The White Caterpillar – Part 3

In which Roger of Sicily completes his daring journey home. Oh, hold on – that’s given away the ending. CONTAINS SPOILERS. Too late.

Part 4 – The Ramp

Five minutes before we got back onto the correct route for a 671 bus, I had texted Elvira saying that if the bus didn’t speed up, I was going to get off and walk.

Oh! The folly of impetuous youth, dear reader!

Turns out, we were stuck behind two cars that had collided in the middle of the road.

Why is it that by the time you get to the scene of an accident, they’ve always just managed to clear it out of the road?

Obviously, I’m not addressing that rhetorical question to any emergency rescue personnel who may be reading. It’s more directed at the casual sitter-and-waiter in traffic jams.

Into Rodley we headed, and I expected the worst. The road up to the notorious Rodley roundabout (the precise analogue of the Traverse of the Gods on the Eiger’s Nordwand) is almost always jammed up. The road from Calverley to Greengates is always jammed too, so I expected gridlock from this point onwards to the end of my bus journey.

“Hold on”, called the driver as we rounded the corner on the approach to the roundabout. I think he meant it in a jaunty, team-spirity way rather than in a literal, alarming way. But I did, just in case.

Well, the roundabout was indeed jammed – but NOT IN THE WAY WE WERE GOING!

I cannot tell you of the joy that went around the bus as we realised that traffic was coming out of Calverley, but none was going in. If the other passengers or myself had spoken to or looked at each other, I’m sure we would all have shared a very special moment of camaraderie. Still, it was implicit.

And on we sped, unimpeded by further traffic. Now that we were back on route, we started picking up passengers – loudmouthed secondary school gobshites mostly.

What is it about being in a school uniform and in a group that makes young people feel an obligation to shout?

And to shout complete bollocks at that?

We crossed the border into Bradford. Friendly territory at last. The bus pulled up and I barged past the teenage guttersnipes. “Well done”, I said to the bus driver as I disembarked.

Part 5 – The Second Ice Field

I had rested for about two hours by this time, and my clothing – while hardly dry – was at least warm.

I must here take the opportunity to pay tribute to my shoes.

The standard, black leather lace-up, brogue-style ankle boot may not be the most fashionable piece of footwear in the men’s department right now. Especially when it has a rounded toe and a rubber sole with “Clarks” embossed on it.

But by god they kept my feet warm and dry, no matter what I was walking through. And as we all know, wet feet are objectively the single worst thing in the whole universe.

Those shoes are the unsung heroes to whom I must pay tribute.

I hopped off the bus and immediately noticed a change in the road conditions since I had boarded.

The snow was now much wetter and rain-like. The road was covered in slush.

Oh brown slush! Child of snow and mud and sly dog poo - how I had missed you!

The thaw had truly begun.

Thus heartened, I began the final yomp back to Casa Sicily.

Walking on snow is really quite uncomfortable. As I had discovered while trying to haul my bike to a suitable berth, brogues afford relatively little purchase. You are therefore forced to walk with flat feet, splayed outward, rolling your shoulders to maintain balance and forward momentum – in a manner reminiscent of the young Liam Gallagher.

[Facebook friends – notice anything familiar? Yes, I am reusing status updates from last month! ODHSNM used to be so much better...]

Back to the plot.

Are we all familiar with the thoracolumbar fascia? Also known as the thoracolumbar aponeurosis?

Good.

Long-term readers will know that this is an area of my back with which I have – if not outright trouble – then nagging doubts.

It turns out that this bit of muscle – which, I must say, feels a little bit too deep to be called a “fascia” – does a hell of a lot of the work when you’re walking uphill in snowy conditions with your feet turned out. And waterlogged, falling-down overtrousers etc.

15 minutes after arriving home, I was unable to bend at the waist. Two days later, the tops of my thighs and the backs of my calves joined in.

Strange, isn’t it, how one’s muscles will often wait a day or so before complaining about over extertion? It makes me think of that terrible silence between the crash and the child starting to cry. The longer that silence is, the more serious you know the screaming is going to be.

Onward and upward, upward and onward I went. By now, the snow was pretty much just rain. I was steaming like a Grand National winner. I kept telling myself “just get to that point then you can stop for a rest”.

I soon realised that “stopping for a rest” would result in my entire body ceasing to function properly – which would necessitate what the mountaineers call a “bivouac” (ie sleeping in a ditch until someone rescued me). In the words of Gaston Rebuffat:

“The human animal in me was unhappy”.

So I didn’t stop and on and on I went. I measured the distance covered the next day. Two miles.

I know it doesn’t sound very impressive. But then the Eiger is only about 13000 feet high, which is about two and a half miles. And I walked further than that. Yes, with a bus journey in the middle, and yes, on a slightly shallower gradient. But a GREATER DISTANCE nonetheless.

Eventually I made it home. My children rejoiced at my return: Roger Jr by carrying on watching TV in the living room; and Tancred by attempting to bring me in on his side in his ongoing, screamed demand for crisps.

Always Tancred with the crisps. Oddly, after he was bought off with chocolate buttons, he proclaimed “I’m not crying any more Daddy” – as if he had only just noticed. However, he started again soon after the buttons were gone.

Part 6 – Epilogue

That evening, I took one final leaf out of the book of Heinrich Harrer – and indeed of the many other 19^th and early 20^th century explorers whose books I have been reading in recent years.

They often treat brandy as a medicine for fortifying people. In general, we no longer use strong alcohol as a means of bringing people to their senses – but I thought, why not? If it was good enough to get Andreas Heckmair down the mountain, it should be good enough for me.

However, by mistake I drank the best part of half a bottle of whisky and instead of being fortified and revived, I became even more tired – and had a hangover on top of the manifold aches and pains the next day. Clearly, my constitution differs from theirs in more ways than one.

Nevertheless, I did manage to get my bike back the next day. All the snow melted overnight, as if it had never been there. Had it all been a dream?

The White Caterpillar – Part 2

We last saw Roger of Sicily dumping his scooter in a snowdrift, and setting off on foot to walk home in the blizzard of February 13, 2013.

Part 3 – The First Ice Field

All things considered, I was not as disheartened at the prospect of figuring out how to get home from the outskirts of central Leeds in a snowstorm as you might expect.

Firstly, I was quite well-dressed for the occasion – not a statement I have regular cause to make. I had on waterproof trousers, a water-proof and insulated coat, heavy gloves and – last but not least – a crash helmet. I was only wearing ordinary office shoes though, to which I will have cause for laudatory return to later.

I was unlikely to get too cold. However, walking in all that get up is fairly difficult.

The overtrousers are prone to a continuous downward trajectory, usually settling with the gusset a good six to eight inches below the ideal level. That means the upward lift of the armoured leg is more demanding than when otherwise unencumbered. Melting snow added to the weight.

I quickly gave up on wearing the crash helmet, as it made me look insane. I started off by carrying it, like a lady’s handbag. After half a mile or so, I realised that it now had about an inch of snow in the bottom of it. So I strapped it to my backpack instead.

Do you have a Buff? I have a Buff. It’s like a scarf for people who are not ponces. Mine is black with red flames on, because I am a rock and roll outlaw.

I pulled mine over my head in an LA gangsta bandana style. On viewing my image in a window – so on reflection in two senses – in fact, I looked more like an out-of-breath Hairy Biker Simon King.

Not like this...

...like this

Style, of course, was not my primary concern. Keeping my ears warm was.

So off I went, and I was soon trudging up a hill with no footpath – that is, I was walking in the road as there was no traffic coming at all.

And on and on it went.

I stopped at the occasional bus stop to catch my breath.

Eventually, I glanced behind and there was a bus coming! I started to run to the nearest bus stop.

Running after walking uphill in snow for a mile or so while wearing a lovely warm set of protective clothing was not – I soon discovered – something that made me go any faster. But I carried on anyway.

I’m the kind of person who would rather be half an hour early than a minute late. Knowing that the bus was coming – even if it would have had to suddenly accelerate to light speed to overtake me (a velocity Transdev's fleet has yet, to my knowledge, ever to attain) – I had to get to the bus stop as quickly as possible. Even if (i) that meant I moved in a manner that got me there no more quickly but used considerably more energy and (ii) it meant I had a long wait gasping for breath and watching the distant bus approaching.

I checked the distance I had walked the next day. It was just over a mile. It felt more like ten.

Part 4 – Hell Ride to Stanningley

As the first bus approached, my heart sank – 508!

But what’s that right behind it? Holy shit, it’s only ANOTHER BUS! And a 671!

The 671 goes to Greengates before turning off to Bradford city centre. Greengates is only a couple of miles from where I live. I can catch another bus from there or walk it, I thought. It will be a nice opportunity to catch my breath.

I got on board. The bus was largely deserted. There were maybe another seven or eight people on there.

I was steaming. That’s not some kind of metaphor. I was quite literally wreathed in a mist coming off my body. I doubt it was pleasant for the other passengers.

We had got to the crest of a hill where the road descends to Rodley when another bus driver – without bus – banged on the window.

He told the driver (and a woman passenger heading to Calverley who had by this time attached herself to the driver in a semi-official, self-appointed capacity as co-driver and general source of unsolicited advice) that there was NO WAY we could go down there, as there were a load of buses piled up unable to get out of the bottom of the dip.

And so began our journey to the outer limits.

The outer limits of West Yorkshire bus route 671, at any rate. We continued straight ahead.

Around 90 minutes later, we finally came into Rodley – probably about half a mile from where we had left the route.

We had been on a fairly wide diversion, which I – having nothing better to do than sit and try to dry my gloves, Buff and helmet out – followed closely on Google Maps.

What did we do before Google Maps, ladies and gentlemen? I suppose we got lost more. And were unable to follow and critique the improvisations of lost bus drivers.

Turns out, when heavy snow falls, a lot of people want to get home quickly. And the upshot of this is that nobody gets home quickly, because all the roads immediately grind to a halt under the weight of the extra traffic.

Weirdly, some of the roads we took were completely gridlocked and others were completely empty. Another reason to have Google Maps on at all times – you’re not then restricted to the four roads that everyone knows about.

Kasparek and Harrer: drying out

Returning to “The White Spider” I remembered reading that mountaineers typically resorted to drying out their wet clothes by wearing them, hoping that body heat would do the rest of the work.

Hanging over the back of the bus seat in front of me was clearly not having much of an effect on my gloves, so I put everything back on with the intention of steam cleaning my gear dry.

Very soon, I was shivering with cold but unwilling to take the soaked equipment off, as I would end up even colder.

We passed through Stanningley – past the big camping shop, where I wondered if I had time to hop off the bus and nip in for crampons – and into Farsley. Kids threw snowballs at the bus, as the heroic, off-route driver refused to pick them up. Soon we were crawling into Rodley. Very very slowly.

In the next thrilling and mercifully final instalment, Roger of Sicily returns heroically home – to be confronted with a two-year-old screaming for crisps. 

The White Caterpillar – Part 1

I am reading a book called “The White Spider” at the moment.

Yes, a book! Not an out-of-copyright free Kindle ebook. It was a birthday present.

It is the story of the first ascent of the north face of the Eiger, by one of the party that did it in 1938. By all accounts, it was a pretty unpleasant experience – mollified only by the fact that they, unlike a lot of the other people who attempted to climb it, did not die.

Well, yesterday I experienced my own snowbound odyssey. It wasn’t perhaps quite as steep, or cold, or risky, or indeed historic as Heinrich Harrer’s – but at the time, it felt not too dissimilar.

Even though I did end up on a bus for quite a lot of it.

So I am calling my own adventure “The White Caterpillar”, for the following reasons:

• Caterpillars are less dangerous than spiders (unless eaten)
• Caterpillars are a bit fat and generally unsuited to strenuous physical extertion – like me

I should point out at this point that the White Caterpillar has nothing to do with the “white slug” referenced in The Inbetweeners movie... I was fully trousered – double trousered in fact – the whole time.

Part 1 – The Ascent

I don’t know if anyone else saw it yesterday morning (February 13) but the sky was uncommonly red when I was walking the dogs around 7am. So red, in fact, that everything took on a pinkish hue, much as I would imagine it would in the aftermath of an atomic blast.

In both these sets of circumstances – red sky in the morning and immediately after a nuclear explosion – shepherds are exhorted to take warning. Some people say sailors – I say shepherds.

Alas! I did not take the hint. I merely commented on how pretty the sky was, hopped onto my oft-mentioned scooter and zipped away to work. As per my undertaking at the end of “Horsforth and my balls...”, I was wearing full waterproofs.

Now, it’s about 10 miles by road from my house to my office and the journey in was uneventful.

Part 2 – Leeds to Kirkstall

It soon began to snow. I wasn’t worried. It does that a lot around here, and usually it’s only the last 100 metres of my journey home (ie the road I live on) that causes a problem. Everything else is a main road and they tend to stay clear.

I kept an eye on a planter in the middle of the road outside my windows to monitor the progress of the snow.

First, the soil was coated with snow. That’s nothing to worry about, I thought.

Then the leaves of the flowers went white.

By lunchtime, the cobblestones between the two carriageways was getting a dusting, but the roads themselves were still clear. I had no cause for concern.

I had intended to leave about 2pm, so I could get home before it started to get colder/darker/snowier and so I could get some work done when I got back. I didn't believe that there would be a problem. After all, snow had been forecast - the gritters would have been out...

By about 1.45pm, the snow was encroaching onto the road from the edges and it looked like a blizzard was in progress. I decided that it was now or never. The main roads would still be fine.

I jokingly said to some colleagues as I left that I would probably be dead in 30 minutes.

As soon as I was on my bike, I realised it wasn’t fine.

Visibility was appalling – my helmet was continually steaming up, and even when I could see through it, my vision was impeded by the barrage of snow.

But worse still was the road surface. Maybe half a mile out of Leeds city centre and the snow was being compacted into ice. I was on Burley Road, which is very undulating (not unlike the motion of a caterpillar). I should have gone down Kirkstall Road. Maybe that would have been better.

Vehicles with front-wheel drive were swishing their back ends left and right. Vehicles with rear-wheel drive were only going forward at 10-20 degrees off straight. No one was going more than 10mph.

I was soon going along with both feet on the ground to try to steady my fishtailing back wheel, stopping repeatedly to let anyone coming up behind me pass, so that if I came off there would be no one to run me over and so as not to have anyone lose control and run into the back of me.

By the time I got to Kirkstall Hill, I was – for want of a better expression – shitting myself, as cars and lorries skidded around and ploughed into one another. I gave up on Kirkstall Lane, rang Elvira – who was expecting me to get home so she could leave Tancred with me while she picked Roger Jr up from school.

There was no way I could make further progress. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of losing control and coming off my bike – which I was. I was more worried about someone else losing control and hitting me.

I pushed the bike on foot into a car park – approximately 300 metres and it took me at least 15 minutes as I had no grip from my shoes and the bike weighs about 18 stone. It was like dragging an unconscious fat man on a skateboard across an ice rink, with a runaway Zamboni careering towards you.

I locked up, and set off on foot.

Come back tomorrow for the second exciting episode of Roger of Sicily’s attempt to get home in bad weather!

The Snowmanhood

At the weekend, my kids and I built a snowman.

Only it did not look like a snowman. It looked like a colossal penis, made out of snow.

I am not sure how other people make the conventional snowman-shaped snowman. Every attempt I made to create a body just ended up looking like a shaft.

And it got bigger. And bigger.

And every attempt I made to make it look less like a cock, only made it look more like a cock. Putting big round head on top, for example, was a project swiftly abandoned.

The kids, naturally, were oblivious to my growing discomfort regarding the social unacceptability of constructing a five foot tall fertility symbol on one’s front lawn.

Fortunately, Roger Jr saved the day with the suggestion that it should be an alien – and so a little decoration later, and behold! One giant space caterpillar.

And that – I thought – was the end of my troubles.

Until the following morning.

Whereupon, I transpired that the giant space caterpillar was not quite as solidly constructed on one side as the other.

And as such, had started to droop. As you can see, this created the unfortunate impression of just a hint of scrotum. 

By the following day – with a fresh coat of snow obscuring the carrot, stones and turnip which distinguish a space caterpillar from a giant penis – the angle of droopage had worsened.

And it was the same the next day as well.

Sadly, I did not take a picture on the last day of standing proud. By that time, it had attained an angle which was both mathematically fascinating and thoroughly obscene.

I returned home on Tuesday night, to see the mighty member lying prone and flaccid upon the ground. I was relieved, but also saddened. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. 

Post Script

I may not be able to build a child-friendly snowman, but I can make one mean snow whippet.  

Sic Semper Tyrannis

I am genuinely surprised to see the outpouring of grief for HMV and Blockbuster over the last few days.

Both are object lessons in corporate hubris and deserve no pity for their fall.

Both these shops priced their products as high as they thought they could sell them at (£4 for a 24-hour DVD rental? £17 for an “import” CD?) and only discounted what they couldn’t shift.

I don’t really have an axe to grind against HMV, but I have always hated Blockbuster.

• You always had to queue because there were never enough staff on – something I experienced in five or six different branches, and so which must be a deliberate matter of company policy.
• The fact that you had to (i) go to the shop, (ii) wait and pay and (iii) then come back to the shop was a huge pain the arse.
• They often didn’t have what you wanted, because (i) someone else had rented it or (ii) they just didn’t deal with a particular distributor.

We were early joiners or LoveFilm, which just blew Blockbuster out of the water – and like many others I am amazed it has lasted this long. Neither shop made any serious effort to adapt to the existence of a little thing that has transformed every aspect of life in this country...the internet...

E-commerce sites at least try to make you feel like a valued customer, not a nuisance who can be ignored, talked down to and kept waiting to part with his money. 

Will the high streets be poorer for the demise of these “institutions”?

Only if you think that town centres have to play the same role in the future that they have done for the last 50 years – that is, as dreary monotonous temples of retail.

I’m afraid to say that everything these shops did, internet providers do better and cheaper. If shops want to survive, they need to discover something they can do that the efficiency of the internet can’t.

And if companies expect any kind of affection from their customers, they need to not try and screw every penny out of them for as little effort as possible while the going is good – because it won’t last forever. 

It’s (not) Christmas (any more)!

Christmas is now but a distant memory, with only a cupboard full of unwanted chocolate and ever-greater discomfort around the waist to remind us it was ever here.  

Lots of amusing things happen over Christmas, don’t they? And yet because we’re “away from our desks” over the period and because once we’re back at them Christmas is the last thing anyone wants to think about, we rarely get an opportunity to dissect them.

Well, fret no more! ODHSNM once again strides out where the mainstream media fears to tread and features a Christmas-focused article in mid January.

Much like Tulisa, One Direction and other glitzy celebs, the Pope tossed off a book for Xmas this festive season.

And "The Infancy Narratives - Jesus of Nazareth” did not disappoint with its no-holds-barred, warts-and-all, nothing-left-to-the-imagination account of how the Christmas story is not actually true.

You sit on a throne of lies

It may come as rather a shock to you to hear this coming from His Holiness Benedict XVI – accustomed as we are during December to driving past empty-looking churches festooned with passive-aggressive posters insisting “if it wasn’t for Jesus you wouldn’t have ANY Christmas”.

Particularly in the light of the various absurd articles of faith the Holy Father has not yet seen fit to debunk.

But if Jesus was not actually born on December 25, then what is stopping us from having a staggered Christmas season?

Not that sort of staggering, you cheeky monkey you.

No, why can’t we just choose when to celebrate it? For example, shortly after the January sales? Everyone doing it at once is highly inefficient. It creates queues, allows businesses to ramp up prices, makes us all take a really quiet week in the office as leave etc. Plus the weather is always shit.

If we’re all getting the date wrong anyway (and I refer you to the Pastor aeternus of 1870 – the bit on Papal infallibility), Jesus would presumably not mind if we all got it wrong on some other, more convenient date of our choosing.

I told you this year’s theme was going to be calendar reform. We’re starting early.

Speaking of “starting early” one of the best things about Christmas is the expectation that you will – nay, obligation to – drink alcohol during the (admittedly scanty) hours of daylight.

WHY?

Not only that, but you are entitled to drink things that you would never consider drinking at any other time – such as advocaat, sherry or banana liqueur.  Or indeed red-coloured paint thinner with clove oil in it, also known as “mulled wine” at this time of year.

Nothing quite beats the feeling of settling down in a chair thinking “it’s 3pm, I’m hammered, I may well fall asleep and nobody is going to give me a hard time about it”.

And if it wasn’t for Jesus, you wouldn’t be allowed to do that so you really should go to church to make it up to him. He looks a bit annoyed.

But really, Christmas is a time for the kids (and if it wasn’t for Jesus, you wouldn’t have any kids).

What I really want to know is, when did it become necessary to have a set of wire cutters about your person when sitting down to open kids’ presents?

I have seen nuclear reactors less comprehensively sealed and 50-storey buildings less securely anchored than most of the things our boys got this year.

A plastic horse we got for Tancred (retail value, I dunno, about £5?) was (i) in a cardboard box that was (ii) taped shut inside and out and then (iii) attached to the packaging by tightly-wound wires around each foot and its tail.

The whole thing is completely crime-proof unless you...oh, I don’t know...STEAL THE BOX AS WELL.

As it was, my finger ends were bleeding raw by lunchtime from repeated attempts to separate box and plastic lump. 

Jesus really doesn’t like all that packaging. He’s tutting and pursing his lips right now.

But if you look round at him, he’ll pretend to be doing something else. 

Is there anything, readership, you would like to share about Christmas? Perhaps you bought ten lighters for a euro and some batteries at an English market in Germany? Or maybe you wonder why the official canon of Christmas songs ends at around 1986? Let's have your amusing observations below. 

Top Six Pictures of Things I Have Seen

And what I thought about them – at the time and later on. Let’s start 2013 with a bang!

By “a bang” I mean of course some random bits and pieces that would not warrant a blog post in their own right but which it is technically possible to argue have a unifying theme.

So here we go.

Walking my dogs in the woods, I came across this (left) carved upon a big stone.

It says “Solvitur Ambulando”, which is Latin for “solve it by walking”. Considering my largely unsuccessful attempts to solve my incipient obesity by walking last year, I was somewhat sceptical of the sentiment, but the more I have thought about it, the better it becomes.

There are not many problems that don’t benefit from a bit of a walk – although my wife (Elvira of Castille - you know by now) is not in agreement with Diogenes of Sinope that you can “solve” a dispute by “walking” away from it.

A little bit of wisdom found in the woods for you there.

A day trip saw us pass by the road to hell (above) and found the Sicilies in a very weird place called Botany Bay near Chorley, where we encountered this mysterious object to the left. What is it, you ask?

Why, a traditional garden obelisk, of course.

A what?

A TRADITIONAL GARDEN OBELISK! Obviously. 

It creates height and interest in beds and borders!

I must confess that have never come across the tradition of having an obelisk in one’s garden. Perhaps it’s an Egyptian thing.

Also at Botany Bay, I came across this, to the right. A spiked carving dish. So far, so mundane.

But what is that extra feature I see?

A GRAVY WELL!

All this time, we’ve been making our gravy from granules when I could have been hauling it up in a bucket from an underground stock aquifer in Denmark. Who knew?

Back to the real world and I show you Boston FC’s car park on Christmas Day 2012. 

As you can see, it was quite floody. The heavy rain had waterlogged the local vinegar mine as well. 

And finally, I give you the acceptable face of Lincolnshire racism. Stay classy Boston!