tl;dr: First time here, clicked Wishlist Search, and it suggested the person whose song I was listening to at the time. Spooky as hell.
So here’s what happened to me today. Feeling unwell – bit of a cold and grumpy about it – and sipping a Lemsip to try to stave off the worst of the sore throat, I found myself
stalking a few people on Reddit, discovering new subreddits based on what they’ve commented in etc., and I discover /r/Random_Acts_Of_Amazon.
I put on some music while I surf – just a selection of MP3s that I’ve bought recently. The song that’s just come on is Peter Hollens’ and Malukah’s awesome cover of Christopher Tin’s
Baba Yetu (better known as the “Civ IV theme”). If you haven’t heard their cover of it yet, here it is on YouTube.
“Random Acts of Amazon?” I think to myself, “What’s that all about then?” I read a little bit of the newbie guide, then try clicking on the “Random Wishlist” button, just to see who
it picks out for me and what kinds of things they want. It picks out a random user… /u/peterhollens.
Wait, what? That’s got to just be a naming coincidence, right? That can’t be the same Peter Hollens whose song literally just started coming out of my MP3 player right
now, can it? I hop across to his intro thread and read some of his other
posts. “What the fuck,” I say out loud, “Is this random wishlist tool psychic or something?”
But no, it just turns out that on the one and only time I’ve ever been to this sub, and the one and only time I’ve ever clicked Random Wishlist, it happened to choose the
person whose song I was literally just listening to at that time. That’s insane.
So here’s a gift, Peter. Clearly the Universe wants me to send this to you. I don’t believe in destiny, but clearly it believes in you and
I.
Je parle un peu le français. Je me excuse pour la rédaction du présent en anglais.
I have been staying in La Tania on a ski holiday with friends and family. This morning, I fell and her my neck, so I thought I’d take a break from skiing and do some geocaching instead.
The hike down the valley was hard in the fresh dump of snow, and I wished that I’d brought snowshoes! Or poles! Our even a rope! I routinely found myself wading through knee-high snow,
and I’d ocassionally have to traverse drifts that came up to my thigh. I was very glad to reach the convenient break point of La Nouva, where I stopped to chat to a small yappy dog
before pressing on.
Villaflou itself is beautiful: I especially love the cute little chapel at its heart. I spent some time investigating the wrong thing, looking for the cache, before eventually working
out where it might be. Only the 5th person to find it!
On the way back to La Tania (an even more arduous hike by a different route that I thought would be easier but truly wasn’t) I was distracted by two French ladies calling me over. They
were lost, having taken a wrong turn, and – perhaps as a result of them being 4 and 6 months pregnant, respectively – were finding it very hard to push themselves up the mountainside
against what was now ocassionally waist-deep snow. Naturally I came to their rescue, using my GPSr to lead them up to the path they sought: a further arduous journey of pushing,
pulling, digging, and crawling until we finally reached the outskirts of La Tania and they were assured of their safety.
Four hours of hiking in snow, sometimes up to my waist and rescuing two lost hikers makes this perhaps the hardest I’ve ever worked for a geocache. And I loved it.
[this post was originally made to a private subreddit]
I love the MegaLounges, and I really love the MegaManLounge. We’re a hugely disparate group of people yet we’ve come together into a wonderful community that I’m proud to be
a part of. And I felt like it’d be nice to give something back. But what?
If you’re like me, you love the experience of bumping into another MMLer elsewhere in the Redditverse (or around the Internet in general). I mean, what’d be really awesome is if we could find one another in the real world, but that’s a project for another day. Anyway: my
point is that I get a thrill when I spot a fellow MMLer wandering around in Redditland. But oftentimes I don’t look closely at people’s usernames, and I’m sure there must be times
that I’ve just overlooked one of you in some long thread in /r/AskReddit or /r/TodayILearned or something. I’d rather know
that you were there, my MML brothers and sisters.
So I spent this afternoon putting together a tool that does just that. Here’s a screenshot to show you what I’m talking about.
I’ve written a basic browser plugin that highlights MMLers (and other MegaLounge-like folks) anywhere on Reddit. So the idea is, if you install this plugin, you’ll always
know if somebody’s an MMLer or a MegaLounger because they’ll get one or two icons next to their name. In the screenshot – taken on /r/MegaLoungeVenus
(the 23rd MegaLounge) you’ll see a snipped of a conversation between our very own /u/love_the_heat and /u/teiu88. /u/love_the_heat has two icons: the first one (obviously) indicates that he’s a MegaMan, and the second one shows that he’s reached MegaLounge level thirty-one
(yes, there are quite a lot of MegaLounge levels now). /u/teiu88 only has one icon (he’s not a MegaMan!), showing that he’s at MegaLounge level twenty-three.
Note that it’s coloured differently to show that this is the level that I’m looking at right now: this helps because I can see whether people are commenting at their highest
lounge level or not, which may factor into my decision about where and when to gild them.
Someday, I’d like to make this available to MegaLoungers in general, but first I’d like to show it off to you, fine MegaMen, and hear what you think. Is this tool useful to anybody?
Should I make a production-grade version to share with you all? Or am I solving a problem that nobody actually has?
Just to add: there are several things I’d like to add and questions I’ve not yet answered before I release it to you; notably:
Right now it identifies members of the Super Secret MegaLounge, which is a violation of the rules of that lounge, so obviously I can’t release it yet. I’d like to find a
way to have it identify such people but only to other members of that lounge, but failing that, I need to have it just “skip” that lounge when showing how high somebody’s ascended.
On which note: what do you think about it identifying MegaMen? If I ever make this tool more-widely available than the MegaManLounge, should the version used by non-MegaManLounge
people identify MegaManLounge members, or not? I can see arguments either way, but I will of course go with the will of you fabulous people on this matter.
I’d like to add tooltips so that people who haven’t got the entire MegaLounge ascension mapped out in their minds can work out what’s what.
Similarly, I’d like to improve the icons so that they e.g. have gemstones next to the gemstone lounges, planets next to the planetary ones, etc.
Oh, and I really ought to make it work in more than just Firefox. I’d like it to work in Chrome, at the very least, too. IE can suck it, mind.
What do you think?
tl;dr: I’ve made a browser plugin that makes Reddit look like this, showing people’s highest MegaLounge and MegaManLounge status. Is
it a good idea?
Update: following feedback from folks who found this post from Twitter, I just wanted to say at the top of this post – we’re all okay.
Our holiday in Devon last week turned out to be… memorable… both for happy holiday reasons and for somewhat more-tragic ones. Selected features of the trip included:
Croyde
This pile of breezeblocks on the edge of a camp site was perhaps the sketchiest fish & chip shop we’d ever seen. Not bad grub, though!
We spent most of the week in Croyde, a picturesque and tourist-centric village on Devon’s
North coast. The combination of the life of a small village and being at the centre of a surfer scene makes for a particularly eccentric and culturally-unusual place. Quirky
features of the village included the bakery, which seemed to only bake a half-dozen croissants each morning and sell out shortly after they opened (which was variably between 8am and
9am, pretty much at random), the ice cream shop which closed at lunchtime on the hottest day of our stay, and the fish & chip shop that was so desperate to “use up their stock”, for
some reason, that they suggested that we might like a cardboard box rather than a carrier bag in which to take away our food, “so they could get rid of it”.
“You’ve never seen a beach before, have you? Isn’t this exciting?” /stares in wonderment at own thumbs/
The Eden Project
In the right dome, a Mediterranean climate. In the left, a jungle. In both, lots of things for Annabel to try to grab hold of and put in her mouth.
Ever since it opened in the early 2000s, I’d always wanted to visit The Eden Project – a group of biome
domes deep in the valley of a former Cornish quarry, surrounded by gardens and eco-exhibitions and stuff. And since we’d come all of the way to Devon (via Cardiff, which turns out
to be quite the diversion, actually!), we figured that we might as well go the extra 90 miles into Cornwall to visit the place. It was pretty fabulous, actually, although the heat and
humidity of the jungle biome really did make it feel like we were trekking through the jungle, from time to time.
The jungle biome was a little hot for poor Annabel, and she was glad to get into the cool room and have a drink of water.
Geocaching
In Devon, nipple-high grass counts as a “footpath”.
On one day of our holiday, I took an afternoon to make a 6½ mile hike/jog around the Northern loop of the Way Down West series of geocaches, which turned out to be somewhat gruelling on account of the ill-maintained rural
footpaths of North Devon and taking an inadequate supply of water for the heat of the afternoon.
Seriously, Devon: if I need to bring a machete, it’s not a footpath.
On the upside, though, I managed to find 55 geocaches in a single afternoon, on foot, which is more than three times my previous best “daily score”, and took me through some genuinely
beautiful and remote Devon countryside.
GC24YCW (“Way Down West 105”) was the last in my 55-cache series, and my body was glad of it.
Watermouth Castle
We took an expedition out to Watermouth Castle, which turned out to be an
experience as eccentric as we’d found Croyde to be, before it. The only possible explanation I can think of for the place is that it must be owned by a child of a hoarder, who inherited
an enormous collection of random crap and needed to find a way to make money out of it… so they turned it into something that’s 50% museum, 50% theme park, and 100% fever dream.
A group of animatronic robots playing automatic-organ versions of ABBA songs greet you at Watermouth Castle. And then things get weird.
There’s a cellar full of old bicycles. A room full of old kitchen equipment. A room containing a very large N-gauge model railway layout. Several rooms containing entertainments that would have looked outdated on a 1970s pier: fortune
tellers, slot machines, and delightfully naïve peep-show boxes. A hedge maze with no exit. A disturbingly patriotic water show with organ accompaniment. A garden full of
dancing gnomes. A hall of mirrors. A mock 1920s living room. A room full of primitive washing machines and their components. The whole thing feels schizophrenic, but
somehow charming too: like a reminder of how far entertainment and conveniences have come in the last hundred years.
Baggy Point
The tip of Baggy Point gave me vibes of Aberystwyth’s own Constitution Hill, with the exception that it was sunny at Baggy Point.
We took a hike out to beautiful Baggy Point, a beautiful headland stretching
out into the Atlantic to make it the Easternmost point in North Devon. It was apparently used by soldiers training for the D-Day landings, but nowadays it seems mostly to be used to
graze goats. The whole area made me reminisce about walks to Borth along the Ceredigion coast. Unfortunately for Ruth and
JTA, who headed back to our accommodation before me, I’d failed to hand them the key to the front door before we
parted ways and I went off to explore the rest of the headland, and in my absence they had to climb in through the window.
The Collision
For all of the wonderful things we got up to in Devon, though – everything above and more besides – the reason that we’ll no-doubt never forget this particular trip came as we set off
on our way home.
[spb_message color=”alert-warning” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]Warning: this section discusses a tragic car accident.[/spb_message]
About an hour after we set off for home on our final day in Devon, we ended up immediately behind a terrible crash, involving two cars striking one another head-on at an incredible
speed. We saw it coming with only seconds to spare before both vehicles smashing together, each thrown clear to a side of the road as a cloud of shattered glass and metal was
flung into the air. JTA was driving at this point, and hit the brakes in time to keep us clear of the whirling machines, but it was immediately apparent that we were right in the middle
of something awful. I shouted for Ruth and JTA to see what they could do (they’re both Red Cross first aiders, after all) as I phoned the emergency services and extracted our
location from the SatNav, then started working to ensure that a path was cleared through the traffic so that the ambulances would be able to get through.
Ambulances, fire engines, and police cars arrived quickly, or so it felt: honestly, my perception of time at this point was completely shaken.
A passer-by – an off-duty police officer – joined Ruth and I in performing CPR on one of the drivers, until paramedics arrived. My first aid training’s rusty compared to Ruth and
JTA’s, of course, but even thinking back to my training so long ago, I can tell you is that doing it with a real person – surrounded by glass and oil and blood – is
a completely different experience to doing it on a dummy. The ambulance crew took over as soon as they arrived, but it seems that it was too late for her. Meanwhile the driver of the
other car, who was still conscious and was being supported by JTA, hung on bravely but, local news reported, died that afternoon in hospital. Between
the two cars, two people were killed; the third person – a passenger – survived, as did a dog who was riding in the back of one of the cars.
Once we’d handed over to the emergency services, we retreated to a safe distance and, for perhaps the first time, began to contemplate what we’d seen.
I am aware that I’ve described the incident, and our participation in its aftermath, in a very matter-of-fact way. That’s because I’m honestly not sure what I mean to say,
beyond that. It’s something that’s shaken me – the accident was, as far as I could see, the kind of thing that could happen to any of us at any time, and that realisation forces
upon me an incredible sense of my own fragility. Scenes from the experience – the cars shattering apart; the dying driver; her courageous passenger – haunt me. But it feels unfair to
dwell on such things: no matter what I feel, there’s no way to ignore the stark truth that no matter how much we were affected by the incident… the passenger, and the families and
friends of those involved, will always have been affected more.
It took hours for us to get back on the road again, and the police were very apologetic. But honestly: I don’t think that any of us felt 100% happy about being behind the wheel of
a car again after what had just happened. Our journey back home was slow and cautious, filled with the images of the injuries we’d seen and with a newly acute awareness of the
dangers of the glass-and-metal box we sat inside. We stopped at a service station part-way home, and I remarked to Ruth how surreal it felt that everybody around us was
behaving so normally: drinking a coffee; reading a paper; oblivious to the fact that just a few tens of miles and a couple of hours away, people just like them had lost
their lives, doing exactly what they were about to go and do.
It’s all about perspective, of course. I feel a deep sorrow for the poor families of the people who didn’t make it. I feel a periodic pang of worry that perhaps there were things I
could have done: What if I’d have more-recently practised first aid? What if I’d more-quickly decoded our position and relayed it to the operator? What if I’d have offered to help Ruth
immediately, rather than assuming that she had sufficient (and the right kind of) help and instead worked on ensuring that the traffic was directed? I know that there’s no
sense in such what-if games: they’re just a slow way to drive yourself mad.
Maybe I’m just looking for a silver lining or a moral or something in this story that I just can’t find. For a time I considered putting this segment into a separate blog post: but I
realised that the only reason I was doing so was to avoid talking about it. And as I’m sure you all know already, that’s not a healthy approach.
Right now, I can only say one thing for certain: our holiday to Devon is a trip I’ll never forget.
After my visit the other day, I went home, read some of the logs, and thought about this cache. Boards? Boards are something that people worry about when they’re not Batman. A cache
that’s placed in the middle of dead space? That’s not a problem Batman would have. I can be Batman, sure. I AM BATMAN!
So today, I finished work, changed into a set of loose clothing (that I could comfortably climb in and wouldn’t mind having to swim in if I had to), rallied my coworker and fellow
‘cacher kateevery to act as my eyes-on-land – and my photographer – and set out to the bridge.
The boards on the side I opted to start my expedition from were a little more-troublesome – stretching farther out over the water – than the one I’d taken on before, but that hardly
mattered: today, I was Batman. A grab and a leap, and I was on the other side. Next came the tough bit – the crossing: no Bat-Belt; no Batarang… but I still had my pure Batmanosity.
Leaping up and bracing myself against the beams, I began shuffling across. Just as I began to tire, kateevery – my very own Robin
– called out, “just four more steps”, exactly the motivation I needed to complete my crossing and grab the cache.
Totally great location. Totally Batman expedition. Totally adding this cache to my favourites.
Last weekend was an exciting and unusual experience, full of exciting (expected) things interspersed with a handful of exciting (unexpected) things. Let’s go chronologically:
Thursday/Friday – Mario, Magic, Marriage
I left work, picked up a rental car (having unfortunately forgotten to take my counterpart driving license to the rental place, I had the choice of either cycling for an hour to collect
it or else paying a fiver for them to run a DVLA check, and I opted for the latter on the grounds that an hour of my time (especially if I have to spend it cycling back and forth along
the same stretch of road) is worth more to me than a picture of Elizabeth Fry. I drove home, packed a bag, said goodbye to Ruth, JTA, and Annabel, and drove up to Preston.
“I just found this card; is it yours? Maybe it will be, later.”
There, I spent most of Friday playing the new Mario game with my
sister Becky, gave a few small performances of magic (did I mention I’m doing magic nowadays? – guess that’ll have to
wait for another blog post) at various places around Preston, and went out for a curry with my mother, my sisters Becky and Sarah, and Sarah’s boyfriend Richard. So far, so ordinary,
right? Well that’s where things took a turn. Because as Becky, our mother, and I looked at the drinks menu as we waited for Sarah and her boyfriend to turn up… something different
happened instead.
Never before in our family has a marriage been conducted with so little pomp nor pre-planning. Except for our mother’s, of course.
Sarah turned up with her husband.
It turns out that they’d gotten married earlier that afternoon. They’d not told anybody in advance – nobody at all – but had simply gone to the registry office (via a jewellers, to
rustle up some rings, and a Starbucks, to rustle up some witnesses) and tied the knot. Okay; that’s not strictly true: clearly they had at least three weeks planning on account of the
way that marriage banns work in the UK. Any case case, I’ve suddenly got
the temptation to write some software that monitors marriage announcements (assuming there are XML feeds, or something) and compares them to your address book to let you know if anybody
you know is planning to elope, just to save me from the moment of surprise that caught me out in a curry house on Friday evening.
Tie some cans behind that trolley and spray “just married” on it in shaving foam, would you?
So it turns out I’ve acquired a brother-in-law. He’s a lovely chap and everything, but man, that was surprising. There’ll doubtless be more about it in Episode 32 of Becky’s “Family Vlog”, so if there was ever an episode that you ought to watch,
then it’s this one – with its marriage surprise and (probably) moments of magic – that you ought to keep an eye out for.
Next, I made my way up to Edinburgh to meet up with Matt R and his man-buddies for a stag night to
remember. Or, failing that, a stag night to forget in a drunken haze: it’s been a long, long time since I’ve drunk like I did on that particular outing. After warming up with a beer or
two in our hotel room, the five of us made our way to the Glenkinchie Distillery, for a
wonderful exploration into the world of whiskies.
It’s hard to appreciate how large the pair of stills at Glenkinchie are, if you’ve only seen the stills at other Scottish distilleries before. See the people in the background, for
scale.
And then, of course, began the real drinking. Four or five whiskies at the distillery bar, followed by another beer back in the hotel room, followed by a couple more beers
at bars, followed by another four whiskies at the Whiski Rooms (which I’d first visited while in Edinburgh for the fringe, last year), followed by a beer with
dinner… and I was already pretty wiped-out. Another of the ‘stags’ and I – he equally knackered and anticipating a full day of work, in the morning – retired to the hotel room while the
remainder took Matt out “in search of a titty bar” (a mission in which, I gather, they were unsuccessful).
The Glenkinchie Distillery bar carries a full range of Diageo Scotch whiskies, plus a handful of other brands, and expert staff are on hand to help with tasting.
Do you remember being in your early twenties and being able to throw back that kind of level of booze without so much as a shudder? Gosh, it gets harder a decade later. On the other
hand, I was sufficiently pickled that I wasn’t for a moment disturbed by the gents I was sharing a room with, who I should re-name “snore-monster”, “fart-monster”, and
“gets-up-a-half-dozen-times-during-the-night-to-hug-the-toilet-bowl-monster”. I just passed out and stayed that way until the morning came, when I went in search of a sobering
double-helping of fried food to set me right before the long journey back to Oxford.
All in all: hell of a stag night, and a great pre-party in anticipation of next weekend’s pair of weddings… y’know, the ones which I’d stupidly thought would be the only
two couples I knew who’d be getting married this fortnight!
A week ago, Ruth pushed a baby out of her body, completely upstaging my birthday and, incidentally,
throwing all of our lives pretty much into chaos. Having gotten to the point at which she’d resigned herself to “being pregnant forever“, Ruth would have certainly been glad to have that stage over and done with, were it not for a long and painful labour followed by a torturous and
exhausting birth.
If Ruth looks like she’s about to die of exhaustion in this photo, that’s because that’s how she’s feeling.
There’s a lot that can be said about the labour: a 38-hour crescendo of Ruth gradually and repeatedly finding levels of pain and tiredness that each seemed impossible, until she reached
them. But Ruth has suggested that she might like to write a little about it herself, so I shan’t steal her limelight. What I can say is that I didn’t – and I don’t think that JTA, either – appreciate quite how emotionally draining the experience would be for the two of us, as well. There was a
strange sensation for me about twelve hours in: a sensation perhaps most-comprehensible by our friends who’ve done emotional support work. That was: after watching somebody I love so
much suffer so greatly for so long, I felt as if I’d somehow begun to exhaust whatever part of my brain feels empathy. As if the experience of supporting Ruth had served to drain me in
a way I’d never fully experienced before, like when you discover a muscle you didn’t know you had when it aches after an unusual new exercise.
Forcep-marks still visible, the newborn takes an extended nap in a crib alongside Ruth’s recovery-bed.
Of course, after the ordeal we got to take home a little bundle of joy, who continues – despite now having a perfectly fabulous name of her own – to be referred to as “tiny”, even
though her birth weight of 8lbs 12oz (that’s about 4kg, for those who – like me – prefer to think in metric) doesn’t really make that a very fitting nickname! Nor the amount of damage
she did to Ruth on the way out, which also might be ill-described as “tiny”! She’s also often referred to as “the poopmachine”, for reasons that ought not need spelling out.
I’m smiling, because I don’t yet know that, within seconds of this photo being taken, she’s about to fill her nappy.
My employer was kind enough to give me paternity leave, even though I’m not the biological father (JTA is; and he’s very-much still in the picture!). I’d looked at my contract and
discovered that the wording seemed to imply that I was eligible, stating that I’d be permitted to take paternity leave if I was about to become a father, or if my partner was about to
give birth, the latter of which seemed perfectly clear. To be certain, I’d wandered along to Personnel and explained our living arrangement, and they just had looks on their faces that
said “we’re not touching that with a barge pole; let’s just err on the side of giving him leave!” As a result, we’ve had all hands on deck to help out with the
multitudinous tasks that have suddenly been added to our lives, which has been incredibly useful, especially given that Ruth has been spending several days mostly lying-down, as she’s
been recovering from injuries sustained during the delivery.
If only we had some kind of way to set up a web-based rota of feeding, changing and comforting the little one…
Despite everything, we and the rest of the Three Rings team still managed to push the latest version into testing on schedule, though
fitting in time for bug-fixing is even harder than it would be were we at our “day jobs” during the daytimes! It’s not that our little poopmachine takes up all of our time, though she
does seem to take a lot of it, it’s simply that we’re all so tired! For the last few nights she’s been fussy about sleeping, and we’ve all lost a lot of rest time over keeping her fed,
clean, and feeling loved.
Who loves boob? Baby does! Also, everybody else in the house.
For all my complaining, though, what we’ve got here is an adorable and mostly well-behaved little bundle of joy. And when she’s not covered in poop, shouting for
attention, or spitting milk all over you, she’s a little angel. And I’m sure you’ll all be sick of hearing about her very soon.
At the end of 2012, I shared some sad news: that Ruth and JTA had suffered a miscarriage. It was a tragic end
to a tragic year.
I just wanted to share with you something that we’ve all kept quiet about until now, until we all felt confident that we weren’t likely to have a repeat of that tragedy: as Ruth just mentioned on her blog, too, she’s pregnant again! With a due date of New Year’s
Eve there’s plenty of time for us to get settled into our new house before
then, but it looks like she’s still going to find herself excused of all of the heavy lifting during the move.
Needless to say, this is all incredibly exciting news on New Earth, and we’ve had to bite our tongues sometimes to not tell people about it. Apologies to those of you who’ve invited us
to things (e.g. at Christmas and New Years’) that we’ve had to quietly turn down without explanation – at least now you know!
I’m sure there’ll be lots to say over the coming months. I can’t promise as thorough updates as Siân‘s fantastic
pregnancy blogging, but we’ll see what we can do.
Went up the PYG track this weekend with the TransAid team, raising money in memory of my father (who was killed when he fell from a cliff last year, while in training for a sponsored
trip to the North Pole). Whlie the stragglers made their way up to the summit, I whipped out my GPSr and found this wonderful little cache (pretty sure it wasn’t here when I last came
up Snowdon, in early 2006).
A glorious day, marred only by the ludicrous number of walkers that had come out to make the most of it – the top was heaving with people!
Didn’t have a pen with me, and there wasn’t one in the cache. I’ve taken a photo of myself holding the cache (which I’ll provide on-demand, but in order not to spoil the cache for
others I’ve not included it: instead see attached a photo of my group at the summit – I’m the guy at the front with his arms out; I’ve just run up from where the cache is in order to
get into the picture at the last second!).
Off for an afternoon’s caching with tajasel, we decided on a whim against our plan to
go down the Thames Path and instead found ourselves further West, in Radley Wood. We spotted this cache listing, and thought we’d give it a go… and we’re really glad we did! A fantastic
cache with a wonderful puzzle theme; the “decoder” is a wonderful idea; I really love it. Thanks for a great cache!
My 100th cache find turned out to be also my most-Southerly find so far, and also turned out to be a most-spectacular little hiding place. After walking up and down the path a bit with
fleeblewidget and her mother, while our GPSrs got their bearings, we managed to pinpoint the
location almost exactly, but we were still clueless. Eventually, it was fleeblewidget‘s mother
– completely new to caching – who decided to investigate what turned out to be exactly what we were looking for! A most-wonderful cache; thanks!
Geoff Major’s tweet about my dad reaching his destination.
So it was a really special moment to discover that, this weekend, my dad finally made it to the pole. My sisters and I had arranged that a portion of his cremated ashes would be
carried with the polar trek team and scattered at what must be one of the most remote places on Earth – the very top of the world. It’s nice to think that not even death was enough to
stop my dad from getting to the planet’s most Northernmost spot, even if he had to be carried for the last 600 miles.
My dad, “dressed for cold weather”, according to my sister.
Meanwhile, donations flooded in faster than ever to my dad’s fundraising page,
taking the grand total to over £12,000 – significantly in excess of the £10,000 he’d hoped to raise. My family and I are gobsmacked with the generosity of the people who’ve donated, and
incredibly grateful to them as well as to the team that took him on the last ten days of his journey to the Pole.
The fundraising total, according to JustGiving. A significant amount of money was also raised offline, via donations at or around my dad’s wake, and is not included in this
already-impressive total.
It pleases me that my dad gets to trespass somewhere he shouldn’t be, one last time: this time, breaking the international conventions that require that nothing gets “left” at the North
Pole. The remainder of my fathers ashes will be scattered by my sisters and I from the top of a particular mountain, as he’d sometimes said that he’d wanted.
And after all of these adventures, I think he deserves to get what he wants. With no apologies for the pun: he’s urn‘d it!
Friday was the day of my dad’s funeral. If you’ve just tuned in, you might like to see my blog post about his death, and a second article about the things that have been hardest, so far, in
its aftermath. I’m not inclined to say too much, so I’ll be brief and let pictures, and a video, tell the story. As usual, you’ll find that you can click on the pictures to enlarge
them.
A convoy of buses arrive to deliver attendees to the funeral.
A remarkable number of people turned up to mark my dad’s passing on this sad occasion. I was genuinely surprised to see how many lives he’d touched (and to hear about a great many more
from people who couldn’t make it). About 350 people struggled to fit in to the cramped crematorium, and many had to stand outside where – thankfully – there were repeater speakers.
The buses with digital display boards, provided by Stagecoach, had been reprogrammed to show my dad’s name and years of life.
My sisters and I were determined that this event would be a celebration of our father’s life. So rather than focusing on his tragic and premature death, we made every effort
to commemorate his achievements and reinforce the lessons that we can all learn from his time with us. In a similar vein, we’d told everybody that we had the chance to that there was no
need to wear black for this funeral: that people should wear what’s appropriate to them for their personal act of mourning and remembrance.
In memory of my dad, I wore his old-style bus driver’s license badge, as well as wearing both socks and sandals together, as he often would.
We’d hired a former minister, Ken Howles, to provide a (thoroughly secular, under threat of non-payment!) framework for the service, but we “rolled our own” so far as possible. Seven
individual tributes and eulogies were given by people representing different aspects of my dad’s life: from my mother, from his partner, from the friend with whom he was walking on the
day he died, from the managing directors of the company he founded and the company he last worked for, from the chief executive of the charity he was fundraising for, and – finally –
from me.
(if you can’t view the YouTube video above, or if you want to share it with others, you can also view it on YouTube)
The contrast between the different tributes was stark and staggering, reflecting the huge variety in the different facets of my father’s life. From guerrilla gardening to
trainspotting, lessons learned to tyres pulled, we collectively painted a picture of the spectrum of my dad’s life. The tributes given were, in order:
My mother, Doreen (watch), who talked about their adventures together as
young adults and the roots of his career in transport
His partner, Jenny (watch), who shared the experiences they’d had together, and
mourned for those that they would not
His friend, John (watch), who let us in on the things that they’d talked about
during my dad’s final hours
Adrian, the managing director of the company my dad founded (watch), on his success in the world of transport consultancy, and working with him
A picture of the “Celebration of Life” order of service that we distributed at the funeral. Click on the picture to download the original (which includes a list of some of the
charities my dad supported) as a PDF.
Kevin, the managing director of Go North-East (watch), on the subject of my dad’s recent career and influence on British transport
Gary, chief executive of TransAid (watch), announced the future creation of the Peter Huntley Fundraising Award, and thanked my dad and his supporters on behalf of
the dozens of charities my dad helped
And finally, me (watch), contrasting all of the above by talking about what
my dad was like as a father and a friend, and the lessons we can learn from him
JTA serves butter pie, mushy peas, and hotpot – classic Lancashire comfort foods – to guests at the wake.
Afterwards, we held a wake at Grimsargh Village Hall which, on account of the sheer number of bus industry attendees,
rapidly became a micro-conference for the public transport sector! It was great to have the chance to chat to so many people who’d worked with my dad in so many different contexts.
Mourners gather near the (convenient!) bar at Grimsargh Village Hall. I’ve decided: all wakes should have a bar.
Between hot food provided by a local caterer, cold savories courtesy of
Jenny’s daugher Eppie, and a copious quantity of cakes baked by Ruth, there was an incredible superfluity
of food. These two, plus JTA, Paul, and Eppie’s
boyfriend James, provided a spectacular level of “behind-the-scenes” magic, keeping everything running smoothly and ensuring that everything happened as and when it was supposed to.
Among other things, Ruth baked biscuits in the shape of buses, decorated in the colours of the different routes that my dad rebranded during his time at Go North-East.
We set up a “memory book”, in which people could write their recollections of my dad. I haven’t had time to read much of it yet, but one of them stands out already to me as a concise
and simple explanation of what we achieved at the crematorium that day. It reads:
“Great funeral, Peter. Sorry that you missed it.”
It was certainly a great send-off for a man who did so much for so many people. Thank you so much to everybody who made it such a success, and to everybody who, in the meantime, has
donated to TransAid via my dad’s
JustGiving page (or by giving us cash or cheques at or after the funeral). You’re helping his memory live on, for everybody: thank you.
My dad didn’t teach me to drive. But he did teach me to read a bus timetable. Thanks, dad. I love you.
