Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

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've been growing tomatoes in my garden. Some from seedlings and some germinated from seed. I had about 10 large tomato plants in my garden and another colony at my parents (I couldn't fit all the seedlings in pots in my garden).

Within the past few days, I've lost almost all the plants in my garden to tomato blight, a fungal infestation possibly brought on by the bad run of cloudy, damp weather we've had. My once-proud 8ft plants have turned into a rotten mush.

I spent this afternoon collecting the dead and trying to save the remainder with anti-fungal spray. There was a depressingly large amount of dead stuff to throw out. My garden feels very empty now without the tomatoes in there, so I'm going to have to think of something else to start growing.

Thankfully, Rebecca managed to salvage some of the ripe and unripe fruit from the vines, so we'll see what can be made with them. Rosie also turned up to commiserate (above).

Apparently, this year has been particularly bad in the UK for tomato blight, and farmers are going mad with the sprayers. As if to confirm this, the colony at my parents' house has also died out.

So, in future, I'll be making sure to spray them with anti-fungal chemicals regularly and to look out for the first signs of the rot setting in.

Either that, or emigrate to somewhere with proper summers.

I had an overdose on Tuesday.

Nobody found me at home with a trickle of blood coming from my dead nostrils. I wasn't passed out in the lounge with a belt around my arm and a needle hanging from my shriveled vein.

That's because I overdosed on coffee.

It isn't the first time, you know. I've overdosed on caffeine before. I remember vividly drinking several strong cups of coffee before going to the gym late one night and being unable to sleep for the whole night. I lay in bed until about 4am, before realising that I was desperate for the bathroom. And here began my dilemma: if I get out of bed, I'll have a heart attack, if I stay in bed I'll humiliate myself. I finally reached a compromise of falling out of bed and dragging myself to the bathroom. I thought my heart was about to explode!

Still, it gave me a preview of an average night in the life of the infirm.

So I felt more empathy than sympathy for this Teenager who overdosed on 7 double espressos, a girl who was a bit tired at work in a coffee shop and ended up in hospital with a caffeine overdose. And she and I are not isolated cases - two friends of mine have completely messed up their body clocks through excess habitual caffeine consumption.

But no Ciaran blog post is complete without some whinge or another. My whinge today is about the abysmal spelling that seems to insinuate itself into everyday life, especially in shop signs. A fine example is the one I spotted with my colleague Chris in a cafe today. What the bloody hell is an Expresso anyway? And why do so many people say expresso instead of espresso?

I'm upgrading my hosting. This may break a couple of links in the site and cause other screwy behaviour. Please bear with me as I complete the migration. If you spot anything particularly amiss, or find that the site runs slowly, please let me know.

I finally caved in and bought a Wii this week.

I’ve had a weird relationship with consoles. Ages ago, I wanted to go halves with my cousin on a super hi-tech Atari 2600. The problem with that was that my cousin lived in Germany and I lived in London. Since he was older than me, I’m pretty sure I’d never have seen that console.

I also have some vague memories of walking through Bentalls or John Lewis and overhearing a boy trying to explain to his father that he was after a joystick, not a joss stick, and that he wasn’t trying to buy drugs (for a while in the early ’80s there seemed to be an idea that joss sticks were marijuana).

I haven’t actually owned a console since the early 1990s, when I briefly owned a second-hand Gameboy. I got a bit fed up of it, since I had a PC and preferred to read on the go, rather than play games in pixellated black and white.

So why did I take the plunge and buy the Wii in the first place, given that I spend arguably enough time on the PC as it is? Well, the main reason is that it is incredibly fun and incredibly social. Instead of going head to head with Sony and Microsoft to produce the biggest, most powerful console, Nintendo have put together something very different. The Wii isn’t about having the best graphics, it’s about having fun and making gaming accessible to people who don’t usually get involved with gaming.

The really stand-out thing about the console is the much-talked-about control system, that uses a combination of infrared and accelerometers to work out what movements you are making with your hands. Thus, the little remote becomes a tennis racket, baseball bat, golf club, or your hands in the case of the bowling game or the boxing game (see photo of Rebecca beating the bejesus out of her opponent).

Pretty soon after setting the thing up, Rebecca and I were leaping around the room like crazed apes, playing the included game, Wii Sports. The controls are incredibly simple and accurate - swing the controller like a putter and it putts, swing it like a bat and it bats. It’s very easy to pick up. Anyway, without further ado, here are the results of our first, fairly drunken, fairly epic evening:

• Tennis - Rebecca won
• Baseball - Rebecca won
• Golf - Rebecca won
• Boxing - Rebecca won with a Knock Out
• Bowling - Rebecca won after getting three strikes in a row.

So it’s official - Rebecca is a natural, and I have all the gear but no idea.