oj’s status update

This article in the Independent by Johann Hari got me out of complacency mode and back on the bicycle this morning.

If the environmental arguments aren’t compelling enough, surely the human ones are. People are murdered for Britain’s oil. How do you get away from that?

For example, in 1998, more than 100 ordinary villagers went to one of Chevron’s barges to ask peacefully to speak to the company’s managing director. They were told to wait.

They saw helicopters approaching, and assumed they were Chevron spokespeople – until the gunfire began. Two of them were shot dead. Others were taken away and tortured. The rest managed to flee. A Chevron spokesman admitted the corporation flew in the Nigerian soldiers who did the shooting – and that the protestors they murdered were unarmed.

After a month of excuses (which started with Chicken Pox, but got progressively less valid as the month went on) I finally got back on the bike and cycled into work this morning.

The virtuous path is littered with rewards, if you count something like following a bumblebee for 20 metres up the road at eye level as a reward (which I do… maybe I’m strange.)

Of course there is also the fiscal reward. I drove past the service station the other day and marvelled at the price of diesel - 130p per litre! (For Aussie readers, that’s over AU$3… or £80 / $192 to fill up my people-carrier!) My immediate thought was that the only way I’m going to feel good about seeing that sign on my way to work in the morning is if I’m cycling past it. So I cycled past it this morning, and it was blank. I guess they were in the middle of putting the price up.

The other immediate benefits of riding in are the endorphin rush (cranked up ‘Whole Lotta Love’ on YouTube and enjoyed ensuing silliness around the office - not sure if my workmates did) and the internal thermostat adjustment - am sitting here feeling a lot less chilly than I was yesterday, though the office is apparently the same temperature.

Re: Whole Lotta Love. Isn’t it nice that Robert Plant measures his love in inches?

Last night I dreamed that I was singing Goodshirt’s “When will the water in my ears stop dripping into my brain and washing all the good ideas away?” (that’s the title; it’s a real song) to a bunch of people at my new office.

I sung the first bit low, and the next bit high, and everyone discreetly left the room during the high bit.

That’s about it. Oh hang on, it was a flying dream too. When I fly in dreams, it’s usually along roads, a couple of feet above the ground. Sometimes I try to get higher but there are usually powerlines in the way.

We are finally in the new office today. It’s been an adventure, working from a dining room table (albeit a very nice one) for 4 weeks… but it’s good to have a desk, drawers, elbow room… that sort of thing.

I treated myself to some nice bicycle accessories now that I’m cycling to work. They cost about the same as a tank of fuel, so they will have paid for themselves after a couple of weeks.

… instead of staying up til 1am playing ‘who has the biggest brain’ on facebook:

- racking off kiwifruit wine
- sweeping kitchen
- finishing Bill Bryson book
- finishing Graeme Greene book
- finding panniers, bike lock, bike light etc to prepare for cycling to work in morning
- finishing off outstanding website work
- grabbing a guitar and sorting out half-written songs
- stretching
- sleeping

However, on the plus side:

- I’d had a productive day already
- I now apparently possess a 2801cc Squidlian brain
- I’m getting much better at dividing by 3

Pity in a way it’s not 2799cc, as that would make 3 neat compartments of 933cc each (but maybe I needed those extra 2cc to figure that out… um… yeah)