I've retired!

Well, retired at 29 - there's not many that can claim that! The shame of it is that I can't claim my pension until I'm 60, so this retirement lark might be a little short-lived. Ho well, easy come easy go :)

I had a great last week at work - spent a couple of days in Dublin running some informal training and drinking lots of Guiness, then the last couple of days in London, including a hilarious night out in West London. You don't get a gold watch for 1 year's service at AOL, but I was pleasantly surprised by a card and cash leaving present (will probably spend that on a memory card for the camera).

We spent our weekend at my parents' place in Suffolk, celebrating birthdays and enjoying the last throes of the English summer. There's a knife block on the way to join our incredible knife, and Dad's got some quality 60s sci-fi short stories for his next holiday. We ate a delicious meal at The Lighthouse in Aldeburgh - they put a pepper grinder and cylinder of French sea salt on the table instead of the usual salt and pepper cellars (I think that's a new indicator of how good a restaurant is....)

Plenty on our plates for the coming month, though - we've got lists a mile long of things that need doing (updating this blog isn't on any of those lists - I should probably be busy doing something else!). We're getting closer to finalising details of our trip - we've got some flights booked, just need to fiddle about with the dates. Itinerary will be something like:

• London - Nairobi
• overland Nairobi - Dar es Salaam
• Dar es Salaam - Delhi
• overland Delhi - Kathmandu
• Kathmandu - Colombo
• Colombo - Bangkok
• Bangkok - Sydney

It's going to be an amazing trip!

Planning to travel....

We're starting to plan out trip more seriously - I borrowed some guide books from work covering South East Asia and East Africa. Here's a great recipe for a saturday afternoon - take guide books to the pub, add a couple of beers or coffees and the pull-out sections from the paper, mix with enough rain to stop you walking back home after the first drink then let it all sit for a few hours. Delicious.

Was searching for some information about Tajikistan the other day (as you do), and came across this site which has photos from a trek through the mountains there, and from Samarkand and Bukhara. Looks like an incredible place to visit. The site also has great photos from other excellent trekking regions, including the Himalaya and the Andes.

Only a fortnight to go until I jack in my job....

Modern mountaineering

I'm reading Heinrich Harrer's "The White Spider", which is a seminal climbing text documenting the history of attempts on the North Face of the Eiger. Harrer was himself one of the party that first successfully made the ascent, but in fact is probably better known for his involvement with Tibet and the Dalai Lama in the years before the Chinese "liberation". Certainly, the book's a must-read for anyone interested in climbing, and moreover, for anyone planning a trip to the Alps of the Bernese-Oberland in Switzerland.

In Harrer's book he makes much of the press coverage of attempts on the Eiger. There was plenty of coverage in the climbing press, but there was also plenty in the popular press. If Harrer is to be believed, most of those popular press stories were uninformed, sensationalist, and in many cases plain morbid. Chris Bonnington also talks about similar levels of popular press interest in climbers during the early days of his career. He did in fact participate in a live TV programme covering an attempt to put up a new route on the Cheddar Gorge (I think) - this was supposed to make for informing, true-to-life and entertaining television. I would have enjoyed watching it, but I'm not sure how successful it was at the time.

In this morning's news, there's coverage of the rescue by helicopter of Slovenian climber Tomaz Humar from the upper slopes of Nanga Parbat. The press seem to have been fairly even-handed and non-sensationalist in comparison to the kind of reports that Harrer reviews in his book. Also, Humar has his own extensive website displaying hundreds of photos from his many expeditions (some of which are amazing) and even has a blog being updated by his support team at base camp. Things have changed since the days of queueing up at the telescopes on Kleine Sheidegg to watch the climbers struggling up the Eigerwand.

So I've had a slightly bizarre mix of 50-year-old and 12-hours-old mountaineering literature today. Flicking from one to the other really shows how far the sport has come - from claw-nailed boots and hemp ropes, to individuals solo-ing new routes up 8000 metre peaks. Mind you, I'd much rather immerse myself in these stories and images of mountaineering than watch the seconds tick by in my dull office as I wait for these last few weeks to be over. I'd love to be a mountaineer - but my fear of heights and trad-climbing kind of tells me that I should stick to just reading about it! :)

Is it only wednesday!??!?!

With only 3 and a half weeks left of work, days are dragging. Difficult to be motivated now that I'm leaving and won't be around to see anything through - difficult even to drag myself into the office on time. This is leaving me feeling mostly idle, or certainly rev'ing at a lower rpm than everyone else at work, which causes some tension. The tension seems to be entirely within me, and pulls between wanting to be professional and get on with work (and not to let my team-mates down), and wanting to just sit back and fiddle my time away doing very little. The end result is a string of unsatisfying days, which is definitely dragging me down. Tough times.

Had a wonderful time last weekend, borrowing a friend's Smart Roadster for the drive to and from Devon - what a great car! Very small, but feels so quick and sporty. Having a turbo, with a turbo pressure guage mounted on the dash, is great fun. After a few hundred miles in it, I could easily be persuaded to get one of my own :) Unfortunately, the weather in Devon was typically English - grey, drizzly, and sub-20 degrees. Looking at photos of our trip to the same part of Devon in July 2003, I can see that we had some very similar weather.

Yesterday, though, the sun returned to London after a fortnight's absence (presumably shining somewhere else in the world) and we had a barbie to mark the last night in the UK for our Brisbanite visitors. Nothing like tending a chock-full barbie with plenty of beer and wine on hand, good company, and a balmy evening. Looking forward to hopefully keeping that up once we get to Oz! I've always been a charcoal barbie man, but I can see myself getting into gas-fired Aussie barbie style once we're over there. I'm still tempted to maintain a cheap charcoal barbie on the side for old-time's sake, and to preserve my Englishness!

I'm still fighting my way through The Algebraist - it's a good book, but it's not great, and not one
of his best. I've tried to avoid reading reviews of books and music before I've made up my own mind, but after writing that last blog entry I thought I'd see what the Guardian had to say. They were pretty bang on with their review.

...and for a pretty comprehensive review website, check out metacritic for games, music, film and books.