Traffic!

Traffic!

don’t talk to me about traffic!

When I were a lad, I used to cycle everywhere. I was pretty quick. I probably averaged well up in the teens, perhaps sometimes 20 mile an hour. In fact I did a couple of charity rides in France, where we did indeed average 20 miles per hour as a relay team, covering about 550 miles.

The secret is bananas.

We bought a crate of bananas and had these in the back of a transit van with the 4 bikes (well three bikes - one was on the road). We started off in Dijon and cycled north, four of us taking turns to do about an hour on the bike at a time.

Before each session, we’d have a banana.

We must have been doing something right, ‘coz we won, although it wasn’t supposed to be a race. But give 7 teams a route to travel and what do you expect?

Anyway, we were the only team with bananas and we won, so what other conclusion can you draw?

I never wanted to see another banana again for quite some time, but it was worth it for the win!

Ah, I got a little diverted, which is also what happened to us on Saturday night. We were going up to Hatch End, where we used to live (near Harrow) to see a friend of ours play her French horn in a concert. The concert started at 7.30 pm and there was a talk beforehand, to tell us about the composers and such, which started at 7pm.

Google said it would take 1hr 24 mins, so we left at 5:30.

Google was wrong!

We crawled along, bumper to bumper for about the first hour, which got us to the junction of the A4 and north circular. At this stage the satnav was forecasting that we would arrive at 19:32, 2 minutes after the start of the concert, meaning we would most likely be refused admission.

Should we turn round and go home? Of course not! We would soldier on! There was still hope! The rest of the way there, the satnav taunted us - the ETA would sometimes drop to 19:28 and bolster our enthusiasm, then it would surge again to 19:33 and cause a sinking feeling.

I took every opportunity to sneak ahead, not giving an inch to other drivers. They probably all hated me and called me every name under the sun (well, moon).

We pulled up into the car park at 19:29 and Mrs A jumped out and legged it into the auditorium.

I had to park the car and luckily found what must have been the last space in the car park. Would I be barred from entry due to my tardiness in arriving 3 minutes late?

As it turned out, they were very gracious about it. They even let me go to the loo (which for a middle aged man after a 2 hour drive was becoming something of a priority). I was allowed to sneak in after the start of the concert and take my seat at the back, which fortunately didn’t disturb anyone else.

A great concert!

And the journey home? Mrs A took the wheel and we were home in 60 minutes! Because of the reduced traffic you understand!?

A little while ago, Mrs A came across a group of people who do ‘Quiz walks’ in Surrey. Since we know Surrey pretty well - we used to live in next door Sussex and would often go walking in the Surrey hills, and still do, this sounded like fun.

The idea is that you walk a route and look for ‘cryptic crossword style’ clues.

We’ve been on three of these walks now. The first one was set by a guy who, being kind about it, was on a different wavelength to us. Because it was the first time we’d been, a very nice chap who was a regular volunteered to team up with us and show us the ropes.

He kept stressing that this ‘wasn’t like normal’ and trying to convince us to come again. Despite the obtuse clues, we enjoyed the walk and we have been back a couple of times since.

By pure coincidence, our daughter Hija, who knows I like puzzles, had forwarded me a link to something on Instagram (not somewhere I’m often found) which had a daily cryptic crossword clue, which was then explained the following day. In fact if you get it right, you can get the explanation straight away.

I’ve always been fascinated by cryptic crosswords, but never been that good at them, so this renewed my interest and started to give me a better idea how to solve them.

Since the quiz walks clues are in a similar ‘cryptic’ vein, this fell nicely into place.

This weekend, we took along a friend, who was, as it turned out, quite good at cryptic crosswords as well, so we did rather better than on previous occasions, scoring 20 out of 25!

I am pretty competitive, so this was gratifying, however I can honestly say that I enjoy the walks regardless of how many clues we are able to answer.

Sadly, with the nights drawing in, this will be the last one until springtime. I’ll have to console myself by doing the Telegraph crossword, which is now available on an app and will tell you whether you’ve got a clue right or not. I’ve managed to finish a couple with hardly any help at all!

Mid-week we had an evening visit to our daughter Hija’s where Little Ray of Sunshine has a new scooter.

She loves wearing the helmet and wanted to ride outside. For some reason I’ve yet to fathom, I was the one that got volunteered to take her outside to practice scooting. I thought this was going to be just scooting back and forth on the patio, but that was simply not good enough - LRS is far more adventurous than that! - she wanted to go out and scoot round the pavements.

So we scooted to the end of the road and I suggested we head back home now.

Nope!

We turned left and scooted down the road to the end. By this time it’s a toss of a coin whether it’s closer to turn back or keep going round the block and LRS’s wanderlust was going in only one direction!

So we carried on, me stooping over the scooter, steering her away from trees, walls and cars and her scooting away, giggling and shouting “I did it, I did it”.

Eventually we made a sharp left back into Hija’s garden when I could stand up fully again and take a breather.

This sense of adventure didn’t just come out of nowhere.

LRS must be one of the best travelled babies on the planet! By her first birthday she had already visited Argentina twice, had visited 3 continents and has racked up more air miles than I have in considerably longer (and with Mrs A having a severe case of the wanderlust, I’m no slouch in the travel department either!)

So it stands to reason that if, by the age of two, you have practically circumnavigated the globe, a bit of scooting back and forth in the garden is just not going to cut it!

That’s it for this week.

Time for the weekend!

Have a good ‘un.

Jerry