fourteen degrees centigrade. clear.

Sunset marked the start of Rosh Hashanah. A new moon, a new start, another software failure. Squarespace is becoming depressingly unreliable as a blogging platform, I'm afraid. These crashes always seem to come when I am most tired and least able to afford the time to re-write my entries. I need to find an alternative. Never mind, we persevere, as we must.

I just got back from a week's walking in Andalucia. My first escape from Britannia's grey embrace for over one thousand cloudy nights. Whenever I get back from a holiday I am always reminded of The Journey of the Magi:

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation

More words and pictures to follow, once the fatigue fades and the disorientation dwindles.

fifteen degrees centigrade. cloudy.

Achewood all going on an eight page road trip over at Dark Horse. El mejor!

seventeen degrees centigrade. cloudy.

If you're wondering why no update yesterday, wonder no more: I was running 10,000m round the industrial wastelands surrounding Wembley stadium. In the rain. In the dark.

Yeah, the Nike Human Race seemed like a grand idea when I signed up for it, those many moons ago. It seemed less of a good idea when I was wheezing my way through an attempt at 5,000m last Bank Holiday Monday after a long weekend spent drunkenly passing out on the sofa. It seemed even less of a good idea on Thursday, when I woke up with a head full of enough phlegm to recite the Welsh phone book. I hate colds. They have preternaturally bad timing.

There were reasons enough to demur on the day itself, frankly; mainly concerning the inevitable insufferable corporate bullshit that comes from getting involved with a company like Nike. There was the compulsory made-in-Malaysia T shirt. The free Starbucks voucher. The Livestrong armband. The utterly inappropriate B-list 'warm-up' gig beforehand, which meant we were sitting on our arses in a cold stadium for two hours before the race. And of course, the bizarre choice of time and place: the dark, winding streets around Wembley on a Sunday night. Hint to Nike organisers: next time, let us turn up and run. Preferably in daylight. Preferably on a course that is predominantly flat, straight and wide. I think the most telling moment for me was sprinting to a finish only to run smack into a wall of sweaty bodies 20 metres beyond the finish line, all queueing up to claim their 'free' Yeah I'm a goddamn winner you son of a bitch T-shirt. Yes, I admit: I did pick up one too. I figure I'd stick it on Ebay for charity, seeing as Nike only deigned to give GBP3.00 of our GBP30.00 race fee to the charities of their choosing.

For the record, your friendly neighbourhood iconoclast Exile, running with a plain, royal blue sweatshirt over his mandatory bland corporate-supplied apparel, finished the distance in 1 hour and 20 seconds, putting me 8,767th among the 20,000 runners in London and 93,825th worldwide.

P.S. Oh, and thanks again to Squarespace - another V5 crash means this is now the second time in three months I've had to write a post twice. An hour and a half of my life I'm not going to get back. Cheers.

twenty one degrees centigrade. cloudy.

Jack Shedd's Big Contrarian is the blog Medway Exiles Club would be if I were smarter and American, etc.

This post, on the subject of writing blogs, hit the spot especially :

Write top ten lists and whore yourself on as many other sites as you possibly can. Don’t be thoughtful, long-winded or interesting. Don’t write about what you love, unless what you love is popular on Digg. And for god’s sake don’t even think about writing about more than one topic.

Whether their strategies work or not is slightly beside the point. It’s cheap. It’s marketing driven, instead of content driven. It’s the type of thinking that leads to a sequel to the movie Garfield.

I'm not given to meta-posts, but for the avoidance of any doubt: the day I develop anything resembling a coherent strategy for this nonsense, the day you start to see adverts or sponsored links, the day I start to post up a list of the five best ways I like to be tossed off, the day I ask anyone to pay a penny toward this preposterous piece of vanity, you can take me out into the street and beat me with sticks. Big ones.

It took me until my late twenties to really discover what integrity is, why it's important, and what you need to do (and not do) to hold on to it, preserve it and nurture it. I don't know how I managed to go through sixteen years of government education, and twenty plus (on and off) of parental instruction without anyone mentioning it, but there we are. I know it now.

seventeen degrees centigrade. rain.

Nothing if not eclectic, my readership.