squaremobius dot net

Here's to The Dog

Our local, the Dog and Six Stories (variously 'The Dog', 'The Dog and Yellow Sign', 'The Dog and Four Horsemen', ad infinitum), has shut down. I think it is being rebuilt as flats.

The Dog wasn't your typical London pub; or rather it was, in the sense that it had idiosyncrasies that we as locals came to almost delight in. The usually sparsely populated upstairs was a blessing if you wanted a quiet game of pool (on one of the five tables). They didn't serve food — but then they didn't mind if you brought some yourself. Even oily, smelly pizza from across the road.

More often than not, we'd be passing the Dog on the way to or from West Hampstead and step inside for a one. There are recycling bins just beside it as well, in case one needs an excuse to be going that way.

The Least Fixed Point Motorcycle Club conquer Scandinavia, part 2

While wandering around the market square in Kalmar looking for somewhere to have a drink (there wasn't so much a lack of bars, more a lack of appealling bars) and some dinner, we ran into another biker who had spotted us in the information center earlier. Chad is an American who teaches at the international school in Göteborg. With the compelling motto "Go big or go home", Chad coerced us into a night of outlandish drinking.

Day Five

Hence or otherwise, Thursday was a lazy day. At 2pm we enquired as to the check-out time at the hostel, and made the desperately hard call of staying put for another night. Instead of more motorways, then, we did a bit of city riding and took TonyG's bike to a mechanic to tighten the chain and check the alignment. Since it was still early afternoon, we made a day trip of it and traversed another long bridge to Öland (literally: 'Island-land'). There are around twenty-three thousand people spread out across Öland, in tiny villages stretched out along sections of road.

The benefit of staying a second night at the hostel is that we could do a mid-tour load of washing, and confidently eat dinner at the adjacent restaurant.

Day Six

Breakfast on the sixth day was the typical smorgasbord of cold meats, cheese and inappropriate bread. Managing an early start for once, we headed North initially but turned West and took B roads towards the middle of Småland.

The settlement of Korrö hosts a folk music festival each year, and we decided on there for a stop. Even though there were a few usable hours left, we decided to take it easy and put ourselves up in a bunk room. The festival was a few weeks away but the regular facilities were all running: We rented a canoe and paddled down then back up the river, looked around the water-wheel-powered sawmill, then cooked pytt i panna with eggs on a real stovetop in the hostel kitchen.

Day Seven

In the morning it turned out that leaving my keys in the ignition of my bike, aside from making it likely that it would be stolen (which it wasn't), also made it likely that the battery would be too drained to power the starter motor (which it was). Luckily my inarticulations in Swenglish were enough to convince the girl running the Kaffestugar that I was worth helping and that what the scenario required was a set of jumper leads.

A short round trip was sufficient to charge the battery enough to start the bike reliably, and we returned the jumper leads and bid a subdued farewell to Korrö. By the time we'd gone the few miles to Rävemåla and turned West again, it was raining sporadically; after a ride North through some beautiful lakelands and some appalling forestry roads, it was ready to commit to a persistent downpour.

Naturally once we'd gone through the process of trying to wait it out, giving up, ferrying things back and forth between the bikes on the road and shelter in the lea of trees on the bank, getting changed into wet weather kit and finally riding carefully on some slick and patchy roads for a few miles — it cleared up. At least, we managed to outrun the stormclouds somewhere around Ljundby. After a brief and bitter stop to change back out of the wet weather kit, we pushed on to Halmstad on the West coast.

It became apparent upon arriving at Tylösands what it was that all the Swedish youth not behind a counter or on the other coast were doing: Playing atrocious 80s music from loudly competing ghettoblasters at our end of the camp ground.

Day Eight

If the sun was insufficient (which our carefully positioned tent assured), the loud music and tween chitchat certainly made up for it, and we were irrevocably awake early. Shortly, though, the sense of urgency departed with the tweens, and we departed ourselves some time around noon. I managed a walk down to the curiously tween-neglected beach. Kids were playing handball on the sand, while some well-kept beach volleyball courts were empty — not for the first time that day I furrowed my brow in consideration of the future of Swedish youth.

Out of Halmstad we spent some time taking coastal roads down towards Ängelholm, zipping through or stopping in pretty little beach settlements such as Kattvik on the very point of a peninsula. The winding roads and not a lot of traffic made it plenty fun, and we gave scarce attention to directions until hunger and a declining sense of progress spurred us on to the next big town.

Ängelholm's central square served well as a late lunch spot, and we determined to enquire at Helsingborg about the car ferry to Denmark. Once we arrived it turned out the next ferry was departing in five minutes, so we bought tickets, drove on board, and quit Sweden.

The Least Fixed Point Motorcycle Club conquer Scandinavia, part 1

Day One

After last minute flurrying to tidy and pack, I packed up my bonnie Bonneville and went to meet TonyG at his in Mile End. The ride to Harwich was uneventful, and we arrived a full hour before check-in. With motorbikes we were loaded first, though by the time we'd improvised stabilisation schemes with ratchets and straps and chocks, all the car drivers had parked up and were harassing the dour bartender.

The sailing was fairly smooth, so in the end it wasn't concern for our bikes that kept us awake. It was the comedic duo of deranged walruses sharing the four berth cabin with us. Even the most outrageous impression of a whale dying from tuberculosis would not be a patch on one man's snoring; each intake of breath was a unique landscape of sound. In comparison, the other man was pedestrian, but made it up in doggedness. The earplugs saw action before we'd even started touring.

Day Two

We arrived in Esbjerg around noon, on the deck gawping at the huge windfarms. After the almost invisible customs and border control we hopped straight on the E20 East. Sometime in the afternoon we stopped in Odense for lunch, giving TonyG a chance to see just how garbled Danish sounds to a Swedish speaker, and the girl in the bakery the inverse experience.

There is a two-part bridge joining Funen with Zealand; we slowed a bit and kept in the right-most lane to enjoy the crossings, along with some of the other traffic. After the bridge to Zealand there was another section of motorway all the way to Copenhagen, but we exited early and went to Køge on the Eastern coast. A couple of tins of Tuborg and some camp-stove-cooked goulash rounded off the day.

Day Three

Usually, when camping the sun is one's alarm. Waking just after 5am the only reasonable reaction is to declare a sleep in, and so it happened that we left Køge a little late and covered not so much ground.

We did manage to cross over into Sweden though, skirting around Copenhagen and taking the long long bridge to Malmö (Øresundsbron). The road outside of Malmö had substantial roadworks and wasn't much fun, so we stopped after a few miles in historic Lund to fuel up and get some currency ('historic', we decided, due to the pretty but horrible to ride on paved streets). Since it was early evening by then we settled on camping at Ringjöstrand near Hörby.

Day Four

Despite waking very early and resisting the urge to sleep the morning out, we dallied with pastries and doughnuts and Ringjöstrand ate our dust late morning. From Hörby we continued following the E22 until it met the Southeast coast at Kristianstad, then kept near the sea through Karlskrona and ice lollies at the world's most soulless mini-golf (called "Adventure Golf", despite the clear influence of graph paper and high school physics exams rather than, say, Indiana Jones). Eventually we fetched up at Kalmar, a port town with very pretty buildings and lots of greenery.

The Least Fixed Point Motorcycle Club

Episode One

Our heroes rampage through the South-West of England, leaving it almost exactly as they found it.

Household management

(14:55:57) fireman q: Might try and find some strawberries --
  no reason ;-)

(15:01:31) holly: ooohh
(15:04:21) holly: champayne hey.
(15:04:44) holly: champagne even

(15:04:47) fireman q: lol
(15:05:06) fireman q: that's a much better idea than mine =)
(15:05:23) fireman q: I will make the /necessary arrangements/

(15:08:57) holly: oh no, strawberry daiquiris - now i get it - 
  lets have that, im sure even sarah would try it.

(15:09:30) fireman q: she'd drink champagne wouldn't she?
(15:09:39) fireman q: it's a good aperitif

(15:11:04) holly: um i think she would prefer the daiquiri

(15:11:27) fireman q: I'll go with that then

(15:19:35) holly: do whatever you want sugar...
(15:20:25) holly: ill be happy with either :D

(15:27:37) fireman q: There's no champagne in the house,
  which is frankly an untenable position
(15:28:30) fireman q: Luckily for us, these options are not
  mutually exclusive
(15:28:57) ***fireman q imagines a splendidly coloured Venn diagram

Landrovers!

My father Philip digs Landrovers, so every time I see one and I have a camera on hand I take a picture. Since my mobile is (charitably speaking) a camera, that's most times.

This one I saw in a side street in Shoreditch on the way to work. It's surprising how many four-wheel drives there are in London, even given the high incidence of roadworks. For some reason I never mind seeing a Landrover though.

I didn't realise this one was occupied until I put the camera up to my eye, so I was in a bit of a fluster because I'd just been wandering around it staring. Hence blurriness.

I've never seen one of these before, but I can be pretty certain Dad has. It's an odd beast, named (BenH maintains) for its wheelbase.

Dad replies:

BenH is right: it's a L~R 101 — guess what the wheelbase is in inches — originally made only for the British forces. This one was an ambulance or possibly a wireless vehicle. Surplus ones like this are popular for long overland journeys, e.g., London to Capetown, although they are quite slow, noisy, and frighteningly thirsty unless they have been retrofitted with a diesel — then they're merely slow and noisy …

and more from BenH:

I think [the 101] is also colloquially known as the Forward Control by dint of its cab-forward layout.

So there you are, Landrovers.