Meaningless, meaningless

Ohhhhhhhh.

 

I was just about to post saying has anyone seen this? and then I looked at Alan's blog and he had.  I'm obviously not the only one who listens to the Today programme.

 

It did bring to mind the bit of Everything is Illuminated (the book, not the rubbish film) where the whole of the shtetl takes up novel writing and they end up with a whole library of books which they never read. 

Oh my goodness!  What has Lucy got against Lauren Laverne?  She's brilliant, damnit.  Wash your mouth out girl!

 

So this is my first weekend off on iin a while.  No Tom, no obligations, bloody brilliant.  Yesterday I wrote a big list of things that I could possibly do and started working my way through it.  I've finally installed the right decoders on my PC so I can listen to mp3s and watch video stuff -- and it was easy.  Woo! 

 

Have started learning Spanish again so have been downloading muchas mp3s en Espanol -- this site's very nice; you can even play Wheel of Fortune in Spanish!  Tom's lent me his Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkaban, which I am steadily working through at a rate of about a page per half hour, but I can feel the language slowly osmosifying into my brain.  Soon I will be so fluent that I won't remember how to speak English and you'll all have to communicate with me by talk-ing ver-y slow-ly and add-ing "o" to every-thing word-o you say-o.  Oh yes.

 

Thought I'd take advantage of the lovely weather in the afternoon and decided to check out the cycle link to the Trans-Pennine Trail that you can supposedly access from Victoria Quays (by the Park Square roundabout).  The crappy map I managed to find on t'Interweb seemed to imply that this was along the canal -- but it turned out to be a poorly signposted and rather scabby road that smells of tramps' wee and runs alongside the canal but on the other side of a high wall.  So I cut back on to the canal as soon as possible.   And twas here I was reminded once more that Sheffield folk aren't like Leicester folk at all.

 

See, on a pleasant afternoon in Leicester at any time of year you're likely to come across a plethora of cyclists, families and other people out for a stroll.  In Sheffield the towpath is populated at sporadic intervals by fisherman of various ages and ethnicities and nobody else.   And, for the first time since I got by shiny new bike I was reminded of the few benefits of all terrain bikes -- they're suitable for all terrains.  The canal towpath is very muddy and not at all suitable for swift and narrow road bike wheels.  Although might be quite a good ride on munis?  Still, I like canals.  All the tumble-down Victorian buildings slowly reverting back to nature and the people on narrowboats saying hello as they go by, as though a remnant of a bygone era of universal friendship and goodwill.

 

Finally found the TPT but no sign of Meadowhall, which was what I was nominally aiming to find.  I realised when I saw the M1 that I'd probably missed it, and by that time the sun was looking rather low in the sky and I didn't fancy riding back down secluded backstreets in dodgy areas in the dark.

 

Got quite lost on the way back -- didn't want to take the canal and the signposted cycle path just disappeared, as they are wont to do in this part of the world.  A nice police woman who was just coming off duty told me I was on Attercliffe Road (which appears to be a Meadowhell ghost town) and it was easy from there.

 

After all that excitement, today is cleaning and shopping day.  And I might go and see my bizarre ex-neighbour, who is currently being put up in a Grimesthorpe B&B filled with people on the council housing waiting list.  Should be interesting. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So what do you attach jump leads to, then?