Black Tower, Orford Ness

I’ve tried to go to Orford Ness for a few years now. It’s where all the British atomic weapons research was conducted through and beyond the Second World War.

The Ness itself is a spit of land off the Suffolk Coast, and despite the fact it’s still peppered with unexploded bombs lingering just below the surface, it’s now owned by the National Trust. You get there by boat – the grandly named Orford Ness Ferry – which is just a small wooden thing with no roof and benches around the edge for you to sit on. It takes 12 people at a time, and the driver, a man who stands at the back and manoeuvres the steering stick with his bum as he sips coffee, makes sure you’re positioned equally on both sides so it doesn’t tip over.

It takes just a few minutes to get to the other side, where you’re met by a guide who hands out maps and sends you on your way. He tells you which bits you can walk on, where you have to keep clear, and what would happen if you strayed (broken legs and emergency evacuations were promised).

Bomb casing, Orford Ness

The whole place is utterly deserted, but for the slowly decaying military buildings. Natrure is slowly taking over, pushing its way through broken window panes and creeping over the edges of the roads. It seems to be well cared for, but while some of the buildings are set out with small displays – really just laminated papers and photos pinned to the walls – others are falling into disrepair. You can’t go in the old bombing range buildings, but you can climb on top of the bomb balistics building, in which they would measure the stresses on Britain’s first test fleet of nuclear weapons as they were dropped on the land all around. You can’t walk through the centrifuge buildings (although you can look at them through an iron gate), but you can go inside the now stripped-bare control room.

Lighthouse, Orford Ness

It’s a fascinating place to visit, and somewhere you could easily spend a whole day. There is so much military debris – much of it totally unidentifiable – half burried or just sitting out in the open. One end of the spit, which is out of bounds at this time of year, is the site of the ultra-secret Cobra Mist project, where Britain and America worked on a radar system that would enable them to see over the horizon. They set yp an enormous array of masts, and strung aerials between them. About the size of a small housing development, this massive construction was only ever moderately successful, and was eventually abandoned. The BBC now owns it, and uses the masts and aerials to broadcast the World Service to Eastern Europe.

Wire rolls, Orford Ness

I was there for about three hours, having assumed I’d need only an hour, but I could so easily have spent double that time. There is a strange, desolate beauty to the place, and a real feeling that you are somewhere you shouldn’t be. This was one of the most secretive, hidden places in Britain for several decades, and we’ll probably never know about all of the things that were done here. It was a genius location, too. Orford itself is a small village, so it would be easy to monitor everyone who came near and outsiders would be quickly noticed. Beyond the village is a wide belt of forest and scrubland that separates it from the rest of the county, so few people would stumble upon it by chance.

As so I imagine I’ll be heading back. Probably in August, when you can get closer to the Cobra Mist site, and when the radar stations might be open. They very occasionally open up the bomb shelters, too, but if you want to go into them you have to be accompanied, which I think means joining an organised tour.

They do give you a lot of freedom there, though. There is nobody to accompany you, and it would be easy to head off the marked tracks and wander through the more dangerous areas without being seen. You could, conceivably, hide out there for some time, but as they check you onto and off it with a named and numbered ticket system it would be immediately obvious you’d not made it back to the mainland.

Inside a building at Orford Ness

I was back on the mainland by 15h, so drove along the coast to Thorpeness, and then on to Sizewell Beach, a surprisingly pleasant, if pebbly beach backing on to a long narrow heath that seperates it from Sizewell nuclear power station. It’s an immense building, and can be quite noisy at times, perhaps when Corronation Street comes on and everyone switches on the TV.

In all, a fantastic day. Lots of walking, and quite tiring, but very interesting, and fantastic weather – a short shower aside. If it wasn’t so close to London, I think I could quite happily live on the Suffolk coast.

Sizewell Beach

It’s not only the runners that get worn out

The streets of London are bathed in Lucozade tonight, in the aftermath of the Marathon. I headed up with the fair-weather commuters and made came in Canada Square so I could watch the runners plod through Docklands.

It’s a couple of years since I last did the marathon, and I’d forgotten how quickly they’re often still going at the 19 mile mark, and was impressed that even the people in fancy dress seemed to be speeding along. The rain probably helped – apart from the man running on behalf of Water Aid. He had a bucket on his head, which was very effectively collecting the rain, getting heaver and heavier as he ran. The irony probably wasn’t lost on him.

It can be quite risky for the runners. I was watching from one of the drinks stations, where sponsored kids and fatties stand handing out isotonic water. Each runner seems to grab one, take a single gulp and then throw it down on the floor. Terrible for anyone following on in a racing wheelchair, although in fairness the only accident I saw (barring the man who’d not made it to the loo in time and so had brown-streaked legs) was a guy slipping over onto his back and tearing open his knee.

Lots of bloodied t-shirts, too, from those suffering from joggers’ nipple, which looked particularly nasty.

A man on a horse on a bike

I have great admiration for anyone who can make their way around a whole marathon, whether they run it or walk it, but I can’t help thinking that if I ran it myself I’d want to make sure I finished before the first runner in fancy dress. It must be hard enough running it in a singlet, but knowing that someone else managed to do it dressed as a banana on ice skates with a 50-gallon water butt on their head managed to finish between you did must be humiliating in the extreme.

I tubed up to Finsbury Park at 13h to meet with Murat, who turned out to have overslept, giving me time to walk around investigating the strange little shops around there. I saw far more vegetables that I’d never seen before than I could have named.

When he arrived, we walked the Northern Heights, a route that takes you down a disused railway line as far as Alexandra Palace. You can see how it got its name. You climb as you walk through Finsbury Park, and never seem to go down again. Pretty soon you’re way up above the houses, looking down into their gardens.

You’d never believe you were still in London. It’s so quiet and green (and in places almost ankle-deep in mud) and all the way along you are bombarded by a wonderful collection of smells, of the woody, watery, fresh from the rain variety. The trees were alive with birds, and we were followed a little way by a robin, which hopped along a disused platform beside us. I explained to Murat what it was, as he’d never realised that Robin and Red Breast were the same thing. Then he put me to shame with my knowledge of English literature. He may be half-Turkish, half-French, and have grown up just outside Lyon, but he is far wider-read than I am.

It took us about two and a half hours to reach Alexandria Palace, allowing for time to stop and have a drink in a smelly pub along the way, and we then walked around the edge, looking at the BBC mast still on top of the older, undamaged section of the building, which wasn’t destroyed by fire, from which the world’s first so-called high definition TV pictures were broadcast in 1936. Our current concept of what high definition means is, I’m sure, somewhat different, but it retains a rightful place in history, and the view out across the city is amazing, even under a drizzly sky.

With darker clouds rolling in, we turned around and started to walk back, and took the tube from Highgate back to Kings Cross where we went out separate ways. It’s been a weekend of walking for me – a long stride out across the fields yesterday, and the marathon then the Heights today – and I was glad of a seat on the train home. The stupid fair-weather commuters, who had been literally screaming in panic of being crushed on the busy tube (clearly never been on a Central Line rush hour train) and almost falling over every time we pulled out of a platform as though they didn’t realise movement generally follows the closing of the doors, were long gone, leaving the trains blissfully empty for those who know how to use them.

We’re one man down as Chris of the Brennan left MacUser, after three and a half years of playing darts in the postroom writing about Macs. Apparently, on my first day as editor, he was skulking down the lab as I did my initial walk around talking to everyone about what they did on the magazine. I was finished by the time he reappeared, and apparently got called off into some meeting or other. He assumed, wrongly, that it meant he was to be the first victim of the swinging axe.

So it was that we’ve spend the last two years sitting within a couple of desks of each other, and that last night we decamped to the pub to bid him farewell.

A cold sweat, as Chris remembers he’s moving to Leeds

Tim quite forgets himself amid all the excitement and gropes Dave’s bum

Only Dave knows what Paul is drawing until…

…all is revealed. He assures us it’s very accurate.

Pio and Pippa try to keep warm

Julian seems blissfully unaware of how much Chris appreciates all he’s done for him

Aston gives Julian some hair advice

I’ve been playing around with Google Calendar these last few days, and I’ve been quite impressed. It looks good, it imported my iCal calendar without any problems (although I’ve not yet separated out my individual offline calendars into individual calendars in Google Calendar) and it has all the friendly, easy to use, twiddly bits you’d expect of a Google product.

However, it’s not entirely Mac friendly. That’s not surprising, considering how long it took it to get Google Earth out on the Mac, but this is a purely online, browser-based offering, so you’d think the Googleplex would be able to roll it out for all browsers at once (although they didn’t with Gmail).

As such, it’s not happy with Safari; not necessarily a problem, since I use Firefox by default, both on the Mac and my PC. I decided to ignore the Safari warning, though, and try it out, only to be prompted with this enormous error message. It’s so long it doesn’t even for in a standard OS X alert window, and the OK button overlays part of it.

And it you’re wondering why it took me so long to get around to typing that last, finally relevant sentence, it was because I needed to make the entry this long so that the right-aligned error box didn’t mess up the entries below. That’s how long it is.

I looked up some books about the Coast to Coast walk on Amazon. Top hit? 101 Things to do with a Slow Cooker. Unless that’s because you could walk the whole route in the amount of time it takes to cook a chicken, I don’t immediately see the relevance.

The illustration on our mailbox page is always a highlight of every issue. I’ve never met Chris, who draws them, but he always does a good job of bringing a bit of humour to the page. And next issue, it’ll be Kenny and me who are the subjects, divining Apple’s future moves with the help of our tea leaves. I’m on the left, Kenny’s on the right.

Of all the pictures that have been drawn of me, I think this is one of the ones with which I’m most pleased.

It’s Easter weekend and it’s spring, so what better way to spend the Easter weekend than out and about enjoying the countryside? So, I travelled up to London and joined 30 other walkers on the second coach of the train to Robertsbridge, a little nowhere town in Sussex. The ticket office at Charring Cross clearly had very fragile windows.

It took forever to get down there. It was a slow service that seemed to stop everywhere, and we didn’t arrive until 11.30. The going was pretty good before lunch. We walked for an hour and a half through fairly firm around, up and down hills and across farmland where the crops – oilseed rape – were still low enough to brush your knees and get no higher. As we ate, though, having all taken off our shoes and left them outside the pub on the pavement, the rain started to come down.

It was just spitting at first, but within the hour it had turned into proper rain, and we had to pad out on the wet street in our socks to retrieve our shoes and slip into our coats. It kept that up for the rest of the day.

That really didn’t matter, though. We were all well wrapped up, and the rain kept us cool, but it did make the ground very slippery. You could feel the mud sucking at your boots as you walked through the wetter bits, and it got precarious as we walked along a sleep, sloping bank along the edge of a river, but apart from some slipping here and there nobody fell in.

The ultimate goal was Bodiam Castle, which we got to the long way round for a 12-mile round trip, and although the route we were following was well described, there was a certain amount of dithering on top of a hill when it looked like we’d taken a wrong turn somewhere a way back. Fortunately someone struck out ahead, and like the sheep all around us (and the lambs they’d all recently spawned), we followed on through a vineyard and the moated castle opened up below us.

We scooted down the hill and took refuge in the coffee shop, sheltering from the rain, eating scones and drinking tea, but after half an hour had to head back out into the rain and walk along a treacherous riverbank towards the station. We all made it, eventually, although there was one dodgy moment when someone almost slid down into the muddy river, and we had to pass by the skeleton of what looked like a sheep, picked totally clean by some scavenger or other.

We just missed the train, though, and being that far out of London it was an hour until the next one; time we spent in a pub, stroking the cat that slept on the bar, and the dogs that ran around our feet.

The weather really didn’t matter, all things considered. We all seemed to have enjoyed ourselves, and the chatty journey home seemed to pass much quicker than the stop-stop-stop route down.

I wonder what they’re trying to tell you with this sign on the train. Are they worried you might get some piercings trapped?

Tomorrow, I suspect, my stiff legs will have rusted into position.

One of the RSS feeds I subscribe to is the BBCF log of film classifications. It gives you a heads-up on films heading this way, and a brief run down of why the board decided they should be suitable for certain types of viewer.

The site also has a run down of stats going right back to 1914: that’s 92 years of British film history full of quirky, interesting facts. Like, for example, the BBFC only classified 7 films in 1920, but at the turn of the next decade went from scrutinising 68 in 1930 to a massive 1,308 in 1931.

Its busiest year was 1951 when it classified 1,567 films, after which British cinema releases went into a long, slow decline, going as low as 344 in 1987. That’s not 344 British films: it’s 344 films total – from all around the world – classified for cinema exhibition. The graph below shows the number of films released in British cinemas and the number to which the BBFC made cuts.

Those stats are most interesting, though, when you look at the number that have been cut as a percentage of of the total number released. The most lenient year of recent times was 2004, when five films – 0.9% of the total number released – were snipped. So far in 2006, of the 135 films assessed to date, 1.5% – two films – have been censored.

That’s very lenient when you compare it to the rash of puritanical censorship in the fifties, early sixties and mid seventies. In the latter it reached its peak with over a third of all films released in 1974 (240 out of 708) requiring some cuts before being shown in public.

I went to Upminster for the first time in about 12 years tonight. It’s traditional that every Good Friday we all get together for dinner in a restaurant of a different nationality. Having exhausted Chinese and Indian years ago, we spent last Good Friday eating Polish food, and tonight munching Greek.

Loads of it. We could have managed with about a third of what was delivered, but it tasted fantastic. Trout with almonds for me, and a year’s supply of brocolli. Mark slipped off the vegetarian bandwagon again, which seems to happen every time I go out with him, and he happily ate his way through an enormous mousakka, in much the same way as he’ll forget about his ethical diet every time there’s duck on the menu.

Fortunately I could tuck in without any feelings of guilt having spent all afternoon walking around the fields with my camera, although by the time I stood up from the table I could feel my legs getting tight, and I suspect that by tomorrow they’ll be quite achey, which is not a good thing: I’ve signed up for an 11.6 mile walk on the South Downs, so I suspect I’ll be bed-ridden by Saturday night.

Upminster hadn’t changed, though, and the long wiggly road between there and Brentwood that takes you past the slaughter house where the national foot and mouth outbreak apparently started felt as familiar as it would have done if I’d driven down it just last week. There was a time, back in my teens, that I diligently drove that path every day, particularly when I was working at Link FM and it was the shortest route between there and home.

Yes. It’s a sweet. Where Keith gets them from (and why), I don’t know. We gave it to Aston to eat, but even he couldn’t manage more than a mouthful.