Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

During the past two days, I've travelled about 400km and experienced two different ways of looking at the world.

The first was when Nev and I had just finished climbing Tunnel Mountain, just outside Banff. During the 2.3km climb, we were overtaken by some rather nubile young ladies. "If only We were a bit younger" we thought, referring, of course, to our fitness and ability to keep up with them back in the days when, five years or so ago, we were training hard at full-contact karate.

When I got to the top, I had a good sit down and admired the view (photos to be added later). The girls, however, were far ahead of their teacher, who joined them to give them a little talk at the summit about the beautiful valley they lived in, as well as giving them a bit of a historical perspective on the area. Apparently, Queen Victoria herself had come to the top of the mountain and had sat upon a purpose-built throne, cut into the mountain, to survey her domininon.

At one point, one of the students remarked that one learns something new every day. The teacher responded that it is important to learn something new about oneself every day.

To the cynical British ear, this was a little cheesy, but why should this be the case?

I've spoken to many people who have commented on how refreshing it is to have been to North America (lumping the USA and Canada together here) and have been exposed to the wonderful optimism and "can-do" spirit out there.

I was impressed by the respect and positive attitude of the class on that summit. My inspiration towards perhaps one day becoming a teacher was renewed.

I'm now in Crowsnest Pass. We're now on our Westbound stretch back to Vancouver Island.

Nev and I just had a wonderful rib dinner. What's very, very nice about going out in Canada is that wherever we seem to go, we end up falling into random chats with strangers. This time, we joined a couple at their table.

The couple was an ex-pat from the UK and her Canadian boyfriend of several years. They were charming and wonderful company.

What was interesting, however,  was that the expat was probably the most negative person I've spoken to on my trip: everything from the car we were driving, to London living, to the hicksville quality of the locals was subject to some sort of derision.

Is this tendency to play down the good things in life and focus on the bad a peculiarly British phenomenon?

Is my last question yet another self-effacing jab at the British psyche?

Will my questions never cease?

I'm in Jasper in Jasper National Park.

It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site - one of the largest protected areas in the world.

When you drive in here - you need to pass through a toll booth and pay your way in, declaring how long you intend to stay there. The site's enormous, so you have to factor in how long you'll be driving through as well.

In exchange, you get a sticker for your windscreen (like a pay and display ticket) and a guide brochure. Here's what the brochure has to say on the exciting subject of bear attacks:

IF THE BEAR BEHAVIOUR IS DEFENSIVE

You surprise a bear. It may be feeding, protecting its cubs or just unaware of your presence. It sees you as an immediate threat and feels that it must fight. This is the most common attack situation.

• If you have bear spray, use it (according to the manufacturer's instructions)
• If the bear makes contact with you, play dead! Showing submission will probably end the attack.
• Lie on your stomach with your legs apart, so the bear cannot easily flip you over.
• Cover the back of your head with your hands.
• Keep your pack on to protect your back.

Defensive attacks seldom last more than two minutes. If the attack continues, it may have shifted from defensive to predatory.

In this case, fight back!

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't expose my family jewels to a big hungry bear. Nor would I just lie there and allow him or her to claw at me for a full TWO MINUTES before deciding to fight back.

I recently had a pretty cowardly encounter with a bear, whilst on a bicycle. I'm no expert, but I know enough about life to be pretty sure of one thing: I'd soil myself and run like hell!

We're in the Rockies, in Jasper. It took a good few hours, but we cleared almost 500km today…

Jasper's on the other side of the Rockies, in Alberta. It's the first time I've driven across a time zone which hasn't involved going into France. France doesn't really count, since it's the same latitude as most of the UK.

We spent the previous evening in Kamloops, which is a place you go to in order to get to somewhere else. Having said that, it does have a curry house, which is pretty cosmopolitan I suppose. It also has a pretty good bar, which we made sure to thoroughly test before passing out in the grimy, stinking motel we'd found.

A late start this morning began with a quick check of the health of the Beast's engine. The Lincoln Continental has been attracting lots of double-takes, a few positive comments and some requests for photo ops. Even so - it is almost as old as I am and has a load of roof insulation in the engine to hold a loose gasket in place and a fair bit of duct tape on the front bumper.

In the Rockies, there's no radio and no mobile 'phone reception. If your car dies out here, so do you. Thankfully, the Beast saw us right through to Jasper.

We come through some fairly odd places. There was Avola, which advertised a promising-looking diner, but turned out to be a town bereft of people but filled with yapping dogs and empty houses.

There was also Blue River, which had a great grill, but some weird inbred-looking chef. Was that a beefburger or a human burger?

The Rockies are a weird mixture of desolate and beautiful. Sometimes, you're right in the clouds and can see them floating through the trees. It's incredible.

On roadtrips, you get to ponder and contemplate a wide variety of things, but I won't go into those. Sometimes the space to think is welcome. Sometimes it isn't.

I sometimes worry that I take my life a little for granted.

Truly, honestly: what's the point in life? You work, eat sleep and that's about it… I'm not confessing to being suicidal or anything. I'm just conceding that on the cosmic scale, there isn't much point is there?

Being an atheist, I don't see myself as having some important role to play on a giant celestial chessboard, so I don't have that to fall back on when I'm struggling to set myself a new goal or make sense of the world. That's the challenge, I suppose, of the philosophical path I've taken.

But in view of the above, I sometimes fear that I don't have a particularly strong survival instinct. After all, if there's no point, why work hard to stick around?

Thankfully, these fears were put to bed quite firmly today on the slopes of Whistler.

You see, I definitely have a strong survival instinct. Not bowel-looseningly strong, but strong enough to avoid risking my neck in pursuit of greatness.

Nev and I are coming up to the end of week one of a three-week road trip across the Rockies. We had stopped at Whistler to enjoy the resort and see what was going on with the snow and the slopes.

Whistler itself is pretty. Pretty and pretty fake as well. The whole town is clearly geared for the tourists and everything you see in Whistler was built since 1980 in Swiss chalet style. It feels a little like Disneyland, only a little colder.

We decided to do a little offroad mountain biking down the slopes. It's fantastic: you take a chairlift up the slope and ride down. No need to pedal uphill!

We had to hire bikes and were successfully upsold the hire of body armour. I was sceptical at first, but it seems to have been money well spent: I took at least three high-speed tumbles and despite the armour still had some nice little marks to show for it.

And I think a lot of my trouble down the slope was due to my very strong sense of self-preservation. I think If I hadn't been so worried about falling off, I wouldn't have fallen off. I would have committed to the runs a little better. I wouldn't have jammed the brakes quite as much, locking the wheels. 

So my self-preservation kept me from a prize: being able to go on the crazy hard runs (I always stuck to the easiest), and being able to brag (but I can always make stuff up later).

Coming down the run, I passed a mother bear and two cubs. They were incredible. My trail took me within 20 feet of them, and I pedalled like crazy to get away. The second run I took, I decided to ready my camera: a bear 20 feet away on camera would be incredible. As it happened, the mother bear was further up the trail now blocking my path. This (6 ft)was the closest I'd ever been to a bear. Not only that, but the bear had her cubs with her. Madness! The Fear took hold and I cycled away down an alternate path. Again: self-preservation got in the way of a great prize.  

Thankfully, I have a telephoto lens…

Just as I was remonstrating with myself, I passed a crossing point, where I could cycle across into another trail of much higher difficulty. This would have meant me doing a 10 foot jump into thin air. Was I crazy? I'd never jumped a bike that high before. Would I end up with a broken femur? Would I lose all my teeth? Would I spend the rest of the holiday in Accident and Emergency?

Too late - I'd missed the crossing. About 40 meters down the trail, however, I saw a young chap getting bandaged up by a first aid patrolman. It looked like a closed fracture of the clavicle. Clearly, his self-preservation instincts were not as developed as mine.

Sometimes, being a wuss has its uses. A friend has promised to teach me to hurl myself out of an aeroplane. That's something I'm just going to have to consider… 

I'm in Canada now, visiting my friend Nev on Vancouver Island.

For once, I'm the first one up and doing things, but that's probably more to do with the fact that for me it's past two in the afternoon and for everyone else it's around six am. By "everyone else", I'm referring to Nev and my two new friends in the flat: Nev's cousin Ben (whose flat it is) and his buddy Mike.

I have a feeling that these chaps aren't going to make it up for a spot of early sunday morning ornithology or a bracing run along Vancouver Island's beaches. This could be something to do with the fact that we've been sleeping among the detritus of a fine evening eating pizza, drinking Canadian beer (not as bad as is rumoured, actually) and playing Guitar Hero II.

It was fairly tricky getting here. After 11 hours on a plane from the UK, I landed in Vancouver airport. The airport's on the mainland and I wanted to get to the island. To do this, one can usually take a normal plane, a float plane or a ferry, but since it was so late in the evening, I couldn't take a float plane (something I'd always wanted to do), and the standard plane was $410 for a 20 minute trip. The fare was $410 because the ticket agent knew that I had no time to get to the ferry terminal before the last one for the night set sail, so he could charge whatever he wanted.

In the end, I had the hairiest trip of my life in the back of a cab adorned with little pictures of Guru Nanak. With 2 minutes to spare, and my heart practically bursting through my chest, I made it aboard the ferry for the 90-minute ride to Vancouver Island.

Nev greeted me at the island terminal and we got into "The Beast". Land yacht is about the right description for the car: it's massive, it's white and it floats along the road on generous suspension. I think we've hit gold as far as a roadtrip vehicle goes. The seats are like enormous couches. Sure, it may be more a question of how many gallons to the mile, rather than miles to the gallon, but we'll be comfortable in our guilt.

More importantly, the boot of the car was nice and roomy. This afforded us with the opportunity to carry plentiful supplies of beer for the party we were going to, and when we arrived, we found the police (unimaginatively known by the party guests as "Pigs") and Fire Brigade (more imaginatively known as "Fire Pigs") pulling into the party's driveway, lights flashing.

It was bedlam, a crushed pickup truck sat in the front garden and fire and police crews were running around whilst the party crowd (in excess of 100) in the garden jeered. Beers in hand, and crate under arm, Nev and I picked our way through the crowd to find his cousin, whose birthday it was. Instead we encoutered varied and nefarious locals who made us feel very welcome. Some highlights:

• "I love accents! I so love accents! Your accent is awesome!"
• "Im Irish, so I am. Yes I'm 100% Irish. Born and raised in BC!"
• "Say 'Knickers'! Your accent is so funny!"
• "Dude! Chestbump!"
• "You came 5000 miles to get to a party? Cool!"
• And the common: "London's so cool! I always wanted to go to London!"

The fire crews got to work and made a very thorough job of irrigating the bonfire. The crowd jeered and people got cold, but continued drinking, laughing, swearing, partying. At some point, the police and fire crew left. Under a full moon, we mixed well with the crowd and were made to feel very welcome. Everybody was very friendly.

A girl of about 5'8" was talking to some chaps and a tiny girl of 5' bounced across the garden towards her, screaming something. Hands went for hair and before you knew it, the bigger girl was bent over getting a good, solid, brutilicious kicking in the face.

Quite a few times, actually.

There was some good wrestling too, when it went to the ground. It was a completely unfair match: It seemed that whilst the tiny girl was about half the weight of the bigger girl, she dominated: "It's not size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog".

Somebody broke up the fight. The little girl complained about getting blood all over her top and went off to get changed, and we did some tequila around a new campfire.

A 5000 mile flight, a sprint for a ferry after a knuckle-whitening Sikh-themed cabride, a party, a police presence, a load of beer and a nifty catfight all washed down with tequila: that's quite some Friday night.

I'm off on a three-week road trip with my good buddy Nev. We're going to cruise around British Columbia in a 1979 Lincoln Continental.

I've no idea what our route will be, where we'll sleep each night or what each day will hold; and I'm not sure I want to know either.

Just the thrill of the open road and the fear of the unknown… 

I'm hoping both my body and soul will make it back in one piece, but if they don't I probably won't be aware enough of what's going on to care.

In any case, wish me bon voyage, and I'll try to post blogs as I go or at least regurgitate it all in posts afterwards (in the queue with the dozen or so other blog posts I've only half-written).

I never used to be a morning person, especially as a teenager. I think I’m a lot more of a morning person since starting work, but I always want to go back to sleep when I wake up on a weekday. On the weekends, I can’t have a lie-in. It’s all very odd.

I have to admit that I’m probably not getting enough sleep at the moment, with the evenings being so long and the light piercing the blinds so early in the morning now. I suppose it’s typical human nature to see the bad in the good, so I’ll hold off any implication of a formal complaint about the weather, the sunshine etc and just say that I’m probably not getting enough sleep at the moment.

Anyway - the weather’s warm, but the tubes are sweaty and hot, but I’m working in my company’s very cool office near Borough Market at the moment. I don’t often get a chance to work here, usually I’m posted out to some nasty industrial estate or something, so I make a point of having what I think is probably the best cup of coffee in London.

This isn’t meant to sound like an advert, but Monmouth Coffee on Borough Market absolutely does it for me. Hands-down. 100%. There’s even a Facebook appreciation group for it now! It’s expensive, at £2 for a small cup, but a great treat and loads better than Starbucks. I make a point of buying an almond croissant from the bakery just across from Monmouth, but since the coffee is so rich and creamy, I’m almost too full to devour the croissant after sucking down that coffee goodness.

My friend at work, Tom Hopkins, has some pretty damning things to say about coffee these days. Where many of us just shrug their shoulders about the parlous state of coffee on the go, Tom’s written an entire post about it on his blog, including an analysis of the horrors of “Americano” coffee and “magic box” coffee machines. I can’t disagree.

However, whilst Tom agrees about the best cup of coffee in London, we disagree over which is better: Latte or straight filter with milk.

I’m right, of course.

Ellen and Andy got married in Kent on 28th April 2007.

All the digital photos are here. I still have to develop the film ones. More to follow shortly.

Happily munching my lunch in the beer garden of my local, this cat walks along the wall. I love cats, so I talked to it and he jumped off the wall and came to say hello back!

I congratulated myself on being a “Cat Whisperer” - having an deep affinity with cats and being able to communicate with them above and beyond that of any normal human.

My bubble was popped mercilessly when the little blighter started trying to get at my food!

I was eating a particularly nice big piece of grilled chicken with salad and he kept trying to get on the table and steal some, so I had to put things in his way and watch him like a hawk. Look at his grumpy little face (and click the picture for more…).

This always happens! I think they want to be friends with me and I then find out that all they want is food!