bikes, eh Ian?

Posted in cycling | Leave a comment

Return to Liverpool – Part 2 – A Dingy, Smelly, Slippy Place

Posted on May 24, 2007 by Clive Andrews


My visits to Liverpool are infrequent these days. After having lived there for five-and-a-half years, I like to visit once a year or so, to catch up with the great friends I left behind.

On this occasion, my visit co-incided with that of Rebecca and Simon, who’d crossed from Brussels for the weekend, also to revisit Liverpool friends and memories.

It became a foregone conclusion that a visit to The Raz would figure on the weekend’s agenda. I only made a few visits during the years I lived in Liverpool, but they were memorable. The Raz is formally known as The Blue Angel (though it takes a leap of faith to consider any variant of the word ‘formal’ in the context of this place). The grottiest, cheesiest of venues with the nastiest cheapest beer and the worst, most ineffectual ventilation had always made The Raz an aquired taste, but this time, things seemed a little different…

The first clue was the smell. The smell in the street. As we climbed out of our taxi and eagerly made our way to the The Blue Angel’s front door, our nostrils collectively caught a whiff of something quite revolting. We assumed it was a drain or a binbag and moved closer to the venue. And the smell grew stronger. And stronger. Until we were in the queue at the front door facing the grim realisation that the smell was coming from within The Blue Angel. As a real sign of the times, a bold notice, not there ten years ago, was displayed at the entrance:

“YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A DINGY, SMELLY, SLIPPY PLACE.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.”

We had indeed.

We entered the foul smelling venue and headed downstairs to the cave-like dancefloor. The smell of stale sweat and vomit grew ever more intense, with the only escape being offered by a visit to the toilet to enjoy the fresh air.

In a previous life, our fellow patrons were more of our own. Students, ex-student hangers-on and university sports teams, all in their early twenties, we would boogie away our cares in youthful abandon. Now, ten years later, we were probably the oldest people there.

Music was a mix of recent tunes and the old classics we used to dance to. Our favourites were seen by most Raz-goers as ‘oldies’ but we danced along together all the same, drinking merrily from plastic glasses – cheap lager for the boys, and an anonymous flourescent blue alcopop for the girls.

Two o’clock came round too soon, and we made our way back to Glyn and Jamie’s flat to catch up on some sleep. We woke the following morning to the funny feeling that something had followed us home. Something smelly. A revolting grey substance identified by Rebecca as ‘boogie poo’ had smeared itself onto our clothes and was living all over our shoes and trousers. Windows were opened, shoes were placed on window ledges and last night’s trousers were plunged into washbasins as we wondered when we’d next make our excitable return to the horrible, horrible Raz.

I took a few photos, but Simon and Rebecca have some great pictures.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Return to Liverpool – Part 1 – Platform 4

Posted on May 18, 2007 by Clive Andrews


If boarding an Olympic flight at Heathrow, the Greek accents, illegible safety signs and stewardesses’ make-up tell you straight away that though you maybe sat on west London tarmac, culturally, your journey to Greece is to a large extent complete.

And so it was that I found myself on platform 4 at London’s Euston station, surveying a long red Liverpool-bound Virgin train, looking for the best place to stow my bulky bike bag.

I asked one of the train’s uncomfortably dressed ‘hosts’ for help and the answer came back in a soft scouse accent that immediately reminded me of my destination for the weekend.

“Go right to the end of the train, just behind the driver, and there’s somewhere there” she pointed out in distinct Merseyside tones.

“Great. Thanks.” I said as I began hauling my heavy cargo to the other end of the long platform.”

The friendly scouse voice continued over my shoulder. “What’s in the bag?”.

I looked back.

“A bike”

“Have I seen you before with that bike? I’m sure I’ve seen you before.”

“I’m not sure.”

“No, I’m definate I’ve seen you on this train before with that bag.”

There was no way she’d ever seen me before, but her friendly insistence and lack of London aloofness was unmistakable.

There I was in central London suddenly feeling like I’d arrived Liverpool. I boarded the train and the Ringo Starr intonations of Gerry, our ‘catering manager for this jair-ney’, confirmed that this train, with an apparently Liverpool-based crew, had already brought me to my former northwestern home, before the train had even left London.


Posted in travel | Leave a comment

Flying to Work

Posted on May 11, 2007 by Clive Andrews

Tailwind Commute

Brighton’s getting a lot of weather at the moment. After a few balmy weeks, the wind and the rain is back with a vengeance.

Yesterday I rode home along the seafront with a howling wind in my face. As I struggled to make headway on my tired old singlespeed, I wished the wind would let up for me. Then I spotted a couple of guys on road bikes coming in the opposite direction along Madeira Drive. They were going three times faster than me, with the wind behind them and big smiles on their faces.

I told myself that the ride to work the next day would make it all worthwhile. And it was. With the wind behind me I flew along the seafront as fast as my little legs could go to keep up.

Posted in Brighton, cycling | Leave a comment

New howies Catalogue is Here!

Posted on May 11, 2007 by Clive Andrews

New howies catalogue

The new howies catalogue landed on my doormat yesterday. It’s always good when this colourful little book arrives, four times a year.

howies are a clothing company, but the catalogue is more than just a selection of pretty people in good clothes. Interspersed between the jeans, T-shirts and hoodies are a collection of essays, thoughts, letters and stunning photos. Lots of stuff to make you think and make you smile.

It’s always worth a read. Their blog‘s good, too.

Posted in books, marketing | 1 Comment