Weeknotes #13

Week commencing Monday, 25 July 2022

Commonwealth Games cycling at Lee Valley VeloPark

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 6/7; Exercise 7/7 and Move 5/7. (86%, getting better).

Life

  • Wednesday 27th: Happy Birthday Dad!
  • Also 27th: Ten years ago was the opening of the 2012 Olympics. I considered blogging something because I still have wonderful memories of that time. But, ultimately, I am not sure I had anything new to say. I did check in with the Little Lego Athletes who joined me at some of the events back then. And Diamond Geezer summed it all up nicely.
  • On Sunday, we did do the Olympic Park legacy trail that’s been created to celebrate the passing of 10 years. Basically a series of photo stops on a 7km walk around the park. You don’t need to do the stops to appreciate that the route takes in most of the main sites (at least, the ones that still exist). The Olympic Rings photo-point can barely see the Olympic Rings. The photo collection is here. It nearly became a blog but I thought better of that too.
  • It’s fitting the UK is hosting another multi-sport competition this month. Birmingham’s Commonwealth Games Opening ceremony was brilliant. I am in awe of the creative people who imagine mechanical bulls, cars forming the shape of a union flag and can mix it all together with a message of inclusiveness and hope.
  • I also have tons of admiration and respect for what British sporting hero Tom Daley has done with his public voice. Using the Commonwealth Games to remind tell 1 billion people that in 35 out of the 56 Commonwealth nations homosexuality is considered a crime was superb.
  • These messages seem so at odds with the narrative coming out of the Conservative leadership contest it makes me wonder if it’s possible to live on two different timelines – or in two different countries – at the same moment.
  • On Sunday morning we went to the Lee Valley VeloPark for our own experience of Commonwealth Games action. The cycling centre is an outpost of Birmingham’s 2022 Commonwealth Games and it’s not in Birmingham (so quite handy for us). And it had tickets when we looked on Thursday. And the cycling was really interesting but the crash towards the end of the session was horrible.
  • Pre-digital nobody messed with your carefully crafted compilation tapes and CDs or your curated photo albums, diaries and scrapbooks. The digital providers of today’s equivalent definitely will. It must be somebody’s law that this is inevitable. This month’s example, Instagram who are off in pursuit of the (apparently, more engaged) youth on TikTok.
  • Chris Stevens, who created an online country music stream that became a UK country music radio phenomenon and my morning listen, presented his final breakfast show on Friday. What a thing to have achieved. When the breakfast show changes it can be a disorienting to a listener’s routine. I’ve said that before and I hope my routine is not thrown out too much on Monday morning.
  • And, in what seemed like a very swift end, Vanessa almost simultaneously announced she’s leaving Radio 2 and the BBC London breakfast show (almost immediately). I don’t listen to speech radio anymore but she’s one of the UK’s best talk radio hosts. Her Radio 2 departure announcement is wonderfully worded. And hand-written.
  • I am tempted to add a ‘Media’ section to my weeknotes. It’s inspired by Martha Edwards’ retrospective-style weeknotes. I’m recording my idea here so I can come back to it in a few weeks.

Archive

To save the links getting lost in the future I checked the Internet Archive to see what they had saved for the posts linked here. If the original source above no longer works, these should.


Archived at The Wayback Machine