I've been riding on my bike...

I have been cycling quite a lot recently. I have, in the past, been very much a fair-weather cyclist... using my bike for relatively short journeys and only when the day was kind of jolly and I knew cycling would be a pleasurable experience. But something has changed. I've had a change of attitude and I fear I might have become (pause, dramatic chords)... a cyclist.

On Friday last week and on Monday and Tuesday of this I've been working in Ladbroke Grove (working on an opera as it goes (don't ask)) and I have cycled each day from Bethnal Green to the office where this work takes place. On Sunday night I went to watch the recording of a Radio 4 show in Hampstead. I cycled there too. It was raining. I put on waterproof trousers.

This is clearly quite a radical shift in attitude. This makes me one of those people who brushes aside hardship and does things simply because they are "good for you" or worse still, the kind of person who enjoys discomfort. I've never trusted the people who claim to enjoy a 5am swim in a freezing ocean on the grounds that it is "bracing" and while I don't think cycling to Hampstead is quite in that league - I did after all want to go to Hampstead - it does make me worry about myself. I'm probably becoming quite annoying company too because a small part of me is really quite proud of having cycled somewhere. I'm a little holier than thou about things... not quite reaching the heights of piety achieved by reformed smokers but quite possibly heading in that direction. Oh dear.

One of the reasons is, of course, my decision to take part in the London to Brighton bicycle ride on June 18th. I don't have any time for training as such and so I have decided to use my bike as and when the journey is do-able. Even if it involves getting wet and there are more sensible options available.

A friend of mine told me that he had entered the ride one year. This is an extremely fit friend of mine. He's run the London marathon before now. He didn't finish the London to Brighton ride and not long after he and his companions decided to call it quits one of them threw their bike in a hedge in frustration. They were, apparently, coming last. I'm not sure why he told me this story. It isn't very motivational. It certainly hasn't filled me with confidence.

What do you mean you haven't sponsored me yet? Go on. You know you want to.

I was made all the more aware of my changing attitude towards cycling by today's events which have seen me gadding about town quite a bit ... but not in the saddle. For the first time in a long time I have been on the underground. Now that I am a proper cyclist (and yes, a week's activity is enough to qualify) whose lungs are used to breathing in fresh air (and petrol fumes) I find the tube unpleasant and crowded. I look at my fellow travellers and think, you fools, travelling in this cramped and unpleasant fashion, you are nothing but drones, cogs in the machine... you should experience life from the saddle of your bike, we cyclists know a joy that you will never experience. You see - holier than thou. I told you.

I was travelling on the tube because my day began with having to carry something too large and heavy for transportation by bike. It has been really quite traumatic. My computer is dying. I don't know quite what the problem is but every now and then - and with increasing frequency - the picture freezes. There are lots of warning shots where the graphics go all crazy. For a second or two the picture freezes and the graphics jump. It is hard to describe but if you imagine the screen to be a woven fabric well, for a split second it appears as if it has been badly stitched together. All of the threads are there, but they are not aligned with each other in the intended way. This will happen a few times and each time it snaps out of it until finally it gives up the ghost and just freezes.

To begin with I have a reluctance to try and deal with things like this. For a while I kid myself that it is a temporary glitch and that it will soon sort itself out. I do this because the idea of losing all of the information on the computer is just too much to bear. It contains so much stuff that carries so much importance. Stuff that I've written, photos from way back when, music... stuff that helps to define me. And stuff that helps to pay my mortgage. I can't afford to lose some of this stuff (or at least I feel like I can't) and so I put off doing anything about if for a while.

But today I decided enough was enough. I did what I could to transfer as much information from the desktop computer to my laptop computer and I struggled to teach my laptop how to connect to the internet using my normal desktop set-up. (Hence, I am able to update my website and this entry exists.) Then I boxed up my big computer and got a cab into town to the shop where I bought it from.

"Is it still under warranty?" asked the young man on the counter.
"I don't know," said I, "can you look up the serial number and check for me."
"Well, how long have you had it?" he asked.
"Isn't that the same question?" I said, a little peeved. I was about to entrust my life (in digital form) to this man and I wasn't in the happiest ofmoods. If I was to walk away from the shop leaving my computer in his care it would have been nice to do so with some degree of confidence and stupid questions from him weren't helping.
"What do you mean... 'isn't that the same question?'?" he asked.
"Well, you just asked me if it was under warranty and I said that I didn't know. Then you asked me how long I'd had it... surely if I knew that I'd know if it was still under warranty," I explained.
"Right," he said, "have you got the serial number and I'll look it up."

The computer is still under warranty. This is good because obviously it will be repaired for free but bad because it means their products aren't very reliable and prone to break down with very little use. Given how much time I've spent away from home in the last year the computer can't have had more than 2 or 3 months worth of use during the time that I've owned it. I expect more from Apple. Oh dear.

I've saved what I can from the computer just in case but I haven't been able to transfer my e-mail correspondence. If the problem is with my hard drive (he wrote, as if he knew what he was on about) all of that will be lost. Gulp.

After dropping the computer off I then had to head to Kentish Town for a meeting. This is a journey that I would have wanted to make by bike under more-reliable-computer circumstances but seeing as I was already in town I hopped on the tube. Ugh. Tonight I am playing poker. I will cycle there.

Total sponsorship raised so far for the British Heart Foundation: £1441.87.

Never Mind...

I spent the last two days finishing my commitment to Annually Retentive which has continued to be fun. Almost everyone involved in the show is playing themself, or a slightly more grotesque version of themself and I suppose the show as a whole is mocking a certain kind of panel show. Which made today all the more ridiculous as I had to leave the filming at 1pm in order to go and film a panel show.

The show I was guesting on was called Never Mind The Full Stops which is already strange because the title is a play on Never Mind The Buzzcocks which itself is a play on Never Mind The Bollocks... Obviously I was appearing on it as a form of field research that would allow me to bring something more real to my behind-the-scenes scenes on Annually Retentive.Well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

As you might guess from the title, the show is about grammar, punctuation and the English language. It's for BBC4 and it should start going out later this year. Oddly it's hosted by Julian Fellowes in a stern schoolmasterly fashion. I say oddly because he's an Oscar winning screenwriter and an actor of note and not really the kind of person you expect to find hosting a panel show on BBC4.

It also seemed a little odd to me because he seemed keen to eschew some of the normal conventions of presenting. As a viewer, even if you know the presenter is reading from an autocue, you assume they have chosen to say those particular words and that they reflect their own opinion. Julian seemed inordinately keen to tell the audience that he wasn't responsible for the script with lots of "this is the one they've given me to say"s and "I don't know why they want me to say that"s and so on.

This might turn out to be a stroke of genius on his part and it will endear him to viewers. Either that or he'll wish he'd used his Oscar winning pen to write the show himself.

I've been very impressed with the initial burst of sponsorship money raised for my London to Brighton bike ride. As I'm writing this the total donated is up to £990. If you're a UK tax payer and you tick some boxes and fill in some details while you're donating, the British Heart Foundation gets to collect even more money thanks to an automatic tax bonus. This tax bonus (Gift Aid) means that so far a further £267.38 has been raised taking the total to £1257.38. I'm pretty impressed - I only decided to do it for sure four days ago.

Thanks to everyone who has donated so far and go-on-you-know-you-want-to to everyone who hasn't. Sponsorship.

London to Brighton

I have decided to cycle from London to Brighton. This might be related to the fact that I have recently turned 35. It might be an effort to prove to myself that I'm not really getting older. But then again it might not. Of course I'm not just going to set off by myself and cycle to Brighton - that would be foolhardy. No, I'm taking part in a big organised event in which everyone pretends that it's not really foolhardy and uses the fact that so many other people are doing it at the same time as evidence.

You'll have guessed by now that the event is of a charitable bent. It's organised by the British Heart Foundation which is a damn good cause, I'm sure you'll agree. Of course my participation is entirely selfish. I'm hoping that the money I raise will be the exact amount needed to develop some radical new life-saving treatment that I will then take advantage of in later life.

Having decided to take part I've been inundated with advice. It's the kind of advice that makes me wonder whether or not I've done the right thing by deciding to take part but of course it's too late now because I've told people. If only strangers had thought to tell me how arduous the trip is before I'd told them I was making it... then I could have decided not to do it and nobody would have been any the wiser. Heigh ho. Shopping list: talc, vaseline.

The ride takes place on June 18th so I have 3 months to do my worrying in. And my fundraising. If you'd like to sponsor me then please visit: www.bhf.org.uk/sponsor/davegorman/ and give what you can. When I'm cycling towards a daunting hill and my legs want me to give up it will be much easier to carry on if I can remind myself why I'm doing it in the first place: misplaced vanity. No, not that... I mean the British Heart Foundation. Yes that's it.

I do hope you will sponsor me and I really do mean it for the right reasons. You can also help by spreading the word and linking to my fundraising page.

Flicker

In the article about flickr that I mentioned a couple of days ago I said that I didn't really know how to pronounce it. Should it be pronounced flicker or flick-R? As I should have expected, many people got in touch to tell me the answer. Of course loads of people told me that they knew for a fact that it was flicker and a similar number seemed to know for a fact that it was flick-R so I didn't come much closer to an answer. But then an e-mail arrived from one of the founders of the site which cleared things up for sure. It's pronounced flicker and had the correctly spelled domain name been available it would have been called flicker too. But it wasn't. So it's flickr.

Some people seem to be upset by the article although it seems to me they're assuming it's meant to be reportage when it's quite clearly an opinion piece. Papers are full of my-favourite-this-that-or-the-other or why-I-love-thingummy pieces and I wonder if they all make people's blood boil in the same way?

I spent yesterday filming a few more bits for Annually Retentive... it really is one of the most enjoyable jobs I've done.

Photographer.

A few weeks ago a scribe from the Guardian stumbled upon my photos on flickr which led them to ask if I'd write a short article for their online edition explaining why I use and like the site. It took me longer than it should have done to get round to it but the article was published today. It's true by the way - a Brazilian magazine has asked if they can publish my photos of East End grafitti. Life's odd isn't it? Maybe I should get some business cards printed up: Dave Gorman: International Photographer. Or maybe I shouldn't.

In other unrelated yet Guardian related news I've agreed to be a judge for the Guardian Student Media Awards. I've done this twice before. The first time I was one of the panel judging the travel writing section and the second time I was looking at the websites. This time I'm back to the travel writing. The judging takes place over a very fine lunch at the Ivy and that's reason enough to accept the invitation as far as I'm concerned.

Vorders

Last July I took part in a show called Vorderman's Sudoku Live for sky one. You can work out what it was from the title. It was live, it was about sudoku and it was hosted by a Vorderman (in this case they'd wisely opted for the one called Carol which is good because she's a TV presenter and I think all the other Vordermans are probably her unknown relatives and that would be silly.)

Anyway it was a bit of a laugh and Carol is dead nice so when I was asked by the same production company to take part in a show called Vorderman's Big Brain Game it was easy to say yes. Which is why this afternoon I spent time on a team with Sara Cox and a guy called Ajay trying to win a game against Lisa Rogers, Rufus Hound and a girl called Jimmy. Or maybe Ginny. Yes, Ginny makes much more sense even if I've spent the whole day thinking she was called Jimmy.

Ajay or Ginny - or for that matter, Jimmy - had the opportunity to win up to £10,000 while I had the opportunity to solve some puzzles and to dress up in a boiler suit and try to dodge some lasers like a fancy jewel thief might, which is better. I won't spoil the show by telling you what happened.

Like an onion

Annually Retentive is a TV series about a TV series. It stars Rob Brydon. The TV series it's about is also called Annually Retentive. It's a panel show. It's hosted by Rob Brydon who's being played by Rob Brydon. I'm playing one of the team captains who's called Dave Gorman. The other team captain is Jane Moore and she's playing herself.

The panel show doesn't really exist... except that right now it sort of does. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week we recorded two episodes each night with 4 guests on each show. The shows will never be seen as complete episodes but bits of them will appear in the show about the show. So right now the show within the show exists and the show that they're within doesn't. But it will.

It's been remarkably good fun so far and the audiences have been great. After the first pair of recordings the producers decided that as the audience was enjoying them so much and we were all relaxed doing them they might as well add a few rounds in and give themselves more choice when it comes to choosing how much of the show is about the show and how much is the show.

Everyone involved has been a pleasure to work with thus far. Especially Rob Brydon and don't let the fact that he asked me to write that lead you to conclude it's not true. It is true.