The curse of the drinking classes

Is work, according to Oscar Wilde. And half of all the quotes worth quoting are Oscar Wilde, according to my Father. It seems that my days of washing clothes, reading Philip Pullman and Kurt Vonnegut novels in the sunshine and blowing the froth off cold bottles of Tusker are numbered: I have gone and got a job.
[If I were clever with computers I would have the music that accompanies the marching of the Stormtroopers in Star Wars playing now, maybe you’ll be good enough to hum it while you read?]
Perhaps I tempted fate too much by stating how I enjoy my employment-free life, or perhaps it was because I was foolish enough to apply for something, but either way there you have it, I have only myself to blame. The School, who employ Suze, advertised 2 posts in malaria research, the eradication of this disease being a stated (and ambitious, commendable etc) aim of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and also part of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. It is interesting to wonder which of these organisations is, these days, more powerful.
I put in my CV, saying I would be interested in either job, and the School (bless ’em) decided that, in the words of the Beastie Boys; “I got the skills (What skills?) To pay the bills” and offered me the more senior of the two. It’s a malaria treatment study, so the more pedantic amongst us, like myself, could question whether it is really epidemiology – a discipline which usually investigates disease prevention. I suppose that epi’ is literally about the study of diseases and how they spread, and semantics aside the aim of reducing malaria deaths, even among those who are suspected to have the disease, is definitely a good one. It sounds as though I will have a number of other staff “under me”, which is a little intimidating. OK, the idea of even turning up 5 days per week is intimidating, having supervisory responsibilities borders on the terrifying, but deep breath, fingers crossed and here we go. I’ll keep you posted.

On a completely different note: Wildlife. We aren’t as surrounded by beasties as I hoped we would be here, but we do see a few new things now and again. And it is odd, you never know what will impress you the most. The bigger stuff has actually not made that much of an impact on me; monkeys and monitor lizards are lovely, of course, and I am really glad they seem to survive and thrive even close to towns. But the smaller things have been the ones really to take my breath away. Lion fish, sea horses and chameleons are way out on top of my list of favourites at the moment, for having a kind of delicate and detailed beauty that simply doesn’t show up on TV. I can’t say exactly what it is, but even though the BBC have shown me these things many times, to see a real one is genuinely thrilling. I found my first chameleon recently. It was actually crossing the road in front of me during a training ride, so I jammed on the anchors, laid my bike down to obstruct passing traffic and carried him off to the relative safety of a bush. I got bitten pretty hard on the thumb for my trouble (“Oh, now he’s gettin’ really mad” in the words of the sorely missed Steve Irwin), but I would take that any day if it means I get to see another one. I remember David Attenborough apparently being moved almost to tears by pygmy chameleons on Madagascar: At the time I thought it was charming if slightly odd, but now I think it is quite understandable.

Oh! You pretty things.

Wearily she opened her eyes and peered across the tiny room. Even the dim light of the single, smoky, kerosene lamp could neither hide nor romanticise the squalor. Dirty walls struggled to hold the low bare ceiling up, as the rain ricocheted off the rusty corrugated iron roof. The floor was about 70% covered by torn, darkly-patterned linoleum, and the single window had neither curtains nor glass, just some corroded iron bars. At least the receptionist hadn’t asked questions. Two US dollars for the room, and a guest list to sign (name, passport number and so on) but it didn’t matter how many boxes she left blank or made up. She realised that sooner or later she must again make the short but long walk, under fog and thunderstorms, across the muddy yard to the stinking communal squat toilet – communal with any other paying guests as well as with the crawling things that she couldn’t name. How long could she live – exist – like this? Was it any better than the prison she sought to avoid?

Alright, I suppose we’re unlikely to be locked up for the crime of me taking occasional turns to drive while we await my licence, especially as our car has the almost unique combination of seat belts, brakes and 4 good tyres. But the above is a faithful description of the double room we shared last weekend at the edge of the rather beautiful Rondo Forest Reserve. To be fair, it had looked for an hour or so like we would have to sleep in the back of the Suzuki, so we were grateful to find anything, and we slept pretty well on the tatty sheets. Besides, the thrill of the place was the scenery not the comfort. About 40km sq of almost-pristine, closed canopy montane forest (the Brit’s in their wisdom, ordered sections of it cut down and replaced with a commercial teak plantation, but this has since reverted more or less back to natural growth) is only about 3 hours by 4x4 from our house. It was an adventure of a journey (quite literally a “Safari”) in itself; the unmade roads changed from loose rock to rutted stream bed to sand with little warning, and even many of the flat sections would have been impassable to any other car we’ve owned. When we stopped the car for longer than the few seconds it takes to shift into the low-ratio gear box, various locals would trot out of thin air and beg us to move them and their child/sister/box of chipped crockery to the next village, anything from 1-15km away. I think we helped about 5 of them in total, but when all your concentration is focussed on reacting to the next pot-hole, drop-off, rock or ford (and I mean this without any hint of racism) the guys in the back seat all blur into one.

We went on two long-ish walks through the forest tracks. The first day a local guy who was an uncanny likeness of a short, un-tattooed Mike Tyson, and seemed to be the village elder/forest warden, spent about 3 hours showing us where to drive in, park and walk. He was a lovely bloke, knew a bit about the forest wildlife and spoke decent English, and genuinely seemed to be pleased and surprised to receive a couple of quid after giving us an afternoon of his time and knowledge. I guess we were a little disappointed not to see more of the big famous animals which are known to frequent the forest, such as leopard, lion, elephant, various antelope etc. But we did see tracks of at least one carnivore, I suspect a rattel, as well as all sorts of small pretty stuff: colourful birds, butterflies, bombardier beetles and chameleons. We don’t yet have our “Spotter’s guide” books, but there are about 11 butterflies and 4-5 chameleon species that haven’t been seen anywhere else on earth except in this forest! For me it was just relaxing to walk in the shade of the varied and venerable trees, listening to things calling. I think if we go back, we’ll take a tent and maybe we’ll see more by keeping still and letting stuff come to us.

Ironman: Close to braking point

I’ll try to keep this brief but I have to whinge a bit. My front brake is rubbish. I train long hours/distances on the mountain bike, and the F brake is obviously pretty bloody essential. There may be one or two people out there (assuming that anyone is reading at all) mistakenly thinking that the front brake is less important than the back brake, in which case I shout poppycock*! When you decelerate, the weight moves towards the front of the vehicle. More weight on the front wheel = more grip for the front tyre = use the front brake more. Valentino Rossi (or any other racing motorcyclist) will probably not use his R brake from start to finish of a race, because when you brake that hard the R wheel has so little grip that it would skid immediately. Which makes it all the more eye-popping when our charismatic security guard turns up on an off-road Kawasaki with no F brake at all! All well and good for doing a few laps of our front garden (which obviously I had to try) but I wouldn't fancy it on the highway. This is also a massive issue on a mountain bike, since you do not have the luxury of both tyres being planted on firm and consistent tarmac, but rather you frequently have one or more tyres squelching and slurring through unidentifiable poppycock (or more correctly pappe kak*, this being the Dutch term for “soft shit”). It is possible of course, to stand the bike up on its front end, and from there even to fall over the front onto the track, by excessively hard and sudden use of the F brake, but you’d have to be a complete clutz and a dullard to manage that. I’ve only ever seen one person do it, and I won’t name him here. (A clue you say? Oh, alright then, Aberdeen, religious fundamentalist, annoying accent…)

But, since I want to be able to brake as hard as I like, I do want my F brake to have sufficient power to stand the bike up on its front end, should I so choose. Indeed, with a little bit of practice one can learn to perform an “endo-stop” or even an endo-turn in relative safety, and once learnt it can actually be useful. I did it once in T2 of a triathlon and the marshal screamed in fear; great fun. And the Hope MonoMini gracing the front end of Rocky (the mountain bike) will simply not do the business. Now I know a tiny bit about maintaining bikes, having built about 6 from the frame outwards. I even make my own wheels, so basically you can’t do much more without a welder. I set up my R brake, exactly the same make and model as the F and it works fine. I set up Suzanne’s F brake (Hayes XC9, fantastic piece of kit with a carbon lever, prrrr) and it is superb. But I have worked on this for some time, and spent sums of cash I don’t want to add up:

• Bled and re-filled the oil reservoir four times (twice by me, twice by a pro’ just in case).
• Replaced the hoses with new Goodridge jobs. This kit is canine reproductive tackle, they use the same brand in F1 racing, allegedly.
• Cleaned the rotor in water, fairy liquid, vodka and any other solvent I could think of.
• Replaced the rotor with a brand new one.
• Adjusted the reach of the lever (which was a revelation, didn’t even know you could do that with an open reservoir system?).
• Cleaned the pads in all the above solvents, and then baked them at 180C to burn off any trace of remaining dirt.
• Replaced the pads with after-market upgrades from EBC.
• Replaced the entire chuffing calliper and lever.

And while this was all infinitely preferable to going to the office, none of it has made the slightest difference to my ability to convert kinetic energy into heat (i.e. to brake, but you knew that? Good). So please, answers on an e-card, what the blazes is going wrong with my brake? I am fast running out of ideas, and becoming tempted to blame bad karma.

Hydro, Electric, Plants.

The rains are here. Yeeehaw, brother, the rains have come, and they’re about a fortnight early this year, apparently. This is mainly good, because it lowers the temperature and/or humidity to levels much more bearable for us white folk.

It also has a number of other knock-on effects, including:
The electricity keeps going off. We have a power cut every day, sometimes three or more. Depending on where you are in the town you sometimes hear an ironic cheer when the local electricity supply finally kicks in again, much like the noise in White Harte Lane when Gomes catches a ball.
The coconut trees drop coconuts. Mainly a good thing because they’re a tasty and free addition to a curry, but don’t make a habit of walking underneath the palm trees. I forget the exact statistics but a surprisingly high number of people are killed by falling fruit each year.
It is easier to sleep in between the storms, again because of the temperature, hard to sleep during them as the noise can be pretty thunderous.
Roads quickly become impassable to anything except a proper 4x4. Fortunately we now have our proper 4x4, and have even brought it back from Dar. Currently only Suze can drive it, as she has a proper local license and I do not. [And as I type; the 4th powercut of the day…]
So I never drive it anywhere, oh no sir.

Here is the car, and Suzanne, showing that she was not at all affected by marketing.

So, I am in the process of gaining a driving licence, which brings to my mind the Monty Python sketch where a man requests a fish licence for his pet, Eric (he’s an ‘alibut). In Tanzania it goes a little something like this:
Fill in a form stating your identity, cost TSH 3,000.
Obtain 8 passport sized photographs (taken on a mobile phone and uploaded to a PC, dreadful image making my nose look even bigger than real life), cost TSH 6,000.
Take the form and photos back to the place where you filled in the form, and fill in a new form, applying for a provisional licence, cost TSH 5,000.
Take these 2 forms and your recently signed and stamped provisional licence to the hospital. Queue for about 90 minutes among the sick and unfortunate, to obtain an eye-test form. Queuing, locally, is not quite the way us Brit’s would expect it, and requires you to lean/push/shout your way to the front or you will never get there. I found it hard to judge this process, as I am the size of about 2.4 hospitalised Tanzanians, and have spent many days over the last few months pushing weights around a gym. But it hardly seems fair to throw my own weight around and symbolically re-enact decades of colonial oppression in a hospital waiting room. Fortunately a local contact who was too small to cheat the system offered to queue for me.
Take all 3 forms to the eye clinic, where Matron fills in the eye-test form while you sit and (for example) memorise the sequence of letters on the eye exam chart.
Return the eye test form to the place where you got it, queue for a while longer, and obtain a signed, stamped receipt for your fee, cost TSH 10,000. OK, make that 10 receipts as they are all pre-filled with a value of 1,000 – presumably to make things quicker??
Take all 4 forms and 10 receipts back to the eye clinic, where you sit in the middle of the room amongst about 15 other patients, covering one eye at a time with your own hand, and reciting the letters you learnt previously. (I jest, I did the test properly).
Once Matron has stamped and signed the eye test form, and a fifth form stating that you are sufficiently sane and able bodied to drive (I had to write my own name on this one, which with hindsight may have actually been the test), you simply return all the above to the local police station, and wait an undefined length of time. Simple!
You will have noticed, that at no stage in this procedure did I have to drive, or even sit in, a car.

Finally, yet another list. Learn from my mistakes, here are some useful tips for distance running during a monsoon;
Take water, you are still sweating underneath all the rain.
Glasses may help you to keep your eyes open when the wind is in your face.
When moving through shin-deep muddy pools of about 5m diameter, walk rather than running, to avoid hitting hidden objects or twisting your ankle.
Don’t wear white socks.
Do remember that all your clothes will double or triple in weight.
Do wear shorts with a drawstring.

IM: It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it.

My training thus far has been following the advice/ideas from a book called “Going Long” by Friel and Byrn. On the one hand this is useful as the authors have been coaching and racing Ironman for several years. On the other there are some glaring errors in the book. The entire chapter on nutrition is, how shall I say? Bovine Surplus-matter, and I speak as someone who has a PhD in the area – OK, in both nutrition and BS, more on this below. There are also some big misunderstandings in the section on bicycle handling, some of which are pointless and some probably dangerous. Still, until proven otherwise I am assuming most of the rest to be correct and going along with most of the ideas. That means, up until now, that training has been all about “preparation”: Improving my technique over short distances and short durations, the principle being that there’s little point trying to do something for hours if you can’t even do it properly/efficiently for the first 30 minutes.

This has been both satisfying and useful. Swimming is becoming more relaxing and smoother and it is great to spend some time thinking about pedalling technique and decision-making on the bike. My running style remains a bit too bouncy and low-cadence, as 1 or 2 better runners have pointed out (Joe Socks and a random Canadian, thanks) but I think I have maybe got a little tidier there too.

What I am also really enjoying is not having a job. For one it gives me the chance to train when and where I can do so best, rather than when the boss dictates. Since my swimming is usually dependent on the tides this is fairly crucial. But more fundamentally it means I can introduce myself to people in a much more honest manner. I’ve always disliked the way a lot of people in Western society tend to define you solely by your job – can this really be the most interesting thing about someone? I am sure Marilyn Monroe did more interesting things than standing on air vents, including having affairs with at least one US president, for example. Those few people I know who have read a Jeffrey Archer novel assure me that his writing can certainly not be the most interesting thing about him, not compared with being a liar and a crook and serving time for it. But is she just a model, and he just an author? No, they are real, complex, multi-faceted (maybe I should say multi-faced in the latter case) human beings with quirks and flaws to their characters just like anyone else. And those are famous, well known jobs. Introducing myself as an epidemiologist was confusing for one, as most people don’t even know what it means, and secondly it was telling less than half of the story. I find (found) research and teaching in epidemiology interesting enough that I could turn up to work each morning, just. And I presume that one day I will have to work again, probably in the same area. But if you offered me early retirement I would take it on Monday. I have 1001 other things more stimulating and rewarding that I will always want to do with my leisure time, and by which I would much rather be defined, or categorised. All I ask of my job is that it pays me enough to do them, for one, and secondly it should be something that I can at least regard as “not unethical”.

So being here is fantastic, I can support the Mrs in her work, aiming to improve the survival rate of newborn Tanzanian infants, which is surely the opposite of unethical. And at the same time we can both be a myriad other things, and be known for those things. Some of them may seem small or quirky (the white couple who don’t drive everywhere), while others may on a local scale be really weird (“How can you not be a Christian or a Muslim!?”), but all of which tell far more about who we really are than the things we have to do to earn money.

Out of Arusha

In the words of the late great Joe Strummer;
“I went to a place where every white face is an invitation to robbery,
Sittin’ here in my safe European home, I wanna go back there again.”

Last weekend took me to Arusha where I was trying to do something useful with my time for the excellent African Palliative Care Association (http://www.apca.co.ug/). Must confess that I felt like a tiny bit of a fraud at first, having very little confidence that my brain was useful enough to make it worth their dollars transporting my body that far. Being introduced as “Dr Taylor” also remains a strange and slightly uncomfortable experience, but perhaps that title is the reason I get offered the odd piece of work like this. Does it make my PhD all seem worthwhile? Maybe it will eventually but it’s not even close yet. The thought that such a dull and protracted episode of turd-polishing and box-ticking, culminating in a viva which I can honestly describe as the worst 3 hours of my life, can lead to me gaining any more than a congratulatory handshake from colleagues still feels like a farce to me. Still, I guess this kind of work is a way of moving on, all part of the process of “closure” or whatever a psychiatrist would call it.
So I landed at Kilimanjaro airport hoping that the few days of work would be at least doable, possibly even therapeutic. It was quickly apparent that if anything was going to make the work difficult it wasn’t a weakness of mine, but of the limited data available. The original and ongoing work – which is valuable and interesting in its own right, naturally – wasn’t set up as a research project, and retrospectively using data for a new purpose is always controversial.

The accommodation was extraordinary, big and opulent and a stark contrast to the surroundings in rural Tanzania. I have to say I wouldn’t choose it myself but I suspect choices were limited anyway. I was warned by the hotel staff and another guest not to put myself in danger by going outside the gates of the complex, hence (at last) my reference to the Clash lyrics above. I am, of course, a surly misanthrope so normally any excuse to avoid personal contact is a good one. But I loathe feeling like the privileged white man, and in accordance with the other theme of this blog I needed to keep up with some exercise, so I got up at dawn to take a run around the local roads. What can I say? It is hard to describe the inspirational feeling of calm and beauty that I felt running through the foothills of Mt Kili. It soothes almost every sense. The views, the birdsong, the cool (yes!) and clean mountain air, just slightly thin with altitude.


The roads were rolling hills, and unsurfaced so the 4-5 cars I did see in nearly an hour could barely go faster than me anyway. I have never enjoyed running so much in all my puff. Normally it is a way to keep in shape or to get somewhere, but suddenly I could understand what motivates people to want to run and run and see just how far they can go, at which point a virtual nod to my friend Anna:
annakatfinn.blogspot.com/

And it goes almost without saying that I never felt in the faintest danger that someone was about to mug me for my cheap digital watch, despite that fact that in Tanzania it is unremarkable to see anyone from the age of about 3 upwards carrying a machete. The most threatening encounter I had was a couple of young men working in a field who called out “Good morning, how are you?” in a difficult accent. My conclusion is that the only robbery taking place on the road to Arusha is the daylight variety inside the hotel (a roughly 500% mark-up on a bottle of mineral water, for instance), and the rumours of danger are “an invitation to robbery” designed to keep these prices viable.