Category: General

Christmas Eve means it’s my birthday, an exciting day of celebrating the year past and year to come.  I always feel it’s the best use of Facebook that people wish happy birthday there.

Piraguismo

This last year I’ve had a fabulous canoeing year.  I’ve been to Uganda and had the privilege of paddling down the Nile and competing against the world’s best in the Nile River Festival on Nile Special wave before it was submerged under a newly built dam.  I competed in Hurley and the British Champs/European Open Freestyle competitions.  My freestyle is only slowly getting better and is pretty limited by my fitness and lack of easy access to good waves but remains great fun, I moved from a Jackson Rockstar to a Pyranha Jed as I find it surfs waves better and I can get the nose under easier but I’m still working out the best boat for me.  I took part in a couple of kayak surf competitions and had fun surfing a few more days, I always want to do more of this but am limited by the east coast’s unreliable waves and not having a decent boat or knowing what I would want to buy if I decided to commit more.  I also went on a trip to the Alps for a couple of weeks which I’ve always wanted to do.  It gave me longer river rapids than I’d ever paddled before and another freestyle competition with Kayak Sessions magazine. Vienna also has a fun white water course much under-used.  Just last month I’ve done training in Advanced White Water Leader and run some trips out on rivers which are new to me including the long Alpine Upper Braan.

Just as important to me as paddling is helping the sport. It’s been a couple of years since it was made clear to me and half a dozen other volunteers that we weren’t welcome to help at the club I grew up in, which was heartbreaking, but I’ve been doing coaching quite a bit for Edinburgh Kayak Club who have lovely people and some nice facilities and I’ve run Safety and Rescue training and White Water coaching for them.  As well as coaching I’ve been a “major contributor” to the Scottish White Water Guidebook where I edited a couple of chapters, proofread a bunch more, raised a few thousand pounds from advertising and brought in some new contributors.  And one of my proudest achievements was working out the tech and social requirements on how to get the river levels page SCA Where’s the Water rewritten so I can now update calibrations and add new features.

I doubt I’ll do quite so much paddling next year but I would like to get the Advanced White Water Award completed and find some other way to help the sport.

Salud

It’s some 7 years since I ended up in a coma after being attacked by pirates in the Caribbean (other explanations are possible but I have no memory) and my health continues to be decent but challenging.  I do still get fatigued randomly and I increasingly feel it is linked to drinking alcohol but the fatigue is a day or sometimes a week after so it’s very hard to tell.  I’m able to do a decent amount of gym work (thanks Poppy!) but I’m not getting any lighter on the scales probably because the fatigue feels like it gets fixed by eating sugary and fatty foods so it’s very easy to convince myself I need to eat them.

Trabajo

I’ve spent a great year making KDE neon continuing to challenge the traditional open source model of allowing someone else to take the credit for the hard work of the projects which make the software by just shipping it directly from the creating community.  I’ve travelled to Kansas on an exciting project, got a new edition of the high end KDE Slimbook selling with KDE neon, seen the ultra-cheap Pinebook shipping with KDE neon, been to Vienna and visited Barcelona to see four different project all using or interested in using KDE neon.

I continue to be frustrated when there are problems in KDE which nobody but me seems to see how serious they are.  In the past it was fraud in donations and broken licences.  This year it’s the promo team being changed from a community team to a closed team.  It was a lot of energy and effort to get that fixed but there’s still not been anyone explained why that happened or why they thought it was a good idea.  But I continue to think it’s important to fix problems even when others would prefer to just pretend they don’t exist in the hope they go away (which just makes the people go away).

Brexit

The political and social year in the UK has been overshadowed by the continuing process of the UK government wanting to leave the EU following a corrupt sham vote which has propagated racism and division. I mostly stopped trying to engage directly with politics after the 2016 referendum in which no person or media or political party did a good job of pointing out the dangers and arguing for sanity or enabling people like me to campaign.  It continues to be astonishing how few people, parties or media point out what a broken exercise of democracy the 2016 referendum was, Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP are about the best at this and of course the Guardian does a lot of important investigative work but it’s not enough.

Nobody knows what will happen next and there’s no point giving any probability for any outcome.  But the most significant thing to keep in mind is that the default option is for a no-deal Brexit which would see the very sudden collapse of UK as a society and economy. Food will not get delivered, medicines will run short, power supplies will be interrupted, people will die and riots will come fast.  This will happen in 100 days time unless the gridlocked UK parliament can agree to do something else, it’s a very serious possibility.  I’ve moved all my savings into Euro as the pound will crash but the food I have in store won’t last long and money does no good locked in a bank in another country.  Maybe parliament will extend the problem for a few more years as Theresa May wants which won’t help anyone’s mental health. Maybe Labour will get a new anti-brexit leader and stop this nonsense. Maybe Nicola Sturgeon will use her mandate and call for a Scottish independence referendum which would be very exciting. But nothing is predictable and the astonishing thing is how entrenched the public’s opinions are on the matter since the polls don’t change more than a few points.  I hope to help campaign for a sensible outcome in some way or other in the coming year but surviving will be the main objective.

Happy Christmas all

Room 23 is the true story of Kavita Basi.  An English lady in the prime of life, healthy with friends, family and career who one day had a headache which rapidly turned into an emergency trip to hospital.  Aquired brain injury happens for a bunch of reasons, from physical trauma to CSF leak but in this case it was a subarachnoid hemorrhage, an uncommon type of stroke caused by a burst blood vessel in the brain (a ruptured brain aneurysm).  There’s no warning for any of this and she covers how it feels so unfair.  She spent several weeks in hospital and even out of hospital had a long and slow recovery.  The books follows her successes and sticking points.  She covers how such sudden and severe illness affects those around her but also the support she got.  A common feature of aquired head injury is changes in personality and this is noteable in how it changed her approach to work and colleages.  A true story of love and loss, happyness and sadness, frustration and overcoming challenges.

I did an Advanced White Water Kayak Leader Training course at Glenmore Lodge with Bruce Joliffe who together with George Fell make a fun duo to paddle with. I’ve done this before when it was called 5 Star Leader but I didn’t have enough experience to go to assessment.

We went to the Findhorn Gorge section starting at Randolph’s Leap. I thought Randolph’s Leap looked fun to do and most of the group and trainer agreed but the second trainer asked how we could cover a section of rapid we haven’t considered and given time constraints and that we hadn’t been on the water so didn’t know each other’s capabilities we decided to skip it. This shows how a two overlooked issues, overlooked, can change the whole decision.

When doing a rapid consider ASL – Assess if it’s do-able, Safety set up and finally Line for paddling. Most people consider these in the wrong order.

It can be useful to visulise the rapid once you have looked at it and before paddling it.

When reading a rapid have a look at what could go wrong. If you can’t see the rapid work out what worst-case-scenario hidden tree etc could be in the unseen rapid. Just because there is a route consider what problems may occur and how likely they are. There is a tree stuck in one rapid on the Findhorn and a first drop goes either to safety or into the tree and it would be hard to guarantee which.

3×3 criteria from avalanche and hill danger is also useful for running rivers, considering conditions, character and people against planning, selecting and cataract. I don’t know much more about this, it’s quite involved.

Heuristics means a quick mental way of making a decision based on a rule-of-thumb.

Pertinent means relevant to a situation.

Sit upright and forward, good posture is important when surfing (or anything) and having your blade infront when supporting is essential.

Bruce’s observations were all spot on as well as his knowledge of and use of the river.

One the Sunday we were on the Spean gorge, a low river which annoyingly has no gauge near it. We played at catching eddies and tried more boofs (it’s all about the timing) and lead folks down the rapids.

A fun weekend which highlighted how I’m still now at the standard needed for an Advanced White Water Leader but shows me what I need to do to get there.

There is a motion discussing Maintenance of Tenement Communal Property next week in parliament which asks that “the government should review the situation and consider any legislative changes, new initiatives, enhanced use of existing rules and/or further action by local authorities that could facilitate improved upkeep of Scheme Property.”  I couldn’t agree more as I’ve written several times about the problems my tenement has here.  In summary we have 11 flats in the tenement, 8 of them rented out, and nobody besides me, not one person, will look at the property to ensure it is maintained.  They won’t communicate with their neighbours to discuss the communal property.  Some examples from 2017:

I took Findholm to a council HMO licence panel to object to them getting a licence for a job they were not doing.  I explained how they had done unilateral incomplete repairs when they had an immediate leak and how this had left cement blocking the gutter and the damn in the attic continued because of the incomplete nature of their repair.  I explained how they had never communicated with their neighbours about this except in response to my questions.  The council said they had to organise a stair meeting.  This they failed to do until I told them and guided them through how to do it.  At the stair meeting they said they were just here to help us organise and everyone else would know better how to maintain the property than them.  They did have a quote to replace the whole roof which would have cost a fortune and would not have fixed the leaks in the chimney stacks.  They had never bothered to look at the roof and seemed surprised that I should expect them to have done so.  I organised these repairs and completed the task they had chosen not to do.  The council passed Findholm’s HMO licence without question, licensing them to do a job they had not done.

I organised a second set of repairs for a blocked communal drain pipe. Graeme Inglis is another landlord who has never once communicated with his neighbours or done any maintainance.  When payment was due he kicked out the single mother and her child from his flat and sold it. His agent, Dick Rudkin, sent only terse e-mails asking not to be communicated with and with a non-functional e-mail address for the owner.  The money did come through after the deadline so someone had been receiving my e-mails or letters but not returned with a single word of communication.

In August one of the owners/landlords reported water ingress in a window in his flat, this means the property clearly doesn’t meet the Repairing Standard and is illegal to rent out.  Already busy with the second communal repair I was organising for the year I asked if anyone could help him and got zero reply.  When I asked people individually they were all impolite and made me sound unreasonable for expecting them to do their jobs.  Neil Baxter said he’d be out the country until December, eventually asked his agent Braemore Lettings to send “a contractor”, nothing more has been heard from them even answers to simple queries like what the contractor was contracted to do.  Owner Morag Bramwell called me aggressive for asking when she would look at it.  And Colin Pretty, agent to a flat for Hamish and Julie Middleton did eventually look at it then refused to discuss it with me or any of the neighours saying I’d “be waiting a very long time” if I expected him to do his job.  Nothing has happened here and the property is being rented out illegally but all the landlords.

This is just from the last year. None of the owners or their agents seem willing or capable of looking at the property, discussing it with their neighbours or helping with repairs.  It’s their jobs to do so or it’s their homes to live in but they are not interested and there’s no means to convince them to do it.  None of them are fit and proper to be landlords but the set up of the law, licensing and the culture of cheap mortgage money during the last Labour government means they are encouraged to take on jobs they do not do.  Renters are not interested in problems which will occur several years down the line, it’s not worth the hassle to them.

So it needs a requirement on owners and agents that they will look at the property and discuss it with co-owners at least annually.  If they are not able to walk up a ladder and look they should not be allowed to rent property.  It needs co-owners to be able to take owners to housing tribunals in the way renters already can.  And it needs councils to give a damn enough that agents and owners who do not do the basics of their jobs  are removed them from the landlord register.

In 2015 the Conservative party won the UK election on a manifesto promise of holding a referendum on the UK’s EU membership.  I highlighted this by changing my Facebook profile picture but was told this was unnecessary.

The referendum was a depressing affair.  Nobody took it seriously even though the consequences were huge. None of the political parties wanted to work together to create a decent In campaign, they were so divided within themselves in England and had such a bad memory of getting a bad reputation from working together during the Scottish independence referendum.  I went to an SNP meeting with the MEP Alyn Smith who told us all why being in the EU was such a useful thing, I asked him what we could do to help campaign on it and he shrugged and said there was some stuff SNP members could buy if they wanted.

I quit the SNP and joined the Greens, not from any specific annoyance just a longer term realisation that I tended to agree with their policies more. But the Greens had also decided not to have any campaigning, at least locally.  When someone was hired three months before the referendum to run the Green EU campaign I e-mail them asking to run a stall but got no reply. Eventually I was told the e-mail address advertised didn’t work.

Days before the referendum people still told me there was nothing to worry about. Only there was.  Then the media and politicians and everyone said we’d stay in the single market and custom’s union. Only that wasn’t to be either. I still hear people say that something will happen to fudge the issue or revert it because nobody would be so daft as to destroy so many sensible arrangements, this despite over two years of all the signs saying terrible things will happen and that being exactly what has happened.

The UK government uses the rhetoric “no deal is better than a bad deal”.  Yet nobody challenges that.  No deal means we lose our freedom to travel to Paris or Barcelona.  Currently we can work in these cities as easy as we can Birmingham or Glasgow, that right will be gone.  It means hundreds of thousands of new Scots being forced to move back overseas (and more in the rest of the UK) with hundreds of thousands of emigrated Scots coming back often to use pensions and health services.  It means no nuclear material for our power stations.  It means the system of food will break with farms being immediately unsustainable due to minimal subsidies or labour.  It means our ability to take our government to court when they want to lock us up for no reason (which was common in Northern Ireland not too long ago) is gone.  It means great schemes which allow my girlfriend to spend some months in the Netherlands for university will be gone.  It means science research will be killed off.  For that matter the funding for our universities will dry up due to lack of students from the EU.  I won’t be able to use a phone for free in the EU as I can now.  I’m contracted by a German company to work, I have no idea if this will even be legal or if my monthly bank transfer for pay will be possible.  No deal will be a social and economic disaster, and while it is hard for people to believe it will be that bad, it is exactly what Theresa May is promising, just as David Cameron promised a referendum nobody thought would happen.

I joined a couple of anti-EU social media forums during the referendum to see what the arguments could be.  They quickly turned to talk of “our race being the only one to voluntarily wipe itself out”, there’s nothing to argue with that so I quit.  The seemingly rational chair of that forum was last seen posting links to the EDL founder on Twitter.  There is no reason I have ever seen for leaving the EU which isn’t a horrible British nationalist racism.

The arguments in the media are about the rights of immigrants and the Irish border.  Those are very important.  But I never see anything about my rights and freedoms which are about to be taken away.  And I never see anything about any other UK border which is about to get a lot more closed.  The media and politicians never make these fundamental points.

A clearly incompetent UK government is failing to make the slightest attempt to solve a problem of their own making and is now calling the EU “the enemy”.  The Scottish Government has made some sensible suggestions but been ignored. The UK parties seem to be unable to understand there’s a different legal system here never mind another layer of government who will be affected. The UK is taking all the powers which the Scotland Act said were for the Scottish parliament, it is destroying the devolution settlement.  It is destroying the UK parliament too.

(1) A Minister of the Crown may by regulations make such provision as the Minister considers appropriate for the purposes of implementing the withdrawal agreement if the Minister considers that such provision should be in force on or before exit day.

(2) Regulations under this section may make any provision that could be made by an Act of Parliament (including modifying this Act).

The EU Withdrawl bill killing hundreds of years of English and British democracy.

That’s from the government who talk about being a big fan of free trade.  Nobody ever queries why they are taking us out of the biggest free trade block there is.  Nobody queries suggestions that a post-brexit deal will be better than the single market. You can not get a better free trade deal than a single market.  Nobody makes the point that a free trade deal is a very bad thing without the associated regulations to protect workers rights, the environment and every other tragedy of the commons for which governments exist.

The leave campaign was a fraud. Vast amounts of money went to the DUP to hide the source, who then used in outside Northern Ireland.  The UK government has now decided not to make them publish the sources even though this was what all the parties in Northern Ireland were told would happen, it’s no coincidence the DUP is now the supporter of the UK government.  The Vote Leave part of that campaign lied about 350 million pounds a week, but besides being a lie it’s a meaningless figure since no government spending is given in amount per week. How does that compare to the annual NHS budget? Anyone who cares will already have realised it’s a lie and anyone who doesn’t want to care won’t care.

The EU is one of our four layer of government.  That’s one layer of government too many for my liking but it makes no sense to get rid of the top layer which helps neighbouring countries work together to sort out the boring stuff like office chair standards and keep an eye on each other for basic rights and freedoms. It’s not sufficiently democratic, but that is mostly a facet of people’s unwillingness to see it as just another layer of government rather than as some international talking shop. Like all governments it screws up, when it apologised for paramilitary force being used to stop a vote in Catalunya this last week it failed itself and its 500 million citizens badly.  But it’s not a reason to want to kill off that government layer.

I’m angry and frustrated and exhausted at the politicians, public and media.  The SNP, who won this year’s UK election in Scotland, are a shining beacon of light at Westminster and I look forward to a Scottish independence referendum on the issue but it may well not happen and it’ll be as filled with nonsense about being too small and too wee and PR-company made “grassroots” campaigns about Vote no Borders as it was previously, and people will believe that.  I plan to apply for an Irish passport but I really don’t want to move away from the country and city and family and friends I call home.

I went on the Glenmore Lodge to take the kayak out for the day.  It was led by elite surf paddlers Tracy and Ian Sherrington and a couple of other staff and there was about 14 of us punters there.  We all had a great time trying different boats, surfing on easy waves then surfing on the Shitpipe, a great and mostly consistent wave on a reef which means you can sit alongside and watch before you join in.

We did some safety and rescue training, here’s some notes while I remember.

If you have a capsized paddler out their boat in deep water you can do a deep water rescue similar to on a river.  The problem is that decent surf kayaks are much lower lying than a creek boat or sea kayak so getting the paddler back in will end up with the boat being filled with water.  I did this the first time and then paddled through the surf with me and another rescuer on either side of the victim in his swamped to empty on shore.

One way to keep the boat from not getting swamped is to have the rescuer and victim boat parallel but facing different directions. A second rescuer holds the bow of the victim’s boat down while the victim climbs onto the rescuer’s boat and into his boat.

Another way is to have two rescuers side-by-side put the victim’s boat onto their bows, the victim then climbs onto the bow and into his boat before being pushed off.

If you are being blown into the surf zone get a helper to drag you out to sea.

More likely you’ll have a swimmer and swamped boat in the surf.  Easiest way to get in is have the casualty swimming into shore, probably holding onto their paddle and paddling with it.  A rescuer can nudge the boat onto shore while full of water.  Rescuer should stay a safe distance away from a swimmer, a common problem is the rescue boat causing an injury.

Another way to bring a swimmer to shore is have them hold onto the back of your boat as rescuer, possibly holding onto the back of the cockpit.

Boats should always have airbags in them.  Many of the experienced paddlers at the gathering didn’t get their foundation safety and rescue right so that’s worth practicing.

Keep a first aid kit, warm drink, clothes, group shelter etc near.  Use a mobile phone (but beware that touch screen is unlikely to work with wet hands so consider a simpler waterproof model), possibly a locator beacon and possibly VHF radio around (but beware VHF is line of site only so contact is often limited).

Signals are similar to on river, pointing in direction of travel, hand on head for come to me. if unsure go to shore.  Distress signal for swimmers is clenched fist waving side-to-side.

Swim lines on boats are important, especially since a lot of surf kayaks seem to have tiny grab handles.

Beware of rip currents and paddle along the shore or in a ferry glide if you get one.