Day: 10 August 2025

Weeknotes #133: Achievement unlocked and other Spanish adventures

Exploring Basque culture, art, coastlines, and football—memorable Spanish adventures.

Week commencing Monday, 4 August 2025

The distinctive titanium-clad exterior of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao designed by Frank Gehry, with tourists walking along the riverside promenade and the red La Salve Bridge visible in the background
Eduardo Chillida's steel sculpture Peine del Viento installed on rocky coastal cliffs overlooking the Cantabrian Sea in San Sebastián, with waves crashing against the rocks and a small sailing boat visible on the horizon
he suspended gondola of the historic Vizcaya Bridge (Puente Colgante) crossing high above the Nervión River, with colourful residential buildings and hills of Bilbao visible in the background under an overcast sky
Rocky coastal islet of San Juan de Gaztelugatxe with its distinctive stone bridge connecting to the mainland, historic hermitage buildings on the summit, and dramatic natural rock arches carved by the sea
Magnificent stained glass ceiling in the Assembly House of Guernica depicting the sacred Tree of Guernica (Gernikako Arbola) with intricate green and gold foliage against a geometric grid pattern, symbolising Basque freedoms and democratic traditions
Interior view of San Mamés Stadium showing the distinctive oval roof opening, modern architecture with white steel framework, and red seating arranged in tiers

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand /7; Exercise /7 and Move /7 (%). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days: 1/5. Total steps: 125,093

Life

  • We spent Monday acclimatising to Bilbao; it’s a lovely city. Although a chunk of the day was spent trying to acquire tickets for a trip out on Tuesday. We found the bus station, saw the queues, and were directed straight to a window where nobody was waiting. It was our lucky day.
  • Achievement unlocked: I’ve always wanted to visit Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum. It’s the reason I suggested adding this bit to our trip. It’s renowned for its revolutionary titanium-clad architecture designed by Frank Gehry that has become an iconic symbol of the city’s urban regeneration. It did not disappoint.
  • More surprisingly, the exhibitions were every bit as impressive. I usually get quite impatient in galleries, but I could have stayed longer.
  • The exhibition featuring works by the renowned American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, known for her provocative text-based art, was pretty impressive.
  • Tuesday, we took the bus to the beautiful seaside resort of San Sebastián. A leisurely stroll along La Concha Bay culminated at “El Peine del Viento” (The Comb of the Wind), Eduardo Chillida’s iconic trio of nine-tonne steel sculptures anchored into the rocks. A beautiful walk in the sun.
  • On the return walk, a tinto de verano on the terrace of a tennis club bar called Wimbledon was very welcome in the heat. Before the return bus trip, we tried a Gilda, a classic Basque pintxo of a green olive, a salted anchovy fillet, and one or two pickled chilli peppers, on bread. I looked up the name: it’s named after the 1946 film Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth. The pintxo is said to embody similar characteristics—green (guindilla), salty (anchovy), and a little spicy—just like the film character.
  • On Wednesday, PY and I did a half-day tour: Bizkaia Bridge (the historic transporter bridge spanning the Nervión River), Gaztelugatxe (views of an island linked to dry land by a two-arch bridge known as Dragonstone in Game of Thrones), Bermeo (authentic Basque fishing village), and Gernika (home to the sacred tree where Basque assemblies have met for centuries and Picasso’s Guernica commemorating the 1937 bombing).
  • The famous Tree of Guernica is depicted in the stained-glass ceiling in the Assembly House (Casa de las Juntas). It’s one of the most impressive stained-glass works I’ve seen, and you have to look up.
  • When we returned to Bilbao, we took the Artxanda Funicular to the summit of Artxanda Mountain for the views over the city.
  • On our last morning, Pete, Mark, and I went on a tour of Athletic Club Bilbao’s stadium and museum. The tour is a behind-the-scenes look at its impressive architecture, history, and the pride the city takes in its team, with the highlight being the dramatic moment of stepping out onto the pitch, where the sweeping stands rise around you and you get a player’s-eye view of the arena. It must be pretty intimidating for visiting teams.
  • When we returned to the UK, the weather matched what we’d experienced on holiday, so we spent three days walking and relaxing.

Media

  • Still managing to stay mostly off social media, except for a couple of Instagram posts; no television in Spain (although a little when we got back). I completed Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die, which is another lovely book—if you can ignore the murder—in the Thursday Murder Club series.
  • I also completed Off the Rails, number eight in the Peculiar Crimes Unit books. When I started it, I realised I’d missed number seven, so that was ordered while I was away, and I’m now reading the origin of the Mr Fox story.

Right Place, Right Time

Where have I been?

A little research tells me that reality TV personalities Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer first entered our lives in May 2010 when “Location Location Location” appeared in the Channel Four schedule for the first time.1

Location was the buzzword of 2010. It was the year that Foursquare entered the mainstream, having launched the previous year2 and January 2010 was my first location-based check-in on the service (The Cardinal Cafe inside 80-100 Victoria Street in London, if you’re interested).

Screen Shot 2016-08-09 at 22.34.09

Fast-forward six and a half years (I’ll say that again: six years), and last Friday I passed 10,000 check-ins. Check-in number one was the aforementioned cafe outside my office at the time; check-in 10,000 was the square outside my current office. That averages just over 4 check-ins for each of the 2380 days between 29 January 2010 and 5 August 2016. And, although it has no real significance, it turns out that both were on Fridays, which I take as a sign of something. Although I don’t know what.

A couple of years ago, Foursquare separated into two: the Foursquare app removed check-ins and the gamification of location data to focus on reviews and recommendations of places you might want to go. Check-ins, mayorships and the other signals of location moved to the Swarm app. I kept checking in.

The company used the game to build up an impressive (maybe the most impressive) database of places on the planet. And, unlike most other directories, this was a database of places and how popular (or trending) they were at any point in time. Critical to the value of the data is that Foursquare can understand how people move between places. Check out the pulse of London to get an overview of behaviours at a city level.

10048 check-ins mapped by Where Do You Go
10048 check-ins mapped by Where Do You Go

I’m fascinated by this kind of data and what it can tell us about ourselves and our society. Each of my check-ins is synced to a calendar so that I could, in theory, look back at where I have been. I don’t do that very often. A few years ago, when I was spending a lot of time in Melbourne for work. I generated a heat-map of the locations I visited just to see where I was spending time. It’s interesting to see the map, but it’s not that useful. I’ve just generated another one for Europe3.

The Swarm app itself tells me more than half of my check-ins are at railway stations, followed closely by coffee shops, offices, hotels and bars. I wonder how accurately that sums up my life? Is it that useful to me?

Occasionally, people see me opening a phone, selecting the Swarm app and doing the little check-in dance and wonder why I am still playing a game that many people stopped playing when the free beers for Mayors vanished. I think it’s an interesting question and, besides the fact that I do have a calendar showing the places I’ve been to, I’ve been wondering why I do it. I think I do it because the value isn’t only in the chronological history of my travels but in how my experiences are useful in informing others.

A day in the centre of London tracked by Google
A day in the centre of London tracked by Google

I find maps so fascinating that, much to my frustration, I’ve spent many hours trying to make Apple Maps accurate for places around my house. For some reason, I regularly resubmit more-or-less the same data. I’d love my phone to store a history of every journey I have taken and show them on a map and save them for future historians (a little like Google Maps can do for you). Can you imagine how amazing it would be to be able to see the paths our ancestors took around towns and cities of the past? The lessons we could learn!

I think Foursquare is the best alternative to those maps, and historians will find their data critical for research. But their database seems to be getting more and more accurate. And their ability to suggest interesting places is improving, which means it’s also valuable to us today.

When travelling, I find Foursquare particularly useful. That great breakfast place in San Francisco when I was last there? Discovered on Foursquare. Oh, and the one I found the next day that was quiet but had great coffee was added to the database to help the next traveller in the area. This globally shared database of places, tips and tricks is invaluable when on the road, and I’m happy to add my recommendations.

In his book Skyfaring, Mark Vanhoenacker has a theory he calls place-lag: a jet-lag-like feeling of disconnect when you’re in a place suddenly very different from the last you were in.4 A feeling that is most commonly felt because of long-distance air travel when your presence is the only real connection between two locations. Yet Foursquare – and similar – is able to make far-off towns feel more familiar because it’s developing the powers to recommend places that we’ll like.

An understanding of place is critical to everything from taxi-hailing apps to controlling your heating (my heating knows when I am moving away from home and suggests I turn the temperature down ). We’re already hooked on GPS navigation systems, but they’re improved when they understand not just where something is but how it relates to the world (which is the best entrance to the building from this direction?).

And an understanding of place is increasingly useful to the advertising industry. When I was first using Foursquare, I discovered offers around San Francisco that encouraged me to visit new places. They don’t seem to have Mayoral Specials anymore, but if advertising’s ultimate aim is to give you the right message, via the right medium, at the right time, then knowing where you are is vitally important. Knowing where you are is more than just reading coordinates from a GPS system: it’s truly understanding the place you are in.

And these are all reasons I keep checking in with Swarm. Every little piece of information is helpful to somebody’s future need to understand a place. I want to help the world understand that the popular coffee place is inside the station rather than the one outside; that the best entrance when driving to the supermarket is the one on the other road; and that people around here are looking for dinner and an offer right now could help somebody decide where to eat.

So, even if mine is just a very small piece of the location jigsaw, it’s all adding to the vast knowledge of places that helps everybody else. Clicking a little check-in helps build a better data set. And it gives me a lovely history of where I have been.

Here’s to the next 10,000.

About BEWA 2016

BEWA (Blog Every Wednesday in August) is a project aimed at getting me writing in a blog style again. I wrote an introduction a couple of weeks ago, and the first in this series championed an Olympic legacy.  There is a page with the #bewa collection (including those from last year).  Fingers crossed I am back next week. I’m sure @curns will mention it.

Footnotes

1 Location, Location, Location: Wikipedia.
2 Foursquare, Crunchbase
3 Foursquare heat map generated by Where Do You Go
4 Skyfaring, Mark Vanhoenacker, p23

Gym Buddy – We Must Not Stop Now

Six month’s on and I reached my goal

At the start of February, I decided you were to become my gym buddy. I didn’t drink alcohol in January 2004. The fact that I managed to survive a month against all the pressures from outside meant I knew I had the willpower to attack my growing girth. On Monday, February 9th 2004, we (you and I) commenced healthy eating (but not a fad diet) and, importantly, an exercise routine.

I do not think I had exercised in any serious way since I was about 15, when I was forced to take physical education classes (in my final years at school, snooker and crown green bowling counted as gym class). Over the years I had been gradually buying larger and larger clothes, but it had not alarmed me. I knew I was not fit, I knew I was getting fat, but even chest pains in 1997 (when the doctor said ‘lose weight’) didn’t make me give up eating in the excessive quantities that I did.

So, on February 9th 2004, I exercised. And then I weighed myself for the first time in half a decade. I knew I would be heavy and, to be honest, was not shocked by what the scales said to me. What frightened me was the realisation that if I continued at this rate of gaining weight, I would be heavier than 20 stone in less than ten years. It was a little bit of a wake-up call.

On February 10th I ached, but on February 11th I hauled myself back to the gym. The exercise was surprisingly easy. I followed my own programme, sticking to ‘fat burn’ routines on the various pieces of equipment (bike, treadmill, rowing machine) and gradually working up to keep my heart rate at a good rate for burning fat, which left me out of breath. I did not want to push so hard that I would be put off or, worse, pass out. At times it has been hard to motivate myself to go, but not too hard, and I have been disciplined enough to ensure that even the occasional lapses were overcome. I promised myself I would not feel guilty about missed days or missed calorie targets – and I haven’t.

During the process, I read a lot about other people’s experiences. Lance Arthur’s Fat Headed, from around the time I started this, was probably the most important. It’s all about mental attitude a little bit of will power/self control.

Fortunately for me, I have always been a reasonably healthy eater. I do not binge on burgers, chips or masses of fried food. I just ate too much of everything. When I compare the quantity of pasta I used to eat in a single portion against a measured, calorie-counted healthy-eating quantity, I am embarrassed by the sheer greed.

Over the months, many things kept me motivated. The laughter when my old trousers would no longer stay up; the move of my Body Mass Index from obese to healthy; the pleasure of buying new (and better-fitting clothes) and the comments of people I met (except for the one customer who told me he’d been scared to say anything because he thought I was ill). I’ve found new ways to enjoy less food, and I flabbergasted myself by enjoying the light exercise I do. I have days when I consume more than others. I just know that the occasional bad day is not going to set me back.

I must say that it hasn’t really been hard. Sure, there have been harder days and difficult moments with temptations along the way, but I just set my mind to it, and the rest came as the results came.

Yesterday was six months to the day since I started this regimen. I feel and look healthier and have a whole new wardrobe. I am no Adonis with a beefed-up body. I could not say ‘swimmer’s build’ if I was in the mood to write a personal ad, nor would you pass me in the street and notice me. But I am a fitter and leaner me. In some ways I am happier in myself – both for the changes that have occurred and for the feeling that I managed to do it. I lost four stone and so many inches from my waist I won’t even say. I have reached the target I set myself in a much faster time. I am a little spooked that it is six months to the very day!

I do know that this is a way of life now and not something I can – ever – deviate from. I must watch what I eat, but it’s becoming instinctive rather than planned. I will continue to exercise and have set myself some goals to ensure I will enjoy it going forward.

As Lance said:

My advice, for those of you unhappy with your current physical situation and hoping for a miracle cure that’ll make you look like the A&F boys or the Conde Nast girls is stop looking for a miracle cure. It doesn’t exist. Eat better food, eat less of it, and get your ass in motion. Move your body in whatever you enjoy. Jog, bike, lift weights, kung fu, yoga, dance, kickbox, soccer, volleyball, swim, whatever, but go out and do it. Ask for help, encourage encouragement, change your life, be happier. [source]

I would like to thank you, my gym buddy, for the help and encouragement throughout the last six months. I think we should go out for a celebratory slap-up meal.

Survival

Well, now I know that a champagne hangover isn’t very bad. Or perhaps I took my own advice, for I am feeling OK this morning. The night was good – lots of champagne (bought in advance during the Happy Hour), and only the two bottles of wine at the end were a bad sign (and there were a large number of us). Met a crazy woman with purple nails who kept telling me and PY that we were wonderful (she was, quite possibly, drunk) and handed my business card to her (possibly not the wisest move in the world, as she may be some kind of crazed stalker that tracks people down). Still, another all-day party begins in Walthamstow at three this afternoon. Am I ready for more punishment?