Bad trip men

We attended Jock Waddington's surprise 50th birthday party at the Ascot Hotel on Saturday night. Jock is the four time winner of the Manx Telecom Parish Walk with straight wins on the 85 mile course between 2008 and 201.

Jock thought that he was attending a fancy dress party for one of his wife's, Teri, work colleagues and so he was suitably dressed for the 60s theme.

I'm given to understand that the sixties was a period of much drug abuse and the fancy dress of some of the attendees was representative of the people who may well have carried out such illegal activities.

I wonder if they these two evil looking guys had any bad trips?

In drug users' jargon, an adverse effect of drug use, consisting of any mixture of the following: feelings of losing control, distortions of body image, bizarre and frightening hallucinations, fears of insanity or death, despair, suicidal thoughts, and strong negative affect. 

I've spent the day researching their past to ensure that I have not been in any bad company and my conclusions are a little surprising.

They are actually responsible for the best trips on the Isle of Man. Michael George and Dave Mackey, whose families run the Welbeck Hotel and the Ascot Hotel are ranked as number 1 & 2 on Trip Advisor.

Read about all the highs they been having.

I've got your number (and email address)

I lost my mobile phone on the day of the third round of the cross country league at Peel.

Not many people, these days, could last without a mobile for a few hours never mind a few weeks. My son, Ben, suggested that I didn't replace it before Christmas - in other words he was going to give me one for Christmas.

Sure enough my first smartphone, made by Chinese giants Huawei, arrived on Christmas day. Although I was grateful, I was still mastering the Microsoft Surface tablet which the same benefactor had given me jointly with Marie for my last birthday and so I didn't take the time to learn how to use it. In fact I barely sent or received a call in the first six weeks.

At last it has come to the top of my list of things to do in what spare time I have had. In the fast few days I have been merging my Outlook contacts, with Googlemail, Skype, Christmas card lists and unsorted email contacts to create a very big contact list,  about 600 people at the moment, which I have been synchronising between my phone, Google and Outlook.

I am hopeless using screens on phones and I really like this application http://mightytext.net/ - if you are near a PC or tablet you control your phone.

And with all sorts of radio, video, email and other apps on my phone I'll have to give up publishing websites to find time to use them all!

Listening to myself

The other day I had the embarrassment of being caught talking to myself. I was on my own in the office just before going home and popped to the loo. I came out muttering to myself only to find that one of my colleagues had come back into the office.

I hope I don't talk to myself too much; maybe less than I listen to myself. I usually contradict my own advice to others and I would certainly not advise anyone to race after six days of not training due to illness. That was my position this week. I only needed to jog around to win the prize for the best over 55 year old in the Microgaming Cross Country league but I thought better of it.

So I snapped away more than 600 times and for the first time I had four video cameras in action. As usual, I messed up a part of the plan as I had zoomed in far too much on the camera by the swamp at the bottom of the field where the races start and finish.

Not competing, made it much easier to take Robbie with me today and he thoroughly getting himself muddy. At least one more day off training which gives me time to take the bus to work in the morning and to drive Ben's car back in the evening. He and Jenny have flown off for a well deserved short break after a very intense few months at work but will be returning with a rather unusual motor vehicle.

Going backwards

I'm still not quite sure why I started to compile another event database at the weekend. I guess it was the frustration and interest generated by finding that the website listing the winners of the Isle of Man Marathon had an error in the very first year. It was the uncertainty of past data that first motivated me to start compiling such list and it was a case of "here we go again".

The most recent years were a lot easier to put together as they were available on the www.manxtimingsolutions.com site and with some of the skills I have learned I was able to manipulate the data to the format I required. After all these years though I am still far from an expert with pivot tables in Excel.

I'm going to work my way backwards through the year. I have gone back to 1995 and have the 1993 and 1994 results from newspaper cuttings on my desk.

I went back ever further on Saturday night. We went to watch the Douglas Choral Union's production of Tommy. We enjoyed it so much that we went back the following evening.

It was 1969 that the "Rock Opera" Tommy was released and 2011 when the Who's lead vocalist Roger Daltrey performed the music at the Villa Marina. I managed to get a photo with Simon Townshend, brother of Pete who wrote Tommy, who was in Roger's band, in the Villa gardens.

But I've also gone backwards in other ways by ignoring the signs of a cold this weekend and carrying on running. There is no way I can run today and not looking forward to going away on a business trip tomorrow - just going back.