On public toilets.

I've just been reading an article from the BBC online news about public toilet closures being another symptom to expect from the massive cuts in public services currently being implemented by the coalition government. Apparently out of Manchester council's 19 remaining loos 18 are to be closed.

As a child growing up in the 1980's I can clearly remember walking around town in Brighton with my Mum cursing Thatcher for all the toilets that had closed. Later as a teen in the 90's I can remember feeling very sheepish about asking to use the toilets in pubs or shops, I think I may have seen a 'for customer use only' sign at a decisive point and have always felt funny about asking ever since! My worst teen experiences are great examples of how the few toilets left open were poorly maintained.

On my 15th birthday I arrived in Brighton Station with an almighty hangover after a very odd evening attending the funeral service and wake of the dean of St Paul's cathedral. There was an elaborate do in some sort of Guildhall building, with canapé’s, ice sculptures and women with wine bottles filling your glass after what seemed like every sip - I had a glass for red in one hand and a glass for white in the other (this may have been inappropriate for a funeral wake, but I didn't appear to be the only one, just the youngest, most impressionable one)!

Waiting in the taxi cue at Brighton station the next morning after a tumultuous train ride home it was no surprise I felt a little queasy and unfortunately threw up all over my smart funeral shoes. I had down into the basement of Brighton Station (an area which is no longer a public part of the building) to try to clean up my shoes but found the toilet in a terrible state. Very few of the lights were working and there was toilet tissue and water everywhere, I tried to enter a cubicle to get some toilet roll to clean off the offending chunks only to find someone had shat all over the floor of the darkened cubicle and I now had my own puke and somebody else’s poop on my shoes.

Another experience I find creeping into my consciousness comes from a public toilet I once visited in Brighton Marina. The toilet was outside and underground, accessible via some concrete stairs, it could have been a cold war nuclear bunker. Downstairs it was very, very dark and dingy, from what I could make out of the facilities in the green-ish blinking half light I couldn't imagine a toilet attendant had visited in a long time. I took up residence in one of the cubicles to attempt my business and shortly after heard another man enter, breathing heavily. He took the cubicle next to me and, I kid you not, he started to masturbate, at least that's what it sounded like. I don't know if he was some sort of pervert who was turned on by the thought of wanking within earshot of a much younger man or if he hadn't seen me go in and was just desperate to bat one out after a particularly sexual moment in ASDA, either way it was a very unpleasant experience and not atypical of public toilets in the late 80's-early 90's.

Although many of the buildings that used to be public toilets were sold off by the council (with at least two becoming rehearsal rooms!) the late 90's and 00's certainly saw a mini-renaissance in public convenience in my opinion. Certainly toilets that had long been out of use along the seafront were re-opened and have been well maintained ever since, on my running route I pass at least four, council-run, bright, clean (ish) conveniences. Those basement toilets never returned in Brighton Station but a pre-fab building sprung up behind WH Smiths. It may well demand 20p at its turnstile, but it's clean and the faeces tend to end up in the toilet bowl, not on the floor, in my experience. The park by the pavilion also boasts a very central convenience, which often has a toilet attendant. I don't think my marina experiences would be repeated here.

I can only hope the drastic cuts Manchester council have had to make to their lavatories don't come to us down south. Unfortunately hoping may not be enough.

[the BBC article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12405259]

On running, running and running some more.

I am currently training to run the Brighton Marathon on April 10th. It is a strange and somewhat out of character activity for me to have willingly chosen to participate in. I officially signed up at the end of January, although, thankfully I had been running for a week or so before then. I suppose now, a few weeks in the full horror of what I have undertaken to achieve is starting to dawn on me.

I suppose one of the things that motivated me to attempt the marathon was running in a charity 10km race last November. My girlfriend lives above a pub and some of the regulars had organised a team to run the race for Brighton Housing Trust. As someone who works part-time in the housing department of my local council I am aware of what excellent work they do, and, in a climate of government spending cuts, organisations like BHT need all the help they can get. I roped Aaron in to run with me then as, besides being an excellent keyboard player and backing vocalist, he's a fully qualified personal trainer and has run a marathon before.

The night before that race day turned out to be a surprise birthday party for our old friend Jonny in the pub closest to our old school, which we somehow managed to frequent throughout sixth form. The Dyke Tavern has recently been transformed into a family oriented gastro pub... gone are the two pool tables, the darts, the bar billiards, the indie-jukebox and the cheap, fatty baguettes; replaced with a more mature clientele and a prohibitively expensive (for me) menu. However, on that night they were boasting a guest ale at £2 a pint. All thoughts of saving pocket and preserving race form were chucked out the window and we both drank about eight pints of the stuff!

The next day we made it through the race in a fairly reasonable 52 minutes, suddenly I felt like I actually could be athletic, even with a tonne of booze in my gut. The flames of my future marathon acquiesce had been well and truly stoked.

Flash-forward to now and the harsh reality of marathon running... 10km is nothing it turns out! 10km is 6.2 miles and a marathon is 26 miles 385 yards or 42.2 km... so over four times the distance! Which means if I could run at exactly the same pace it would take me 3 hours and 40 minutes to complete the marathon, which is no mean feat. I'm actually aiming for roughly 4 hours 15 minutes, but that's still going  to be damn tough, just to keep running, as I've been finding in training this last week.

Here's a little peak into what I've been doing in the last week:

Thurs 3rd Feb - I did a 7 mile run.

Fri - rest

Sat - I did the 7 mile run again, this time in the drizzly rain - my first run in really unpleasant conditioins.

Sun - I was going to attempt a 13 mile run (from Kemptown to to Rottingdean, then turn back and run to Hove lagoon and then back to Kemptown)... unfortunately the first 7 miles of the journey over the cliffs to Rottingdean and back in strong winds absolutely killed me, on the way back I was running as hard as I could up hill and into the wind but not really moving anywhere!

Mon - Aaron realised we were a week out on the running schedule he'd been following, we were meant to do 15 miles on Sunday! We decided to reorganise the schedule to set us up to do the 15 miler on Saturday coming and ran a 6 mile fartlek... fartlek is a sort of training where you sprint for a set distance then slow jog the same distance and then sprint again. Repeating this for 6 miles is one of the hardest things I've had to do so far!

Tues - We ran another 6 miles together.

Weds - I was going to run again yesterday but my legs were so sore from four days in a row I decided to rest them... which means

Today - I'm going to have to attempt some sort of run, but not too much so I don't exhuast myself for the 15 miles on Saturday morning! Killer. I could probably bang on for hours about nutrition and stuff, but I'll leave it at that for now, there's plenty of weeks to go before the actual run and so I'm bound to give a progress report before then. Today should be day one of not smoking or drinking ( more than a pint a day, which is apparently good for you!) so I'll have to see how well that goes (may well be essential to manage the big run)!

Please donate to my charity (Teenage Cancer Trust) they're awesome (and I need to raise £650)!!!

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserProfilePage.action?userUrl=AdamKidd

On Mubarak and Myspace...

Briefly on myspace now, don't want to give it the time of day but I do have an additional gripe I wanted to get off my chest. It seems like proof myspace is determined to become the North Korea of social networking sites. I decided, as you might have realised, the stop using myspace as a blogging space. That was why I first went there, so it's been my main blog home for over five years. Once I'd set up this page I posted final entries on my myspace page blogs letting people know I'd moved here. When I tried to click on the link I posted in the myspace blog (to come here) I got this message:

Sorry, you have reached a link that is no longer accessible due to one or more of the following:

-      A reported spammer site

-      A reported Phishing Site: A site designed to trick the user into giving up user name and passwords.

-      A site which contains malware

-      A site that currently contains a lot of spam

-      The user entered HTML syntax was inaccurate.

My initial reaction was that I must have somehow put the link in incorrectly, so I returned, edited the blog, made sure it had the right URL, put in the right html, but all to no avail. Myspace is blocking links to blogger... which means myspace thinks blogger is a spammer/phishing/malware portal or it is deliberately trying to isolate itself from the increasingly integrated social networking community. It shows that the team Rupert Murdoch has put behind myspace, since they bought it, haven't understood what makes social networks tick: you have to get the user generated content right first, ease of use and compatibility with other popular sites (not dogged resistance to them and poor attempts at copying them). Know what you're good at and do it well, once you're good at it the community will build and you can start trying to turn a profit from them, not the other way round.

Now for Mubarak; I want to write about him because I am aware that there is a lot of unrest in Egypt at the moment, a popular movement (somewhat inspired by the Jan 14th uprising that overthrew Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia), but I realise I know very little about him. What follows will sort of be thinking out loud - getting an overview (using limited web based sources of information - primarily the questionable source of wikipedia - I'm not trying to get definitive answers just slightly broaden my knowledge base).

Mubarak became president after the assassination of President Anwar El Sadat. Sadat was killed by Islamists who, amongst other things, were outraged at his peace treaty with Israel in a series of meetings facilitated by US president Jimmy Carter. Mubarak continued friendly relations with the US, when George Bush snr. wanted allies for Gulf War I in 1991 Mubarak and Egypt eagerly stepped up. At the end of the war Egypt was forgiven about 14 billion of its national debts by America, the Arab states of the Persian gulf and European allies. Mubarak maintained a strong alliance with Israel, but was opposed to George W's Gulf War, as he felt it was more important to settle the Israel/Palestine issue first.

Mubarak has stayed in power this long whilst maintaining the thinnest veneer of democracy. In his wikipedia entry it doesn't say he was elected president in '81, it says he 'assumed the presidency'... whatever that's supposed to mean. Mubarak and his family are extremely wealthy; estimates put him at having a personal/family wealth of around $40-70 billion USD, much of this wealth accumulated from military contracts while he was in the air force according to an ABC News report. I don't suppose it's the norm for military officers to expect such massive remuneration for 'service'. Mubarak was Commander of the Air Force, Egyptian Deputy Minister of Defence and air chief marshal before becoming president, showing how powerful a force he was within the military.

Mubarak was able to win referendum elections in '87, '93 and '99 largely because no one could run against the president due to the fact the Peoples Assembly played the main role in electing presidents (presumably Mubarak also had control of the Peoples Assembly to guarantee those re"elections". Under pressure for reform there was a multi-candidate presidential election in 2005, but with Mubarak controlling the media, the electoral institutions and security it was unsurprising he won. However there have been growing independent media outlets and of course internet access (I saw a graph on the bbc a week ago that said 20% of Egyptians used the net, much higher than most of their neighbours) and so popular displeasure at Mubarak's undemocratic reign and policies have grown to fever pitch. It looks like he'll be stepping down soon enough.

It's funny that I visited Egypt in 2008 and had absolutely no idea about any of this, and no one told us, or hinted at it. Our guide had been explaining a newspaper to me, but I guess it must have been one of the many in Mubarak's pocket. Although I learnt that the Egyptians didn't have any time for Sarkozy; and not much for Blair, no one was going to turn around and tell me that Mubarak was essentially a military dictator in all but name. I suppose America were inclined to keep him in place because although his reign has been most likely illegal (according to international law) he has contributed to stability in the region (in America's favour) by keeping peace and diplomatic ties with Israel (who are largely rejected by members of the Arab League).

Similarly Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia has a military background, having earned degrees in American and French specialist military schools (the Special Inter-Service School and Artillery School, both in France, and the Senior Intelligence School and the School for Anti-Aircraft Field Artillery, both in America). After high profile military and diplomatic careers Ben Ali -ahem- 'assumed the presidency' on the grounds that the incumbent, Habib Bourguiba, although Fulvio Martini, former head of the Italian secret service later said that Ben Ali had been put in power by the power of a military putsch, allowing Bourguiba to flee (and preventing him from performing rough justice executions on the bombers).

In '99 Tunisia had its equivalent of Egypt's 2005 presidential elections: only Ben Ali got a highly unlikely 99.4% of the vote. Under Ben Ali's thinly veiled military dictatorship human rights suffered along with freedom of the press (surprise, surprise). Ben Ali won another sham election in 2009, but it would seem the high employment caused by the global reception has galvanised people against him, leading to the popular uprising that overthrew him last month. In the aftermath arrest warrants have been issue for the fleeing Ben Ali, for illegally taking money out of the nation, and illegally acquiring real estate and other assets abroad.

I wonder if Mubarak will face questions about those old military contracts that made him so personally rich, but I suppose there are ways of legally enriching immorally, such as the UK bankers receiving excessive bonuses, despite the financial collapse and the fact they were bailed out by public money - or the shocking figures Tony Blair now makes for consulting work. I figure Blair probably handed out a few of those lucrative military contracts during Gulf War II to assist him in accumulating so much wealth after office.