Trail run, Monday 2nd May

Last Saturday was the first time I'd run off-road in some while, and it reminded me what I'd been missing, so on Monday I headed in the direction of some of my favourite, easily accessible trails.

I think I first discovered how easy it was to get to Birley Edge walking back from my sister's at Fox Hill, the path disgorging me from the fields onto the Baxter Road cul-de-sac near the bottom of Fox Hill Road, less than 2 km from where I live, so it quickly became a favourite dog walking route and - when I began running and got to the stage of being bored with the relatively flat routes, that too.

Monday was (and I know I probably overuse this phrase) perfect running weather. There was no wind at all, and it was cool enough to have no worry of overheating whilst being just warm enough to not feel the chill on bare limbs even before the blood began to flow. The sky was a hazy grey, but it looked as though that might slowly burn off.

I started at an easy warm-up pace down from Hillsborough, the streets bank holiday quiet, up the incline of Penistone Road North and Fox Hill, then I turn and there are the startlingly green fields. I'm not sure what this crop is, that I've seen in so many fields in the area. Perhaps it will be the bright yellow of rapeseed flowers in a few weeks.

The path forks, one part going up the middle of the field, but I took the more trodden part by the edge fence before it began to turn up the hill, the start of an almost unbroken climb of 200 metres over the next 4 k, where Woodhead Road separates Wheata and Greno Woods.

I'm soon out of the field onto what I think of as a "trail"; rough, sandy soil, embedded with a mass of broken rocks, surrounded by gorse and grass and ferns. I've run and cycled so many similar around the city, from here to Rivelin, the top of Wyming Brook, Lodge Moor, Redmires up to Stanage Pole, Ringinglow and Burbage, this kind of trail is one that defines out area. 

I started running quite late in life, in my 41st year (as a lifelong cyclist, I'd always turned my nose up at this slow, sweaty endeavour), but quickly fell in love with it - and even more so when I left the predictability of the pavement and took to trails. As well as the scenery and lack of traffic, there's something about the focus required by having to watch your footing amongst uneven rocks and grasping roots.

Soon enough I was on Birley Edge, the dry sandy trail running below a broken-down drystone wall, with a view of the city behind me and to my left the fields around Worrall, Oughtibridge and Kirk Edge, below clouds made of tarnished pewter backed by a silver glow.

The only roads to cross are on the first couple of kilometres of the trail - the all-but deserted Midhurst Road and Stubbing House Lane, and then near the top of Oughtibridge Lane, or Jawbone Hill - then you can stay on trails for miles and miles, all the way out past Wortley and Oxspring and Penistone if you want, without ever having to take to tarmac. 

Approaching Jawbone Hill, you start to enter woodland, at first straight white birches in a carpet of grass and ferns, and then you cross a stile and the forest begins to become more mixed, ash and oak, alder and sycamore and hawthorn. The path splits in  many directions, and I take that that continues to wend its way forward and up hill. I sometimes forget how blessed we are for footpaths around here. The trail broadens and I start to encounter people, almost all seemingly couples out for a stroll on this fine if cool bank holiday. At the highest point is the car park by the Woodhead Road. I could cross into Greno Woods proper, where many trails snake down toward Penistone Road, but I'd have to return to pavement to get home (or come back up that hill!). I could turn down the broad paths directly into Wharncliffe, but I continue forward, turning by the little farm to skirt the woods and the field.

I unexpectedly find an alpine meadow opening up in front of me, backed by the tall, straight spruce and pine of Wharncliffe plantation. Before getting back to the woods there is an odd area of moorland, out of place somehow like a bit of Burbage transported north. I take the path that skirts this instead of crossing it, for no reason other than the whim of my feet. Getting back to woods, I find the most joyous track of my run. Just below the a high drystone wall, it is at times barely a game trail, winding and uneven. The soil here is a rich dark peaty loam, but is still studded with boulders which along with the gradients make it unfarmable, the reason we have so many intact paths. This stretch of track is just tremendous, as I find myself leaping over rocks, no doubt grinning like a fool at the feeling of exhilaration. In wet weather these little paths become horrendously boggy, but it's been so dry in recent weeks that, between the rocks and roots, the loam is delightfully spongy.

I switch between the trails and, when I must, the major named paths - Old Yew Gate and Pales Wood Gate - sharing the latter with the a few groups of walkers or cyclists. I've cycled these myself many times, although not the muddy, rutted downhill course that the hardcore mountain bikers have made. I grew up on a road bike, switching to a mountain bike only in my mid-twenties, and I think you don't start throwing yourself down mountains in the fearlessness of youth it's too late to start.

I'm only about 10k in, but I don't want to overdo and suddenly find my legs are done and I need to find a bus route to get home, so when I reach Plank Gate that runs along the bottom, western, side of Wharncliffe I sensibly turn left toward home. The flat firmness of the fire road bends in a long curve, rising and falling like a gentle roller coaster, bringing me back to Oughtibridge Lane where I cross into Beeley Woods. 

In recent years this has been parcelled up and sold off, and is marked as private woodland with the public footpath sign pointing up the hill and around, however the paths through ARE still public rights of way. I really must contact the council about getting the signage fixed.

Again, these paths so often become a series of swampy puddles in wet weather, but the descent among patches of bluebells is dry at the moment. After crossing the track that takes the train to the steel works at Deepcar, the gradient suddenly becomes precipitous and I let gravity take me until I have to slow for a family coming uphill.

From here it's a gentle, flat few kilometres home. I cross the Don on the footbridge by Abbey Forge and keep to the path on that last bit by the river before returning to the road.

I feel ready for a pint or two of Vimto, and to get some food inside me, but that has been ridiculously fun - something I would have thought insane had someone said it to me 12 years ago.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed the reading of it even a fraction as much as I did the running and the writing of it.

Book review: The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie; Long Live the King

 Abercrombie is the king of this kind of thing; showing the horror and fear and blood of pre-modern battle, with a human face. Indeed, with many human faces. He draws character superbly, with very few good guys or bad guys but shades of grey, for the most part people who are making decisions for a mix of reasons selfish and altruistic, noble and venal, wise and stupid.

Here, in the continuation of stories in the same world as his First Law trilogy, we focus on a battle between the Northmen and the Union, three blood-soaked days surrounding the taking of a more-or-less strategic hill. While the set-up could be classic Generic Fantasy - the Union sees itself as civilised, some meld between the empires of Rome and Britain, and the Northmen are the classic Viking/Saxon rough-hewn hard men, a loose alliance of carls and named men seeking battle-glory - but Abercrombie gives many of his POV characters a depth and complexity that makes it far more real.

On the Union side we have Bremer dan Gorst, former royal guard who has thrown himself into constant training, haunted both by his disgrace and his infatuation with his commander's daughter.

That young woman, Finree, smart and ambitious to advance herself through the only means available: her brave, noble and slightly stupid husband.

Corporal Tunny, veteran soldier, far more interested in theft and fleecing his fellows at cards than glory in battle.

For the North, Calder is the younger son of the man who first united the North as something approaching a nation; he knows he isn't brave or strong, but is handsome, clever and ambitious.

Curnden Craw, seen by many as the most honest man in the North.

Beck, a young man fresh from his farm, seeking to match the tales of glory told by the father whose sword he carries.

Along with these POV characters are a host of others, some drawn deeply others merely sketched, but Abercrombie has the skill to make each seem fully fleshed. While there are complete sociopaths (Caul Shivers who has the ability to instil terror into anyone with his calm, cold, menace, the brothers Deep and Shallow, a psychopathic Abbot and Costello double act) most characters clearly act through a mix of motivations, a tension between self-interest and the Right Thing.

The other great skill the author has is in plotting; as shown in the first book in the series, The Blade Itself, he exults in blindsiding the reader, writing in such a way as makes it impossible to predict who will come out on top - without this feeling like a cheap conjuring trick.

The plotting of this book is lesser than the previous one, although that is understandable both in the scope of this volume being over the course of this single battle and Best Served Cold being the finest book of his I've yet read. While these volumes don't follow on directly as did the original trilogy, there is clearly a throughline (Gorst and others appeared in the previous book, while Calder along with Black Dow, Wonderful and several more are veterans of the adventures of the Bloody Nine, who is referenced not infrequently) and the ending appears to set up a return to the the Southern Border. I am very much looking forward to what comes next.

To close, I wish again to praise the reading by Steven Pacey. For his pacing and intonation and differentiation of character, he is an absolute master. For each of the myriad of characters he gives a distinct, individual and utterly believable reading - mostly various British accents, ranging from posh Union men to Yorkshire and Scotland, a couple of rough East End-types (including Deep, who he give an excellent Michael Caine impression), to Calder and his brother Scale, who have distinctly different Welch voices. The single sour point is an unfortunate confluence of Pacey's pronunciation with an authorial quirk. In putting the emphasis on the second syllable of the word "grimace" -gri-MACE, rather than how I say and think the word, GRIM-uss - this does draw attention to the fact that Abercrombie somewhat overuses it. However, the fact that this is the worst I can say should also speak volumes.

Book Review: Harrow the Ninth: Lesbian Necromancers in Space, part two

 I confess that I vacillated on scoring this. Gideon the Ninth was my favourite book of 2020, narrowly beating out A Memory Called Empire, so Harrow had a lot to live up to.

And it was, to put it mildly, confusing.

Chapters more-or-less alternate between third-person and second-person narrative. That latter is unfamiliar to many people as it is little used, for a very good reason: writing the you viewpoint - "The sword hated you to touch it", "You still prided yourself in three things..." - is very tricky to pull off well. It's usually a method to put the reader in the centre of the action, as Iain Banks does in Complicity. The confusion is further intensified by it being difficult to keep track of who is being referred to and the characters in general, as all characters have multiple names and titles, and the generally wordy, Gothic style in which Muir writes. Early on I was tempted to put it aside and re-read Gideon, but then just began to let it wash over me and engulf me and pull me along.

When the reveal comes about who you are (is?), that does make much of what has gone before come into focus but it is still quite tangled and I suspect I will need to re-read both books, likely ahead of the next volume or as a full series read once it is all published, to really understand what is going on. However, like much Gothic literature, I feel the point is to be experienced and enjoyed more than to be understood - which isn't to say there isn't a deeper understanding to be had, this is very complex and multi-layered, and I'm certain will reward further study.

One thing to add is that Harrow is much more science-fiction-y than the previous book. While there was (minor) space travel Gideon the Ninth read more like fantasy, mostly due to the necromantic "magic", but there was the underlying sense of scientific structure and here in the second book this is more to the forefront. This, a science fiction in which there is a vast power that could possibly be described as magic operating over vast timescales with familial conflict, slightly gave the feel of Dune.

One thing I have heard from other reviews that I somewhat agreed with was that the first volume worked so well partly due to the bitter, angry, sarcastic humour of Gideon, and that is sorely missed in this volume, however I still found this book a mad, enjoyable, captivating and sometimes infuriating ride.

The end also hints at what is to come. I can't wait to see where this story goes.

Book review: Before the Fall by Noah Hawley: a masterful slow-burn mystery

 Minor spoilers.

I'm a huge fan of Hawley's TV work - notably Fargo and the truly astonishing Legion - so when I saw he was also a novelist I jumped on this.

Starting is was a strange experience. I'd just finished [author:Emily St. John Mandel|2786093]'s [book:The Glass Hotel|45754981], and to have the second book in a row starting with someone in the ocean, then giving various character backstories one of which involved financial crimes, really did give me an odd sense of deja vu. However, the two are very different books.

Here, a private jet flying from Martha's Vineyard to New York mysteriously crashes 18 minutes into the short flight. The only survivors are Scott Thompson, a painter, and the four-year-old boy he rescues and swims to shore with, in a remarkable act of perseverance.

Each chapter gives us the back story of one of the people on the flight - the conservative media magnate who owns the jet and his family, the slightly less wealthy couple who are their friends, the crew and Scott - as well as exploring the repercussions of the event. Is the crash to do with the fraud investigation, or an attack on the mogul, or something entirely unrelated? Is if just an accident?

Originally described as a hero, the biggest commentator on the right-wing news channel run by the plane owner, Bill <s>O'Reilly</s> Milligan decides the death of his boss - and friend - was caused by a terrorist attack that the government are obviously covering up and that this survivor must be involved.

Hawley unravels the story expertly, drawing rich characters with effortless prose. Along with the mystery of the crash he explores the power of the media and touches on the levels of extreme wealth - the fraudulent investment fund manager "rich, but not owning my own jet rich", to the media mogul, to the socialite art collector in New York who may be the seventh richest person in the world and "can buy literally anything - OK, maybe not Amazon".

This is a literary slow-burn of a mystery, not a thriller, and is utterly absorbing. Perhaps the ending is too sudden but, other than that, it's damned near perfect.

What happens when bad people die?

 Let me give you two examples of people who have died very recently.

Rush Limbaugh is sometimes called divisive, but was a lying, vitriolic hatemonger who took pleasure in insulting and attacking those who held opinions with which he disagreed. He died from lung cancer.

Captain Tom Moore was centenarian WWII veteran who became somewhat famous for walking the length of his garden 100 times to raise money toward fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Interviews showed him to be a cheerful, genial, cheeky old man whose family utterly adored him. He died from being almost a 101 years old.

Both men are now dead and what has happened to them is identical. The electrochemical processes that gave them life and thought, personality and identity, have ceased and the thing that made them them is no more.

What is left of them is what lingers in the world - the people’s lives they each touched, the memories they left, the way they mad others feel.

I know there will be people who were left bereft at the death of Rush Limbaugh, both those who knew and loved him and those who were fan of his work, but there are many who frankly celebrated. There are thousands upon thousands of lives that were made worse by his words, his incitements to hatred and even violence, his mocking of people with HIV and, ironically, his refusal to accept the proven link between smoking and lung cancer.

I’m sure Captain Tom in his time caused hurt; as a human being he would have been as flawed as any, and we all at times hurt others through our inattention or thoughtlessness or callousness, but at the end he left many people feeling better about the world and about their species and about themselves.

I know which state I’d wish for my “afterlife”, even if I will not be there to appreciate it.

( Originally published on Quora in answer to the question "What do you believe happens after we die being a horrible person?"

https://atheismandscience.quora.com/What-do-you-believe-happens-after-we-die-being-a-horrible-person-32?)

Waiting for the vaccine

 I really, really can't wait to get back out to pubs and restaurants and theatres and cinemas and gigs, to go on holiday and be able to travel places on a whim.

I can't wait until I can get the vaccine but, more importantly, I can't wait until we can ALL get the vaccine.

Because that's how it works. It's about herd immunity, raising the resistance against the infection to a high enough level that the virus can no longer spread and survive.

And that's probably in excess of 90% of the population that needs to be protected.

There are people who simply can't take the vaccine - mostly if they're immunocompromised through diseases or other treatments (for example, many chemotherapies for cancer absolutely fucks your immune system so you simply can't take vaccinations) - so it's all the more important for the rest of us to accept the vaccine as soon as it becomes available.

And I am sick of hearing about the "risk" of taking the vaccine; it is incredibly low, all forms of available vaccine are thoroughly tested and been demonstrated beyond doubt to be safe.

Completely, 100% free from any risk? No. Nothing it, but it is a matter of weighing relative risks. When seatbelts were first introduced some of the major car companies argued that they would prevent people escaping a trapped vehicle and cause more danger - something that has been shown to be absolutely complete nonsense. It *could* happen, but wearing a seatbelt is far, far, far more likely to save your life than endanger it - which is why wearing one is mandatory.

And with vaccines it isn't just about protecting yourself; it's about protecting everyone else - the people on cancer meds who can't take the vaccine, or the few people who have allergies to it, or our elderly relatives with severe health issues and weakened systems who the virus is way more likely to kill.

Oh, and while I guess I have to accept people's personal autonomy if they choose not to vaccinate - although I cannot respect the decision - I think anyone who encourages others to do so is deplorable.

Book Review: The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith:

 Leo Demidov has more issues than the average literary homicide detective. Not just a drinking problem, an ex-wife and a passion for obscure music; Leo has done some Very Bad Things.

When we first met him at the beginning of Child 44, he was a loyal member of the Soviet secret police, both a true believer in the cause and naïve enough to be blind to the problems. At the start of this sequel, we get a flash back to those days - indeed, to his first infiltration mission, when he had befriended and betrayed a Russian Orthodox priest and his wife.

Since then, after the five years he spent in the forerunner of the KGB, he is a reformed man. Heading up a secret homicide bureau in Moscow (secret because the authorities would never publicly acknowledge that such an act occurs under the leadership of their perfect State), trying to atone for his former evils by bringing to justice murderers and protecting his fellow citizens.

Until events set in motion by that first betrayal come back to haunt him.

Unfortunately, this isn't a patch on the previous novel - although, to be perfectly fair, that would be pretty damned difficult; Child 44 was a borderline masterpiece, an incredibly taut thriller with interesting things to say and writing so good that the book was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Here, for whatever reason, the writing wasn't quite up to that standard, and the parts of the novel didn't fit together entirely seamlessly - in particular, the third act seemed rather disjointed from the earlier parts of the story. I suspect the issue is the author wanting to involve the characters as major players in the real-life events of the post-Stalinist USSR.

Still, this was a gripping read, with excellent characters, some intriguing morality, and a good examination of some of the horrors of a society unwilling to face up to its crimes, or even that it can possibly be in the wrong. I'll definitely be reading the next instalments.