Chapter XIV

Well, hello again and thanks for tuning in, or whatever the equivalent is for reading a blog. I’m choosing to assume that you are here deliberately and not because you have inserted a Muppet’s name into Google and been directed to my pub-quiz chapter¹ . If you have, well then get a round in, and settle down for a quick read. It has been a wee while since the last update, so this could ramble on quite randomly for a bit. Mostly it has been a while  because of young Master S arriving and taking up a great deal of time. This has led to a decrease in the amount of leisure time I have, but has led to an increase in the opportunities to emotionally blackmail Mrs S.

Although to be fair, as she points out, if I really loved her, I wouldn’t emotionally blackmail her and she’d love a cup of tea whilst I’m up. So, I got to go biking. I didn’t ride a great deal when we first got to Timaru, and didn’t ride a great deal up until about the Easter holidays, but when the Easter holidays came I decided to get out and about a bit more.

Just around the corner from us here is a park called either the Scenic Park, or the Centennial Park. Locals seem to refer to it by either title, and as Scenic Park is shorter to type, I’ll call it that too. There is a small stream and spring in the bottom of a steep-sided valley, and the local council have given the local MTB club permission to build a ‘few’ trails. With a bit of ingenuity, a lot of digging and some bending of the space-time continuum (Who’d a thunk Slartibartfast moved to Timaru and took up biking and trail building) , the local MTB club have built a positive cornucopia of trails in quite a small area.

Depending on where you start from, and this is where I start, then here’s three different routes straight off. The two to the left of this picture are okay in the dry, but a bit slippy on the up in the wet. They all lead more or less to the same place though..

This is the middle track through this bit, one above and one below. I think it is an old quarry, there are quite a few in the Scenic, and some trails wind their way across the top of them, which is fun in the wet,  fun in the dark and chuffing hilarious when it is dark and wet. Zippy in the dry though. Zippy being the technical term obviously. On this part of this trail, it is vitally important that, if you are going to crash, crash left as opposed to say,  crash right. (Unless you are riding it the other way of course..)

I think this is the Goat Track, fans of Pram Cam (TM), will recognise Tatooine. If you aren’t a fan of Pram Cam (TM) shame on you. Or rather sham on you!

Gloriously wet and slippery pine-needled undulating single track. Sweaty and technical.

The start of the track known as ‘The Bypass’. It bypasses the old railway track, and is a lovely bit of single-track, bordering on genius. Don’t know who designed it, but it makes you want to go faster and faster through it until you slide off and find one of the many trees.  It’s the bit of track that feels most ‘British’². Possibly ‘cos it is quite muddy and aggy. Oh, and it sort of runs alongside the old railway track, built to take the stone from the quarry to build the docks, but bypasses it. Just so you know.

Normally, I can wee harder than this stream flows, but we’ve had a week of heavy rain, so now it’s about a foot deep. It connects to a line of track called ‘Flatliner’, which is a nice, easyish trail to ride and is on the way home. It is another section of track that is designed to bring out the hooligan in you, and wants you to try to mow down all the dog walkers whilst bombing along it at warp factor nine. Before you start muttering about ‘multi use environments and respecting others right to use..’  I should just say that ‘Flatliner’ and quite a few others have big wooden posts at either end saying ‘Mountain Bike Track’ and there are plenty of other paths for dog walking.  Once you’ve hooned it to the end of ‘Flatliner’, you can either go home, go around again or follow the stream to the sea. Choices, choices, choices. That’s the Scenic Park though, you can ride  or go round the harder stuff and there’s usually something fun. It has to be said it is bloomin’ slippy in the wet, especially some of the wooden bridge bits³. All the trails have a lovingly crafted feel and are designed to be able to be ridden by most people. Kind of, sort of,  like a diminutive Marin Trail, which suits me fine. As I get fitter, I can add more bits into the loop I ride, my next challenge is to try and ride more of the ‘ups’. Oh, and fall off less. *Ahem* Oh, and in order to help maintain them, we’ve joined, as a ‘Family’  the local MTB club.

We have continued to make the most of the opportunities of living in Timaru, one of which was a quick quince scrumping session from someone’s front hedge. We got away without any quincequonces as it were, and now have about ten jars of quince jelly. We’ll let you know how it turned out when we open a jar, as at the moment e are still working our way through a jar of apricot jam we made earlier. Mmmmm, apricot jam. Maybe I will try some on my porridge tomorrow morning, it could be a way of making porridge a little more palatable. I’m trying to avoid the ‘loads of cream and sugar’  technique to make porridge more appealing, as it is supposed to be the healthy option. I’ve been trying to take the healthy option a bit more recently. It occurred to me that I was eating a huge amount of cheese a week in sandwiches, and cheese is delicious quite high in fat, so in a bid to make lunch less delicious more healthy, I have been making a batch of vegetable soup on a Sunday and freezing portions. It’s cheap and healthy, although it can have some unfortunate side effects, especially the ‘Broccoli and Bean’ batch, (Although the ‘Cauliflower and Leek’ wasn’t too bad, and the ‘Lentil and Tomato’ could have been a lot worse).  We have a pumpkin patch in the garden, which is producing a fair few pumpkins without any effort from us, so  the produce is both free and ‘organic-by-neglect’  and I have been able to make some delicious healthy pumpkin soup. There is a knack to making pumpkin more palatable, and that’s to add a semi-lethal dose of paprika and a good pinch of cayenne pepper, which not only clears the sinuses a treat it distracts you from the pumpkin flavour. (Pumpkin isn’t as bad as you fear it might be, which is handy, because there’s a lot of  it about.) So that’s the cookery bit done and dusted. Except I was supposed to making gnocchi today, but it got a bit late so it is vegetarian shepherd’s pie instead.

Making the most of Timaru, that was going somewhere.. oh yes, the local library has been receiving our custom a fair bit, although they did almost get told to ‘do one’ when they tried to charge me $30 for damage to a book. Apparently, the edition of Neil Gaimen’s ‘Coraline and Other Stories’  I borrowed had some water damage (It is the rather nice black coloured page ends version)  I denied all knowledge, and offered to buy the book anyway. I also pointed out that it didn’t affetc the readability of the book in any way. Perhaps I should have thrown the librarian a box of chocolates to distract her, or a cute kitten picture (Stereotypes exist for a reason folks..) or, on the basis I can push a pram faster than she can waddle,  just done a runner, but in the end she just grunted and went off to stare pointedly at some-one for breathing too loudly. In the name of poetic license, I have just done the local librarians a massive disservice, they are all lovely really and very helpful.  Um, library, leads to books and so to reading. Read a fair bit recently, but nothing major really stands out in ‘recommend to people to read’ kind of way. Finished the Elizabeth Moon ‘Vatta’s War’ series. Yeah, not bad, a bit of one of those transference thingies where the author clearly wishes she could be the main protagonist, but quite readable. Still re-reading the ‘Sharpe’ series. Again, quite readable, a little predictable and formulaic but easy to read and curiously more-ish. I’ve started, and got past page ten of, Guillermo Del Torno’s book ‘The Strain’ but to be honest, having just re-read ”Salem’s Lot’ any vampire book  (Oops, there should have been a spoiler alert there, sorry) would have to be awesome, and ‘The Strain’ is definitely a bit blah. I’ll probably finish it, but if you liked ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ you may feel a little disappointed. I certainly expected more. I have read more books, I must have done, but the mind is drawing a blank at the moment. Re-reading ‘Ender’s Game’. It deserves another go, I know how it ends, but can’t remember how it gets there, if that makes sense. There’s a lot of re-reads going on..

Not really seen much film wise either recently, apart from one of the scariest movies I have ever seen. Quickly go and read the blog about post-apocalyptic dystopias, then go out and watch ‘Idiocracy’ by Mike ‘King of the Hill’ Judge. My word, a truly chilling vision of the future, and unless some-one starts enforcing sterilisation, an all too plausible consequence of the Jerry Springer generation. We have been watching ‘Life on Mars’ on DVD though. I sort of missed the first series when it aired and the first half of the second series, but caught a couple of episodes towards the tail end of series two. I’ve  enjoyed the way the series deals with the existential  philosophical concept of reality, the nature of good and evil, utilitarianism, ethics, determinism and free will and the notion of trust and faith in authority, but mostly I like watching Gene Hunt kicking in nonces and saying things like ‘Oi sugar tits, tea, white with two’. I think one of my favourite lines so far, went to Chris, the slightly dopey DC, who on seeing a man about to try to hang himself, said something like ‘I find there’s always time to put down the noose and put the kettle on’.

Musically, tragedy struck, as once again our hard drive is  knacked and this time the data is irretrievable. Somewhere, in a box in my parent’s utility room is our music collection on CD, and at some point we will ship it all over, but until then, my MP3 player has a few albums on it, as does Mrs S’s and we have bought a few CDs since we have been here. One of which is the Violent Femmes ‘Best of..’ which led to an unusual sing-along for Master S earlier.  The most recent batch from Amazon, was heavily weighted towards Master S, with Putumayo Kids featuring heavily. Children’s music with a bit of Guardian reader cred.  Two tracks that stand out in particular are a manic Italian version of ‘Old McDonald’  and a reggae version of ‘No More Monkeys’.

Oh, I have also been reading ‘Tiger’ by Nick Butterworth…..

1 Happens more than you think.

2 ‘British’ okay, okay, English. Okay, southern English. Alright, Thames Valley. Okay, okay that specific bit of the Thames Path between Pangbourne and Goring which is wooded.

3 Bloomin’ slippy= fucking lethal.