Posts Tagged ‘harrogate’

As the cycling world championships were just up the road in Harrogate, we hopped on the train to go watch the elite men’s time trial.

Time trials are quite good for spectators because they release the riders at one-minute intervals. In contrast, in standard road races, the peloton rides together, so you have to get there in plenty of time, they all come through at once and then they are gone.

I’m doing this new thing where I try to enjoy my life, rather than create a photographic record of it, which meant I was shotting on a little GoPro, rather than my massive DSLR and f2.8 superlens. The pictures were predictably mediocre, but it taught me to use burst mode on the GoPro.

For week three of our swimming tour, we drove up to Harrogate to visit The Hydro.

Changing facilities were okay. It’s all one big mixed changing room with individual cubicles. This made it quite difficult to get Venla changed as we had to use a changing table, which is complicated when everyone is wet.

The pool itself very good. The main pool actually has a deep end. It claims to be 1.8 metres deep, but my measurement put it at about 1.7 metres. They had three swim lanes as well as a general area.

The children’s pool was very warm and had a slight gradient, too. In the shallow end, I could sit on the bottom while holding Venla. There were lots of toys and floats about. Venla really enjoyed the watering cans.

They have a diving pool, too.

The “session” was just general swimming all morning. This was great as it meant we did not have to be there for a specific time or get kicked out.

The viewing area is much nicer than other pools. They have a cafe that serves a good range of hot food including breakfast and main meals, and you can sit inside or pool side. It is cash only, though.

A few years ago, while I was working up in Harrogate, my friend Alan and I refined the art of pub lunch. At Buzz, Jason and I achieved pub week, which was no mean feet. However, we could only dream of the system Alan and I put in place. Sometimes with other colleagues, sometimes not, we got it down to a schedule.

This went on for months. We managed two team lunches in my current team this week. That was great, but I can only dream of the glory days…

I have been working with a client based on Harrogate for the past few months.

Actually, I have been driving up there for over a year now. Previously I was working with a client two days a week, which was fine as I was able to drive in early and miss the traffic. It is a very pleasant drive when you do that: countryside abounds.

However, having taken on a new client, it has been more appropriate to be there standard office hours. This quickly introduced the misery of the commute. Especially as most of it has been done in the dark.

If you leave Leeds at 7am, you can arrive in Harrogate at 7:30am. If you want to be there for 9am though, you need to set off at 8am. It brings out the worst in human behaviour too. People using the right lane to avoid the queue, and then going straight on at the roundabout. It’s usually an Audi, and such drivers are worst than child molesters.

Thus I am looking forward to avoiding the daily commute, at least for a short while.

On Thursday we headed over to see Stewart Lee in Harrogate.

The show was opened by Simon Munnery who I have heard twice before – he opened for Stewart Lee last time I went to see him and spoke at the Enquiry conference as well. He was good as ever but doing the almost exact same set as twice before I kind of new which jokes were coming.

Stewart’s set was good, there were some classic moments, but he was trying out new material and so it really didn’t build like his previous show did and while there were some very funny parts, I really felt it didn’t match up to the standard set in York.

It did seem quite a networking event though – I ran into Mike from work who had managed to get a ticket at the last minute, David who I used to work with and Professor Ian Cram who is coming to speak to Atheist Society on Tuesday.