New Blog

10 days after writing that last post I shoved my camping gear into my rucsac and caught a bus into the Peak District. I got off at Blackwell in the Peak, threw my tent up in the campsite there, and rushed off up the nearest hill. I spent the week reminding myself what it was like to not have to go and work in a square box for eight hours a day. I revisited places I'd known as a teenager, and discovered new ones. I got lost and changed my plans, I got wet and dried off. I drank slow cups of tea and talked to people I bumped into. I watched the sun set and saw the stars. The feeling of freedom was overwhelming. At the end of the week I walked 8 miles with my 30lb pack and caught the bus back again.

I checked the jobs websites and my emails and started planning the next trip. Lincolnshire seemed a good option for my first cycle-touring trip in years. Nice and flat, isn't it? Well, yes, some of it, but the Lincolnshire Wolds are more than undulating, and where the land is flat, it makes up for lack of contours with headwinds. I had another great week discovering a whole county which was largely unknown to me, despite my Lincoln heritage (my father grew up in the city). Lincolnshire has pleasant and in places unique landscapes, traditional market towns, quiet roads, and a fine tradition of food that is enthusiastically promoted by Lincolnshire Tourism. It was good to discover so much cycling potential so close to where I live, and I was soon planning further trips.

All well and good, but I was supposed to be finding a job? Well, I'm not going to bore people with details, but my new blog is called On Me Bike. I hope to see you there.

Friday evenings: reasons to be cheerful

• No more school for more than two days - in this case potentially no more school EVER.
• Pop! Glug glug glug glug. Shluurrp. Crunch crunch.
• Cooking dinner listening to the News Quiz.
• After-dinner stroll around the neighbourhood, criticising other people's front gardens and trying to talk to cats.
• Doing the ironing listening to the Astronomer Royal talking about the history of star-gazing.

Blimey I know how to have a good time.

The road home

Yesterday was my last proper day at Ryton Gardens, and it's almost exactly a year since I started this blog with photos of sunny fields, flowers and butterflies. It's not like that this summer...

This is the River Avon between Wolston and Brandon, my route home. Fortunately there is a pedestrian bridge, or I would have got very wet going home after a pretty wearing day.

This is the River Sowe. It was higher than I've ever seen it before, though I couldn't get photos which directly compared with my previous blogs here and here without taking a detour of a mile then back again. My short-cut was well under water!

This is Stoke Floods, a lake formed by mining subsidence which the Sowe fills. I guess the name says it all... The interpretation board is usually on dry land, as one would expect. There were several lads out keenly fishing for disoriented carp.

Although everybody was enjoying themselves here (it was almost a party atmosphere in Wolston), it's been a pretty crummy couple of days for many people elsewhere in the county. All that water in the River Avon and River Sowe is now inundating Tewkesbury or Gloucester. I truly hope that this is not a harbinger of what is to come with climate change. I truly hope I'm wrong about what I think is happening to the weather. Even if it means that I needn't have stopped flying to all those places I would love to go to, and should have applied for all those jobs which I turned my nose up at because you had to drive around three counties (in your own car).

On Tuesday all my worldly goods will be travelling back up to Nottingham, where I lived till I was 18 and which I may well be making my long-term home. So this looks like the end for CovBlog. I'm sitting surrounded by cardboard boxes, and tomorrow the computer will be getting boxed up like all the rest. There will be no NottmBlog in the foreseeable future, and certainly not a TeacherTrainingBlog. I may do a 'best of' post of unpublished photos, if I get round to it.

Although it's been a pretty mixed year, and though things haven't turned out as I'd hoped professionally, Coventry has not been a bad place to live. Thank you for reading CovBlog during the last year - I suspect that I have had a small but very select readership!

Summer flooding happened so fast...

It's been a bit wet the last couple of days, wouldn't you know, and guess what? Lots of us have been out taking photos. Is this a particularly wet year or do I live in a very wet place? Being slightly fluvially-obsessed (never lived near a river before) I took more pictures of the Sowe. Could be the deepest yet - but difficult to say. Compare it with with my January post on the same theme.

The bit of chestnut paling is identifiable in both. A couple of days ago it was hanging a couple of metres above the water level. More photos of wet Warwickshire here. This link contains inappropriate use of apostrophes, so beware if you are sensitive to grammatical malpractice.

Global warming or what? (The near-tropical rain, not the apostrophes). Despite now having two pairs of wet trainers and two sets of wet waterproofs drying out, I'm still happy to not have a car.

Music to defrag discs to

Fopp, I think, will be my new favourite shop. Not sure yet if there is one in Cov, but spent a very happy hour or so in the branch in Bath the other day. The opportunity to listen to my booty came last night when I decided to defrag the hard disc on the old 'puter. This meant that I couldn't do any maths homework (yippee!) so I lounged about on the sofa listening to 'Chavez Ravine' - Ry Cooder, 'Before the Flood' - Bob Dylan/The Band, and 'The Man in Black' - Johnny Cash. Wonderful! I think I may have to wait to listen to 'PUNK F**k Art Let's Danse' (various artists) till I am sure that my neighbours are out...

The defrag took nearly 12 hours and has resulted in some improvement to computer speed - I'm sure you are all interested to know... By the way, does anyone know any tips on unit conversions?

Weekend Bath

Spent a jolly weekend visiting Tabflower and Hubby and Bean. A city with hills and views is rather a novelty to me at the moment, even more so a kitchen with a view of hills - so I gladly volunteered to do the washing-up!

Off down the Kennet and Avon canal on a borrowed bike (made me realise that my brakes are not exactly state of the art...) to dodge all the other Sunday cyclists, strollers, joggers, etc. It's rather different from the canal towpaths which I normally frequent.

This surreal sculpture may be connected with the nearby narrow-boat - a narrow-boat you can imagine Tolkien describing (if you can imagine Tolkien imagining narrowboats) - with round windows, doors, and a roof made of coppice poles. Just one of many lovingly-adapted boats, stretching along much of the ten miles to Bradford-on-Avon. Lots of arty recycled windows, gardens in containers on roofs, even a 'green' roofed boat. I liked the slogan in one window: "We're all here 'cos we're not all here". I wonder if this is where some of the people who were called New Age Travellers by the media 15-odd years ago have ended up. It seems an idyllic lifestyle, living on a narrowboat, but it could just as easily be pretty tough. It was obvious that some boat dwellers were not able to spend much money on upkeep. I didn't take any photos, as I feel it is rather cheeky.

Until this week I thought cube roots were diced vegetables

It's been a bit quiet at CovBlog recently, I know. The weather turned normal again, so I've not been out cycling much and taking nice photos. What I have been doing is maths. Never thought I'd say that - and I've been enjoying it too. When I did my 'O' Levels (yes... that long ago) my big success wasn't the A in English, Biology and Geography, nor even the B in Chemistry - it was the CSE Grade 1 in Maths. Without going into boring details, the combination of shortsightedness (didn't realise you were meant to SEE the blackboard till I was 10) and disenchanted or misguided teachers, meant that maths was just not my thing. Thank goodness for Mr Baggaley (it's only the really good and really bad teachers whose names you can remember after 28 years) who pulled the whole class through the CSE syllabus in one year. A third of the class got Grade 1, the golden grade which was equivalent to an 'O' level C, and meant you'd didn't have to retake.

But... I've decided to train to be a teacher, and though my prized CSE is adequate to get into teacher training, I suspected that my maths wasn't up to teaching modern sciences. And how right I was! I've enrolled on an Open University Short Science Course called 'Maths for Science', and I'm slowly negotiating the first chapter. The one which you are supposed to know pretty well anyway. So it's been onto the GCSE Bitesize Revision website (the wonderful BBC!) to revisit hazily remembered and sketchily learnt subjects like fractions, directed numbers, powers, square roots and cube roots. I think I might have been staring out of the window the day we did cube roots. And there seem to be things now called surds which I've never heard of. Actually it's all very interesting, and I do seem to be picking things up, the only trouble is I keep dropping them again. Tonight I had to look at Key Stage 3 Bitesize Revision to remind myself about some things. Fortunately you can take two months to do the course - or five!

Even if I don't get into teaching, I'm hoping that it'll have been worth doing this course. It's a great feeling to work things out for myself, and to realise that it wasn't because I was thick that I found maths so difficult. But I've to negotiate trigonometry, logarithms and statistics yet!

Though I've not been out at weekends much, I've had a few evening expeditions when I got too stir crazy. I've discovered a route out of town which gets into sort-of countryside in about 10 minutes. It goes past the new hideous hosptital (PFI, wards being closed to save money...) across the A46 and up Walsgrave Hill, which even has a trig point on the top. From there you can see the whole of Coventry. Then you can turn away and cycle across a field into Coombe Abbey Country Park and cycle around the woods in the encroaching darkness. Saw a badger the other evening - the first live one I've seen for about 20 years.

Now, I've procrastinated for long enough...back to 'Multiplying and dividing with powers'. I understood it last night, now lets see if I remember it...