April fool?

Good morning folks

Here is the latest hotch-potch of gubbins that is my self-imposed ridiculously overcomplicated life, which started life being scribbled on my laptop on the 10:02 from York to Stevenage, imitating (and failing at being) a jet-setting highflier city type, bit tricky when you look like a hobo and didn’t book a seat with a table, resulting in 2 hours of contorted typing torture, oh to be 5’2” or smaller.
Backward facing seat always gives a different perspective, let the train take the strain…

House move No#44 was (and still is) the bedlam that was to be expected and just to up the stress levels to 11, I decided to embark on an accidental buying-&-selling of cars scheme,  plus selling my life (and what was left of my soul) on the idiot-&-general-fruitcake magnet that is eBay. I also applied for another job where I work and continue with my run365 venture.
On top of all this, we had to get the new gaff ready for the young ‘un’s birthday party, which was basically moving everything out of sight and out of mind, a bit like my shed, but more of that later.
So, all in all, things have been a tad busy.

So, in no particular order here is my cathartic purging of this month’s sins, mishaps and cock-ups!

(Started on an Inter-City 125 and finished on the last day of my 2 week working holiday, in the new gaff).

Cumbria(n) forever!

This is not an April Fool’s joke, I wish it was.
As of midnight on 31/03/23 the county of Cumbria was abolished, to be replaced by the old counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and Furness. A regional council cost-cutting exercise sneaked in under the carpet and forced through during lockdown.
I was born in Kendal, Westmorland, but when I was 2 years old, Westmorland became Cumbria, so all of my life I have considered myself and identified as a Cumbrian.
No amount of whining, whinging or wailing will change it, but can one imagine this happening in neighbouring Yorkshire or Lancashire? There would be riots!

Trying to fins a positive note, there may be a resurgence of Cumberland Westmorland Wrestling, or an increase in sausage sales or an expanding readership of the Gazette, but overall it was a sad day.

I would like to end this sorry chapter with an ode penned by a Cumbrian friend, Neil:

Cum-bri-a, my Lord.
Cum-bri-a,
Cum-bri-a, my Lord.
Cum-bri-a,
Oh, Lord, Cum-bri-aaaa!

Cumbrian ‘til I die.

Moving on.

When we fled Arequipa and Peruland in September 2020 we really had no concrete plan and for a man who used to plan everything (fuelled by OCD) this was not easy. My phone feeds me constant reminders of 1 year ago, 2 years ago, (which is generally photos of junk I was putting on eBay at the time), etc, and just now I am reliving the not-so-heady days of early 2021 AQP lockdown, when (the not yet disgraced at the time) President Vizcarra) announced rules pandemic rules of “One person allowed out of the house only to go to the shop/chemist/doctor/hospital, with the only shops being open being supermarkets and “bodegas” and an extra special men allowed out of Monday/Wednesday/Friday, ladies allowed out Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday. Nobody allowed out Sunday and a curfew from 8pm-6am”
Zoom was my lifeline (as that was my job/life for 6mths and still is on a Sunday night with my mates at 7pm). So anyroad, we jumped ship and came back by a contrived route to Blighty via Government approved taxi and 3 flights back to Taddy and to the beautiful hideaway that is the caravan. It was meant to be a stop-gap but got stretched and stretched until now.

Caravans are ace, it’s my 4^th stint in a caravan as a home, but if you are not a one-knife-one-fork-one-spoon minimalist, it quickly becomes unmanageable.

That. Is where the shed came in!

In 2013, during a(nother) house move, I had the brilliant foresight to put up a shed* as temporary storage for, yet another rushed house move. “Stuff it all in and sort it later” became my motto. Circumstances forced several other rushed house moves and then when we jetted off back to Peru in 2014 I secretly hoped the Shed Fairies would sort through all the tat, leaving all the good stuff neat and tidy and organised.

(* As a general rule, I won’t pay someone else to do a job I can do myself. Retrospective apologies to both my brother, James and my Dad, for the 2 sheds I have put up, both of which were a complete nightmare and with hindsight, I would have happily splashed the cash to someone who does it for a living who could do it in 1/4 of the time!)

I am generally pretty good at giving stuff up &/or cutting it out completely (chocolate, beer, coffee), normally for no reason other than personal stubbornness, but my one major weakness is buying crap on the internet. At first it was just an excuse for not going out shopping during the pandemic (“Stay at home”), but after a 7yr sojourn in the non-internet-nor-mail-order land of Peru, where I struggled to buy anything my size, the temptation was too great once back on Amazon soil.
Reformed gamblers are always looking for “Value” and the internet is a bountiful place of value and bright lights, where anything is just a maximum of 3 clicks away. It is just too easy. Buy it/try it/return it/flog it.
I spent weeks and weeks “sorting out” the shed, making space for more and more junk and more and more hobbies; camping, climbing, cycling, fishing, fishkeeping, motorbikes…
When “the guilt” would kick in and I would have a clear-out blitz, basically to get some more pocket money. This became a pattern, and a bloody hard pattern to break.

As all our old house stuff was at the back of the hangar/shed, it was a massive effort to empty the shed, something that demanded dry weather and something that I have never actually managed yet, so we bought new stuff for the caravan, which in turn became fuller and fuller.
I was kidding myself basically.
So, eventually (now) it all needed to be sorted out and either sold on, given away, recycled or burned. With burning being the only fast option, (but my dad hates fires and as it is his land, not really an option!)
eBay attracts the biggest audience, but with the highest percentage of tyrekickers/timewasters/freaks, some of whom are decent (normal) people, the rest who are just after something for nothing, with Mr. eBay sat back rubbing his hands when not sat in his undies counting the money pouring in! Selling fees go up and up and margins get tighter and tighter. A friend of mine who was a full time eBay seller, recently gave it up as it has just become harder and harder to make a buck.
“Good natured recycling” is what another mate of mine calls it, which is a better way to look at it. Even in these cost of living crisis times, it remains hard to sometimes even give stuff away, but it feels rewarding if you can sell something to someone who will appreciate it and maybe just about cover your P&P time/costs!
It is not a way to make money when one is skint.
(I only eBay when I am skint, which I have now realised is basically all the time, but believe me, I would kick it all well into touch in a heartbeat…)

After photographing and listing an item, you then get the questions;
“How big is it? (see description)”
“What colour is it? (see photos)”
“What is your “best” price? (see starting price and if that is 99p, hope for your life that more than one person is interested)”
“Will you post it? (COLLECTION ONLY PLEASE generally means a big fat NO, as it is to big/fragile/awkward to take to the Post Office)”

Then you get the ghost bidders, people who raise their hand, nod their head, scratch their nose, wink, then slope off into the background when the Gavel does down. So you have to relist it, when “watchers” (more often voyeurs than interested bidders) will assume there is something wrong with the item and send you a “Will you take a shilling for it with free delivery to China?” message. Then the pantomime starts again.

IF you do get a sale, you either have a demented “Blue Peter on speed meets Challenge Anneka” frenzy to catch the Post Office after work, or arrange a rendezvous.
I have met some really interesting, brilliant, genuine, lovely people but as many hardened “punters” who say the item was a “no-show”, then you start the Lost Item procedure, I could go on, but you get the general picture.

I have had a geezer from Essex coming up to buy a pushbike, a Cornish fisherman (defying all lockdown rules) to collect an imitation “Gibson Flying V”, and most recent a Missionary in Ghana, sending a courier from Birmingham, to pick up a keyboard going to a church in Accra  and many more, but very soon I would like to put it to bed. He says, typing this on a laptop on a train, facing backwards, on the way to Stevenage, to buy a car, which brings me nicely on to the next topic.

IBUYANYCAR.COM

I had a Honda XR125 Trials bike in Peru, I absolutely LOVED that bike, it took me to places I would never have seen, but when a big school bill suddenly reared its ugly head and the realisation that I had probably used up nearly all of my 9 lives in the Lima traffic, it had to go.
Bloody ‘ell, you think eBay is bad!
There is a kind of second hand market in Peru, in its relative infancy. Mercadolibre.com and the like. Online notice boards really, not a platform as such, with zero protection.
I did sell a bass guitar on there, what a ballache process that was, but buying and selling vehicles is a whole new level of pain that is!

Any vehicle; car, motorbike, mototaxi, llama or other, if being sold by someone married, needs to have both parties present and in agreement for a sale. A morning of inconvenience at best, but if one party disagrees or cannot go to the “Notaria”, forget it.
Every piece of paper/documentation in triplicate, (how I miss Latin American red tape) and then to “Banco de la Nacion”.

In Blighty you just have to hand over the green bit of the V5 and Voila, it’s your’s!

Too easy?

In January 2022, after selling my penultimate crown jewel, my beloved red Honda C90 SuperClunk, (the last crown jewel is my double bass, which I have carted round houses/flats/caravans/shed since 1989), I bought what was meant to be a long term project and investment which was our Nissan Elgrand campervan.

It was a beast! 3.3Litre V6 Automatic, which did about 10mpg, on a good day.
So, a conversion to Bi-Fuel, with a LPG conversion was the answer I thought, a tankful of gas for 80p a litre would make motoring practically free, but LPG became harder and harder to find and it still only did the same MPG. With high insurance and £300+ tax, it had to go too, which it did, to the first viewers (after filtering out the usual tyrekickers), had I sold myself short? One never knows, but the second hand vehicle market had definitely become a seller’s domain.
I started looking around at cheap runarounds; Ford Fusions (£30 tax), Fiat Pandas, and the Honda Jazz, with its patented “flat boot”.

I quickly became blinded by the GOV.UK MOT checking site.
Pretty much everything in my budget was either:
a) A future MOT failing money pit.
b) A complete rust bucket.
c) A combination of A & B.

We all make mistakes in life, it is how we learn (in theory), but this particular car deal was one to forget.

Now I was only after a cheap runaround and you don’t buy a Honda Jazz to race around the bus station car park on a Saturday night. Extreme steadiness personified and with a generally “mature” driving population cross section.

I did my 10 point check and had seen a few red flags/bargaining tools, but when it came to that awkward moment of bartering/haggling, something I did every day in Peru with hard-nosed emotionless efficiency, the vendor refused to budge. It was an onsight purchase, I could have (should have) walked away. There were “several” others interested, said the guy.
Lina was silent and the Nipper was uncharacteristically (scrabble bonanza that one) ungiddy.
A voice came out of my mouth “Ok, I’ll take it”.

What the handbagkettlepartridge was I thinking?!

I spent the rest of the day in a kind of mourning, sulking, what have I done, low mood.
Even washing my new acquisition didn’t endear it to me, there was no spark (well there was a spark, it is actually quite a good starter, but there was no passion or lurve for the new set of wheels).

THEN, another car model I had trawled eBay and Auto Trader for weeks and weeks for popped up as a “search alert” (dangerous things them, don’t be sucked in).

A K11 Nissan Micra, 2002, full service history, 21000 miles, undersealed, not a fleck of rust and not one MOT failure.

I was basically checking out the bridesmaids on my wedding day! The ink on the V5 had barely dried and I was eyeing up other motors!

I moped about and overthought it completely. There is only one picture hung up in the new flat and that is one of Lina and myself sat on the bonnet of the Silver Streak on my 40th birhtday, in the Gobi Desert. (“You are both smiling” says the Nipper! Not much of that these days).

Nostalgia is a very, very dangerous thing.

I did the sums (when I say I did the sums, the books were already cooked, it was really just a case of justifying it to myself and the convincing Lina that it was a potentially brilliant investment), Then I got in touch with the Vendor, John from Letchworth…

Cutting a long story short, my “value” addled brain justified a way of buying the Micra offset against selling the Jazz, backed up by a small buffer of junk sales on eBay.

So I bought a one way ticket to Stevenage and met the nicest North London couple you could ever meet, John and Anita, in a car park next to the station, had a good chinwag, checked the oil, did a few donuts round the car park and then drove it home.  John even filled the tank before I left, what a guy!

So “Red Rum” now sits outside my kitchen window and makes me smile when I look at him 😊

Anyone want to buy a Honda Jazz???

Smells a bit fishy…

I have always been interested in fishkeeping (now there is an admission by a Honda Jazz owner, zero rock and roll points this blog!)
As a kid, I had a small tank full of tropical fish, with very little idea of what I was doing, I had massive problems with algae and most of the poor little fellas ended up being buried in the garden.
Then as a young man, I was given a big tank and swatted up on it more and was quite good at it, until I came home from work one day and heard a “drip-drip-drip” which was the sign of a hairline crack and which pre-empted a trip to the pet shop with all my fish stock (not soup) in a bucket.
Then, during Lockdown in the caravan, I thought it was something that the Nipper and I could get into, so we bought a small aquarium, set it up and it was generally a success.

Now, tropical fish are not like goldfish, you can’t just scoop them up and plop them in a bowl of tap water, so moving a community of fish is a bit tricky. You need to set up a second tank and let it “cycle” which takes 1-2 weeks.

So, back in August, for my birthday I bought a HUGE tank off eBay from David in Normanton and kept it undercover for the big move, (as indeed we originally thought we were moving last summer, but it never happened).

Now my memory is bad, but I don’t remember it weighing as much as it did when I bought it, but then we only had to move it 3 yards from David’s garage to the van. There is a base which also weighs a ton and both units are a 70” cube, which holds about 1240 gallons of water!

My brother Danny is way stronger than me, but we both struggled to lift this new tank from the trailer to my door, then the shock-horror-realisation that it was about half an inch to wide to get through the door, and even if we did, to then get it up a flight of stairs and into the lounge, without dropping it, would be at very best, ambitious.

A plan B was quickly cooked up. I had to look for another tank.

Facebook marketplace is an unruly, unregulated version of eBay, but it has its uses and it turned up a tank in York, which I could collect that night!

Lina was not quite as onboard/enthusiastic about the idea as the Nipper and me, so she stayed at home unpacking boxes whilst we borrowed her car and trotted off  to try and  find the most hidden/impossible to find address in York. Now I am not judging the guy, but it was immediately evident that him and his mate had been having a smoke, and not just Benson & Hedges. They kindly put the tank in the car and after parting with some hard-earned we drove home, with Valentina asking me “What is that smell?”, as the car reeked of weed.

All was going smoothly until I tried the tricky manoeuvre of getting into our yard with its extremely tight right hand bend, and on an inky black night, as those of you who have scraped cars will know, if it goes wrong, reversing out of the problem usually makes it worse. I had never scraped a car in my life until then. It did not go down too well.

After getting the tank and cabinet upstairs successfully, it then proceeded to smell out the lounge with its stink of skunk. After a fortnight, the old boys from the old tank, were rehoused in the new tank and seem quite relaxed (possibly helped by the smell of weed. The old tank was sold on to a bloke who had bought it for his 5 year old son, so another cycle continues!

Meanwhile, no fishing outings this month, but hopefully will put that right soon.

Raiders round-up.

Not much sunshine at Craven Park yet this season 😦

No quite the out-of-the-blocks blinding start of last season, more of a “paced” approach.
Trouncing everyone (including Wigan) in the pre-season friendlies, then…

One solitary win, a draw and 5 defeats.
Away at Ally-fax today, a win would be a bonus!
Not panicking yet, but work to do.

New job?

Next time…

And finally

Last January, I caught Covid 19, (I might have mentioned this previously) which flourished into the not-so-delightful condition known generally as Long Covid, around about the time when everyone was sick to the hind teeth with lockdowns, facemasks, social distancing and the general pain in the ar$e rules, regulations and restrictions of the pandemic.

It came and it stayed, making me not really ill but a long way off feeling well. I had big problems sleeping, breathing and regulating my heart rate, and any ideas of exercise were out of the window, as C19 was a condition that it was not possible to push through, as it kicked back twice as hard.
I have already moaned about this at length, so the hopeful epitaph to this sorry episode is that I have found an inhaler that works, maybe coinciding with waiting for 14mths and it now seems to have gone. Hurrah!

On Thursday, I achieved one of my dreams that was simply to get back out into the hills, for the first time since the El Misti Race in 2019. Something that I seriously thought I might never do again.

It was a very steady (slow) outing, the weather was typical Peak District (rain, wind, mist) and I got lost, but it felt bloody great 😊

The Mickleden Straddle, in the High Peak was my first ever fell race as a senior and also a few years later, my first ever DNF, where my self imposed “vest only” declaration in early February was a trifle foolish!
Not an especially hard or technical race, it had a bit of everything including a few miles of tricky navigation, where naturally I got lost on Thursday. Did see an amazing toad though, which paced me for a while until it got away…

It was an important run for me as it finally buried the ghosts of my unfulfilled dreams of AQP, plus hopefully the last of bloody C19 and also that blot in the formbook DNF in 2003!

If my legs fall off tomorrow, I will be content that I did make it back onto the fells again, if only once!

Nicky Spinks is a person who inspires, motivates and amazes me in equal doses. An incredible person.

I met her in 2018 at a talk with another great Fellrunning legend, Joss Naylor.

THIS VIDEO is what makes me want to put on my trainers and get cold, wet and muddy!

That’s all for now folks.

Stay cool.
Johnny, Lina, and Valentina

p.s. If you do have time and want to see another truly inspirational video, watch THIS!