Camping beside the Cleveland Way near Sneck Yate Bank. My adapted racing bike and Terra Nova Competition one-person tent.

I suppose I really ought to begin this with an apology to the owner of this lovely piece of land, not that you’re likely to read my blog – you’re probably far too busy trying to eke out a living working the land – but if you do…sorry. I didn’t ask your permission to camp the night, partly because I didn’t know where to find you, but mainly because I was utterly exhausted. The second thing I should do is appeal to every other wild camper to respect the countryside and leave it, within reason, as we find it. Wild camping and “stealth” camping are slightly thorny issues, but the bottom line is that, in most of the prettier parts of England, we are tresspassing, strictly speaking, on many occasions, if we don’t ask permission to camp, and the practice is only as common as it is because of the generally good nature of landowners (and, perhaps, the hassle and expense of trying to sue someone). I might get into all that again later, but for now I just want to write a bit about my camping trip.

Here’s the bike, a Marinoni frame with mostly the original Campagnolo fixtures.

Er, that's far too much gear, mate...

My Bike

I’ll interupt this to say a bit more about my pushbike. If you’d rather just read about the trip, skip on to the next heading. The frame is a racer, and a rather top-end make, but I’ve replaced the narrow racing wheels for some bog-standard alloy tourers after the front wheel went down an expansion gap in a level crossing, bent badly and nearly caused me serious injury. I also replaced the pedals for some simple plastic ones.

The bike came to me by accident. I found it resting against a skip out the back of Morrisons, where I worked at the time. It seemed abandoned, but that was suspicious, since who would leave a racing bike in perfect working order unattended and unlocked leaning against a skip? I asked around all day. I moved it to somewhere a little safer, but left a note in case someone came for it. By the evening, I decided it must have been stolen and dumped, put up more notices, and threw it in the back of my van to take home. Now, with hindsight, I know that I should have taken it to the police station. Someone might have claimed it. You never know. I feel rather guilty, because I didn’t do that. I pretended to myself that putting up notices would be enough. It was probably nicked miles away and the owner might have reported it, and if I’d taken it to the police that person could have got it back. Sorry, mate. I guess I probably thought it was alright because I hadn’t stolen it; “finders keepers” I probably said to myself. I liked it very much. I didn’t have a bike. I had no idea that it was a good make. The strange thing is that if you’ve ever seen the logo for Marinoni and the logo for Morrisons, you’ll know that they’re almost identical, a capital M inside an ellipse inside a square, and when I saw that stamped on the frame I thought, stupid me, I didn’t realise we had our own delivery bikes here. Maybe someone else had found it dumped earlier, after its little excursion, and thought they were bringing it home to us!

So anyway, that was about 1992 or something, 17 years ago. I’ve loved it since, although it’s actually far too big for me, and then I decided to do some modifications for cycle touring and camping. This summer I made some front pannier frames out of aluminium that I had lying around, mainly because the forks don’t have the usual fitting holes for mudguards, which most front frames utilise. Of course, it would be a simple job to buy some and make a small alteration, a bracket at the bottom or something, but since I had to alter them I might as well start from scratch and save myself a few quid.

DIY front pannier rack

The horizontal bar is L-section aluminium with two short slots cut in the upper face to accept the lugs on the pannier back and bolted to the forks via a simple bracket and rubber mounts. The other end is bolted to the diagonal, which is made from some carpet joining strip, with a hole drilled for the axle end to go through. Another piece of the same forms the small extension with a similar hole drilled, pointing down from the axle and has a lug at the bottom for the pannier lower attachment. The axle nuts are just tightened up to hold these two pieces together against the fork dropouts.

I considered not having the diagonal connection bar, and overcoming the tendency for the horizontal to rotate foward by placing the upper pannier lugs either side of the fork. This would reduce the weight a little, but in the end I went for the stronger, triangulated design, which also kept the pannier further forward away from my feet on a tight turn.

Here you can see the lugs on the pannier back slotted into the frame. If you fit things like this, it’s useful to fashion a curve on the bracket to help hold it in line with the fork, and to pad both sides with rubber to protect the paint and give the mounting a little bit of give.

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Pannier rack fitting close-up

We found the black rear panniers that you can see on the earlier picture in a cupboard, the “wife” and I, and we both had no idea where they came from. They would be perfect, I thought, for the rear carrier, with some hi-vis stripes ironed on and various other modifications to the fittings.

That meant that my old separate panniers from the back could be hung on the front wheel, which is what serious touring cyclists do, as any fool knows. For one thing, you need to carry more than you can get on the back; for another, it balances the bike much better that way.

The little patch of silvery plastic on the rear pannier is another addition I made – a solar-rechargeable torch, fastened with velcro – or at least some Velcro(TM)-like hook-and-loop stuff. This worked for the one trip, until I ripped it off a little too quickly and the inevitable happened, the hooky bit was more adhesive than the glue sticking it to the torch.

The handlebar bag is also a do-it-yourself job, an old camera bag, which I suspended with cord and some of those spring-loaded D-clips you can get in outdoors shops, the latter just clipped onto the brake cables where they enter the brake lever housing. That’s not really best practice, but I was sick of trying things that didn’t work, with this and two other bags, and this did work.

The bag was suspended by the loops where the shoulder strap had been attached, just above the side pockets, so all it needed was securing below to stop it swinging back and forth, which I did even less technically, clipping it to the looped-wire spring of the front brake. I know, I know…! Again, it worked, only needing adjusting at one point on the outward journey when the cords lengthened and the bottom began to rub on the tyre.

I was chuffed to bits with this bag, because it had moveable compartments made of foam padding, so I could set it up nicely to protect my camera, and it was big enough for tons of other gear, phone, wallet, field glass, compass, kitchen sink… I put it “backwards” so the top opened away from me. The pocket nearest me was big enough for a map, and I gave it a spray of silicone waterproofing.

The Trip

I have referred to this trip since as a nightmare and a failure, but in reality it was a steep learning curve and involved some really good parts. It was, after all, my first ever cycle camping trip involving wild camping. My only other cycle camping was during a single journey from Harrogate to Oxford spanning about four days and three nights spent on commercial sites. I had only been wild camping once, spending a dreadfully stormy night on the moors, having gone there on the bus and then a few miles on foot. After that I realised that I wasn’t up to carrying a pack on my back. Either I needed more practice and workouts to get fitter, or those days were just behind me now. I hope it’s the former and I do a little backpacking too in coming years, but for now I turned my attention to cycle-camping, letting the bike take the strain.

This trip was rather  a catalogue of mistakes, a lesson in how not to do cycle camping. Mistake number one was setting off too late. Despite thinking that I’d done most of the packing the day before, it seemed to take forever to get the last bits done that morning, and I set off about 1:30 pm. That’s only a mistake if you intend to go a long way, and I did.

Now, I should point out that some people will consider this a short way, a quick spin on the bike, I know that, before I reveal how far that is. Actually, I didn’t even know how far it was (and still don’t) – that’s mistake number two – I just had a spot in mind, from looking at the map and google earth, and I thought it wouldn’t be too much trouble to get there. A rough guess would be about 45 to 50 miles. Insane.

I could probably do 50 miles without too much difficulty if it was fairly flat and I didn’t have any luggage. I know that I average about 10 miles an hour and I’m sure I can sit and peddle for 5 hours, but for that I’d have to set off in good time, and the route wasn’t flat, and I had an insane weight of gear on the bike, I estimate somewhere in the region of 17kg. Why so much? Well, I was hoping to be pretty well self-sufficient for about 5 days, for no good reason, and that meant carrying more food, more clothing and a few other extras like a hand-wound torch with built-in charger for when my mobile battery was low. Even so, mistake number three was to pack far too much. At the last minute I was still trying to decide whether to take only a pair of sandals, only sneakers or both, and ended up taking both. I had a similar difficulty deciding whether to take a half-litre vacuum flask of hot water to have a cup of tea on the way (and to keep water hot while camping, too), and ended up doing so – a ridiculous luxury, I now realise.

I set off through Knaresborough and out to Ferrensby, then West across to Aldwark Bridge, and enjoyed the ride. Most of the first hour or so it was raining lightly, which was refreshing. I stopped once to shelter under a tree when there was a heavy downpour.

Mistake number four, however, was that I didn’t stop and eat or drink enough. The flask did me a couple of cups of tea, and I ate some Brazil nuts from time to time, and I drank probably about another half litre of water. The first mistake, setting off late, played on my mind, so that instead of stopping and having a good meal in a pub or resting for longer, I kept pushing on, and I got some of that mission mentality, like this was some macho test of stamina.

I then rode North through the villages on the York plain towards the moors, and I think I went into a weird kind of mental blank.

Approaching Oldstead and White Horse Hill

Kilburn White Horse

That was the view ahead, White Horse Hill, and that was the hill I intended to climb, but I wouldn’t be finished by a long chalk, pardon the pun. My journey was supposed to continue over the moors to the top of Sneck Yate Bank, then go East down the hill into Hawnby, then climb again over the Osmotherly road across more moorland.

I did get to the top of White Horse Hill. I had to push the bike up it. In fact, I was so knackered by then I had to push it for about 20 paces and take a rest, over and over. Even if I had mountain-climbing gears instead of racing ones I would probably have got off and pushed. The little road wound up and up. I thought I’d never get to the top. I didn’t time it, but had the feeling that it took me most of an hour.

Part of the problem was that I didn’t have a clear destination or route, and by this time I was scouting for suitable campsites. That’s ok, except that if you don’t stop to camp, you might waste time looking at a spot and trying to decide what to do. Not being used to this game, I was constantly trying to weigh up how much daylight I had left, how much energy I had left to pitch the tent, find water, cook and so on before losing the light, and how confident I felt that something better might turn up in the next few miles. In fact, I was beginning to scout for campsites long before reaching White Horse Hill, and I only took the detour to Oldstead because it looked more promising on the map. This meant more wasted time and energy, because, although there were places I could have camped, I got another fit of machismo and wanted to push on and get higher.

White Horse Hill itself would probably be a bad place to camp, being quite a hot-spot for tourists and, no doubt, early-morning dog walkers. Once I was up on the higher ground, I began searching more seriously, now giving up the idea of getting all that way to my intended destination past Hawnby.

It was then that I remembered the wonderful view from a little track that I’d seen just at the top of Sneck Yate Bank (as I used to live in Hawnby and communted along that route most days), and decided to investigate it for camping potential. There was nowhere suitable to pitch a tent there, but I saw a stand of trees nearby, marked on the map as High Barn, and saw that there were a few springs marked too a little way off. The trees would give me some shelter from the elements, and I would just have to hope that I could find water. I only had about half a litre left.

High Barn

I opened the gate and pushed my bike over the rough grass on the bridleway, part of the Cleveland Way, up to High Barn and chose a good spot down behind some piles of brushwood between the trees. There was quite a stiff breeze blowing, but behind these it was nice and still. The photo above was taken the next day, of course. By this time it was late evening.

I was exhausted. I pitched the tent and got the stove out to make some dinner. However, the endless decision-making continued: should I try to find a source of water first, or try to eke out the small amount I had left. I’ve lost count of how many bad decisions I made by this point, but this was the next. It was beginning to get dark rapidly, and that put me off trying to search for springs or streams down the hillside by torch-light for obvious safety reasons. Who knows, it may have been a good decision, a life-saving decision. Certainly it made sense at the time not to go trudging about over land I didn’t know in the dark. I had passed some big puddles on the way along the bridleway, which also persuaded me that this was the best decision, since I wasn’t going to die of thirst. It seemed best to put the dinner on with what little water I had (carrying only dried food, obviously) and hunker down for the night.

So that’s what I did. Unfortunately, I put a little too much of the dried vegetable soup in the pan for the “sauce”, and then, worst of all, I put some pasta in as well. The resulting thick gloop was hard to get down, and the pasta just didn’t cook, but merely sat there soaking up some of the precious water and turning to a rubber consistency. When you’re very tired, often you get past eating. You don’t feel hungry, and have to tell yourself to eat for the sustenance. I tried to eat what I could of the soup-gloop without throwing up, went to do what bears do in the woods, enjoying the view of the lights of villages all across the plain below, and went to bed after a quick phone-call to my partner and then a text with my map coordinates.

Now things didn’t improve at this point. I had chosen carefully the bit of ground that gave the best compromise between shelter and surface, but I’d given too much emphasis to the shelter. I realised it was a bit lumpy and rather damp, but figured that the lumps were damp clay, and I could easily thump them down to make a flatter bed. Once in my sleeping bag, however, I found that they were harder than I realised, and so began that well-known camper’s routine of shuffling round most of the night, trying to fit one’s limbs between the lumps. Despite overpacking on most things, I had rather skimped on the mat, using a couple of layers of the yellow plastic underlay that goes under wooden floors (a tip from another camper on a forum), and my sleeping bag was pretty thin too. I had a slight headache, probably from mild dehydration. It was colder than I expected. I slept intermittently, then deeply after the sun came up.

I woke up rather too hot and unzipped the tent to cool down. I thought that it wouldn’t be long before people started coming past – this was probably quite a popular route of a weekend, and it was Saturday. It was very pleasant basking in that warmth, but I knew that I had to get up and start finding water. I collected up what I would need, remembering to take my valuables with me, and set off to see what “spring” on the map would actually translate into. The view from here made it all worth it.

The view from High Barn

As I set off I saw someone coming towards me, a man walking a couple of dogs, so I said hello and asked if he was local. I said I was off to find a spring or stream, and did he know of a good place. He said there were some springs further down the hill, but he didn’t know if they were running or not. He said that he knew the farmer who owned the land, after I made apologetic noises about camping, and that he wouldn’t mind. He pointed to the farm house, which wasn’t more than half a mile away, and suggested that I should call and ask to have my water bottle filled.

Now this is a curious issue that I’ve thought about quite a lot since then, but it isn’t really a favourable proposition to me, getting tap water from houses and farms. Part of the reason is that I’m camping where I shouldn’t without permission, partly it’s because I’m trying to manage without home comforts like running water, and part of the picture is certainly my generally introverted nature. I cycle off into the hills to be on my own. I had passed a pub in Oldstead, where the smell of food and beer mingled with the soft murmur of voices, and didn’t stop. This tendency, I’ve decided, is stupid. It’s not like I’m supposed to be living off the land like a commando. It’s supposed to be a biking holiday!

I descended the hill, following the map, and found the nearer of the two springs marked. It was disappointing, being not much more than an area of mud. This is a common occurence. It’s not a good idea to take springs marked on maps at face value. Sometimes there may not even be any trace of water at the surface.

I continued further downhill, nearer to the farmhouse, and found the other. That was more like it, a circular depression about ten feet across full of murky water, but with a relatively clear trickle flowing out and down the stream bed. The only problem was reaching the water across the mud all around, but I found some good spots, washed my pots and then moved upstream a little to fill my water bottle, my “dirty” water bottle, that is, and I also scooped some into a plastic bag. It was hard to get much for the mud and the debris running into whatever was placed in the flow. I three-quarter filled the bottle by gently pushing it down into the mud, holding the lip upstream at the surface. It was then that I realised I had hardly got any better water than I’d passed in those puddles, but at least it wasn’t standing water.

Back at camp I set up my home-made filter and filtered the least dirty of the water into the pan to make coffee. The filter is just an old plastic pill container, a cylindrical pot with a lid, into the bottom of which I melted a few holes; I lined this with cotton wool, poured a small measure of the contents of a Brita(TM) filter cartridge in and placed more cotton wool over the top to leave the bulk of the volume as a reservoir for the dirty water. It works pretty well just placed in a pan, as long as you’re careful not to spill the dirty water directly into the pan (or it’s not critical anyway, which it certainly wasn’t this time). I think the Brita stuff gets rid of a fair amount of any chemical polution that might be present, and, of course, does a pretty good job of removing the particulate matter, though not down to the micron levels that a proper outdoor ceramic filter would. I’m not sure how much of the bacteria and other nasties it kills, but I was going to boil it anyway, which does the rest.

Readers may repeat experiments with Brita filter materials outdoors at their own risk! I did email them to ask their opinion on how suitable their products are for such pursuits, and kindly offering them my free consultatory expertise as a novice outdoorsman – there may be a gap in the market – but I’ve heard nothing back. They’ve probably filed it under “Top Secret: New Product Development”, or “Crank Emails”. I think there must be a gap in the market. Everything else seems to be heavy and/or bulky and, although it might remove all known pathogens in one go without boiling, I’m sure there are a few folks like me who just want to improve the clarity and remove a good percentage of any pollutants.

The bloody stove ran out of gas next. I’ve got one of those [name to be inserted], that is basically an oversized cigarette lighter: you fill it up at the base with butane from a cigarette-lighter-refill canister, and it has a knob to turn it on with an integrated button for the piezo-electric spark. The first trip I used it, I bust the knob by overtightening it and had a cold dinner, but I made a repair later. I’ve not used it much yet, but on this trip I noticed that it does seem to empty pretty quickly, or I haven’t managed to fill it fully. It’s hard to tell whether it’s still taking gas when you fill it, and, unhelpfully, the instructions don’t say if you should use any of the adaptors (that are listed for different lighters on most cans of fuel), so I just do it with none of them. The other downsides with these things are that they’re no good at altitude (you need a different fuel – propane, I think) and they’re not exactly very lightweight either, I guess because of the need for a good strong metal case to hold the pressurized gas; then you have to take a refill. It’s one of the things on my list to look into improving for next season. On the other hand, it has advantages: it’s odourless, relatively safe (the flame is controlled and more visible than some fuels), compact (I carry mine inside a 1-litre cooking pan along with the stove’s dismantled base pieces, a washing-up sponge and the pan handle), and cheap. The base, however, is already wearing at its joints, making it a lot less safe, and I have replaced this with my own design which is smaller and stronger and lighter (more of that scrap aluminium).

Anyway, the stove running out meant letting it cool down before filling it, and while I was waiting for that along came a couple of very chatty walkers who kept me from my morning cup of coffee for another twenty minutes as we compared tents, stoves, routes and prefered methods of travel. They were very kind and offered me some of their water, but I was fine, thanks.

Finally I got some coffee made (with powdered milk, of course, but I don’t mind that), as more people filed passed saying hello and commenting on how late I was having breakfast. Breakfast? Jesus, it took all morning to fetch water, filter and heat it and make a cup of fucking coffee. I’d get round to breakfast in good time. One of the lovely things about the outdoor life is that you appreciate ordinary luxuries more. You can’t just fall out of bed and switch a light on, turn a tap, flick a switch, open a cupboard and hey-presto, there’s your coffee.

I enjoyed that coffee, and then I made porridge for lunch. I lazed in the sun for a while, and began thinking about what to do next.

This trip had had to be fitted in between other commitments, and all along I’d been a bit disappointed by the weather forecast. It was lovely that day, but Sunday was supposed to bring very heavy rain, and then it was meant to ease off a bit after that. When I set off I was ignoring the implications, that I might spend a lot of time sitting in the tent in the rain, but now the idea seemed rather depressing. I could sit it out and hope things got better before long, but going home today was quite tempting, even though that made it just a one-nighter when I’d intended to have a few days to a week.

I put off that decision a little longer by focusing on the present campsite. The ground was wetter than I had realised last night, and I’d had to put a load of straw in the doorway to minimize the mud I was tramping through. The ground was lumpy. I could move the tent a little way along to a better bit, but then the water supply wasn’t very good. I could go further afield to find better water, but then I was camped on what was clearly a busy public bridleway at the weekend. The rain might keep them away tomorrow, but then we’re back to the other question again, whether I wanted to be here in the rain at all.

Would it be better to move into the woods somewhere for more shelter from the rain? No. Trees don’t really shelter you from continual rain. They shelter you from a shower, because the water sits on the leaves for a while, but if it continues it all just runs off on you anyway, bringing dirt and debris onto the tent with it.

In the end, I decided to pack up and cycle somewhere, leaving the question of where until I’d set off. This was probably another bad idea.

Uppermost in my mind was the idea of cycling on to where I had intended to go yesterday, but I had to admit that my apetite for this trip was waning, and besides, I hadn’t even seen the place. I expect that I must seem very pathetic to a lot of people. I have an anxiety disorder, I’m told (I worry about stuff too much). Anyway, this is what happened. The negative possibilities seemed to grow in my mind every time I formed a plan of action, but in particular I imagined that tomorrow would bring torrential rain and the “easing off” would be minimal. Some people would expect moderate rain and then a lovely few days afterwards to look forward to. By the time I’d got back to the road, I was beginning to think that heading home today would be best. Besides, the cycling itself was very enjoyable, whereas camping in the rain on my own might turn out to be a washout, despite having brought a book to read.

Another cyclist pulled up beside me and we had a chat. He was in all the lycra stuff on his racer and was just enjoying a spin up from Thirsk where he lived. I briefly mentioned my predicament and how I was thinking of quitting and riding home today. He said that the weather could be very unpredictable around these parts, so not to take too much heed of the forecast. It almost made me change my mind, but by now I had cycled in the wrong direction for a while and I didn’t want to start taking the whole thing apart again. He cycled off ahead and I continued to “quit”, as it felt. Even as I did so I had big doubts about the wisdom of this. By now it was mid-afternoon, perhaps around 4 pm. and much later than I’d set off yesterday, and I was tired from the outward journey. My trip meter said it was 35 miles, although it would be more downhill and I could avoid the detours, making it more like 33, but this was a crazy decision, the worst one yet. I kind of knew it at the time.

I continued, and whizzed down White Horse Hill in a matter of minutes, just a little concerned for my brakes. That was that. I realised that my worst error the day before was in not stopping enough, eating enough and drinking enough, so I vowed to stop at the next pub and have a jolly good nosh before the trip home, which might take me well into the evening.

I did stop in Coxwold, but only had a pint of bitter shandy and a packet of crisps. I didn’t feel like eating any more than that, and just packed another packet of crisps for later. I asked the barman if he’d fill my water bottle with tap water, I chucked away the remains of my filtered water and set off.

I made good progress at first, helped by knowing most of the turns without having to check the map. However, I got complacent at one point, went the wrong way and added another 4 miles to the journey. This was unfortunate, as it was just when my morale was about at its lowest anyway and I was really flagging.

It was only a few miles further on that I decided that it would be most sensible to phone my partner and ask her to come out the remaining 8 miles in the car and pick me up. It honestly wasn’t just a failure of guts and determination. It became a serious medical decision, because by that time my neck was giving me appalling amounts of pain from the riding position and the cool breeze on it, despite a home-made buff. It was dark and getting colder, and there was the prospect of a number of steep hills, the worst being the last half a mile up from the Nidd valley at Knaresborough. I was pushing my bike up Gallabar Hill towards Marton and the A1 when I called, at about 9 pm.

I could have got home in about an hour to an hour and a half, and wouldn’t mind the exhaustion – indeed I would revel in my suffering and success  – but there was a good chance that I would have grave issues with my spine, and that was not worth the trouble. Another solution would be to just stop and pitch, but in my condition I thought that was also a stupid option. I had blown the chance of making this a nice cycle-camping trip. I had overdone it massively on the mileage over two days for my age and condition, and now it was finally time to do the sensible thing rather than make it worse by causing myself more suffering. It was wonderful to get home. I had beans on toast and several cups of decaf and began to feel human again

Even with quitting early, my neck has been pretty painful and stiff for many weeks. I hate to think what it would have been like if I’d pressed on.

The lessons from this first cycle-wild-camp are many. My legs were hardly stiff at all, so I know that I’m up to that level of physical work. It wasn’t the peddling that did me in. It was poor attention to food and drink, combined with the riding position and my neck problem.

I’m planning to replace the drops with a straight handlebar or even something more cruiser-like for a more upright position. However, I’m now considering whether further messing about with my old racer that’s too big for me anyway is sensible, or if I’d rather splash out and get something more suitable. I’m crap at making decisions, that’s clear, but last time I thought about it I was in favour of sticking with it, putting a new handlebar on, refitting the whole gear train with a “stump puller” and getting a sprung saddle, as my behind is going to take more of a battering if I sit more upright.

I remember reading that one of the most important things in a touring cycle is comfort, and that any reduction in pace from the wind on your chest is more than made up for by being able to keep going longer. It was in Richard’s New Bicycle Book, and for that reason he considered a mountain bike a good choice for touring, to my surprise. I don’t think he means those cheap 30 kg things that pass for mountain bikes, though, but a grand-or-so’s worth. Hmmm….

It was pretty sickening that I’d made such a hash of the trip, especially as I began to analyse it and realise what bad decisions I’d made all along. Even worse, the next day, supposed to be heavy rain according to the Met Office, was fair, as was the rest of the week. If I had only decided to move from High Barn and find a new camp, I would probably have had a good time up on the moors, and I wouldn’t have had the painful and aborted trip home. I could have rested up, sunbathed, chilled out, and set off several days later for a nice relaxed ride home. Oh well, you live and learn.

I can’t believe it’s so long since I last wrote here. I knew it was a fair while, but not best part of four months! I never said how the Honda CBR 125 turned out for me, or even whether I eventually took delivery of it.

Going back to the garage about the squeak!

I did, and to be honest it’s been a bit of a let down. I’m beginning to enjoy it in recent months, but only on fairly short runs, and there was a long time when I didn’t want to bother with it. While I was still waiting for it to arrive I began doing up my push-bike, and by the time it did I would have preferred not to have bought it at all.

It’s ok I suppose, but the main thing about it is that it’s not really for me. All my careful deliberation on the theory of what sort of bike I wanted was pretty well wasted time, mainly because I’m getting on a bit and am more susceptible to aches and pains, especially from chills in the breeze whilst riding in slightly awkward positions. I couldn’t take it for a test ride, of course, which might have flagged the problem up, but I soon found that the racing style – a relatively hard and narrow seat combined with low bars – meant that I was quite uncomfortable after only a few miles, both in the deriere and neck area.

The latter was certainly made worse by a cycle trip on my push-bike, carrying an insane amount of gear in four panniers, tail pack and handlebar bag, 35 miles up onto the North Yorkshire moors (via White Horse Hill, which took me about an hour to push the thing up!), and back the following day. It was my first cycle-camping trip since I was in my twenties, and I caused myself such dreadful pain in the neck that I phoned “her indoors” with about the last 12 miles to go and got her to pick me up in the car. Even so, my neck has been really bad since then. I have got to keep it warm if I go out on either machine now. I’m doing some remedial yoga to help keep it loosened up as the Autumn comes on.

Other things that got me down about the bike were that the rear tyre is more worn than I realised and the bike squeaks quite a bit as it rolls, noticable at low speeds. I rode it down to Castleford to ask for some advice, but they said that both were fine – loads of tread left and some bikes do squeak like that, but it’ll probably go off in time; it’ll be the brake pads just slightly touching the discs most likely… I’ve noticed that I can stop it sometimes by putting the rear brake on for a second, as though it’s that it doesn’t quite disengage sometimes, but I still feel that this must be a fault – I just haven’t had time to find out more about it yet.

In terms of the looks of the bike and my general ownership of it, things have changed now. It turns heads occasionally, and I do love the thing, but I also look at Van-vans and suchlike with envy and wonder what it’s like to pootle about on those sedate things with their soft, wide saddles and fat tyres and slightly more upright position.

A trip up to Pateley Moor

The CBR is fairly nippy, but needs to keep buzzing at moderately high revs to have any kind of decent torque, which is another thing I dislike. I remember by old CB125 and how you could open it up with the engine barely more than ticking over and it would accelerate doggedly, sounding strangely powerful for a small bike. The CBR isn’t as whiney as my Suzuki GP100, but probably doesn’t quite pull as much of a punch either, as that was a 2-stroke. It will do about 60 comfortably under normal conditions, and I’ve had it up to nearly 70 (indicated, which is probably nearer 65 in truth) with a following wind and a downhill stretch.

It’s this racing style I wasn’t used to, and I decided on it partly for the experience – so if nothing else I can now say I’ve had one and don’t like them all that much. Chugging through traffic, it is harder work than other bikes I’ve had. Of course, I’m still not used to it yet, having only put about 400 miles on the clock so far, but I don’t feel balanced as I come to a stop and set off, either. People keep saying that it’s a great bike to do your test on, but I can’t see how. I need to do some more practice at low speed – I expected to get the hang of that much quicker, and still wouldn’t really say I’m confident I could do a 180 in the road without putting my feet down at some point. I got used to slow turns on the learner bike in a few minutes!

So I’ll probably get round to doing my test in coming months, maybe next Spring, and then find something very different for my “proper” bike.

Well, you've got to take one of those shots, haven't you?

On the other hand, I’m starting to feel rather attached to it in the meantime. I also have plans to make good use of it – oh, no, I’ll probably be naming her next! – as the colder weather comes on. I’ve done a couple of wild-camping trips on the pushbike over the summer, and hope to continue to do some more. However, while cycling in the cold isn’t too much of a problem, camping in the cold could mean taking a heavier-grade sleeping bag and more clothes, and the shorter days limits the distance I can go, particularly with my neck problem. I realised the other day that using the motorbike could solve both of those problems, allowing me to go further and carry more gear without strain.

Again, of course, the CBR isn’t the most sensible bike to put luggage on (and a bright orange one isn’t the best to do “stealth” camping on!), but I’m planning to make a frame that I can put the larger of my cycle panniers on. I’ve looked at a lot of motorcycle panniers online and in the shops that are “suitable” (sort of) for my bike, but I don’t think they’ll hold much compared to mine, and are short in the vertical direction, which is also a pain for the shopping trips. I realise this is to keep them above the up-swept exhaust, but I’m going to mount them higher (sacrificing the use of the pillion seat, of course), which should allow them to fit. I may put an extra metal plate above the can if necessary, too. The frame, which I intend to make from something like ply wood or strong plastic and attach vertically either side, will also allow fitting points for a tail pack. I can then buy, or fashion a rucksack into, a moderate-sized tank bag. If I need even more stuff, I could carry a small rucksack, but I don’t like riding that way.

But one of the little moments of realisation that came to me was that motorcycling in the winter I will need my thickly padded waterproof one-piece suit (one that is large enough to go over other warm clothing and afforded me the nickname “Michelin Man” in the sixth form), and that means that I’m already carrying about all the insulation I’m likely to need for the night. Embarrassing as it may be, I’m planning to get into my summer-grade sleeping bag with it on, or even dispense with the sleeping bag altogether.

Wild camping (or “stealth camping” if you will), particularly by pushbike, has been a bit of an obsession with me for a few years, but it’s taken me all that time to get organised, buy equipment, adapt my cycle and find suitable places to go. In recent weeks I’ve been prepared and finding places has been the limiting factor, other than the weather. The motorbike has been a great boon in that. I’ve been able to nip up to the North Yorkshire Moors or the Dales and quickly scout around in a tenth of the time it would take by pushbike, even without luggage.

Up on Pateley Moor

Pretty, isn’t she? Name suggestions, anyone? Sorry about the state of the pics, by the way, but I left my camera at home and just used my phone.

Well, that’s about it for the CBR news. It’s still squeaking, but not quite as badly. I haven’t had any major problems so far. The other day, after overtaking, the gearbox seemed to slip between the gears for a moment and the engine ran wild until I closed the throttle and shifted again. I guess that’s all it could be, and it is something I’ve had happen several times on other bikes, so I’m not too seriously worried, but it’s something to keep an eye on. It’s something else for the guys at Castle Motorcycles to tell me is perfectly normal!

I can’t believe how stressful the last month has been, or that it’s nearly a month since I passed my CBT. It’s taken quite a long time to choose a bike and find a suitable one to buy, made more difficult by not having much access to my car, since my partner uses it through the week and some weekends too, and I suppose by my rather obsessive nature – all that research on 125s online.

I might have bought a bike that was ready to ride away, but I wanted to get one from a dealer for my relative peace of mind, and they generally need servicing before you collect them. I put the deposit down on mine last Saturday, and it’s now Friday, which was when I was going to pick it up. In the interim I’ve got my insurance and I’m ready, but I already phoned to put it off.

It was quite windy yesterday, and I checked the Met Office website for a forecast: the last thing I wanted to do was ride my new bike away from the shop in a gale. Looking out, I decided that how it was then was somewhere near my limit – if it was easing off tomorrow I’d be ok, but if it was about the same or worse I shouldn’t risk it. You need some time to get used to a new bike, and one of the most dangerous conditions for riding is high winds, especially with strong gusts. The windspeed in the Yorkshire region, according to the Met Office, was 18 mph, gusting up to 34 mph. The forecast for today was for winds of 26 mph with gusts up to 41 mph. Saturday (tomorrow) was back to Thursday’s kind of speeds, and Sunday was supposed to be as calm as a millpond. Since it made sense to avoid the Saturday shopper traffic, too, for my first ride, I phoned and said I’d pick it up on Sunday. I think they were glad of the extra time to fit their servicing in.

There’s really no way I’d set off to ride a bike in this. I’ve checked the website again and it’s worse than yesterday’s forecast, 23 mph with gusts to 43 mph. The steady windspeed is slightly less than yesterday’s forecast said, but it’s the gusts that really cause you hell on a bike. With more experience I might be able to cope with this wind, but I’ve no idea how the bike handles, and it will take some time riding in more moderate conditions, or in this level of wind over short distances on clear roads, to be able to gauge it accurately. I’ve never ridden a bike with such extensive fairing cover, which will help it slice through a headwind nicely, but could act as a big sail to sidewinds.

Winds, especially blustery ones, are about the worst conditions for a bike, particularly because there is almost nothing you can do to compensate. There are a few things you can do, which I’ll relate below, but unlike rain, cold or snow, high winds can just make it impossible – or extremely dangerous – to ride at all, perhaps even more certainly than patches of ice on the road. Bikers are a little like ancient mariners – we have to wait for a favourable wind – although in our case it’s better if it’s dead calm or a steady light wind (and, of course, from behind). Like the captains of sailing ships, we’re stuck in port if it gets too violent out there.

It’s sometimes very problematic, because you might have ridden somewhere on a nice calm morning, only to find that the wind picks up by the time you want to return. If you’re not far from public transport or can hitch a lift in a vehicle with a few more wheels, you might take that option and collect the bike later. If not, you may have to decide whether to try to cope with the high wind somehow, or find somewhere to stay (perhaps even overnight) until the storm abates. I don’t think I’ve ever had to make an unplanned overnight stay, but I think I remember sitting around after school on more than one occasion, coming home in the late evening when the wind died down a bit. Winds are often lighter in the evening and early morning, though there’s no counting on it. Sometimes they’re steadier, even if they’re still fast.

So how do you cope with high winds on a bike? Well, the first thing to note is the big difference between a steady wind and a blustery wind. A strong wind can be relatively easy to cope with, though it requires some care: the greater danger comes when that wind suddenly changes, either faster or slower than the average. Changes in wind direction can also happen suddenly. Both these kinds of sudden change tend to throw you off balance. In a steady sidewind, even quite a powerful one, you would lean the bike towards it and that would be that – you’d hardly have any trouble at all. Unfortunately, real winds are seldom like that.

It hardly needs saying that in high winds you should reduce your speed and proceed with extreme caution. You should also pay even more attention than usual to owning your lane – all of it – the full width of which you might need to occupy at any moment. Do not ride along close to the kerb, even if you’re going very slowly, or you may end up mounting it, or being overtaken dangerously close. Also be aware that pedestrians and their belongings could be blown into your path. Everything needs a wider berth – someone getting into or out of a car might have the door pulled out of their hand by the wind; a child’s buggy could easily be tugged or tipped over; umbrellas, shopping, bin bags and other litter could come at you at any time.

As a biker facing a windy ride, you need to be aware of all these different, constantly changing, conditions. From even before you set off, you need to feel the wind on your body and watch its effects on the landscape around you. As you begin to ride you have to gradually (but as quickly as possible) gain some understanding of the conditions this particular wind is going to throw at you. You might ride for a few minutes in relatively steady wind, and it is easy as a novice to become complacent. A gust can come from nowhere and change your direction and balance in an instant. Your direction of travel relative to the wind is important, and this will change as you turn corners and as the wind itself changes.

The wind suddenly dropping is just as dangerous as it suddenly rising. As well as happening naturally from the general motion of the air over the land, this can happen due to the immediate landscape around you, including buildings and other traffic. If, for instance, you’re riding along in a steady sidewind on an open road and pass a large building, you may suddenly find yourself in a calmer patch of air and have to compensate. Worse still, the wind often reverses, or changes direction in unexpected ways behind such obstructions. It can also change when it’s on the leaward side of you, although it’s not usually as dramatic. Conversely, beware the open spaces at the ends of roads and other gaps. Sometimes in a town you can be riding in almost total calm and forget the wind, only to be hit by a massive blast from a road end, the entrance to a courtyard or similar hole in the protective wall of buildings, where it can be funnelled and reach even greater speeds than elsewhere.

The same can happen if you overtake or are overtaken, and as traffic passes in the opposite direction. Large lorries and buses can be particularly dangerous, and the wind round bridges and tunnels can be very turbulent, but even the wind blowing across a barren plain can be quite changeable.

So, as a general rule, you must be ready for the unexpected. However, the trick to this, somewhat counterintuitively, is to remain relaxed and fluid, not tighten up. You may, of course, have to tighten your grip a little on the bars, and it might also help to grip the bike between your legs, but you need to keep your body relaxed so that you can respond quickly and automatically to any sudden push. It’s a bit like the Aikido principle of moving with a blow from an opponent instead of trying to stay solidly opposed to it, which just hurts more: be like the willow rather than the oak, Glasshopper.

If the windspeed or direction hitting you changes suddenly, there is no doubt that it will result in a different natural direction of travel, and you will have to move to compensate in some way to avoid weaving too much across your lane. If this all sounds rather difficult, don’t worry – we’re talking about adjustments that your brain computes and your body makes without you having to think about them, just as you compensate automatically if you’re standing on a train and it suddenly brakes.

Many a time, a strong wind will involve repeated gusts that last for less than a second, after which the wind returns to how it was before, a fairly steady speed. With experience you may find that you can ride through these momentary changes, not adjusting your balance at all. You will be buffetted slightly off course, then come back to your line again, without any particular hazard being caused. Indeed, in most cases, you will find that you are making that judgement subconsciously all the time: which changes are momentary and which continue for a fraction of a second longer and have to be compensated for.

Riding in winds becomes easier and more natural, but there are always going to be limits. Side-winds, of course, are more dangerous, tail winds can be advantageous in terms of your progress and petrol consumption, and headwinds can slow you down to a crawl or make riding very uncomfortable, depending on the engine size and fairing cover of your bike. Crouching down is helpful in a headwind, of course. Crouching may be of some use in balancing in a side-wind, but staying relaxed and responsive is more important, and crouching might interfere with that.

A further tip that can make a big difference is to tighten your clothing in any way possible, as well as securing any flappy bits of luggage. Specialist motorcycle clothing should be quite close-fitted anyway, depending on the purpose it’s designed for, and even at 40 mph you begin to see why – the headwind you create even on a still day grabs at any loose clothing and makes it flap, causing turbulence, reducing your speed and increasing your fuel consumption. It also tires you out on longer journeys. Many jackets have adjusters on sleeves and at the waist or hem: tighten them as much as is comfortable.

If you’re wearing looser clothing that can’t be adjusted, a few rubber bands round the arms might help. It might sound strange (and look a bit odd), but it’s amazing the amount of drag caused by loose bits of clothing. The wind will pull at you less, you’ll feel much safer and more confident, and therefore relax more.

If it’s dry, keep your visor down as much as possible to avoid dust and other debris being blown into your face (if it’s raining, you’ll probably have it down anyway).

Experience – gained always with an emphasis on caution and riding well within your abilities – is a great teacher. If you live on a housing estate or have somewhere safe you can get to easily, it’s worth practising in more severe conditions than you would normally, to learn more about and extend your limits, but be very wary if you’re still on the public highway, keep your speed down and watch out for pedestrians.

Finally – something I’ve just realised from doing it myself – if you spend a bit of time checking the windspeed forecasts online, for instance at the Met Office, and compare the current conditions with the numbers, you’ll have a good idea what to expect from forecasts at a later time, perhaps when you’re planning a longer trip.

I chose my new bike today at Castle Motorcycles, Castleford. Here she is:

Pic of my bike

Now, I’m not going to bang on about this particular bike and how it’s the best bike in the world and all that…yet. First, I thought I’d share some of the decision-making process that I’ve been through over the last three weeks. I’m hoping that my experience might be of some use to others getting into motorcycling, or returning to it, and choosing a learner-legal 125. It might be of particular interest to other old fogies and mid-life-critical ex-bikers like myself, but if you’re a teenager and have an open mind, you might just learn something too, you never know.

I have about a decade’s experience of riding bikes. First I had a Honda SS 50, which I used to commute on from the north side of Leeds to school in Pudsey when I was 17, about 12 miles away. Then I traded it in for a Honda CB 125 when we moved to Harrogate, about twice as far from school, and my dad thought that the journey would have been pushing it for a moped.

I continued to ride my trusty CB when I went to college in Oxford, and rode back home on it in the holidays up the A and B roads – ah, that lovely old Fosse Way, I must do that journey again soon for nostalgia’s sake. I sold the Honda when I was strapped for cash several years later, and regretted it bitterly. Some time later I got my third and last bike, a Suzuki GP100, which was ridiculously fast compared to the larger displacement Honda, being a 2-stroke.

And that points to one of the first considerations: 2- or 4-stroke? Two-stroke bikes are generally quite a bit faster, both in terms of their top speed and particularly in their acceleration, but they have a higher-pitched sound, and you have to mix 2-stroke oil (either in the tank or, for more modern bikes, by filling a separate 2-stroke oil reservoir every now and then). This gives them the distinctive smell and the pall of bluish smoke, which some like, others hate, and which we should all wean ourselves off anyway for environmental reasons. Manufacturers are still making 2-stroke machines, but they’re becoming rare for consumer bikes, keeping their status in the sports market. As well as these differences, 2-strokes run hotter and take more careful maintenance, making them more trouble, more expensive to maintain and fix, and much easier to burn out. My GP100 died a death when I rode the 600 miles or so from Oxford to Inverness and beyond – which would probably be a bit of a strain even for a larger engine.

In contrast, 4-strokes, pretty much what everyone has in their cars, are more resilient, quieter, with a lower-pitched rumble that’s more pleasing to everyone except race fans. Racing should be relegated to the race track, so if your bike is for road use, just forget 2-strokes. If you need more poke for occasional racing in the appropriate place, or for off-road sports, maybe a 2-stroke will suit you. They’re a hell of a lot of fun even in the smaller end of the market. Four-strokes are fun, but it’s a more sedate kind of fun.

Two-strokes often have a narrow power band in the rev range, and require more gear changes to keep using the full power. Four-strokes tend to deliver power more evenly over the rev range.

There’s a relatively new 4-stroke 125 engine with four valves instead of two, in a few models these days, including the Derbi Mulhacen, and this has a little more oomph without losing the benefits of 4-stroke technology, but I’m not sure quite how much difference it makes, and they’re not particularly cheap.

The Derbi Mulhacen was on my shopping list last week: there was one for sale, the Cafe version, 14 miles away and I went to try it out in the shop’s carpark (although the oil light came on after about 30 seconds and the guy said we should stop). I fell in love with the Mulhacen as soon as I saw it. It’s a gorgeous bike. Unfortunately, it was sold while I was considering my decision, but I don’t mind. I’m not absolutely sure that it is “learner legal”, since it is quoted as producing 15 bhp (brake horsepower), and strictly speaking the limit for learners is 14.6 (or, in new money, 11 kW). Also, I’m not sure I trusted the seller completely, as he told me that I, as a mature learner, could ride more powerful bikes than the 11 kW limit while I was learning, which I have failed to find mentioned on the Government website, but which conveniently would include the bike he was trying to shift. Strictly speaking, he was right – I could ride faster bikes while I learned – but only accompanied by an instructor on another bike, and in radio contact, but he failed to add that little qualification. Also, I saw the power statistic for this bike stated wrongly at bikez.com, where they say it puts out 20 horsepower, and I queried how his Mulhacen could be advertised as learner legal, and he didn’t correct that massive overstatement of its power either. Cheers Baz. If that’s your real name (LOL).

Seriously, of course, you have to double check your information and take your time, unless you are absolutely sure you want a certain model and there aren’t many about.

Anyway… I can’t continue without demonstrating just how gorgeous this bike is:

Derbi Mulacen Cafe 125

See? Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I don’t imagine you could park one of these in the middle of town without a lot of admiring looks from passers by.

One of the things that attracted me to this bike, appart from its looks and the 20, er, 15 bhp (still more than most 125s), was the ground clearance. I’m a bit obsessive about choosing my purchases when they’re anything more important than a biro. I make a mental list of the features I want (and don’t want) and check each option against it, and one of my wishes was for some decent ground clearance. The wish-list is informed by my intended use, and I hoped to find a bike that would cope with some moderately difficult terrain. I hesitate to say “off-road”, because everyone immediately tells me that nothing I suggest will cope with “offroading” (including, bizarrely, the XR 125 L), because they imagine I mean racing round a dirt track doing crazy jumps or wading through swamps, crossing the Sahara, or riding up a vertical rock face, when what I mean is just that I’d like my bike to cope with getting off the tarmac and onto rocky or muddy tracks, particularly those that cross the moors and wind their way into the hills.

Honda XR 125 L

So what in hell am I doing with a CBR, a race-style bike? That would seem to be the least favourable choice for getting into the wilderness. Well, to some extent I had to compromise – I had to limit the kind of terrain I tackle, and I had to consider other uses – but the CBR’s ground clearance isn’t actually as bad as I thought even with the lower fairing; plus, I might consider removing it when I set off for a bit of wild camping in the hills, and without it there’s a lot more room underneath. The exhaust pipe is then exposed, and there’s no protective belly-pan as some of the offroad bikes have, so care will be needed, but I’m interested in getting from A to B, not how quickly I get there.

The other considerations are that the vast majority of the riding I do will be on tarmac, and I don’t want to have the disadvantages of something like the XR. In particular, I wanted to minimise the problem of 125s (especially 4-strokes) being underpowered. See, I might be working this little thing quite hard, carrying camping gear and riding most of the day, or I might be wanting to commute or have a nice long Sunday ride into the country with no luggage at all, but keep up with the traffic on A roads. Reading the reviews, my list of possible bikes shrank a lot on the number of niggles about not having a decent speed. The CBR isn’t a fast bike, of course, and there are complaints that when you hit a headwind or a big hill you slow down a lot, but the CBR seems to be one of the fastest 4-stroke 125s around. The quoted power output is 13 bhp. Many user reviews (the believable ones) report it cruising on the flat at 70 quite easily.

In contrast, the XR is quoted as about 11, and many of the reviews say the acceleration up to about 40 mph is fantastic, but after that it’s a bit of a struggle, and many report it topping out at a cruising speed of around 55 or 60. Then again, this is a bike that has big knobbly tyres, and you don’t want to be cornering too fast. There’s little in the way of fairing to speak of, certainly nothing that will reduce aerodynamic drag, and it’s an upright seating position, with a higher seat and wide handlebars, so of course you’re going to find high speeds hard work compared to something that takes its design from a racing machine and is fully faired, a small, light bike with a low saddle and lowish, narrow bars. Aerodynamic drag is the biggest factor limiting speed for any given power, and it increases as the square of the speed. This means that the drag at 60 mph is four times the drag at 30. The weight of a bike is of less importance to top speed, except it will affect you on hills a bit. Generally, it will reduce the acceleration, and increase the stopping distance also, but a heavier bike should reach about the same top speed given more time. Don’t start me on Newton’s Second Law of Motion again, for fks sake.

The same sort of concern made me reject the Suzuki RV 125 Van-Van…

Suzuki RV 125 Van Van

The van-van seems like one of those bikes that generates a fan club. I love them, although I haven’t ridden or even sat on one. I think they look cool, especially from the back due to that enormous tyre, the width of the thing and the lazy riding position. People look comfortable and unhurried riding around on these bikes with a bunch of luggage, two up, in their greasy old leathers and open-face helmets, and you could ride one across a beach, but they won’t cope with much serious off-road stuff because they’re quite heavy, and they don’t cope that well “on road” either, due to being seriously underpowered (according to the majority of reviews I read).

Many of the riders are more mature (as I am), and many of them cite this lack of speed as a positive thing. I saw reviews more than once saying that the RV quite possibly saved the rider’s life by being rather slow. Others praise the RVs stately passage from a more aesthetic perspective. I’m not so sure. The safety aspect of having an underpowered bike – this argument presumably resting on the fact that you will fall off at slower speeds, or not fall off at all – is offset by the increased danger from being constantly passed by other motorists when on main roads, and undermined also by an argument for self discipline and safety awareness that we should all apply anyway. If you’re riding at a safe speed, you’re riding at a safe speed. If your bike is capable of doing no more, or ten times that speed, it makes little difference to what is a safe speed in those circumstances. Almost the opposite applies, in fact: if your bike is an underpowered lump and you’re going too fast round a corner, you’re in more danger than doing the same on a bike designed to lean more and grip more.

Having said that, CBR 125 owners should be warned that their bike, while it looks like a racing machine, hasn’t got limitless grip, and the stock tyres are one of the least praised aspects, so don’t push it. I’m all for riding (or driving a car) well within safety margins, not somewhere around or just inside them. There are other ways to get thrills, and driving fast on the public highway is not a legitimate one; simple as that. I have to admit to pushing the envelope a lot in my younger days, especially when I found that power band on my 2-stroke Suzuki, but I had to stop and give myself a stiff talking to, because I wasn’t going to survive intact much longer doing what I was doing on it. Personally, I think that a lot of that madcap driving is compensation for not being satisfied in other areas of life – certainly that was so in my case then. It was like, deep down, I wanted to crash, or didn’t care enough about myself. Now I care big time. I want to keep all my faculties and my life, and I enjoy improving my riding skills along the lines of the advanced rider, not the fast rider.

Finally, I should briefly mention the Honda CBF 125, and the worthy workhorse of a bike that it has replaced, the CG 125. Yesterday, when I went to Castle Motors, I spent the last hour or so of this three-week-long research trying to decide between the CBR (600 miles in the ownership of Honda UK, 57-reg, a few minor scratches, £1895) and a brand new CBF (£2020)…and still getting on the XR as well a couple more times and wondering…wondering…dirt tracks…?…

The CBF would have to be brand new; it’s just been launched very recently. I’m a bit of a miles-per-gallon freak, too, and this would probably be the most economical production 125 anyone has ever made. It’s supposed to be moderately quick, although I have doubts about how it would compare to a CBR, and I think it’s only about 11 bhp, but Honda boast fuel economy of 120 mpg. It would be fine for a bit of light touring, perhaps. I even had to admit that in the flesh it isn’t quite as horrifically ugly as I thought, although straight from the side I hate that pointy little fairing below the level of the headlight with the overstated flame-like version of the Honda wing logo. I sat on it and it was comfortable. The bars were somewhere between the wide XR’s and the racing CBR’s, just bog-standard.

And that’s the problem. I’m not a complete slave to being sensible. I didn’t want to come home with a bike that I don’t really like the look of, just because I might get another 20 miles out of a gallon of petrol…although I might be kicking myself in a year if petrol is twice the price it is now and CBFs are worth more than they were new. However, it was partly a sensible decision, in that that eventuality is a bit of a long shot. Although it was only a hundred quid more, any new bike loses several hundred the moment you sign the documents. The CBR was, I think, a snip, and I haggled very unconvincingly, but got another £50 off, and then 15% off a jacket and boots while I was there. I have to say the salespeople at Castle Motorcycles were great, helpful without being pushy, friendly without being patronising, and I got the feeling that they could be trusted. Thanks again guys. They’re a Honda dealership, which makes me feel more confident, too.

There’s a load of other options out there, and I haven’t mentioned the Derbi Cross City I was thinking about, or the Derbi Terra Adventure, which would probably be my dream 125 if money were no object, but the reliability of Honda bikes is probably second to none (although occasionally a lemon gets through quality control), and it’s worth remembering that if you choose a popular model, or even just a popular make, parts are likely to be cheap and easy to come by, and servicing might be cheaper too.

I should take delivery of my CBR next week. I still have moments of doubt about my choice, but it can’t be too far wrong, and it’s under warranty for a bit yet, as well as having AA cover, and at the end of the day it’s a learner. I might get something bigger in a few months.

It’s about 20 years since I rode a motorcycle, if you discount last Sunday. What the hell took me so long? That was a great day! It was my Compulsory Basic Training (CBT).

I thought it would be quite a small group, but I didn’t expect to get a day of one-to-one training. The other person didn’t turn up. Dave, from 3D Motorcycle Training, is a nice guy and a very good teacher; he should be, he said he’s been doing it for 25 years (he hardly looks old enough). My only two gripes were that the 125 I rode seemed to have a rather stiff clutch lever and gave me cramp (although maybe some of that was my gloves – I shouldn’t have taken my new ones – or, as he said, my being tense), and that he said we would go out on the road for about two hours, and I’m sure it can’t have been more than about one. Cheating bastard!

Maybe that was because there wasn’t much point in doing another hour with me because I’m so brilliant… Well, I am a good learner, and most of the basics were already under my belt from the fact that it’s like riding a bike. Yeah. I didn’t have to learn to do the balancing bit, or which control does what, or how to find the biting point of the clutch. It was weird though, that first moment when I engaged the clutch and rode forward a few yards, and I did find the bike slightly awkward to control – maybe mostly because of that annoying clutch, which never seemed to engage smoothly.

By lunch time, however, I was getting quite confident round the school playground, and starting to relax more. I had no real nerves about going out on the road. I was chatting to someone working in a camping shop the other day whose husband had recently done the CBT and spent a lot of money (I don’t know if this included a bike), and then couldn’t cope with the actual riding out there on our dangerous roads and packed it in again. Cheers, that was comforting for me just two days before mine.

I always used to feel quite safe on a motorbike (if I was sensible, which I have to say wasn’t always the case when I was younger). I had a Honda CB125 in my late teens and early twenties, and then got a Suzuki GP100, and they could keep up with most traffic apart from on dual carriageways, when there’s enough room for vehicles to pass anyway. Before the 125, I had a Honda SS50 “Sports” moped, which was a little more dangerous due to its slowness, causing everyone to try to overtake it, and making me feel like my rightful place was a foot from the kerb.

A great deal of the theory talk emphasized the importance of driving assertively, confidently, staking your place on the road and keeping up with traffic when reasonable. The position to hold is generally near the middle of your lane, perhaps just slightly to the left of centre, but not too far in, or people behind you will immediately decide you’re a hazard to be passed. I already had this habit pretty well, but he said I wasn’t very consistent with it on turns, and I passed parked vehicles far too close, leaving myself in danger of riding into someone’s suddenly opened door, or a pedestrian running out.

Similarly, if you leave too much space between yourself and the vehicle in front, it can invite people to fill it, and you end up again being overtaken and then having to back off to maintain that space. This is a difficult point, however, because generally people drive too close, and you don’t want to do that, so sometimes you have to find the best way you can to minimize the risks – perhaps riding well out when you need to protect that “two second gap” – but there’s actually not really any perfect solution, and it’s a problem I have in the car, too. Driving too close is one of the top causes of accidents.

I can’t for the life of me remember what bike it was – something like a Yamaha YBR or maybe a Suzuki EN – a very basic sit-up-and-beg 4-stroke, but it pulled away pretty nicely and cruised around on the town streets and country lanes at the kinds of speeds I reckonned I was ready for after all these years. It was slightly off-putting having Dave ride his big bike close behind and to the right of me most of the way. I can see the point of it – he was in a position to protect me and observe quite well too – but it interfered with my natural driving sense, my “radar”, because obviously I would not normally expect someone to be doing that (and would probably take evasive action if they did!).

Also, whenever I did the rear-observation over my right shoulder, instead of observing the traffic, I pretty well just got a look at his bike, and knew that’s what I’d see anyway! I suppose that “life saver” move isn’t really designed for looking down the road so much as the blind-spot between what you can see in the mirror and your normal peripheral vision.

It was a good little taster of what it might be like later to have a few more lessons towards my test, and what it might be like on the test.

So now I’m hanging out for my “learner-legal” bike, which means it has to be no bigger than 125 cc and produce no more than, I think, 10 kW, or about 14 bhp in old money. I did a bit of research on the net and soon the Honda CBR125 settled into first choice. It’s a good balance between economy and green credentials on the one hand and sportiness on the other, being like a little mini racing bike in styling, a 4-stroke, and the later ones, at least, meeting the stricter European emissions regulations. I haven’t quite got my head round the changes, but I think a few years ago they got electronic ignition, which helps with the fuel efficiency, and have catalytic convertors – or is that another one, my head’s spinning with the data. I’m also not sure how clean 2-strokes are these days (or a few years old), but I’ve never been particularly fond of the whine (though I always loved the smell).

I would love to go the whole hog (pardon the pun) and get an even greener CBF125, but it just looks awful, is another upright sitting position, and the build quality isn’t nearly as good. The CBR should do at least 100 mpg with skill and patience – although people often quote about 80, this might partly be due to the bike’s racing heritage and the kinds of people, therefore, who often ride them. Picking up a second-hand one, it’s probably quite important to differentiate between those used by mature learners or returners like me and ones that have been thrashed by teenagers.

I’m also confused – or a lot of people are – about the number of gears on them. I’m fairly confident it’s 6, and that gives you a nice overdrive for cruising, but many places list them as 5-speed. It could be a later mod – I haven’t found the definitive history yet.

Now it just so happens that I found one – a red and black 57-reg in nice condition – in my local shop, but they’re trying to get hold of the buyer, because they’ve had a deposit on it for weeks and not collected it yet. I sat on it, which felt very tempting, but of course couldn’t take it for a test ride. That seems to be about the only thing that would change my mind on the model I want – unless something very interesting comes along in the meantime – if I rode one and felt it wasn’t right.

Next choice might be something like the Yamaha YBR, but it’s relatively underpowered and rather boring looking, and I don’t really like that upright stance very much (although it’s actually all I’ve ridden so far). I think I’ll prefer those lower bars.

There are quite a few around, but no more of them that I’ve seen within about 20 miles. I’ll have the car on Monday and Tuesday, so I can have a look at some more then, and hopefully take one out for a spin.

P.S. – yeah, it’s 6-speed, has injection and a cat – I found these 2007 version features.

My goodness, how time flies when you’re having fun. What is it, half a year since I posted here? What was my blog about before?

It was going to be all about philosophy, especially my conversion (or awakening) from buddhism into the light of reason. Then I just got bored with the sound of my own typing, and the next thing I knew I was reading about a strange little brainteaser on the JREF forum (and everywhere else, apparently), the question of whether it’s possible to build a vehicle that goes directly downwind faster than the wind (DDWFTTW) powered only by the wind, “steady state” (which means not just as a passing burst, but settled at that speed).

There is so much to this, which I’ve been immersed in since at least December, both as a physical phenomenon and a social one, that it’s really hard to know where to begin.

I learned a lot in these few months. I learned how a little cart with wheels and a propeller can go directly downwind faster than the wind. I think…

…because I also learned how wrong I can be about such things. Even now, I’m not sure, and keep thinking I’ve spotted a flaw. I spent the first few weeks very sceptical about it, and even got to the point of saying that I’d eat my hat if it was true, but the last few months I’ve been 99-point-something percent convinced that it’s not only true, but has been demonstrated both outside and on a treadmill.

The treadmill tests have been a big part of the debate, and it was something of a revelation – or a rediscovery – to learn about equivalent frames of reference in mechanics, how useful they are, and how philosophically interesting. Motion, as we kept insisting to the nay-sayers, is entirely relative: hence, a cart being blown by a steady wind over the ground is entirely equivalent in its local conditions (i.e. for a Directly Downwind cart running there) to a treadmill belt going backwards under the still air of a room. Thus, if we put such a device on a treadmill and it moves forward in still air, that is equivalent to it moving across a piece of land outside blown by a steady wind. It’s also a little easier to do the tests, and to guarantee that this is a steady wind (if you close the doors and windows and don’t wave things about too much).

Writing the above, I’m well aware that many people will laugh at the idea, or just read blankly wondering what on earth I’m talking about. How can still air have anything to do with a steady wind? How can a cart going forward on it prove that it would go faster than the wind outside? Well, answers to that are plastered all over the net, but in brief, it is so for all such situations where the relative velocities between the parts remain the same: you can shift all of the velocities numerically one way or the other, so that a moving wind becomes still (in this case) as long as the “road” is now shifted in its velocity also, by the same amount. The different “zero velocities” are called inertial frames of reference, and we’ve known that they are equivalent for several hundred years, with no exception whatever. These things are so long and fully established that they are considered basic laws.

Complications exist. With a treadmill, there are some things one can observe that don’t occur if you literally translate the motion to an outside scene. On the ground, the ground continues to stretch out as far as the eye can see, and is a globe and comes back around the backside. If you translate the treadmill with a cart on it back to a piece of earth, you’d have to construct a smaller stationary piece of earth with the cart on, and great areas on all sides moving forward. But such differences as exist are ones of scale – they have the potential to alter the result, and must be studied, IMHO, and shown to be negligible, rather than just ignored, but in this case they do seem to be utterly negligible.

As with many brainteasers, once you see it, it’s easy to keep seeing it, and your earlier objections fall away. However, I’ve never come across something for which my personal mental objections kept rising and rising, each time being shown to be unreasonable, yet, as I say, I still have the occasional doubt.

The social side of it has been immensely interesting as well, almost more so than the physics. There are two guys, one of whom goes by the username of spork (and at youtube, spork33), and his mate, “ThinAirDesigns”, or “JB” as he signs his posts, who are heavily into this and promoting the idea in dozens of forums, building carts, testing them and posting the video, teaching the physics, arguing with naysayers and trolls, and one wonders how they manage to hold down their jobs (and, apparently, go flying or paragliding at the weekends, too).

I have recently fallen out pretty badly with spork, and I guess that puts me in JB’s very bad books too, since they seem pretty well joined at the head. Our relationship was stormy from the start. I was a bit naive to expect that I could blather on about the machine from a position of relative ignorance and be heard with patience and respect. Perhaps I shouldn’t comment on things I don’t know enough about, or perhaps spork and JB should have allowed more of this outsider ranting, but spork in particular is a live wire and reminds me of one of those Jack Russel terriers. You can pick those damn things up by whatever they’ve latched onto and swing the bastards round all day. Spork just doesn’t let anything go.

We had a final fight after I got sick of his insults on the RichardDawkins.net forum (towards others, in fact, not me, although he had been pretty insulting to me earlier on JREF), and our final contact was a PM from him asking if I was going to keep attacking him and having a pissing match with him. I decided just not to respond, because any response would seem to him like more of my attack. I would have pointed out that I wasn’t attacking him, but he wouldn’t have seen it that way. I thought there might have been a friendship developing there for a while, when I was behaving myself, agreeing with him on everything, but we’re too different.

Someone I have made a better friendship with is Recursive Prophet. This was a little surprising as well, because he did strike me as an unlikely friend at first. I didn’t trust him. He was too complimentary about everyone, and then occasionally stuck the knife in about something, or seemed not to respond to answers to questions he’d asked, just repeating them. He got a lot of things wrong, especially his analysis of “humber”, the uber-troll of the whole downwind debate. But he – “RP” – turned out to be a genuinely nice guy, and it has to be said that almost all of his biting remarks were in response to being rubbed up the wrong way by others.

This is a big learning too, for anyone who doesn’t know already, the way we go around with a mental picture of ourselves all squeaky clean and wonderful, only ever being a bit short with someone who deserves it, after much provocation. Unfortunately, we’re all doing much the same. Some are a little more patient and forgiving and “relativistic” in their outlook than others, and they tend to recognise that ubiquitous human problem and sometimes manage to apply it to themselves (I’m thinking of my good self here, obviously, tee-hee), while others have no idea how different our perspectives are, just believe that things are correct however we see them and if anyone disagrees, they’re obviously wrong.

Spork, for instance, said that he never gave insults that weren’t in response to an insult by the other. I tried to suggest that the other might also see it the same way from their side, that our little niggles and irritations can grow gradually, each adding to the severity of the response, always thinking that they are giving a reasonable and measured reply, or perhaps trying to warn the other off – a sort of “I have caught on to the fact that you’re getting at me and if you don’t stop, you’ll get more of this incredible wit” – while the other reads that as “your last warning is ignored, and I insult you further”.

Anyway, I decided to write here not to slate spork or talk about the physics of downwind travel, really, but just to celebrate friendship and people like Recursive Prophet, whom I find very positive, on the whole, although I can see that he’s quite sarcastic about the spork-JB program now as he exits from it, and I’m pretty sure that he’s seen on the forums as a troll and a troublemaker, talking shit and being aggressive. I think it’s because RP and I recognise that our beliefs and views are separate from us, that we can disagree entirely on several matters, and not feel any resentment about that.

From the start, RP tried to get everyone to lighten up, and reminded us over and over not to take everything so seriously. He enjoyed the humour of our arguments and enjoyed our sarcastic digs, but he kept saying to keep the “ad homs” out of it, attack the argument, not the arguer.

The difference between “that’s a stupid statement” and “you’re stupid” – which is the watershed on a lot of forums – goes deeper than just a handy distinction for separating dispute from insult. One example that came up is “liar” and “a lie”. JB – I think it was – argued that if someone has clearly been shown to have told a lie, then they are by definition a liar, so calling someone a liar should be an exception to the no-insults rule.

But to someone who understands a bit more about relative viewpoints, or just has a little deeper understanding of psychology and philosophy, this argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Firstly, whether something is established as true is a doubtful proposition (due to the self-referential quality of language, if nothing else), and secondly, it is generally considered unlikely that any human being has not lied at some point, so by the definition we’re all liars.

Logically, this doesn’t mean it’s an offence to point it out, but it’s a bit like saying to someone that they are “nuclear waste” (as opposed to “stardust”), or “somewhat evolved slime” (rather than “a human being with a brain that is an example of the most complex entity in nature”). Clearly, calling someone a liar has meanings of greater social significance than saying that the statement they just made was a lie.

Similarly, some were angry when RP called spork a “fundamentalist”, and a few posted to say that the word had very offensive connotations, but RP posted a standard definition of the word, from which it was clear that belief in the tenets of classical mechanics, or of science, without any doubt, could be a kind of fundamentalism. Again, it could be said that it had greater social significance than the definition, like “liar” does, or one can observe the accuracy or otherwise of the meaning that the speaker intends to convey, and if it is not known, ask more to find it out.

One can take offence with a semi-conscious image in mind of a suicide bomber, or one can try to learn what another human being is trying to get over. Understanding what the other is trying to get over has to come before working out whether we agree or not; deciding how to respond should then come even later. What too many of us do most of the time is react to communication almost at an autonomic level: a word triggers a gut reaction as it filters through the unreflective lizard brain we all still have below the grey matter.

Of course, in the world of science, it is often argued that the facts are pure and simple, established beyond doubt, and all that relativistic nonsense should be kept in its social context. The next minute, the same people might argue that they’re not fundamentalists in outlook, because science is about holding theories reasonably tentatively, being ready to doubt them and overturn them in the light of more empirical evidence or powerful theory. There is a healthy balance of these things, which I feel does defeat many of RP’s arguments for relativity (where they apply to laws of physics) – and humber questioned many such established “facts”. On the other hand, too many scientists push the boundaries of the absolutism of science, or they fail to appreciate the postmodern insights into language that make such statements as “I’ll find the quote where you said it”, or “I know exactly what you’re saying and it’s just plain wrong” childish extravagances or denial.

A perfect example happened in my last few days’ involvement, when I tried to help spork and another poster, “asymptotic freedom”, to recognise that they were misunderstanding each other in their discussion. Spork denied that there was any misunderstanding, but AF acknowledged it – although he called it a mis-communication. If anyone was paying attention through these months (for some, years) of debate, it would be clear by now that we often take a simple statement or question as though its meaning is totally unambiguous – “does a balloon track the wind?” for instance – only to discover that each of us may assume different bounds and relevant conditions, and we might set off arguing about the answer and not realise we’re discussing two different things. One way to try to avoid that is to establish the correct meaning at the beginning, but some details may only come to us as we investigate the question, and if we’re already pissed off we’ll not be free to discover them with equanimity. We get too invested in having the right answer already, and our discussion with others, instead of being a mutual discovery, becomes a fight. Science, of course, is full of it.

The “pissing match”, as spork called it, of DDWFTTW was amazing fun at times and brought out some people’s best humour. I’m sure everyone learned a few things, and a lot of people learned a lot of things.

I nearly got to the point of wanting to study mechanics at university or something, although I’ve backed off from that since. I know I can’t get my head round maths problems quite the way I used to, and there are other things that interest me more.

As an ex-therapist I’m often aware that I have unconscious motives for the things I do, and I suspect that all this involvement in a physics problem was to give me a break from my own pressing personal problems, and I think I’ve come out of the other side now, clearer of the answers to those life questions. I was taken down-life faster than the life, while my unconscious sorted out the mess I was only making worse by worrying about it.

As Spring springs, I’m gearing up for getting a new motorcycle and starting work on getting a book published, which is almost finished in draft form. I also intend (when I’ve got a new laptop to replace my desktop machine) to use the space freed up in the study for recording my music, something I’ve neglected for years. I hope to blog a bit more frequently and on a wider range of subjects in future.

In the meantime, one of my new pleasures these days is listening to RP’s voice mail most mornings – it’s like my own personal Letter from America – and sending mine to him. It’s down to his enthusiasm for that medium that I got into it. Thanks, RP.

It was weird at first, but I quite enjoy it now. Talking in a 2-way conversation on Google Talk is slightly more difficult at the moment, because I haven’t got used to the dropout that happens as each of us try to talk on the same channel (and because he talks most of the time ) but being able to talk to someone is quicker than typing emails, even for a fairly quick touch-typist like myself. Like an email, each participant can pay attention to it when they have time – also an important consideration when there’s about 8 hours between us, me in the UK and him on the “left coast” of the US.

Ok, that was all very childish. I was thinking I really should look at the good side of the Law of Attraction. Surely it must have something going for it. I set out to sort the wheat from the chaff. I then realised that I hadn’t actually seen the movie or read the book, so at least I should look at a trailer on youtube. Maybe you haven’t seen it. Here it is in case (follow the link below to watch it and read my analysis). Or save yourself 20 minutes. It’s up to you. By the time I was finished, I was writing this blog entry, and there wasn’t much wheat…

The Chaff

Where to start. The HYPE. The repeated message “You can have exactly what you want!”

The stupid Conspiracy Theory – the secret was kept secret by the rich minority, so you’re wonderfully lucky to live now when we’re disseminating it widely (Don’t forget to buy my DVD). This unfairly suggests that the rich were using knowledge of the magical law and deliberately keeping it from the lower classes. All the great artists and politicians and scientists mentioned as luminaries are implicated in an evil plot to keep the masses ignorant, when in fact they were acting in accordance with their social norms and, if anything, working to improve the lot of humanity. We are urged to feel grateful for things we haven’t got yet from a universe that really doesn’t give a fig, instead of being grateful for the things we have got - the whole of human culture – from our greatest ancestral benefactors, many of whom would be turning in their graves to learn how backward, ungrateful and full of mumbo-jumbo we’ve become!

As for quoting Winston Churchill to suggest that he advocated it – ‘You create your own universe as you go along’ – in fact he believed the opposite. Now, of course, the credulous can turn anything round – he would pretend that he didn’t believe it, since he was part of the conspiracy. Strange though, to quote him out of context to suggest that he preached solipsism, when what he was really saying was “…These amusing mental acrobatics are all right to play with. They are perfectly harmless and perfectly useless. I warn my younger readers only to treat them as a game. The metaphysicians will have the last word and defy you to disprove their absurd propositions.”. I think he was being generous – they are not perfectly harmless – but he was insightful enough to recognise that the solipsist argument is impossible to gainsay. That, of course, does not mean it is true.

Orthodox moral tenets, like the ‘golden rule’ (which was already misrepresented by pretending that it is a rule) are misrepresented by shoving them all together under one single universal law.

The pretense, by using the word ‘law’ that this is on a par with the laws of physics. Scientists just laugh or cry.

Magical thinking instead of critical thinking, eg. thoughts as frequencies being sent out (this was said several times and reinforced by the video showing waves of blur emanating from people!). It encourages belief in psychic phenomena of all sorts, again utterly unsupported by science. They then add to this with ridiculous misinterpretations or almost subliminal mention of Quantum Mechanics – you have to make a ‘quantum change in your thinking’…or stop thinking properly, more like.

The ridiculous upside-down magentism metaphor pisses me off, too. ‘Like attracts like’, just as in magnetism, as though you were actually a magnet attracting things to you…except that in magnetism like attracts unlike.

This points to something else. LoA is a rather unbalanced view compared with some ancient ‘wisdom’, eg. the central, balancing, Tantric principle of yin-yang, where, rather like magnetism, like attracts its opposite. Suffering, pain, fear and other negative emotions are not valued, but flipped out of deliberately – life has to be perfect happiness all the freaking time…had by…

Shiny, smiley, happy people lecturing us on how their success is their own creation and comes with no effort while they sleep or sip martinis by the pool (usually from their internet marketing). They fail to see that it is supported by the modern infrastructure of a rich nation, which their forefathers toiled and sweated and fought to create with practical, material effort. It’s supposed to be a law that works every time with every person, but I wonder how starving refugees get on manifesting their chosen lifestyle.

It teaches people to avoid negative thoughts (since the Law doesn’t discriminate between good and bad, just attracts whatever you’re thinking) like “this mountain of debt I’ve got”, which encourages people to avoid their responsibilites and live in a makebelieve world. Debt doesn’t magically disappear! In the movie, the scene is of a woman looking glumly at her computer screen – she’s obviously in debt and attracting more of it by thinking that. The next scene, in which a voice-over is telling us that the law is very ‘obedient’ and will give you exactly wyw, is of another young woman peering in a shop window at a neclace, segueing to her having it placed round her neck by – presumably – the guy she persuaded to buy it. Alternatively, she might have bought it herself, after ignoring how awfully in debt she was.

So, the message is clear, ignore your mounting debt, smile, think happy thoughts and go shopping. Is the true secret behind the secret simply that it was devised by whoever would benefit most from encouraging higher spending and borrowing? Is the Secret responsible for worsening the credit crunch? Was the conspiracy closer to home?

Everything bad happening to you is your fault. If you’re stuck in a traffic jam trying to get to work and thinking you’ll be late, you’re stuck because you’re thinking you’re stuck and you’ll be late because you’re thinking you’ll be late. Odd. As more and more people learn to use the LoA, traffic presumably will either flow better or magically disappear from the streets. Oh yes, of course, everyone’ll be at home on the net trying to sell each other stuff.

Next up we have the example of the gay man who went to Bill Harris complaining of being bullied at work, receiving homophobic abuse in the street and heckled as a commedian – confidence, not magic, perfectly ordinary cognitive therapy and relaxation would have done as well. Bill tells us that through using the LoA, most of his abusive co-workers changed departments or left their jobs (which is a nice coincidence, interpreted by a magical thinker), the others treated him well and he wasn’t heckled or abused in public (because he was now more confident; he’s actually shown smiling and nodding at people, when before he shuffled along looking guilty and fearful. The fact that we tend to be treated as victims if we look like victims is well known to psychology without the stupid magical ju-ju shit!). Thinking positively (if realistic, not fanciful) is good, encouraging and enabling – it doesn’t require invoking a universal spiritual law.

Decide to feel good emotions and reject bad emotions. I dislike this part of the film because of my general objection – something ordinary and sensible is repackaged and interpreted as part of the new-thought religion. Then it ties into the shiny happy people thing – incredibly fortunate people find it very easy to make a career out of telling depressed people they’re doing it to themselves. I want good things to happen to genuinely selfless people, and real misfortune to wipe the self-generated smile off the smug faces of people ‘practising the secret’! That encouragement to focus on being happy for the sake of it, generating positive emotions, is fine up to a point, but it could also be seen as a way to be irresponsible and selfish. If our own good feelings come first, we aren’t noticing the suffering in the world – indeed, we may have to deliberately ignore it – some LoA gurus decide not to watch TV; the news disturbs their finely crafted, artificial happiness too much.

Banal example of how stupid this is: the film goes on about how if you’re thinking negative, fearful thoughts, you’ll attract bad things, while a guy, looking slightly nervous, locks his bicycle to a lamp-post. He comes back a while later to find that the lock has been cut and his bike stolen. So let me see if I get this – first I can imagine the most expensive new bike I want, then just dump it in the street and have confidence that it’s going to be there when I come back.

That’s before we’ve considered all the people with curable diseases who don’t get medical help because they think it’s only curable from within. Still, it’s just a bit of magical thinking, What’s the Harm?

(WHEAT: The cat with its head stuck in a bag is funny.)

What I hate most about all of this is that there is wheat amongst the chaff – there are good, useful, encouraging principles of living that people aren’t aware of – but in the LoA these good things are twisted into a magical religion based on a silly, ignorant superstition, at a time when we should really be waking up from such things and facing the real future, with its real problems and opportunities, not putting on a happy face every morning and thinking about what we want. It’s hard to describe precisely the stomach-churning disgust I feel when I see these preening fools, pyramid selling a pile of mystical crap.

Occasionally someone in the movement puts forward the view that having stuff doesn’t make us happy for very long, reminds us of the sick fantasy of owning and ’succeeding’ rather than loving and giving and finding significance, and maybe pieces of sensible advice get through. Personally, I’m playing with the theory that this is a phase that certain particularly depressed, suppressed, anal types have to go through first; hopefully some of them will come out the other side in a few decades. Reality has a habit of gradually reminding you that it isn’t as flexible as you’d like it to be.

There is an ancient spiritual message that things are rather upside-down: those who concentrate on getting what they want, lose everything, and those who give everything, or care not, gain everything. Some try to squeeze this message into the strange vessel of the LoA, but they’d be well advised to use another. The Law of Attraction is repulsive: you can spot them a mile off, ‘practising gratitude’ for the things they’re gonna get today. I’m a fairly forgiving person, but they strike me sometimes as actually quite evil. I’m sure it’s just that they’re deluded.

It’s telling that most of the search results you get when you google ‘the secret’ or ‘law of attraction’ are people trying to sell you their version, their DVD or book or lecture, competing in the market place, demonstrating that their psyche hasn’t magically shifted from a deficit mentality to an abundance one, they have just learned (or rather, been indoctrinated with) some marketing strategies, and now, in order to make their millions without effort, you have to buy the same.

The LoA is the biggest pyramid selling scheme ever. It sells a new age religion of selfishness and wealth, distorts history, congratulates the fortunate and insults the unfortunate. It deepens the sickness of our celebrity- fame- and external-image-fixated culture. It is spritual consumerism, whittled down to the its most catchy essential propaganda, thoroughly marinated in woo, then writ large in Hollywood-capitals hype.

My earlier treatment of the Law of Attraction was rather erudite, and I found this excellent video, which, while not as erudite as my treatment, does involve a man with the magical ability to attract antique meat grinders to his head, Mark Day. This is probably the direction my studies have to take in future. Thank you, Mark.

I’m having another run-in with believers in the so-called ‘Law of Attraction’ at Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development for Smart People forum. Someone posted to share their unease about it, and I dared to venture the opinion that unease was wise.

The Law of Attraction

The Law of Attraction, what is it? Basically, it’s the magical message that whatever you want you can have, you just need to believe in it enough. Your thoughts create, or deeply influence, reality. It was popularised in the 2006 film The Secret by Prime Time Productions.

Now, of course, within reason, that may be true. For a start, there is my internal, subjective reality, and my thoughts are a big feature in that landscape. Thinking positively, trying to look on the bright side of things, hoping, being optimistic, these things will help you to be happier, is that all it means?

Well, sometimes those interpretations are given, but some of the protagonists take it much more seriously, extending the influence of thought to the supernatural. Some take this to the extreme solipsism, in which objective reality is considered meaningless or not even real, a construct of the individual mind. And there are more complicated versions, in which human beings are creating various parallel realities according to the power of the ideas and the numbers projecting them.

Some of the other buzz words, then, are Intention Manifestation, since this is about manifesting exactly what you want, and Subjective Reality. The Law of Attraction is big business. If you google ‘the secret’ or ‘law of attraction’, most of the links you’ll find on the first page will invite you to sign up for instructions on how to get rich. Many of them vie for your interest by proclaiming they are the REAL Secret or Law, in a sick parody of the philosophy.

Steve Pavlina is one of the protagonists. I have discussed these views critically at Steve’s forum for some time, because I think they represent quite a significant risk to people’s psychological well-being, and perhaps their physical well-being.

There are important caveats: one must not dismiss the idea of mind-over-matter prematurely or completely. For a start, all of human culture, including every piece of technology, was in some sense created from thought, but the normal way of seeing this happening is through people taking action, discussing their ideas, moving their limbs, making experiments and finally developing the physical manifestations of their ideas. This they do without recourse to magic, without breaking the laws of physics.

LoA-ers (Law of Attraction practitioners and dabblers) often seem to ignore these limitations. Just believe and you can do anything! It’s an appealing slogan and a comforting place for those requiring a mystical worldview, but who reject what they call ‘religion’. However, as far as I can discern, there is no such magical ability, and there are some things people can’t do, and believing otherwise is simply to adopt another kind of mysticism. It’s amazing, actually, how venomous some LoA protagonists are towards ‘organised religion’ (often citing the believer’s enslavement to superior priestly figures), while they lap up every last mindless blog entry and fiercely marketed book, DVD, lecture, retreat or full-blown course of their New-Age gurus.

Then there’s the matter of mind-over-body. While it seems there is absolutely no meaningful evidence whatsoever of mind directly (i.e. supernaturally) influencing matter, there is quite substantial evidence of mental states affecting the physical world directly – only that world is limited to our bodies. This mind-body connection is seriously impressive, and it is a blessing in such instances as the hypnotic suppression of pain. It is something of a problem for the reductive processes of science, for instance when trying to separate the objective effect of a medicine from the ‘placebo effect’.

Placebo

This in itself raises a peculiar set of philosophical and political problems. Sceptics often dismiss a treatment (or the whole of complementary medicine) because it has not been shown to be any more effective than a placebo, but this ignores the demonstrable usefulness of  placebo. This must make us wonder whether we should consider the ‘objective’ effect of a treatment to be the only correct one. There may be millions of medicines and treatments which, if we could isolate their objective effects in a rigorous research project, would be labeled by science as ineffective, ‘no better than placebo’, yet millions of people may benefit from them because of the placebo effect, precisely because they believe them to be objectively effective. Medical science, by investigating these medicines, and then pronouncing them ‘useless’ - or worse, taking action to ban their sale on the grounds that to do would mislead people - would in real terms be harming whole populations, increasing suffering, perhaps even sentencing patients to early death. Even if it did not ban someone’s trusted placebo, the educational function of disseminating the truth about it could be expected to undermine the effect.

In considering this problem it seems there is almost a reversal of character in the typical responses: those who would normally be considered ‘alternative’ or ’spiritual’ or ‘new-age’, and would use unproven potions and herbal rememdies, might be expected to raise pragmatic arguments in favour of subjective effects and urging science to leave well alone, while the scientist, typically of a practical nature, might have a bout of intense idealism and argue that the truth, even if it hurts, must be known. Perhaps placebo will place medicine as a whole in a difficult position with regard to the hippocratic oath on this issue, as it may in other areas.

Applying this insight to LoA, does placebo stand as an indication that there was never any reality about a particular drug, and add weight to the claim that the world is made up of our thoughts alone? I don’t think it’s quite like that, although arguments like it are favourites of the LoA apologist.

Nevertheless, the deliberate harnessing of that ‘placebo effect’, for instance through self-talk, meditation, hypnosis, etc., may offer useful advances for us individually, and should perhaps usher in an alternative way of understanding alternative medicine. There may be a temptation for the sceptic to dismiss and ridicule all the scents and crystals and whale music and incantations, but there may be good sense behind these activities.

Good sense may be debatable in the case of the user who is an innocent believer, for then ’superstition’ is more applicable and there is no telling what damage may result from accepting things at face value, but the sceptic would be using good sense, knowing that it’s all ‘in the mind’, but also being in possession of a true understanding of the mind’s capabilities. At the moment, people seem split rather diametrically between the credulous, taking advantage of their unconscious processes unconsciously, and the sceptic, generally shunning the subjectively good medicine. There is a problem for many, however, in continuing to invest psychologically in that subjective help once they know the science. I have just taken a course of glucosamine for my joint pain. The research I can find on the net is equivocal – as is so often the case – and without great risks being reported. In my new sceptical mindset, I know that it may have no obejctive function, but I also know that I can, to some extent, use self-talk and deliberate expectation about it, and that this has some chance of being useful, too.

There is, of course, no distinct division between this and performing magical rituals, with or without known placebos, if one can train one’s use of the effect. I could fill the old bottle with plain water, chant ‘glucosamus fixibackus’ three times, and save a bob or two. It is true that the mind has affected matter, should this piece of theory be true (and it occurs to me that I really do need to check more about the placebo effect and the mind-body connection), but let us be very clear that nowhere has the objective result of placebo travelled outside the confines of the body; nowhere has any spoon been caused to bend; nowhere has a single elementary particle been sent spinning in a different direction (they love the QM BS argument); nowhere has piles of cash manifested merely  from thinking about it. However, we might have cured a bad back partly through belief, and been able to earn more cash.

Psychic Tricks

The LoA protagonists are many and varied, but the basic idea of the mind attracting events into a person’s life dovetails with all sorts of other new-age woo. Erin Pavlina, Steve’s wife, purports to be a psychic reader, and there are quite a few members of the forum who are convinced of her, or their own, skill in giving significant information to others (or discerning it for themselves) by supernatural means. The idea that one is psychic is clearly very closely related to the supposed Law: the mind extends beyond physical limits and influences or picks up information removed in time or space.

Skewing the Data

A set of psychological theories explain a good deal of the two beliefs (“I can mysteriously influence reality” and “I can mysteriously sense facts about reality”). The most pertinent, confirmation bias explains how we naturally tend to notice things that fit with our current beliefs and overlook things that don’t. As soon as we begin to investigate an idea, we skew the data. We don’t intend to cheat, but cheat we do, casually all day as individuals, and formally in research.

A long and solid series of experiments have demonstrated this propensity to fool ourselves. The file-drawer effect is another feature of the trick, a term used particularly to describe scientific (or supposedly scientific) experiments and the gathering of data, in which the researchers pay too much attention to results that support their hypothesis, the hits, and too little to those that undermined it, the misses.

In informal psychic research projects, for instance, it is typical for someone who is being tested and who believes they are psychic to write off sessions that showed no evidence of their ability, saying that they just weren’t focused or the vibes weren’t right. The effect then percolates upward through whole research projects and finally to meta-analyses, where it is particularly damaging to a clear view.

Research departments intending to demonstrate psychic abilities may have lots of results of different studies, but have understandably only publish ones that, for whatever reason, showed some positive result. This is where the name of the effect comes from, the great number of results stuffed in a drawer somewhere that failed to demonstrate the particular hypothesis. Statistically, of course, occasionally studies will go ‘well’ by chance, but these are generally the only ones that see the light of day. Once you begin to grasp the subtlety and unfortunate power of this principle, scepticism is given a great boost. One begins to see that no news is – well - no news: in our ordinary life we hardly consider it, but scientific results are based on statistical significance and in that case no news is extremely significant.

Try it yourself, for instance by tossing a coin while intending to throw only heads. If you are honest with yourself, but watch your thoughts carefully, you will have all sorts of illogical ideas, and these will increase the more you believe you can influence the coin, or the more you get into that mindset even temporarily. Typically, people will break the test up into sets, maybe of ten throws – you have to count to something - and then they start ‘forgetting’ past results that showed more tails than heads and, perhaps even more, the ones that showed a fairly even mix of heads and tails. Results you’d expect due to chance alone are boring old normal results: they aren’t news.

They play other tricks. I caught myself doing this when I tried: I threw nine tails in a row, and I was really quite amazed by that time, even though I know full well that every throw could be equally a head or a tail irrespective of what came before – chance doesn’t count previous events, that’s central to the theory! (Of course, I was genuinely trying to demonstrate I had the psychic ability, concentrating and hoping and willing and wishing.)

By about seven tails my intuition overrode my mathematical knowledge and insisted I should be getting more heads than this. Finally, I got a head on the last go. Then suddenly this idea struck me from nowhere: maybe I am influencing the coin. Maybe those LoA-ers are right, but, because I’m a sceptic, I’m influencing the result negatively!

Can you believe it? I was contemplating turning a 9-1 experimental defeat upside down for the sake of proving that I’m psychic, when I’m fairly confident already that I’m not! It’s no wonder the many worlds of woo have so many followers.

Footnotes: 

If the articles at The Skeptic’s Dictionary above (in bold type) have whetted your sceptical appetite, I highly recommend clicking on the relevant links further down the pages; there is much else to discover about selective thinking and self-delusion.

Unfortunately, the thread I alluded to was closed after a particular protagonist’s posts decended into personal abuse. At least that’s my reality.

I’ve been trying to think how to describe my philosophical position. Changing so deeply in such a short time, I suppose I am actually trying to decide my philosophical position. The vague yet monumental vista of a divine universe, in which my human life was inherently meaningful and redemption its natural end, collapsed.

It is so important to transcend duality, though, in understanding these things, or anything: we should try not to think in black and white or, if that is impossible, remember that we think in black and white. The great redemptive hope was not simply my belief, solid and unchanging, but something I saw a certain amount of sense in, yet sometimes doubted. Now, it is not a false view that I have rejected, but a theory that I strongly suspect is false. Similarly, I need to keep taking on that worldview again, doubting its negation, in order to check my reasoning and my intuitive feelings or imagination (call it what you will): the alternative is to be closed-minded.

But what is it I’m trying to work out? The word ‘mystical’ keeps coming to me, dragging a set of curious associations. I described myself on a forum yesterday as a ‘recovering mystic’, but this morning awoke to a train of thought that it would have been easy to label as a mystical observation, at least in the absence of a dictionary and before my first cup of coffee.

It was interesting but not immediately productive for me to look up ‘mysticism’ at Wikipedia just now. Firstly it reminded me how much I like to write and how little I have read. It scared me a bit to remember just how complicated philosophy is, and that somewhere out there are REAL philosophers (sic joke?) who could actually tell you what Kant or Heidegger or Plato said and how the different systems all fit together, or don’t.

Then I thought about it differently. There are several advantages to not having read what everyone else said about a subject. I knew this even as a youngster, and have had an ambivalent attitude to learning ever since. It is a great treasure, personal discovery, whether phenomenal or philosophical, and occupies a large part of childhood learning. It is in the nature of things, however, that if we gain knowledge of something first symbolically – being taught it in a classroom, for instance – it has the effect of biasing the field of our imagination thereafter, sometimes so strongly that we cannot think anything to the contrary.

I perhaps became a little too cautious, and am now trying to catch up with my education, but nevertheless I do feel that I have gained something quite important from my intuitive decision - long before I dropped out of college – to avoid specialising too much, to keep daydreaming, using my imagination and working things out myself. I wanted to take every theory that came my way with a pinch of salt - not fill my field of view with it, but store it on a shelf, as it were, to take down and ponder, compare and contrast with others.

But that is an impossible ideal. It could be thought that science biased my mind and then I found mysticism made more sense. It could be thought that I held on to mysticism mostly through my adult life and now I am overcoming that bias. Yes, I think that may be it: where my central beliefs about life and death were concerned, I failed to keep a democratic mental library, with the competing philosophies stored as resources, but felt compelled to pin the charts to my staff (“…of comfort still…”), and wave them at other people like flags.

Just coping with life demands a religion. My childhood religion, transmitted down echoing corridors full of the incense of blackboard chalk, glowed and buzzed with little particles, orbiting in electric dervish dances, the great wild-haired guru Einstein smiling down from the cloister wall. To the Old God we paid lip service on Monday mornings to avoid offence to His doddering ministers, but we knew that everything was made of bits, and we had a pretty good idea how those bits spontaneously became pieces, and those pieces replicated because they could, and, a long way up the chain of self-organising patterns of material objects, here we were, humans, inventing God in our own image.

I began to read about yoga at some point, I forget when and it’s not important enough to check my diary - we’re talking mid ’70s, I’d guess. My mother took up Hatha Yoga, a relatively new fad in Britain, with virtually no thought of its mystical dimensions, and, having found great health benefits from it, decided to train to be a teacher with the British Wheel of Yoga, which required her reading more theoretical works, and I picked up Ernest Wood’s book, simply called Yoga, among others, and began reading about a different world from the one I was still learning about at school, a world involving direct perception of Reality (it took capital letter) through meditation and purification. With practice, this direct perception or ‘insight’ would reveal to the adept yogi such strange ‘truths’ as different spiritual dimensions, personal acquisition of supernatural powers, the reality of reincarnation and a state of being in communion with God and/or liberated from suffering, etc.

To describe this condition precisely, it was pointed out clearly, was impossible, since it involved subjective experience – it was the nature of subjective experience itself. Reality was to be found in that empty space where words and thoughts have stopped. Words and thoughts were ephemera, ripples on the surface of Reality that distract us from Reality. Furthermore, the external objects we took for granted, I read, were also, in a sense, illusions: the whole conceptual world was an illusion, called in Sanskrit, maya. It is not to say that there was nothing there at all, only that what existed was in truth One (again with the capitals), sort of projected by ‘our’ deluded ‘human’ minds.

The single quotes above are to indicate an immediate objection that arises: if all is One and no object is really itself, who is having a delusion? This is, of course, a paradox, and what a useful word ‘paradox’ is! ‘Paradox’ allows questions to be left unanswered, yet with the subtle implication (at least in mystical circles) that they have somehow been dealt with. As Douglas R. Hofstadter says of the word, mu, allegedly used by Zen masters in response to paradoxical questions, ’Now there’s a paradox!’ has the magical ability to unask the question. This is, of course, a serious concern about mystical systems and religions, but hey, what can I do about it? Paradoxes arise.

Lest anyone think that that’s an end to the matter and rationalism wins, it should be noted that paradox arises pretty well everywhere. Physics and mathematics are riddled with paradox: all matter and space and time exploding out of a singularity (‘nowhen’) is perhaps vastly more paradoxical than the real you being an unreality suffering from a delusion! In mathematics, in the simplest mathematics of counting, it is not long before we consider zero or infinity, and those concepts involve all sorts of paradoxes. Then there’s the question of what a number is: we can count objects and it seems we’re doing something physical concerning the real world, but no-one has ever seen ‘five’ alone, only five somethings.

The kind of worldview we might feel more comfortable with, where solid, three-dimensional objects inhabit three dimensions of space and float predictably along in one dimension of time, the one I grew up with in the ’60s and ’70s, actually seems quite untenable. At least, science must store what seems like an increasing number of puzzles on library shelves to solve later, since it does not allow the unasking of paradoxical questions, but must clear them up one way or another. My sense of it – admittedly as a layman – is that the cosmologists and nuclear scientists are scribbling equations, doing experiments to test their theories, scribbling some more (as they have always done), but not actually getting any nearer to offering an explanation of the world that would satisfy the original intention. Science developed to see if we could find out what the reality of the world actually was, if not the plaything of some self-explanatory deity. Its answers have always been in terms of new questions and still are so. Scientists seem to avoid the idea of reality, go the other way and pontificate about being engaged in discovering the Mind of God, or bite your head off if you point this out.

At the base of all this rationalism, on which science is founded, is the simple set of ideas we call logic, and one of the simplest of those is the dualism of true-false, or yes-no, proven-disproven. While things are not proven, they may inhabit the reaches of scientific thought, but are awaiting clarification, and their clarification depends on the binary resolution of other questions. We will know whether the moon is made of green cheese (yes-no) when we’ve brought some back and spread it on a cracker. Until something is proven or disproven we have only theories - usually, a number of competing theories - and can’t say which is true.

Of course, mature scientists who haven’t gone completely insane do acknowledge that the quest hasn’t quite led where it was supposed to, that they are as far from discovering the mind of god (which one would intuitively understand as revealing the meaning of the universe, as opposed to its constitution) as they ever were, or will say that science never should be thought of in those ‘human’ terms (‘meaning’ is a human judgement, an invented concept, which may not be part of the real universe). Yet here another central problem arises: if investigating nature is not meant to reveal its meaning, then what is it meant to do? We might add, why do scientists get so upset when people say they do know what the meaning is, if that’s not their bag anyway?

The answer to the first of these is something like this: science is describing observable phenomena in terms that allow the reliable prediction of other observable phenomena. Another way to put it is that it explains effects by discovering their true causes (a powerful thing), but can only trace this chain of causality back so far; it has not discovered, and perhaps cannot discover, any ‘first cause’ (and if we say that our universe began with the Big Bang, any fool can see that that is not a first cause, and ask the simple question, “What caused the Big Bang?”). Some scientists, I feel confident, would say that the idea of a first cause is nonsensical or not the remit of science, but I cannot help thinking that just supposing it were possible to explain EVERYTHING to people perfectly, they’d not hesitate to do so, claim that they had finished the great project of the Enlightenment once and for all, as they had set out to do just that very morning.

Another way to answer is to say that science deals with ‘how’ questions, not ‘why’ questions. Is there a difference between the two? If I ask why the Moon orbits the Earth, gravitational formulas would seem to suffice as an answer just as well as if I had asked how it does, except perhaps in two very closely related respects: how answers can be utterly impersonal and don’t have to be at all final, whereas why answers convey at least the faint suggestion of personal causality and have a very strong suggestion of finality. An adult would not expect personal causality where the Moon’s orbit is concerned, you might think, but of course, some adults do: God causes it, like everything else.

At a human level, if I ask ‘Where has my wallet gone?’ (deliberately avoiding either interrogative), “It is in a jacket pocket travelling west on the High Street,” demands another question, whereas “Someone stole it while you weren’t looking!” resolves the mystery - even if I would naturally want a name or description of the culprit. If someone gave the first answer, I would even unconsciously assume the missing ’fact’ that the jacket is being worn by a person, even though it might not. ‘Someone did it’ is, to the human mind, a full, meaningful explanation, because, on our social level of thinking, the existence of human beings is taken for granted, and, for the most part, their possession of choice and agency is natural. We do not have to ask what caused the thief to steal my wallet; we can just assume that he decided to.

Clearly then, one of the challenges to religion is that ‘God did it’ is just a human-scale, convenient answer to everything, and it is a very powerful challenge. It suggests a deep and embarrassing flaw in the thinking of the religious person, an almost infantile requirement to answer difficult questions with an easy, final answer, the way a child is satisfied in the relating of fairytales and, indeed, the way primitive people satisfy themselves about the existence of holes in mountains by making up myths about giants taking pieces to throw at their enemies long, long ago.

There may be philosophically mature responses to this challenge, and perhaps I have indicated something of the flavour of one of them already, i.e. to propose that all the questions of matter and energy – which, as we have seen are not by any means resolved - are insoluble because they are illusory, and the foolishness is to be taken in by maya. The primacy of human meaning and consciousness can be elicited as reasons to ‘look again’. If human beings are still unable to understand the world in a full and meaninful way, and cannot even say what meaning is, yet seem everywhere to thirst for it and explain smaller problems with recourse to it, perhaps we are missing something. How, after all, could meaning, if it belongs just to the crazy mixed up delusions of human beings, have evolved out of a meaningless universe, from fiery stuff exploding into a void? If one considers this long enough, it is not hard to concede that it does require an incredible stretch of the imagination on the face of it!

So, where have I got to with all this, after writing about it all day? It may take another day to answer, but I’ll try to summarise for now. First of all, that incredible stretch between blind particles careening around in space and all the human consciousness with its rich symbols and emotion is, I have to say, not all that incredible. If we liken it to a river, then certainly there are stepping stones that traverse some of the distance. It seems undeniable that life, for instance, can get started, given a suitable chemical environment, and that stellar chemistry leads quite naturally to such an environment; so too, is it quite clear to anyone who investigates biology that evolution by natural selection is perfectly automatic, inevitable and true.

For those who are already materialists, that’s about all we need, with the addition of the most difficult, but penetrable, route from reactive animal functioning to a fully self-conscious human mind, thence human culture, agriculture, civilisation and Celebrity Big Brother …

…but…

In the course of this blog, I will approach some of those stepping-stones as I learn more about them. The ‘…but…’ indicates something else, however, two things, which are that I have my own set of questions about this crossing (which I probably need to discuss with wiser heads first), and that, as far as I know, it is accepted that there are still rather large gaps in the stones, or at least some very slippery surfaces.

In the meantime, to close somewhere near where I began, while consciousness is still a mystery to me, the steps in the river-crossing that I know about, combined with some of my psychological knowledge about self-deception, convince me that the mystical union, the direct intuition of reality, is not the divine connection I read about. It seems difficult to imagine any reason why the human mind would be capable of such intimate knowledge of its deep, ancient cause. It was honed to separate bees from honey and chip pieces off flint and estimate the motives of its fellow human animals by their expressions.