118 800

Phonecall, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

In September last year I received a text message from a stranger that said, "Oh my God! I can't believe this is Dave Gorman's phone number!" (Only with poor spelling and grammar) I ignored it. It was possible that it was a friend with a new number trying to wind me up... and if it wasn't and some genuine stranger had actually happened upon my number, I guessed they'd probably go away if ignored. I didn't blog about it at the time because when someone's trying to get a reaction out of you, it's really best not to give them one.

But they didn't go away. They called me at 8, 9, midnight and 3am. I ignored all the calls. But being an idiot they didn't think to hide their number, so on an off chance I googled it. Unusually, it turned up. I found the name of the person responsible. he was 19. He was at Surrey University. He played in a horribly disappointing rock band, used to play in a jazz orchestra and had a depressingly illiterate myspace page.

The next day there was silence. But then the next day there were more nuisance calls. I screened all calls that came from unknown or hidden numbers. There were many. Mostly from hidden numbers.

The day after that, work took me to Austria. And on Saturday night, in Austria, I received something like 40 or 50 nuisance calls. I didn't answer them. I stopped looking at my phone. I wasn't going to spend an hour wading through my messages on an extortionate T-Mobile roaming rate just to hear a variety of prank calls from a variety of students. I knew there might be some calls from friends in amongst them but I figured they could wait til I got back home.

Not one of the prank calls was mean or abusive. There was no name calling or anything like that. It was more:
"Hi Dave, it's Gordon here from BBC3, we've got a really exciting project lined up for you, can you give me a call on the following number asap..." at which point they'd give me their mates number in the hope that I'd call that number and hilarity would ensue. That sort of thing.

(It is fascinating to discover that that's how they imagine things work. Yes, TV executives (whose voices haven't broken yet - even for BBC3 this is far fetched) are always calling me up from rowdy pubs at 10 o'clock at night and offering me great opportunities... and I'm so desperate to suckle at television's teat that I'm obviously going to call them immediately to pursue it.)

But while they weren't abusive - it felt more like I was the prop in a gag they were playing on their mate and they'd have been just as likely to do it to WH Smiths, say, as me - en masse it was becoming a huge inconvenience. But it became more than that when I went through my messages back in London. There was one message from a friend. It was important. Not in a work way, but in a personal way. It was something I shouldn't have left for a day. I really should have responded. Someone, somewhere needed to hear from me and as a friend, I should have been there for them. The details aren't important... what's important is that some students having a laugh had managed to make life quite a lot worse than it should have been. It was no longer just an inconvenience...

Oh... and on my first day back in England I received around 150 calls from unknown numbers. It was still escalating.

So I decided to do something about it. So I hid my number and called the semi-literate, Surrey University student. He seemed very surprised to hear from me. He was 19 years of age but sounded like a 12 year old who thought he was in trouble. His voice was shaking. I could almost hear his heart beating. I honestly thought he was going to cry.

I asked him how he'd got my number. He sounded flustered and pretended he couldn't really remember. I told him that he could. So he did and he told me. He'd got it from a friend. Who'd also got it from a friend... who had been in Edinburgh during the festival where he'd found a mislaid mobile phone. Being a decent sort he tried to find out who the phone belonged to by looking through the numbers it contained. Which is where he found my number. Instead of thinking, "oh look, I've heard of him", shrugging his shoulders and carrying on, he'd thought, "oh look, I've heard of him... I'm going to write that down."

But then the phone had rung and he discovered the phone's owner on the other end and he'd made arrangements to give them their phone back.

So, I asked my nearly-blubbing student for his friend's number. He said he didn't know it. I told him I knew he was lying and he nearly started hyperventilating under the pressure. I suspected he was telling the truth. But one of the things I'm good at is finding information. I had a name. And a place to start, so I soon found the next link in the chain.

He also sounded like a scared animal when confronted. I asked him how he'd got the number. He corroborated the story. I asked him for the name of the friend who'd found the number.
"Ummmm"
"Don't pretend you don't know."
"Okay. It was ????? ??????"
"Right. And do you have his number?"
"Ummm"
"You do."
"I don't think I can access it while I'm on the phone."
"Yes you can."
"I don't think I ought to just give someone's phone number out..."
No irony. He meant it.
"I agree. And I think I'd like to tell him that too..."
"Oh... right. Yeah... it's..."

So it took me three phone calls to get through to the man who'd written my number down and started it all. He too seemed shocked and scared to be hearing from me. In fact I'm pretty sure he did start crying during the call.

But these three phone calls identified only a small handful of people who'd gotten hold of my number and the calls were coming in from different numbers every day and there was no point me trying to pursue each and every one of them. Besides, scaring 18 year old boys and making them cry wasn't making me happy.

What had happened is that the first person had found my number, gone back to his home town and given my number to four or five others. They were all about to go off to different universities. So they all did. And in the craven social atmosphere of Freshers Week they'd all done a bit of showing off... which had involved giving my number to new people who'd all done the same... and some of them had done the same and so on. First year students drinking please-like-me pints do that sort of thing.

Making nuisance phone calls is a crime. The calls kept on coming and the police did get involved warning some of the people who were making them. But as the number was being passed on to new people every day that wasn't doing anything to contain it. So, with regret I was forced into changing my number. I'd had that number for as long as I could remember. I knew that number inside out and backwards. I've had my new number for ten months now. I still don't know it. I hate that I was forced into changing my number.

Anyway... that was probably at the back of my mind when I first heard about this new 118 800 service - a directory enquiries for mobile phone numbers. The idea that anyone could dial in, try their luck and get my new number was alarming to me. There have been a number of scare stories in the media about it... like this from the BBC and this from The Register.

I find the whole idea that you can opt out offends my sensibilities. It seems to me that it's the kind of thing you should have to opt in for.

According to that Register story, Connectivity confirmed it had planned legal action to get access to operator data saying, "Exactly as all the landline directory services were entitled to request telephone number data from BT, 118800 is also legally entitled to request data from telecommunications companies."

The thing is... if I remember rightly, when I moved house and got a new landline number I think I was given the option there and then on making it ex-directory. When I was given my new mobile number I wasn't. So the comparison doesn't stack up. BT might be obliged to hand over those details to a ladline directory service... but they do so knowing that their customers have consented to being in a directory. As a mobile directory didn't exist when we were given our numbers nobody stopped to ask.

As I type this the 118800 website is currently not working. Presumably because of all the people using it to try and make their number ex-directory.

In fairness to them, I ought to point out that they don't actually give your number out to anyone. What they told me is that they call you, explain who's asking for you and then offer to patch the call through. Which is still too much intrusion for me.
Getting a call from 118800 saying "Hello... we have someone called Gordon from BBC3 on the line, do you want me to patch it through?" isn't materially different to getting a message from a student saying the same thing after all.

Because the website wasn't functioning properly yesterday I called the number and asked to be made ex-directory. The person I spoke to was very defensive about the whole thing and very keen to tell me why I shouldn't believe things I might have read in an e-mail. Which seemed odd because I didn't know anything about any e-mail.

He went to great lengths to explain that they had bought their numbers from legitimate sources and that if I'd never given my number to any company I had nothing to worry about.

But I have experiences to prove that's nonsense also. I've had compensation from two companies who have sent me spam text messages before now. Both were mainstream companies. Both had bought lists of numbers from reputable sources. On both occasions the reputable sources had got my number illegally. On both occasions I put more man hours into it than is reasonable in order to prove my case and get compensation.

I'm delighted to see the 118800 website is down. I hope it stays that way. If you haven't already, do call them and ask to be ex-directory. Let's keep them so busy removing numbers that they don't have time to actually call anyone and offer to patch them through.

Breaking The Deadlock

The excellent sports writer, Simon Barnes, recently wrote a piece in which he assessed the modern innovations in our major sports and gave his opinion on their effectiveness.

He looks at limited overs cricket - 65 over games started in the 60s, while Twenty20 was born in 2003 - the tie break in Tennis (born 1970), the introduction of petrol breaks in F1 (1994), the many intricate rule changes made in rugby over the years and in football, the penalty shoot-out (also 1970).

I'm not informed enough about cricket to have an opinion and Formula One leaves me mystified at the best of times - whatever they do to it I can't get past the fact that the man with the best car seems to have something of an advantage. Besides, while I know the drivers are doing something remarkable I don't feel able to perceive their skill as a spectator. I mean, I know how fast they're going but on a TV screen it simply doesn't look that fast. The rules of rugby have changed so much since I was being kicked all over the school playing field that I've given up trying to understand it properly but can still sit and enjoy an international because good rugby is still mightily impressive to watch.

The most interesting assessments to me were those made on tennis and football, not least because they're both rule changes brought in to achieve the same goal: to break a deadlocked game. Here he concludes that the tie-break has been an unqualified success but that the penalty shoot-out has had a negative impact on football. And I think he's right.

While a penalty shoot-out is undeniably exciting it's not football. A tie break is undoubtedly tennis. The presence of a tie-break doesn't encourage players to play for a draw. A penalty shoot out does, if not from the start, then at some point.

Surely there ought to be some other resolution to a drawn football game that's better than the toss of a coin, fairer than a penalty shoot out and that still involves playing football... all of it, rather than just one particular part of it.

Here's my suggestion. I'm probably not the first person to come up with this. I won't be at all surprised if I find dozens of people telling me where hundreds of others have discussed it in the past. If that's the case, my apologies for not having my finger on the pulse. Here goes:

Currently they play a period of extra time and then go to a penalty shoot out. I'd suggest that when a game is drawn at 90 minutes they should play ten minutes of extra time - but that each team should withdraw two players. If it's still drawn after that, they should withdraw two more players each and play another ten minutes. And so on. Ten minutes of 9-a-side, ten minutes of 7-a-side, ten minutes of 5-a-side and if needed, ten minutes of 3-a-side. Rugby Sevens is a more free-scoring game than its grown-up counterpart because there's more room for players with pace to exploit and I would have thought the same would be true for football.

It would reward fitness, make it less of a mindgame and more of a game, maintain the fact that it's played by teams and not individuals and involve a manager making tactical decisions based on his players strengths and weaknesses.

Of course, it doesn't address what happens if, after 40 minutes of extra time and with only 3 players left for each team it's still a draw. So, um, well, then you, er, um... have a penalty shoot out.

Putting Two And Two Together

In a behind-the-scenes stairwell at the BBC I used to see these paint marks on a window ledge and wonder what they were from...

Then one day, in a BBC corridor, I passed this picture in a frame:

It all makes sense now. Obviously.

Thanks To Human Sat Navs

So this is my Boardman bike, rigged pretty much as I think it's going to be when I tour. I've changed the saddle, got some luggage from Carradice (ace stuff), changed the pedals and got comfortable clipping in. I'm very happy with it.

A couple of other Boardman bike riders spoke to me when I was in Brighton and they were all singing the praises of theirs too. Lovely stuff.

But the main reason I'm writing this is to say a big thanks to everyone who's responded offering their services as a Human Sat Nav.

I've been really surprised by the response. I've tried to send an e-mail to everyone who's written although I haven't yet been able to go through them all in detail and organise who will be my guide on any given day. There are some days where I've got as many as twenty people offering and plenty of others where there's only the one. Where there are several I'll probably go for a lucky dip of sorts. Or maybe it's an unlucky dip. It's not as though guiding my lumbering body through a 50 mile ride is a particular treat.

I won't know for sure until I go through them all properly and filed them in some kind of order but I'm pretty sure I've got almost every ride covered. I reckon there's only two or three of the routes that people haven't volunteered for and they tend to be in the least populated parts of the ride... where there's likely to be only one road carrying me from A to B in any case.

Anyway... I'm going to have to pull the shutters down and ignore any new offers until I've sorted out the current inbox. I'm hugely grateful to everyone who's written and only sorry that I'm not more organised. Ta.

From London to Brighton to... London.

So... yesterday was the annual British Heart Foundation London to Brighton bike ride. I took part in the event four years ago. That was the first time I'd taken on any kind of distance. I loved it. When someone asked me to join their team of cyclists in the event this year I thought I really ought to do it again... with my tour looming I didn't really have any excuse not to and I figured it would be a good training ride.

At the time I hadn't done any serious training rides and wasn't used to cycling out of London on the open roads. I know a lot of people think that cycling in London is scary but personally I feel pretty safe in that environment. So long a syou look ahead and assume people are going to open their car doors in front of you and so on it can work to your advantage. The average car is travelling at less than 10mph and while they might not like the fact that cyclists are there, there are so many of us out on two wheels that drivers are kind of expecting your presence. It's out of town that scares me more. It's in country lanes that boy racers take bends at 50mph and with no expectation that there might be someone on two wheels ahead of them.

So while I knew that London to Brighton would be a good work out I was also aware that it would be a slightly artificial situation because there are marshalls all along the route and plenty of sections where the roads are closed or the regular traffic is at least separated. So I decided that I would cycle home too. I figured I had to get used to going from town to town without the assistance of several hundred volunteers in high-vis jackets. (Incidentally: I don't think the people who marshall the route get enough of a thankyou from the cyclists. It's a huge event that the BHF organise incredibly well and the volunteers who line the route are amazingly good humoured and supportive. Thanks.)

By the time the ride came round I'd already done a few town-to-town, city-to-city rides and got used to it but training's training and I knew another one couldn't hurt. Or rather it could. But in a helpful way.

My plan was very much to play it by ear. If I felt tired after the ride I'd stay in Brighton and then tackle the return journey the next day. If I felt up for it I'd do it all in one day or, and this seemed to me to be the most likely, I'd do 30 miles of the return journey on the day and then complete the trip on the Monday. As it was I ended up doing it all in one day... I was bushed by the end of it. But pretty damn pleased with the achievement too.

I'm also really pleased with my new Boardman bike. I've changed the saddle and the pedals and got some excellent luggage from Carradice and I reckon the way it was configured yesterday was pretty close to the way it will be on tour. It felt very right. I loved it.

I plugged some of the toys in as well. I set the new bike-cam running as I left Clapham. I know that by the time I had got to Brighton it had stopped recording. Whether it had run out of juice or memory or both I don't know. It doesn't have a preview screen so until I upload stuff I won't know how long it lasted. It' a shame not have caught the whole ride but at the same time, I need things to work in a way that means I can just hit a button and forget about them. If I start obsessing with how-to-record-the-journey or stopping every hour to change a memory card it will change the actual first-person-experience of the journey into something else. Something worse to do... but nicer for other people to look at. Which isn't what it's about, really.

I also had my Garmin Edge 705 on the bike, timing myself and recording the route - and for the return journey, choosing the route. Thanks to the magic of MapMyRide.com, I can show you where I went... here's the London to Brighton ride:


... and here's the journey back:



You can open them full screen and zoom in to see the minute detail of where I went if you like. (I turned it off before I got to my front door - I'm not mad.)

The first third of the ride to Brighton is always very congested. There are loads of bottlenecks in small lanes where you're forced to stand and wait a while or walk but slowly as the ride goes on it thins out a bit and you can get into it properly. Ditchling Beacon is the stiffest test... a steep and long, long hill about 6 miles from the end. The good thing about it is that when you get to the top you've pretty much finished the ride. It's all pretty easy after that.

Four years ago Ditchling Beacon was a pretty disorganised mess. Loads of people end up walking up the hill and they can block the path of those who are still cycling. My main memory is of the really hardcore cyclists screaming at people to walk on the left. I don't think I would have been able to pedal all the way up Ditchling Beacon last time but I didn't get the chance to find out as I ended up losing momentum behind a group of four walkers who covered the whole width of the road. Once off the bike there was no choice but to walk myself.

This time round it seemed far more organised. I don't know if it was just because I'd started earlier or if people have spread the word but the walkers all cleared out of the way and left a channel to the right for the cyclists. I cycled all the way up.

I've always been quietly dismissive of those people who claim to have an exercise-high... but yesterday as I topped the beacon and continued into Brighton I felt properly euphoric. I must have been because on the flat section across the top of Ditchling I got up to 31mph. On the flat I can normally get a little over 20mph if I make an effort... so it must have been down to some kind of adrenaline rush. Better still, on the long descent, even with my fingers stabbing at the brakes I got up over 42mph. I spoke to several people afterwards who'd got over 50mph. It's an exciting part of the ride.

As I came down the hill I looked at the clock and realised it was possible to get in to the finishing line in under 4hrs. I got snarled up with traffic lights coming in to the city centre and then with a large group of riders on the home straight but I made it. Just. 3 hours, 59 minutes and 50 seconds.

I made a bit of a cock up then. I should have gone to have something to eat but instead I hung around waiting for my team to arrive. I knew they were going to be doing the ride at a more leisurely pace and would be stopping en route for refreshments but I stupidly didn't realise that this was my best chance to eat and recuperate. When they did turn up - every one of them equally delighted to have cycled up Ditchling - they then went off for a celebration drink which I didn't do because booze seemed like a bad idea before taking on another long ride. So not only did I start my return journey quite late in the day, I knew I'd be stopping on the ride to get some food that I could have dealt with while I was waiting.

It was hard. Much harder than the ride to Brighton and that's not just because of tiredness. The sat-nav seemed to take me on an odd and circuitous route and there were more uphill sections. Nothing as steep as Ditchling but a damn site more of them. I was getting frustrated with the road surfaces too. A bad road slows you down so much and it left me unsure as to whether it was down to the conditions or me. But then about 40 miles in I suddenly hit a nice new road and found I still had plenty of juice in me and got up over 25mph with ease. Which is kind of when I decided to complete the job and get all the way home.

I took two refreshment breaks on the way back - totalling an hour - and all in the return journey took five and a half hours. Even if I just take into account the actual cycling time it's half an hour slower and that's without having any of the bottlenecks that plagued the first part of the outward journey so it was definitely harder going.

But I did it. And I'm thrilled. Taking into account the journey from mine to Clapham for the start of the official ride I totalled just over 120 miles of riding yesterday. The longest I've done in a day before being 90ish miles.

When I did my three day training ride a wee while back I was aware that I started out being very bad at making myself take on enough fluid. I lost a stone in the first two days as an unhealthy result. I bought a Camelbak backpack to help me to drink more and it was great. I must have got through 5 or 6 litres of water, possibly more... and the result was that I lost only 2 or 3 lbs in the day. Much better.

I don't think there's been any time in my life before this when I could have done these rides in one day. Without wanting to come off all mid-life crisis about it, it's pretty damned satisfying to be fitter at 38 than I was at 34. Or 24 for that matter. How odd. And lovely. And by criminy do I feel it in my knees today.

Radio Ga Ga

Thank-You Stranger, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

I've not long finished recording the last of my three shows for Absolute Radio. It's been a while since I did any of that kind of radio - y'know, talking and playing records - and I'd forgotten just how enjoyable I find it. It's been a blast.

It's a really lovely, close team who make the show and Absolute have been really supportive too. When we made the first show I had no idea that there was going to be a podcast too. It wasn't until after the first show was over and the producer showed us through to another studio to record an intro for the podcast that I realised such a thing existed.

Which makes it doubly sweet that the podcasts have done as well as they have. This last week we were number one on the iTunes chart. That's just silly. I'm not quite sure how that happened. If you tuned in to the shows or downloaded the podcasts; big thanks.

The final show will no doubt be online soon... and even though my supply teacher's stint is over, we recorded another silly chat that I think they'll make available next week. The Absolute Radio website is here.

The Bicycle Never Stops

I've got a new toy. I'm not sure how toyful it's going to be yet... but I figured that the bike ride I'm taking on this autumn is a bit of a once in a lifetime thing to do and it would be a shame not to take some kind of record away from it.

So I've bought a GoPro Hero Camera - the idea being that you can mount it on the bike, or a helmet and just let it get on with taking video or photos.

My first thought was that still photos might be more useful than video - as much as anything because I'm not sure how long the camera can record for in one go - it's tiny and loves eating batteries - and I don't fancy having to stop too often to attend to it. Having tried it today - automatically taking a still every few seconds - I'm not convinced by it... but I will continue to play.



I've put them together though. Be warned. The result is very jerky - not especially easy on the eye - but it's an experiment so what the hey.

I'll give it another go with a different set up as soon as I can. Maybe on Sunday when I'm doing the London to Brighton ride for the British Heart Foundation. If you'd like to sponsor me - and I and the BHF would really appreciate it - my JustGiving page is here.

Incidentally, the music in the video - Never Stops Never Rests Never Sleeps is used with permission from the lovely Misty's Big Adventure. They're ace.