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(How about that for the name of a sequel?)

This photo was me and my team at the end of our stage win on Day 4 of the Ride The Lobster race.  We were a scratch team having not met before arriving in Nova Scotia, and with a range of ability from Chuck (left), a scary unicycling machine and probably the fastest rider around at the moment; me (right), fairly fast but not quite up there with the best racers; and Geoff (centre) who was a good solid rider but new to big-wheeling with less spinning experience than many people here.  Saying this, we got within sight of a win on Day 2, after running in the lead for a while.  That pushed us to give everything to go like the clappers on Day 4 (Day 3 was a time-trial day) and get a stage win.  Wrestling back and forth with the other top teams - Geman Speeders, NZUNI, Personal Rollercoaster and Texicali (the eventual top four teams overall) was awesome, and somehow we got to the front somewhere mid-way through the day, and pedalled like crazy to keep hold of the lead.  In the end we kept a couple of minutes over the excellent riders of the Germans and New Zealanders - so we were pretty chuffed. :)

In the end we finished up holding 5th place, which was very cool (top five teams are represented above out of order - this was the very start of Day 2 - from left: Vince LeMay, Ken Looi, Me, Corbin Dunn and Jan Logermann).  It was an incredible and humbling experience all week to meet and ride with so many top riders, and to get blasted past by some amazingly strong athletes.  I got to meet many of the big names which I have been inspired by from a distance for years, and ride alongside the likes of Kris Holm, Ken Looi, Tony Melton, Nathan and Beau Hoover and many others.

Riding unicycles may be enough to make it a unique sport, you might think.   But really it is the spectacular sporting attitudes and comradere to be found at the highest level of competition.  Especially the Criterium - a ’round the block’ street race of six laps in the closed streets of Truro - which allowed for closer proximity to the other riders than we got on the long-distance team days.  It was the most highly charged buzz I’ve ever known around unicycling, and at the end of the faster of the three races, with all the other competitors, we just wanted to hug and hand-shake everyone else racing for such an awesome ten minutes of racing.  There’s nothing like starting 35 fast unicyclists in a bunch and letting them pelt around four tight corners and four short straights, leaning hard over on the corners and straining for acceleration up the straights.  That’s something to get the juices flowing.  Woooo!

There are far too many annecdotes and amusing stories to bore you with, so I’ll spare you them, but suffice it to say it was a week of such excitement, fun, friendship, challenge, hills, torrential rain, fame, humility, endless trees, open roads, sunshine, encouragement,  randomness, lobster, bananas, international accent-swapping and unicycle-swapping as I’ve ever known.  Definitely one week I’ll never want to forget.

Then I went to New York City.  More later…

This is the long-distance unicycle road race in Canada that I am going to.  100 unicyclists, five days of racing. Nova Scotia.  It’s going to be fun :)

You can watch the live GPS updates which the event should be producing via magical internet things on maps, from  Monday to Friday next week (16th - 20th June): www.ridethelobster.com/race/results.php

This is the official logo for the 15th Unicycling World Championships and Convention in New Zealand in 2010 (the spiky bit is a fern - the national symbol of NZ). It was also my first dabble in Illustrator, and it won me a free place at the convention. Woo!

Mmm… misty.

Yesterday I went to Hay-on-Wye.  It is a place of many, many books.  And mud.  And Jimmy Carter.  And Guardian Ponchos.  And the ‘honesty bookshop’ (above).  And rain.  And JesusDub.  And many other things.

We had a nice time.  It was nice.

The Spanish tourism board was also there advertising with wet deckchairs…

Woo - I have done all of the essays, assignments, project work, revision, exams and last-minute cramming required to say: I’ve finished my degree!

As with most things with such a build up (like at least a couple of years thinking ‘OK, it would be silly to quit, it’ll be alright really, just get it done however frustrating it is’) it was a bit of an anti-climax.  Oh well, it is quite nice all the same.

I don’t have the crushing realisation that I will be leaving Aberystwyth for good though - because I’m not!  I’m going to be working here doing website things with a company called One Bright Space based in the Technium on the Marina.

Before that though, I have an action-packed summer of unicycling:

• Ride The Lobster - A five-day long distance road race (think Tour de France for unicyclists) with 100 of the world’s top distance riders.  I’m on team #78 called “Smile” (I was hoping to get sponsored by the ethical internet bank of the same name, but that didn’t quite happen).
  After the week of racing I’m going to make the most of my transatlantic flight* and go on a train adventure down to New York City and be a tourist for a week.
• Luxembourg to Liechtenstein - A 500 mile cycle tour between the two smallest European countries which begin with the letter ‘L’, hostelling and camping with some good friends old and new.
• UNICON 14 - Copenhagen, Denmark: the World unicycle convention and championships which happen every two years.  I’d describe it as the Olympics of unicycling - all the disciplines of one-wheeling from synchronised freestyle dance routines to trials stunts to track racing to off-road and long-distance racing (that’s what I’m entering, and hoping to bag a bit of bling, if I’m lucky).

I’ve been fortunate enough to be awarded a travel bursary from the University’s ‘Tithe and Capitular’ fund which will cover the transport for the two big competitions.

* Hello, yes - I know I’m a ‘greenie’ type who can happily tell you about how damaging climate change is and how flying contributes so much to it.  It really is serious, and we - the rich - contribute way, way more than our fair share to the problem; especially unjust as we are not the ones whose houses easily collapse in flooding or whose subsistance-level farms grow less and less. So…

A return flight to North America will emit about 1.3 tonnes of CO2 per person (me).  I think I will ‘offset’ this by paying a trifling £11.14 to ClimateCare who invest in carbon reduction projects.  But really that’s a far less convincing thing than actually not polluting in the first place.  For excuses I could say that because I don’t drive a car around (12000 miles/year in a small car emits about 3 tonnes), or eat much meat, I already have a ‘footprint’ of only a couple of tonnes, compared to the UK average of 10.

That really doesn’t ‘allow’ me to go and pollute more than I can avoid, but at least it makes me feel a bit better about it.  My logic is that this is the biggest unicyle racing event ever done, and it is a wonderful thing to have people from across the world getting together for something like this - it’s not just a random urge for an exotic holiday, honest.

For the other two European trips I’m doing this summer I’ve chosen to go by train (figures vary, but it’s at least a third less carbon-tastic than flying the equivalent journeys).  It won’t cost much more, and we’ll see much more of the places we’re going to as well.  Trains are cool.

There we are.  Hopefully that wasn’t too much in the way of liberal hang-wringing for you.

I have handed in my final essay of my degree. It was about ‘reflexivity in visual media’ and was completed according to the schedule above. The time line starts at midnight, and ends at the deadline of noon. Some notable points are the finish with an easy 20 minutes to spare for printing and handing in. This turned into a slight panic when I forgot to print the references page, and then the university computers wouldn’t read my USB stick to print it again. But the paper copy was accepted at 11:57 - three minutes clear. Easy does it.

I wasn’t hardcore enough to manage an all-nighter on it, and as such it never quite got to the word limit of 2500, stopping dead on 2000. The large flat line at 3-7am was when I was asleep due to feeling like a rather un-intellectual lumpen mass. Then there was a smaller flat-line at 10am when I walked up the hill from my house to campus so that I could finish it and print it without having to run up the hill.

What mark it gets, I will have to wait and see. But I can tell you now that it included the phrase: “so perhaps it could be turtles going out in every direction.”, a reference to the wonderfully obtuse Slavoj Žižek and the quote “My Dad went to New York and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”.

Just three exams (sadly all mundanely computer science ones) and my degree will be complete!

On the return train journey I saw a nun.  She was wearing a pale grey habit with a dark red girdle.  And she was knitting while waiting for the train.

We got on the same train, and she smiled at me as I stood with my unicycle.

Then we changed in Shrewsbury and I saw her again.  She smiled at me again.

How nice.

Today I went on a train journey. I think I stayed within the rules too, but I didn’t half feel guilty and paranoid for much of it!

First, some highlights:

• Discovering that I can run from the platform (oh yes, there is only one) of Aberystwyth station to my house and back again in under 4 1/2 minutes. This was needed due to forgetting my cycle helmet and gloves and being at the platform nine minutes before departure. Phew.
• Seeing the building work on Dyfi Junction station. The line closures recently have been to raise the tracks by up to a metre to reduce flooding disruption in future. I’m really quite amazed at how they have managed to get it done with so little ‘down-time’ on the line. Good on Arriva Trains Wales.
• Putting my unicycle on and off five different trains without a slightest bit of agro from train staff about cycle reservations (and feeling how light it now is, following my weight-reduction measures of recent times knocking over a kilogram off it). In fact there were some new cycle-loading signs which are helpful once you know that they mean that is where the cycle section of the long trains will be found. Nice.
• Getting lenient treatment from the conductor lady on the cute little train from Bristol Temple Meads to Nailsea and Backwell - selling me a ticket on the train without a technically justified penalty fare.

Now, the bit which made me feel guilty and paranoid…

I’m pretty good at going on trains these days. I can do it. I can go all by myself and book tickets, arrive in time (sometimes), find platforms, load cycles… the works. But apparently I’m not so great at getting off at the right place.

I never meant to go to Swindon. Swindon is a lot further than I should have gone: from Newport to Bristol. But I don’t remember anything in between. Maybe flicking through the Metro free paper induces a trance-like state of amnesia.

So I had to turn tail and get the next train back to Bristol. Which made me feel naughty (despite it being an honest mistake which can reasonably be an excuse for the ‘return’ journey), not just for going in the opposite direction from my valid ticket, but for wanting to go to Bristol when my ticket was for Bath. It was a cunning manoeuvre which would have worked a treat coming in the right direction - just hop off the Newport train at Bristol… and continue my ticket’s nominated journey to Bath later in the day, after visiting Martin somewhere near Bristol. Easy. But coming at Bristol from Swindon would have taken some explaining, had I been challenged on what on earth I thought I was doing with the ticket I had.

Luckily I wasn’t inspected at any of the more suspect stages, and all was well. I think I played by the rules anyway… it just felt a bit scary.

Moral of the story: um, trains are nice, timely, clean, easy and cheap. Just pay attention better than me.

It is very nice outside.  Finally it is warm and sunny and well worth wearing shorts and sandals.  Or a skirt if you are inclined.  The bluebells are out in style in the woods by PJM.

At this point in the year, doing anything indoors seems quite inferior to anything else outside.  Time to go and do some ’study’ in the sun…