Archives: Reading list

The Art of Winning An Unfair Game

I’m not going to lie, I read this book mostly just because I really like the film, but it turns out I actually took away a huge amount from it. I did have to stop reading fairly often to Google baseball terms, though, because I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about at times.

This book isn’t really about baseball, though. Well, of course it’s about baseball, but it’s not about baseball. It’s really about innovation and finding new ways to do things that have been done the same way for years. I took away a very timely lesson to question everything and work hard to take assumptions for what they are: someone assuming they know the best way of doing things without having tried any other way.

Key highlight: “If you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.” p98

“The difference in Billy wasn’t what had happened to him, but what hadn’t. He had a life he hadn’t led, and he knew it. He just hoped nobody else noticed.” p15

“People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn’t.” p18

“That Erik had never played even high school ball was, in Billy Beane’s mind, a point in his favor. At least he hasn’t learned the wrong lessons. Billy had played pro ball, and regarded it as an experience he needed to overcome if he wanted to do his job well. “A reformed alcoholic,” is how he described himself.” p24

“A person willing to rethink everything he learned, or thought he had learned, playing baseball.” p24

“Foot speed, fielding ability, even raw power tended to be dramatically overpriced. That the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success.” p33

“That was the moment when the scouts realized just how far Billy Beane was willing to go to push his supposedly rational and objective view of things.” p35

“‘You take a guy high no one else likes and it makes you uncomfortable. But I mean, really, who gives a fuck where guys are taken? Remember Zito? Everyone said we were nuts to take Zito with the ninth pick of the draft. And we knew everyone was going to say that. One fucking month later it’s clear we kicked everyone’s ass. Nobody remembers that now. But understand, when we stop trying to figure out the perception of guys, we’ve done better.'” p39

“The Mets scouting department had badly misjudged Billy’s nature. They had set him up to fail.” p44

“He decided that his talent was beside the point: how could you call it talent if it didn’t lead to success?” p55

“The new, outsider’s view of baseball was all about exposing the illusions created by the insiders on the field.” p62

“It is because baseball statistics, unlike the statistics in any other area, have acquired the powers of language. —Bill James, 1985 Baseball Abstract” p64

“Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them.” p65

“After all, wrote James, ‘you have to do something right to get an error; even if the ball is hit right at you, then you were standing in the right place to begin with.'” p67

“Fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers, is what interested him.” p67

“‘When the numbers acquire the significance of language.’ he later wrote, ‘they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry.'” p67

“But the details of the thing didn’t matter. What mattered was James’s ability to light a torch in a dark chamber and throw a new light on a dusty problem. He made you think.” p69

“What got counted was often simply what was easiest to count.” p70

“A hitter should be measured by his success in that which he is trying to do, and that which he is trying to do is create runs. It is startling, when you think about it, how much confusion there is about this.” p76

“‘The people who run baseball are surrounded by people trying to give them advice,’ said James. ‘So they’ve built very effective walls to keep out anything.’ p85

“People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.” p90

“Think for yourself along rational lines. Hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it ever will be.” p98

“‘What you don’t do,’ said Billy, ‘is what the Yankees do. If we do what the Yankees do, we lose every time, because they’re doing it with three times more money than we are.’ p119

“Highly trained mathematicians and statisticians and scientists who had abandoned whatever they were doing at Harvard or Stanford or MIT to make a killing on Wall Street. The fantastic sums of money hauled in by the sophisticated traders transformed the culture on Wall Street, and made quantitative analysis, as opposed to gut feel, the respectable way to go about making bets in the market.” p190

“Bill James’s work had been all about challenging the traditional understanding of the game, by questioning the meaning of its statistics.” p133

“His coach was creating an alternative scale on which Hatty could judge his performance. He might be an absolute D but on Wash’s curve he felt like a B, and rising. “He knew that what looked like a routine play wasn’t a routine play for me,” said Hatty. Wash was helping him to fool himself, to make him feel better than he was, until he actually became better than he was.” p168

“No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo.” p193

“The power of an imagination can arise from what it refuses to foresee.” p224

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

This book shows the power and purpose of revisiting books. I first read it as part of my GCSE curriculum way, way back in the late 90s, and haven’t really thought about it since. It made almost zero impact on me other than vaguely remembering something dystopian about it.

Re-reading it, especially in today’s climate, showed me just how much I missed from it because either a) I was a teenage boy who couldn’t connect with the first-person narrative and so dismissed it, or b) I was taught it really badly. It’s probably a combination of the two, to be honest.

“There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from.” p24

“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.” p30

“The red is the same but there is no connection. The tulips are not tulips of blood, the red smiles are not flowers, neither thing makes a comment on the other. The tulip is not a reason for disbelief in the hanged man, or vice versa.” p34

“This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.” p34

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” p56

“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter.” p103

“His face is beginning to fade, possibly because it wasn’t always the same: his face had different expressions, his clothes did not.” p104

“I didn’t much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.” p201

“Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.” p211

“People will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.” p215

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

This book had a genuinely profound impact on me. Having heard it talked about so often, I finally decided to give it a go and I have to confess I almost gave up after the first few chapters and it’s not the kind of storytelling I really engage with. Much like life, however, the power of the lessons in the book and the wisdom that it imparts is genuinely transformative.

This book is often mentioned in the same breath as Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, but where that book totally failed to connect with me, Siddhartha is already a book I know I’m going to read and reread time and time and time again. These highlights don’t do it justice at all, but are useful reminders for me of what I took away from the book.

Most importantly, a deeper understand of the value of everything in our lives, whatever it is. They are all a part of us, who we are, what we believe and how we see the world. Nothing and no one should ever be dismissed.

“That was how everybody loved Siddhartha. He delighted and made everybody happy. But Siddhartha himself was not happy.” p4

“We find consolations, we learn tricks with which we deceive ourselves, but the essential thing — the way — we do not find.” p15

“The rumours of the Buddha sounded attractive; there was magic in these reports. The world was sick, life was difficult and here there seemed new hope, here there seemed to be a message, comforting, mild, full of fine promises.” p17

“Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.” p27

“It is not for me to judge another life. I must judge for myself. I must choose and reject.” p28

“Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.” p32

“It was beautiful and pleasant to go through the world like that, so childlike, so awakened, so concerned with the immediate, without any distrust.” p37

“Why should I not attain what I decided to undertake yesterday?” p44

“From the moment I made that resolution I also knew that I would execute it.” p49

“He is drawn by his goal, for he does not allow anything to enter his mind which opposes his goal.” p49

“Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.” p49

“He only noticed that the bright and clear inward voice, that had once awakened in him and had always guided him in his finest hours, had become silent.” p61

“I am not going anywhere. We monks are always on the way.” p72

“Now, when I am no longer young, when my hair is fast growing grey, when strength begins to diminish, now I am beginning again like a child.” p74

“I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace,” p75

“Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?” p77

“The water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.” p79

“The eternity of every moment.” p89

“‘You have suffered, Siddhartha, yet I see that sadness has not entered your heart.'” p90

“Siddhartha began to realize that no happiness and peace had come to him with his son, only sorrow and trouble. But he loved him and preferred the sorrow and trouble of his love rather than happiness and pleasure without the boy.” p91

“Could his father’s piety, his teacher’s exhortations, his own knowledge, his own seeking, protect him? Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiling himself with life, from loading himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path? Perhaps your little son, because you would like to see him spared sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But if you were to die ten times for him, you would not alter his destiny in the slightest.” p94

“Perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.” p108

“‘When someone is seeking,’ said Siddhartha, ‘it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal.'” p108

“Many people have to change a great deal and wear all sorts of clothes. I am one of those, my friend.” p108

“Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.” p109

“The world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Sansara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.” p110

“Every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal life. It is not possible for one person to see how far another is on the way; the Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin. During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. Therefore, it seems to me that everything that exists is good – death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding.” p110

“This stone is stone; it is also animal, God and Buddha. I do not respect and love it because it was one thing and will become something else, but because it has already long been everything and always is everything.” p111

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

Having started the year with some Graham Greene, the next stop on my ‘books/authors I really should have read by now’ was Huxley and his rightly-lauded Brave New World. I found it hard going to start with, but it gets better and better as it goes on.

“A man can smile and smile and be a villain.”

“One’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”

“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”

“Stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

“Happiness is a hard master – particularly other people’s happiness.”

“Providence takes its cue from men.”

“The tears are necessary. Don’t you remember what Othello said? ‘If after every tempest come such calms, may the winds blow till they have awakened death.'”

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

A Counterintuitive Approach To Living A Good Life

I adored this book1, and it’s one I really needed to read. I’m a people-pleaser by nature, always looking to take the path of least resistance and steer myself away from conflict because I’ve been terrified of people not liking me. This book helped me realise how pointless, absurd and unhelpful that is as a way to go about living life.

I want to be really clear for anyone reading this who thinks it sounds like a big, brash, “don’t give a sh*t about anyone” kind of American self-help book that it’s very much not that. Instead, the big lesson I took from this book was simply that you have to choose what you want to care about in life, and then follow up on that by not attributing disproportionate weight to the things that aren’t important.

“It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.”

“Albert Camus said (and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t on LSD at the time): ‘You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.'”

“You must give a fuck about something… The question, then, is, What do we give a fuck about? What are we choosing to give a fuck about?”

“You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.”

“It then follows that finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy. Because if you don’t find that meaningful something, your fucks will be given to meaningless and frivolous causes.”

“Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.”

“We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.”

‘Don’t hope for a life without problems,’ the panda said. ‘There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.'”

“To deny one’s negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve problems.”

“An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more.”

“What determines your success isn’t, ‘What do you want to enjoy?’ The relevant question is, ‘What pain do you want to sustain?'”

“The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.”

“This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal. And because we’re all quite average most of the time, the deluge of exceptional information drives us to feel pretty damn insecure and desperate, because clearly we are somehow not good enough.”

“The Internet has not just open-sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.”

“The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they’re obsessed with improvement.”

“People who become great at something become great because they understand that they’re not already great—they are mediocre, they are average—and that they could be so much better.”

“You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are ordinary. But maybe they’re ordinary for a reason: because they are what actually matters.”

“Freud once said, ‘One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.'”

“Some examples of good, healthy values: honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity.”

“We should prioritize values of being honest, fostering transparency, and welcoming doubt over the values of being right, feeling good, and getting revenge.”

“Growth is an endlessly iterative process.”

“We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something. The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.”

“The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.”

“It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something. If you’re sitting there, miserable day after day, then that means you’re already wrong about something major in your life, and until you’re able to question yourself to find it, nothing will change.”

“We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at.”

“The problem was that my emotions defined my reality. Because it felt like people didn’t want to talk to me, I came to believe that people didn’t want to talk to me.”

“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”

“Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.”

“Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.”

“Absolute freedom, by itself, means nothing.”

“Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person.”

“Acts of love are valid only if they’re performed without conditions or expectations.”

“We’re all driven by fear to give way too many fucks about something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death.”

“Without acknowledging the ever-present gaze of death, the superficial will appear important, and the important will appear superficial.”

“Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing.”

“You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived.”

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

1. The number of highlights/notes in any book (especially non-fiction) is usually (but not always) a good barometer of my feelings about the book as a whole. [↩]

I’m trying to read more of the ‘golden oldies’ or at the very least more works by the kind of authors who are thought of or talked about as greats. I’m a bit embarrassed to say that Greene is one of those authors whose work I’ve never ventured near, so I thought I’d pick something (pretty much at random) to get started with.

I enjoyed this – it lulled a bit in places and isn’t quite what I’d call a page-turner, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Here are my highlights:

“Cynicism is cheap – you can buy it at any Monoprix store – it’s built into all poor-quality goods.”

“We have standards to which we do not always rise.”

“The confused comedy of our lives.”

“This is one of the pains of illicit love: even your mistress’s most extreme embrace is a proof the more that love doesn’t last.”

“Distance lends enchantment to the view. Mr William Wordsworth.”

“We have failed – that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men.”

“In port (she was the only ship there) the Medea seemed oddly dwarfed. It was the empty sea which gave the little boat her pride and magnitude.”

“I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.” Dark humour at its best.

“I felt the premonition of jealousy like the first shiver which announces a fever.”

“We can’t even talk to you, can we? You won’t listen if what we say is out of character – the character you’ve given us.”

“There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?”

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

I have discovered a new feature on my blog which allows me to change the datestamp on the posts, so I can post an entry for Thursday after typing it up on a Saturday (exactly what I’m doing now). This excites me because a) it means I can technically never miss a day’s blogging without feeling like I have to write something hilarious at midnight when I’m straining to keep my eyes awake, b) I can better keep track of all the things I do from day-to-day without having to write a single, enormously long post at the end of the week or such.

Really, the excitement stems from having got lost in re-reading Kevin Smith’s diaries, which I used to follow avidly on his website but have now been published in paperback form. What occurred to me as I waded back in to them (alongside memories of their first reading as long ago as 2005) is that part of the reason for creating this blog was not only to try to give myself a kick up the butt when I needed one, but also to have something on which I could look back in a few years time (God willing) and help me to remember what life was like “way back when” in my old life with rubbish lungs.

So I’m hoping to keep a slightly more day-to-day diary of events from here on out, although I’m sure they will still be peppered with the usual random tangents and streams-of-consciousness as all my posts have ever been.

So anyway, Thursday (today… wait, that’s weird…) saw me waking, annoyingly, 10 minutes before my alarm went off. I say annoyingly, but actually, thinking about it, it’s quite nice to wake up naturally, even if the first impulse on waking to roll over and drift back off to sleep has to be fought off to get up and set the a.m. dose of drugs flowing. Which I manage to do.

I park myself, still slightly dazed, in the chair by the telly and watch something or other while the drugs kick in. By the time they’re done, I’m actually nearly awake, which is quite rare for drug-mornings. I stick on the extras disk from Lost Season 3 (which we finished last night) and immerse myself in behind-the-scenes stuff which always gets my creative-juices flowing.

At 10 I wake K up as we have a visit from our littlest niece and nephew and she just about manages to roll out of bed in time to greet them at the door. They are so excited to get here it’s almost magical, and no sooner are they in the living room than they’re up on the sofa bouncing their heads off or pulling the contents of the coffee table off onto the floor.

We sit and drink tea with their Mum while they tear the place apart (in a nice way) and we play with anything we can find to play with. Most excitingly, because of the delivery of drugs I had yesterday, we have a big, empty cardboard box to play with, which ends up getting decorated with colouring pencils.

I grab my camera and get some super-cute shots of them as they run around, including some wonderful full-paparazzi-style shots of the little on, hand extended at the camera in “get out of my face” mode.

They leave around lunch time and I immediately crash out back in bed. I’m pretty impressed that they didn’t actually totally exhaust me, but I know for sure that if I don’t take the chance to recharge my batteries now, I’m not going to make it through the rest of the day unscathed, and with the hint of a cold still around, I don’t want to use all my energy up.

I wake up a couple of hours later and feel strong enough to run K to college, which cheers me up as I’d assumed I would be house-bound most of this week. I drop her off and head home, spending the next hour or so on the ‘net checking emails and getting a little lost in Facebook, as is my unfortunate tendency.

K calls in a seriously foul mood (justifiably, after a completely wasted and pointless night at a poor excuse for an educational establishment – shame on you Milton Keynes College) and I run out to pick her up.

We get back to find an old friend of mine from the Theatre in the car park, where she’d been waiting for me to get back (I thought K was going to be out longer, so I’d be around to let her in before I had to shoot off to pick her up, but ended up leaving her parked outside for 20 mins while I did the school run). We go upstairs and grab a cuppa while catching up on anything and everything from the last 6-months or so. She has a lot more to share than I do…

In fact, I hadn’t seen her since before she went off on a jungle-trek to Thailand in the summer, through which she raised over £7,000 for the CF Trust and nearly died in the process after an unfortunate incident with a bamboo raft and a set of rain-forest rapids. She fills us in on all the details of everything and it sounds like an amazing trip.

What was intended to be a quick cuppa turns into a lengthy evening’s nattering, which eventually ends with her taking her leave about 10pm. K and I settle on the sofa while I do my drugs and watch tonight’s episode of Studio 60, then hit the sack just before midnight.

Today I am tired. Today made no sense. I think it’s because I’m tired. But really, it made no sense.

I woke up this morning at 6.30am – that’s really early. Luckily, it’s not dark, because the clocks have gone back. So I woke up in the light. But it was still really early. I didn’t get much sleep last night. It was past midnight when the light went out and I then spent the next hour or so getting to sleep, where I then spent the next four or five hours dozing and waking every hour or so to readjust my position because either a) Neve was coming off my face, b) my shoulder was hurting because of the port needle or c) I was lying too much over on my chest and giving myself breathing trouble.

I woke up grouchy. I don’t think many people wake up at 6.30am happy, but when you’ve slept badly two nights in a row, coupled with not sleeping long enough two nights in a row, coupled with being on really high doses of the most drowsy-making drugs in the world (with the notable exception, perhaps of sleeping pills, which I suppose really ought to win the most drowsy-making award and if they don’t then they should really have a different name, or get their makers sued under trading standards) then it’s pretty hard to wake up at 6.30 in the morning without being grouchy.

I did my drugs. This involves (at the moment) doing about 10-15 minutes worth of injecting solutions from a syringe down the tube then connecting up a big bubble-thing which works like a drip, but in a different way. (That doesn’t make sense, does it? If it works like a drip, then it must be a drip; if it works a different way then it’s not like a drip, is it? Told you today didn’t make sense.) That takes an hour to go through, then it’s a couple of quick syringe squirts and hey presto, all done.

So the whole shebang took me up to about 8am. Every Monday morning, I have a delivery of portable oxygen cylinders to give me enough to move around for the week when I want to go out. Invariably, the delivery driver arrives at 9am. Looking at the clock, tired and grouchy, I decided I didn’t want to go back to bed for an hour just to get woken up as I settle into a nice sleep to have to get up and answer the door. So I try to occupy myself to keep myself awake until 9.

Dutifully, the lovely Brummy gent turns up and drops of my new cylinders and whisks away my old ones. Following which I retire to bed for a catch-up nap, aware that I have to be up no later than 11.30 to get ready to go to the hospital for a physio appointment and drug-level check.

I clamber into bed and strap on my Neve-mask, only to discover that the condensation in the mask has done something – I don’t know what and boy, do I wish I did – which makes something on the mask make a really loud, annoying clunking sound every. Single. Time. I. Breathe. In.

Annoying? Slightly. Grumpy-making? Exceedingly.

After, oh I don’t know…. 5 minutes of trying, I give up and clamber out of bed, thoroughly bad-mooded for the day. I wash the mask up, in an effort to have cleared whatever the problem is for tonight, and sit myself quietly on the sofa to start reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which I’ve finally wrestled from K and am keen to get through before having the whole story spoiled for me by people who’ve seen the movie.

Bizarrely, all the time I’m sitting reading, I’m perfectly awake and alert, despite having had not enough sleep and being beside-myself with tiredness when I’d gone back to bed. As soon as I got up from my perch, however – to make tea, to fetch things, to do anything at all, really – I was exhausted. My chest was heaving, my legs felt like lead and my eyes couldn’t have been heavier if they’d entered a Weight Watchers programme and won the prize for world’s worst dieter by gaining their own body-weight three times over.

I was not a happy bunny.

By the time K got up I was happily reading away, but ready for some morning physio, which is never fun at the best of times but when you’re tired it becomes a peculiar kind of torture – long, drawn out, unpleasant, occasionally painful, sometimes exhausting, often breathless and very, very hot (this morning, anyway). Needless to say I ended in a mildly worse mood than I start – impressive, huh?

I did manage to lever myself into a bath and chill out for a fraction of an hour before throwing some clothes on and getting ready to head off to Oxford, only to be phoned and told that the physio I was supposed to be seeing had broken her tooth and wouldn’t be able to see me today, so could I come Wednesday instead? Of course, I said. Why not?

But here’s the weird thing: having not gone to Oxford, which I took to be a blessing on account of my overwhelming tiredness anyhow, my body then decided that actually, it was feeling pretty happy and perky. After 5 hours semi-sleep, a 6.30am start, a morning of trial after mood-blackening trial, I found myself suddenly feeling an urge to sit at my keyboard and write – to carry on with my screenplay with which I have been having so many recent tussles. (For “tussles”, read: “hit a structural bump which sapped all creativity and forward-momentum and left a big black mark against my 5-page-per-day copy book for the last month or so”)

So all afternoon I’ve been beavering away on my screenplay without so much as a care in the world, pausing only for the occasional break for food, water or the odd episode of Lost (just keeps getting better).

I have no idea what my brain is doing with itself, nor what my body is up to at the moment. My chest feels like it’s improving, but my sleep certainly isn’t. My mind is lost in a mire of lethargy which saps any mental strength and positivity right out of it, whilst still apparently providing me with enough drip-fed muse to be able to carry on doing the kind of creative writing which is usually the first thing to desert me when I’m feeling rubbish.

Literally nothing about this day is making any sense to me right now. But I guess that’s just because I’m tired. Can you tell?

Strangely for someone with the aerobic capacity of a small field mouse, I find reading sports books particularly fascinating and inspiring.

I don’t know if it’s the thought of hopefully one day being able to push myself physically in the ways I read of others doing, or if it’s precisely because I have no idea what it feels like to push you body to its limits in those ways.

One of my favourite books is Matthew Pinsent’s Lifetime in a Race, which is not only really well written and engaging but also brilliantly descriptive of the punishment Olympic sportsmen and women put their bodies through.  Similarly, I enjoyed Paula Radcliffe’s book and others too.

Recently, as you may have read here, I picked up Lance Armstrong’s book It’s Not About the Bike, the story of his struggle with cancer and eventual comeback and first ever Tour de France victory, a feat he would go on to repeat a further, record-breaking 6 times.  It’s a fabulous book, just as fascinating and inspiring as I’d heard it was.

What intrigued me about it was how interesting it was from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about and has no interest in cycling as a sport.  Despite numerous recommendations I had always sort of ignored the book before on the basis that, not being a follower of the sport, the book wouldn’t interest me.  It turns out to be much more than a cycling book, though, and it tells stories with a rare perspective and wonderful fighting spirit that I think many people with critical illnesses often share.

More than that, though, it actually got me interested in cycling.  So much so that in the spirit of trying to find more books to inspire me on my mini-quest for mini-fitness I picked up a copy of a book called Inside the Postal Bus by a guy called Michael Barry.

There were a few reasons I chose this out of all the books lining the sports section of Borders when I was browsing.  The main one, though, was the promise from the blurb of the book to get an insight into how a cycling team operates within the Tour de France itself – how the other riders in a team work to support the lead rider in his bid to victory.

The book covers the 2004 racing season from Barry’s perspective as a rider on the same team as Lance Armstrong – the US Postal Racing Team, named for their sponsors, the US Postal Service – riding in the races with him and on their “tour bus” between events and stages, the titular Postal Bus.

The blurb itself proclaims: “Journey across Europe with US Postal – from the first workouts in the winter to the intense intra-squad competition to make the Tour de France team selection.”  It tells us Barry had “The hardest job in sports: riding for Lance Armstrong in pursuit of a Tour de France victory.”

What a brilliant idea for a book I thought – cycling from the perspective of a regular athlete, rather than from the point of view of something of a super-human success story.  I was really interested to find out what it was like for a semi-mortal – and the rest of a winning team – to go through the rigours of such a massive event.

There is, however, one big flaw in the book, which I’ve just uncovered.

Ignoring the fact that the “intense intra-squad competition” promised in the blurb actually amounts to about 3 paragraphs telling us that since there are 20 riders in the squad, not all of them will make the 9-man Tour team – a pretty big fact to ignore, I know, but wait for it – and getting past the fact that it is actually quite sketchily written, with paragraphs that jump all over the place and often fail to hold a cohesive thread of thought (not something I can really complain about given the nature of my ramblings on here), there is one pretty major, single issue that stands out above all the rest.

Michael Barry didn’t ride in the 2004 Tour de France.

He wasn’t injured, he didn’t crash, he wasn’t taken ill.  He didn’t make the team.

The publishers – in their infinite wisdom – commissioned a book (in 2005, no less), one third of which concerns the 2004 Tour de France and Lance Armstrong’s record-breaking 6th victory, from a rider who spent the 3 weeks of the Tour watching it from his home in Spain in his boxer shorts.

He even say it himself – he watched in his underwear, on the telly.

Just how much insight did they expect him to be able to give to the goings on in the tour party?  Honestly, it’s not hard.  I know nothing about cycling save for what I’ve read in Lance’s two books and the first third of this one, but I could tell you just as much about the 2004 Tour if you gave me the broadcast tapes and let me catch up.

His analysis of the race as it unfolds amounts to, “They looked really tired after that stage, which was really long.  I think that the long stage made them really tired.  Actually, I spoke to one of them and they said they were all really tired because the stage had been really long.”

The mind boggles.

So, if you want to read an interesting book about cycling, buy It’s Not About the Bike or Every Second Counts – not only inspirational, but interesting too.  If you want to stop in your tracks halfway through a book and stare at the wall thinking, “What the….?”, go for Inside the Postal Bus, by Michael Barry.  Who wasn’t.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if I’m going to be sitting around on my rump for the greater part of the passing days, then I might at least put the working parts of my body to good use and exercise my eyes and brain by learning some new stuff.

So in a spirit of adventure, I have embarked upon devouring the full 800-odd closely-typed pages of a biography of Churchill written by a man so famous that his name eludes me and shall continue to do until I clamber into bed this evening, seeing as I’m not inclined to rise myself from my typing post to go and check it now.

(The thought has just occurred to me that I could check the author’s name on Amazon, and even provide a link to said biography, save for the very important fact that it would interrupt my flow and my stream-of-consciousness would become merely a trickle.)

It’s heavy going, for sure, and I’m only managing about a chapter a day – any more and I don’t think I’d take any of it on board – but it’s fascinating stuff.  He was quite an impressive bloke that Churchill, not just bowler hats and cigars, you know.

I’m also working my way through the Alastair Campbell Diaries, which are just as fascinating, albeit in a very different way.  They’re much more easy to read and digest, too and being in daily-diary format (my personal preference for historical/biographic material) are much easier to pick up and put down.

I say easier to pick up, actually they’re mildly hard since they’re about the same numberr of pages, but in hardback not softcover, making Alastair Campbell more weighty than Churchill and I bet that’s not something oft said.

Given the political bent to my current reading, I have developed something of an obsession with it over the past few weeks and have additionally to my real-world reading, spent a lot of today online learning all about the parliamentary process and goings on in the Houses of Parliament.

They say you learn something new everyday, which is undoubtedly true, but by my judgement, I can after today go for the next eight and a half weeks without learning a thing and still hit my average for the quarter.

Other than that, I’ve not done much today.  Harefield tomorrow – I’m going to lobby them with my new-found political powers to bump me up to the top of the list and get my butt-sittery days behind me.