Social – Page 28 – Fooyah

May 15 2014

Lightning Port

I had to get my iPhone fixed recently. The charging connector would only fit correctly into the socket at very particular angles. This was a touch annoying and it also meant that I couldn’t play music in the car as I use the cable to send information to the stereo. I could connect via the headphone cable but that’s a pain and I can’t use the car stereo to control the iPhone.

Searching online it looked as though I was going to have to post the phone it off to some company and then wait for it to be returned. I was almost looking forward to spending some time without my phone. It would certainly be a bit weird. I know I rely on it a lot for weather, news, email, twitter, remote control, in fact nearly everything tech-wise. I rarely turn on my PC now because I don’t do a great deal on it. I use the PC when I have to type because I don’t like non-tactile typing on phones [such as writing this website].

For some reason I hadn’t thought of looking for shops in town that would fix my phone. I also had found some instructions online showing how to do this by myself but given the equipment I would have to buy and the time and stress of doing this alone in my dining room it just wasn’t worth it. I would have liked to have tried doing it myself but the phone is a precious thing!

I searched Google and the little map bit in the right came up with some possible places in town where I could get the phone fixed. I gave one a call and they seemed confident they could fix my port and also change the battery at the same time. I enquired about warranties and times to fix etc. I was reasonably happy to let them have my phone.

One morning I took my phone in to town and left it with Mobile Street to be fixed. Customer service was good. They seemed like bright people and confident they could fix my phone. It would take about an hour.

Later, I went to collect the phone, pay my bill which was comparable to the online services, and feel connected again. The technicians had managed to fix my phone charging port, replace the battery and also clean some chocolate that had ended up being dropped in the speaker grill.

The charging port works brilliantly. The battery seems better than previously but I haven’t really been able to test it properly as the phone has had a lot of use. The battery dies pretty quick at work because I work in a building that is almost a Faraday cage and my phone is constantly seeking a signal. At weekends the phone has been used to play games a lot and so it is being used intensively. Maybe one day I’ll try not to do much on the phone and see how long the battery lasts.

I, once again, feel connected to the world.

May 14 2014

Sabotage

I rated this film as 4/10 on IMDB. See my ratings guide here. There were parts of this film that were funny and others where the buddy-buddy thing was well written but the overall plot was terrible. This film lived nowhere near reality. It was a gore fest for the Call Of Duty generation. Plenty of illegal killing and two dimensional characters. At the exact point where I thought “Oh dear, please don’t let them have sex”, they had sex. The epilogue was comical.

An irritatingly poor film that had promise at times. Not worth paying for.

May 3 2014July 22 2014

Duxford 2014

Yesterday I should have accompanied some students on a flying experience trip as part of the cadets at work. We were driven to the base and had our safety briefing before we were told that the unit had just been told to ground their aircraft because of a pre-flight check list issue. We had to leave! No flying.

So, the next best thing is to go and look at a load of gorgeous aircraft. Fortunately, the Imperial War Museum at Duxford was on the way home. It is seriously worth a visit. I love it. My one criticism would be that there are so many aircraft in the display hangers that a good look or photo angle is quite rare!

Here are my best shots:

Looks like a JP but isn't — Looks like a JP but isn’t

Now, some of the planes here are not named, so if you know, drop me a line and I’ll change the details in the gallery above.

April 26 2014April 26 2014

Circus

A short while ago I went to the circus! According to the information I was given it was the Circus Of France and they were based for a while at the Newnham Court shopping thing on the edge of Maidstone.

The tickets seemed expensive to me, although the last time I went to the circus was around 1991. The arena tent itself was pretty big and we were guided to some bench seats. I tried to take a photo but dropped my phone under the raised seating. I had to borrow someone else’s phone to use their camera flash to see below the seating and to find my phone, I could just reach it!

The acts we saw were all human, so animal lovers don’t have to worry about the living conditions. There was a juggler who came on in different costumes for three different acts, the high-wire artistes also did the trapeze at the end of the show, there was a climbing rope act and also a foot juggler (who was dull). The clowns provided reasonable entertainment for the scene changes although I would have liked to see a clown car fall apart in the ring.

The first ropes act included Spider-Man, which was an interesting piece of marketing, and also the anti-Spider-Man who was dressed in black. My sons loved this. During the interval there was the chance to have your photograph taken with Spiderman. We didn’t do this, but I can understand why the circus did this.

The knife throwing act was interesting. There was the typical man throwing the knives and a woman having knives thrown at (or not) her. The lady was tied to an upright spinning disc and the disc was set in motion. Before the man could throw a knife the axle broke and the woman and disc crashed to the floor, woman first and the mechanism on top of her. I have to say the staff reacted really quickly to this and the lady came back on stage shortly afterwards and completed the act.

The best part of the show was the trapeze act:

Leaving the circus there was some lovely blossom trees.

April 6 2014April 6 2014

Vegetable Patch 2014

Planted the vegetables for this year. It’s a disgrace really as I don’t eat them and neither do the kids but I think it’s important for them to see stuff grow.
This year we have:
Sweetcorn
Onions
Carrots
Potatoes

The potatoes are in round pots to try and keep them contained:

We have the rest planted in the ground. The silver plant container has chestnut trees we planted last autumn.

April 5 2014April 5 2014

Losing Mass

I want to try and have more communications on here with an overview of my take on the evidence out there for common practices. I’ve only really done one of these before and it is a look at the evidence for osteopathy. Our greatest achievement as human beings is to be able to test ideas and then form better ideas based on the evidence. It’s quite simple really, but, at the same time it’s denied by most of us. Just look at religion, it’s a pervasive and destructive view of the world backed up by an entire lack of evidence and it has such a hold on humans, we just want to believe the easy stuff and ignore the realities of what we know.

You would think that the subject of dieting be straight forward. It’s a very basic law of physics [thermodynamics]. For a subject to use energy the energy must be there in the first place. The human body synthesises food to make energy. If there is excess energy the human body stores this as fat. It really is that simple. To make the body use fat you have to reduce your energy intake and force the body to use its stores of energy. Essentially:

Make energy out greater than energy in.

This should be the end of the communication. But there are some pervasive ideas I wish to contend. To maintain a mass loss you have to change your overall behaviour.

It’s My Genes
Yes, it is your genes and it is “programed” into you. That’s why it’s so hard to do. It’s not an excuse. No, you do not have a “hormone” problem. You have an eating problem. It is IMPOSSIBLE to get fat by eating fewer calories than you need to maintain your body. The thinner you are the less food you require to maintain your body. The fatter you are the more food you need to maintain your body. It’s not a lot though. Look up your Basel Metabolic rate, mine is below. It’s surprising how little energy we need to stay alive.

Diets DO NOT work
Temporarily restricting the foods you eat with the desire to lose mass will always result in later mass gain. You might see a mass loss and you might be really happy about it. However, ultimately you need to change your behaviours permanently. You have to develop your habits to find food that suits you and fits into a calorie controlled diet. You have to be HAPPY with what you eat and how much you exercise. This is REALLY hard to do. This is why Weightwatchers doesn’t work. You lose the mass and feel the peer pressure but ultimately you end up putting the mass back on because you haven’t changed your behaviours overall.

A lot of diets, where you count points or use replacement foods, are just calorie control mechanisms. You are too lazy to understand how to add up calories and so you rely on a crappy points system and buy into foods branded with your particular regime. You might wander the supermarket with a booklet giving you permission to buy certain foods or not. This is not a good way to live. You must change your habits entirely.

Food and kcalories
Ever wondered why in some diets you are allowed unlimited amounts of some vegetables? It’s because they contain so few calories compared to other foods that you can’t eat enough to survive or if you could you’d hate it. Here’s an idea of calorie content:

Water – 0
Pre-cut slice of bread – 100
Apple – 80
Chocolate bar 200-400
Café Latte – 120 or more
Can coke – 140
Glass (small) red wine – 120
Bottle beer – 150
Shot spirit – 50
Cookie from supermarket – 300
Donut – 250
Crisps (30g) – 180
Carrots (100g) – 40
Chicken breast – 200
Richmond Thick Sausage (grilled) – 130
Rice (100g) – 120
Pasta (100g uncooked) – 370
Potato (100g) – 80
Granola / muesli (100g) – 500
Cornflakes (100g) – 380
Special K – (100g) – 375
12″ thin pepperoni pizza (supermarket frozen) – 900
Dominos lg reg crust pepperoni passion pizza – 3200

The surprises for me when I started looking into this were:

Pasta and all wheat products are really efficient in terms of food mass to calories. Other wheat products are all bad, essentially anything cooked with flour: cakes, biscuits all types of bread are all heavy with energy, flat breads are the worst, a large pitta could be about 300kcal. They are the baddies. If you want to lose mass really restrict these items. Cook with alternatives. Potato is a good this to use but you have to make sure you cook it sensibly. Roast potatoes are lovely because of their texture and because they are soaked in fat.

Beer and wine are pretty bad. They don’t have to label bottles with calorie information so it’s hard to tell. I tend to drink a spirit and diet coke. Fortunately for me I’m not that fussed about beer.

Café Latte is a surprising one here. Coffee shops tend to use semi-skimmed milk but that’s still quite calorific. Ask for a skinny-latte or better still just have an Americano with semi-skimmed milk. A teaspoon of sugar is about 30kcal. Use sweeteners to help control the overall calories. It’s very surprising how quickly you reach 2000kcal a day just with a normal routine.

Breakfast
Breakfast cereals contain CEREAL and so are high in energy content. Muesli and granola are the worst [peddled as healthy by the advertising industry] because they have loads of wheat and other cereals. Have you ever measured a “serving” of 30g of cereal. It’s depressing. The industry might think it’s a serving and call it such but it’s not what most people would call a breakfast. The little multipack boxes are 25g.

The most amusing thing about breakfasts (apart from all the sugar and chocolate that are added to encourage kids to eat a healthy cereal based breakfast) is that Special K has (effectively) the same energy content as normal cornflakes. This STILL makes me chuckle whenever I see adverts for it!

FAT
Low fat. High fat. People seemed programed to think that if they eat fat they will get fat and the way to lose mass is to cut out fat. Yes, this will help as fat in foods is energy-efficient. However, food manufacturers replace the fat with SUGAR! Start looking at the energy content of all foods as you buy them, you might be surprised. Choose foods you enjoy but have lower energy content. It really is:

Energy in, energy out.

Exercise
It hurts and requires effort. Losing mass is really hard. If you watch something like “Biggest Loser” on TV you see people losing mass really fast. Why? because they eat sensible amounts and work out like crazy in the gym. More importantly they learn to enjoy the new control they have over their lives. They like the power they feel. I hope they are able to maintain this loss once they have left the ranch. It’s very hard to keep these changes going and all too easy to think that one biscuit doesn’t matter.

Thin People
Do you know someone who

can eat what they want and not put on mass

I do. Thing is, it’s bullshit. Skinny people tend to eat less or exercise more. It’s that simple.

SuperFoods
Do not exist, it’s bullshit. Just eat a sensible varied diet.

Diet Pills
Bullshit. They may help a little bit but you’d do better to spend your money on vegetables and fruit. We love a quick fix and they DON’T exist.

The Summary
Change your entire behaviour and develop a new approach to life or forever life with a poor relationship to food.

More information is available everywhere on the planet. Read around the subject but don’t buy into schemes or special diets. This article on Science Based Medicine is a good start. Do not trust health GURUS, do not read diet books. It really is quite simple really:

energy in, energy out

The Gaia View
Being overweight is morally reprehensible given that we (as a species) don’t feed all our own kind. It’s a disgrace that I can enter six massive shops within five miles of my house and pretty much buy anything I want to eat while there are 870 MILLION under-nourished people living in this world. This does not count those for whom finding food is their primary concern.

Mass
Once again I have used the term MASS in this communication. It’s because I understand physics.

Evidence
Early on in this communication I used the phrase “my take on the evidence”. I realise after writing this that the phrase is rubbish. The evidence shows what the evidence shows. This is more my generalisation of the evidence for you, my readers. There may be some discussion in “science” about some issues and that generally occurs where the evidence seems conflicting. I am not talking about the “debate” about global climate change or evolution as these are pretty much as settled as they can be. There is no debate. Just the imaginings of the deluded few who see these things as attacks on their beliefs. Which is what they are. Your beliefs do not follow the evidence, hence the term belief and so you have to change your beliefs, which is really hard. It is much easier to deny the evidence that to change your beliefs. Anyway, this communication has been my interpretation of the evidence for you.

April 4 2014April 5 2014

The Mass I Lost

The quick way but maybe not the easiest way I could lose mass would be to change the cross component of the Higgs Field, a by-product of which would be adjusting the mass of the Higgs Boson. I failed in my quest to do this, the scientists at Cern weren’t happy with my suggestions.

Towards the end of 2011 I wanted to lose mass. I had been large (95Kg) for a while and it was time to get fitter and aim for a healthy mass. I had heartburn a lot and snored a lot with some sleep apnea rolled in for fun. My details from Wolfram|Alpha.

By simply calorie watching and keeping to a maximum of 1800kCal a day I lost weight. Probably at about half a kilogram a week. The sums are quite simple! A kilogram of body fat contains around 7000kCal. So, if you reduce your calorie intake by 500kCal a day, you will lose around 3500kCal a week of body fat. If you don’t believe my fat energy content then just look up the calorific content of butter or margarine. They are both pretty similar to body fat.

Within 3 or 4 months I had reached a natural limit of mass loss by diet alone and so decided to up the game with some serious exercise. I started small. Running and jogging a mile. Eventually I built this up to 4 or 5 mile runs over about a period of six months. I lost the rest of the mass and settled at about 80Kg. I tried to do about three runs a week at roughly 500kCal each. That means about 3 miles per run. You could walk this distance and achieve roughly the same effect, it just takes longer to complete the 3 miles.

My heartburn has vanished. I no longer snore. I don’t have sleep apnea anymore. I have a resting heart rate of around 50 bpm and I can run for 10k without feeling dead. As long as I run I get to enjoy some bad foods now and then. I feel pretty great.

There are days I hate this. There are days I really don’t want to run or I find it particularly unenjoyable. You have to get over these. It’s so easy to slip back into old habits.

I know the BMI isn’t perfect as a measurement but it’s a good guide to use.

April 3 2014April 5 2014

Logging My Life

I’ve had a request [!] to cover some subject matter on this website! What a wonderful thing to happen. I’m quite excited to use this opportunity to pass on information that might influence others. Mind you, I guess the point of some of my communications is to persuade readers to think and to challenge their current thought patterns.

Since December 2011 I have been recording everything I eat. I did this originally to help me lose mass. I do it now to maintain my mass. I think I have a curious relationship with food, although it’s probably not much different to anyone else’s. Over the last twenty five years or so my mass has varied from around 80Kg to 95Kg. Long gone are the active days of my teenage years where I didn’t have to think about these things. I can still remember going gliding with the Air Cadets at RAF Wethersfield and being asked my mass in pounds, it was 140lbs. I don’t think I could physically get that low any more.

During the first half of 2012 I actively tried to lose mass. The process of this will be covered in another communication. To help this process of losing body mass I logged my food using an iPhone app. This is good for a few reasons. Firstly, you get to learn and understand the calorific values of the foods you eat. Secondly, you realise that it’s extremely easy to over eat. Lastly, you start to see the body as an incredibly efficient food-to-energy machine. It shouldn’t really be a surprise but the amount of food needed to sustain the body is not really that much in comparison to the amount we expect to eat. There is a big social problem in that large portions are acceptable and that people can’t add up. When you learn that walking or running 1600 metres will burn around 160 calories [just under two slices of plain bread] you realise that it’s a lot of effort to lose half a kilo of fat!

I use MyFitnessPal to record my food intake and, early on during my mass loss programme, I used this to record my activity and exercise too.

Food can be scanned and the nutritional details are entered automatically. It’s a very handy way to keep track of what you eat. Sometimes you have to guess, especially if you eat out, but over time you get a good idea of how much energy is in the food. I will be a bit more specific in another communication.

To track my exercise I use an app called MapMyRun. It tracks the route that I run and then also converts the information it receives to calculate my energy burn. This app can be used for cycling, walking or logging any activity.

I have spent quite a while looking up energy burn and calibrating the data I get from the app. I have looked at academic papers about energy use and also looked at information from Australian sports institutes. In very basic terms, if you walk or run 10m you use 1 kCal. I think the apps I use are accurate to a sensible level of accuracy. If there are errors it could be within a 200kCal range and it wouldn’t really affect the outcome. Just by being more aware of energy intake and output you learn to self regulate a bit.

I like the apps I used to log my life as they synchronise with my Up software. This means that all the information I enter cross-pollinates and everything adds up nicely! It saves having to enter lots of data into different apps.

Yes, I do know that I used the term MASS throughout this communication and I am aware that I was actually referring to what most people would call WEIGHT. The problem is that I’ve not been measuring my weight for a few years, if I had the units would be in Newtons. If I use the units of KG then I must be measuring MASS. If you don’t like the use of this term then I suggest you don’t read any more of these communications.

April 2 2014April 5 2014

Up – One Year

I have been a member of the Up community for a year. I first found out about the Up band on the flight to Washington DC and then bought one in the Apple Store in Georgetown.

The Up band measures and stores information about my movement. That is pretty much it. What this allows me to do is track my steps each day and also my sleep patterns. The Up app on my iPhone also connects to my food intake app and the app I use to track my runs and other forms of exercise.

In the year that I have owned an Up band I have had a number of replacements. I think I have had to get three replacements. I’m not sure if there is a build issue but something seems to go wrong. While I still have a band that is in the guarantee period I will continue to use an Up band. Eventually, the company will stop replacing them for me and I’ll probably jump ship to another fitness tracker.

Over the last year and for the periods that data is available [there’s about two months for which I do not have any data as I had no band] I have:

Eaten an average of 2492 kCal per day
Burnt an average of 2502 kCal per day
Made an average of 9064 steps per day
Walked an average of 7803 metres per day
Average sleep per night is 7.04 hours

I have just noticed that n=308, so two months without the band is about right.

My Up band, large, onyx.

March 31 2014April 5 2014

British Summer Time

I don’t like change. I particularly don’t like changing the clocks. Some of my distaste for this biannual event is that it means I have to walk around my house adjusting various time displays and I also have to find the instructions for the cooker because I can never remember how to change the time on it. Why does my cooker need a clock? I also don’t like the day being asymmetric for around six months of the year. Finally, more daylight in the evening means more glare on my television [I need to buy some curtains but haven’t for ten years and so the likelihood of me getting around to it is quite low].

For around six months of the year we change the clocks so that we are in British Summer Time, what our American cousins would call Daylight Saving. I find this bizarre. I like how our clocks are aligned during the winter. When it is midday the sun is at its highest point in the sky and also due south. This makes an amazing amount of sense. I am aware that local midday is different across the UK and it depends how far east or west you are from the meridian but as a general measure it works well.

What I don’t like is the notion of midday during British Summer Time. The sun is not at its highest in the sky and won’t be for about an hour (depending on where you are). There is apparently an economic argument for having more daylight time later in the evening but I have yet to be convinced that it makes any difference. The “farmers need the light” argument is quite pathetic. Farmers would just get up earlier. I am not aware of any good reason to perform this ritual mess up of my routines.

Let me explain a couple of things.

The definition of noon is, first and formost, MIDDAY.

The definition of midday is the MIDDLE of the day. If our clocks say 12pm [12:00] then this should be the middle part of the day. If the sun is yet to rise to its highest point and we have more daylight hours after 12:00 than we had before the 12:00 BST is NOT midday. AM and PM both contain M which stands for meridian.

So, meridian refers to midday which refers to the middle of the day which, to me, is quite clearly the middle of the day when the sun is at its highest.

I could almost accept us changing to be in line with other European countries as we trade and work closely with them but unfortunately they are also wrong. France is either GMT+1 or GMT+2 and given that Paris lies on the meridian they clearly have no idea about how time works.

By the way, the National Physical Laboratory recommends the use of the 24 hour clock. I think I tend to use the 24 hour clock on this site more than I do am and pm. Apparently there is no convention to indicate whether midday is am or pm. I had thought that this was solved and that midday is pm but amazingly not.

If the NPL are telling us something we should listen.

I am quite aware that my bad feeling towards BST is mostly to do with my interpretation of the definitions and that other people might decide to define midday as the point when our clocks are halfway through the day rather than use the sun to define the halves of the day.

Just so you are aware the international time standard is UTC.

Universal Coordinated Time

Although UTC is synonymous with GMT and for all intents and purposes the same it is no longer a recognised standard. UTC is maintained by the scientific community and GMT is not. I used UTC as the time indicator on my tattoos.

March 30 2014April 5 2014

Five Finger Death Punch

I snuck into London last night to see Five Finger Death Punch at The Forum in Kentish Town. Curiously Kentish Town didn’t look as Kent-like as the name implies. Here’s a power station viewed from the fast train from Ebbsfleet to St Pancras [who was a Roman convert to Christianity and beheaded for his belief].

I had a pleasant walk from the London terminus to The Forum, about 40 minutes, and waited in The Assembly Rooms for Smith. Once he had arrived we chatted and ate. The queues to enter the auditorium were large, but gave us time to digest the contents of the flyers we were handed before discarding them in the traditional manner.

The first band on were called Pop Evil. They played ROCK. It was ok. Not to my current tastes but they were a good warm up band.

Then, on came Upon A Burning Body. A band from Texas. They played pretty good music although I couldn’t understand most of what the singer sang. This didn’t worry me, I don’t really do lyrics. Although I wouldn’t go out of my way to see this band again they were pretty good over all. I liked the suits they wore.

During their set all the lights stopped working and they carried on while lit from torches held by security and the guys in the “desk-in-the-middle”. The pit opened up in front of me and it was quite funny to see this close. Young men running in circles and generally pushing into each other. The atmosphere was one of comradeship as when someone fell down after being hit, they would be helped up by everybody. I saw a couple of rugby tackles and at some point it turned into a competition to see who would be the last man standing. Then, it went wrong. A short tubby man decided he was going to hit with his hands. He threw a punch and got warned to stop by most in and around the circle. He had gone too far. You don’t intentionally hit people in this small world of machismo. Then he threw another punch, caught a chap on the chin and stood gloating. About five guys rushed at him, pushing him to the floor and then two of them dragged the guy to the side and security. I didn’t see him again. As much as most people would look in horror at “the pit” it’s actually a safe place where, if you accept the rules, you will be looked after and everyone has the same needs.

Five Finger Death Punch burst onto the stage playing “Under and Over It”. There was energy and excitement. They played well and have a good stage presence. I was really impressed at Download last year and so was looking forward to this. They played songs. I don’t know the names of the songs. I just recognise them. I’m pretty sure my head is full up and can’t learn new song names. Also, the way I listen to music has changed. I no longer sit in my bedroom staring and the record sleeve, I play music while running, driving or working.

It was a solid gig. They played well. They played 3 ballads too many. I hate ballads. The atmosphere gets lost and the energy of the room fades during ballads. Also, as a rock child of the eighties, ballads were how bands promoted themselves. They had their place but are not necessary anymore.

The set finished at 22:30. This made the FFDP stage time about seventy minutes which was rather short. I was hoping to hear four more hard and heavy songs when the houselights went up. I was left feeling a little disappointed. They didn’t quite “bring the house down” in my opinion. A big problem for me was the singing of the chorus to Champagne Supernova by Oasis. I never liked Oasis. I think they wrote poor songs, sang badly and were hyped in a battle with a group of real intelligent people who could write songs. Don’t be a metal band and then play some Oasis. They were shit. It’s shit and it makes you shit.

March 23 2014March 25 2014

The Longest Day

This isn’t the longest day in terms of the hours of sunlight during a rotation of the Earth. However, this is being written reasonably close to the vernal equinox. Nor is the about the film The Longest Day. This probably isn’t really about my longest day, which was, in recent times, my first day in Rome last year.

This communication regards my involvement in Sports Relief Charity Day at MGS.

I set the alarms for 04:00 as I had promised to do some rowing on the ergs at 05:00. The MGS 24 Hour Row started at 10:55 on Thursday 20th March and was so scheduled to finish at 10:55 on Friday 21st March. When the sign up sheets had been up for a while there was a big area of dead time in the early morning so I said I would come in and help.

So I woke at 03:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. My neighbour was coughing lots and I could hear that. At 03:45 I got up and made a coffee. I got ready and then left for work. When I arrived at the Big Hall there were rowers asleep on collections of chairs. There was a space for rowing already free and so a bit before my allotted time I sat down to row until 05:40. At the end of my time I had rowed 11074m in 50 minutes. Not bad!

I hung around and did some marking and preparation and then once the Home Tech room was open I went and cooked a good old fashioned fry up for me and DM. We ate at around 07:40 and everything was washed up and tidy by 08:00.

Time to do some work. I went to register my form group. Then I had another 40 minute stint to complete as I had volunteered to do 09:00 to 09:40 as I had a free lesson. There was more of a crowd now and I concentrated more on my split time and aimed to keep that at around 2:10 /500m and my average split at that too. Nearing the end of this session I decided to row further than earlier this morning and so I managed 11120m in about 48 minutes. I was happy but very tired. I had to wash up and head to teach some mechanics.

I listened to my own music during my rowing excursions. The first time I listened to Combichrist’s “What the F^^K is Wrong With You People – Darkside” and the second time I listened to Combichrist’s “What the F^^K is Wrong With You People”. Very good music for working out.

This is the time lapse video for the event. You can see me do my first stint on Erg 2 [from the right] at 1:48. You might then see me in a bright blue top do some marking at about 1:56. My breakfast appears at 2:06, bright blue top on the right hand side. Then my second rowing stint is at 2:12, I am on Erg 1 [RHS] wearing a black top.

During break time I headed back to the Big Hall to see the end of the row-a-thon. There were four rowers active at the end and the atmosphere was really nice. Once the allotted time was up the total distance covered was just over 900km, which gets us from Maidstone to about halfway through Scotland to John O’ Groats. It was a splendid effort and a brilliant piece of community building work. Well done to all.

I had another two lessons before entering the MGS mile at lunchtime. I had booked an ICT suite for these lessons so that the pupils could do some independent learning, focussing on their weaknesses. It didn’t take long for the lunch hour to arrive and during those couple of hours my back was starting to feel rather dodgy.

Just under seven minutes was my time for the MGS mile according to my Up band. I’m not convinced I did it that quick because I didn’t feel as tired as I do when I try and do a fast mile on my usual runs. I will still claim a sub-seven-minute mile though. I know I could make that time. The lunch hour had been extended to a full hour and the mathematics department took full advantage of this to have a good meeting to discuss department business. As soon as I had completed my mile I jogged to the mathematics office to make sure I didn’t miss anything important during the meeting. It was a good gathering.

For my final lesson of the day I had a statistics class. They worked well on the past examination paper I set. Then, for me, it was off home to collect my children and clean up ready for the evening performances.

I am part of the MGS staff band and we are called Disaster Area [with apologies to Douglas Adams]. The evening of this day was dominated by the Rock Band evening at MGS where student bands play in front of parents and other pupils. As the staff band we get to go first and warm up the crowd. This time around we played “The Ace Of Spades” and “Highway To Hell”. I understand there are videos available on Facebook but as you should be aware I don’t do Facebook. About halfway through Highway I started to relax and really enjoyed the experience, especially as I sand some backing vocals in the song.

I came on about 20 minutes later to play bass guitar for a pupil band playing “The Trooper” by Iron Maiden. When I get footage of this I will link it from here. Playing this song was great fun and I hope I get the chance to play it again.

Finally my school day was over. I got home about 20:30 after bailing out on the rock evening. I should have stayed for longer with DM as he had been in school a since 05:00 but I wanted to try and get some sleep before my sons woke at 05:00 Saturday morning. This felt like the longest day. I’m sure it won’t be the last. I’ll keep you informed of more throughout the coming years.

Me, playing with Disaster Area at MGS: