15,000 miles

I did a 16-mile walk yesterday, taking in Hengistbury Head and the coastline west to Bournemouth. It was a cold day, but there was no sign of the snow that had bedevilled much of the country. There were some great views from the cliffs in the morning, before the skies slowly clouded over.

The big news is this: as of yesterday, I have walked 15,000 miles since I started logging my walks in 1999.

I had expected to feel really exhilarated, as I did when I reached 10,000 miles. Instead I feel strangely numb. There are so many walks remaining to be done, and so many experiences to be had. I can't wait.

Cold house

We have lived in this house for a little over two years, and are just entering our third winter. It is a three-bedroom end-of-terrace house, built in the 1980s. Yet for some reason it is by far the coldest house that I have ever lived in.

The strange thing is that the house is also quite cold even on a still summer's day, with no breeze to create draughts. It feels like the interior of the house is a constant three or four degrees cooler than the exterior in summer. Perhaps we are haunted with shy ghosts whose only pathetic gift is to reduce the temperature.

In summer this is quite nice; in winter it is highly annoying.

We have tried all of the obvious things: we shut all the ventilation vents over the windows in October, and put the heating on timed. Yet whatever heat we have soon leaks out. The loft is well insulated, and it seems to be well constructed and has been well maintained over the years.

One problems are with the patio doors, through which a slight draught constantly flows when there is a breeze. All the windows are double glazed, yet it seems to have little or no effect. Another problem in the bedrooms is that the radiators are placed directly under the windows, meaning that the overhanging curtains divert some of the heat towards the window and away from the room.

We are both really fed up with this. If we owned the house, then we would consider giving it a firm makeover and try to upgrade the insulation and windows; unfortunately we rent, so that option is not open to us.

We will shiver again through this winter.

Slideshows

We have just spent a questionably pleasant hour in the company of some friends (the friends being pleasant, the hour questionably so).

Three of the girls had just been on holiday to somewhere that is warm and hot in November. The name escapes me, but I am sure that it was not Skegness. Most of the resultant stories involved drinking copious amounts of sangria and staggering around. In short, they really enjoyed themselves. I have no problem with that; indeed, it was great to see them so enlivened after their trip. What annoyed me were the photographs.

There is something sordid about showing holiday snaps to a captive audience. It is like saying: "We were getting as pissed as fart beside a pool whilst you were all working your arses off. Ha ha ha." The three girls studied the photographs and chatted amongst themselves as the rest of the group politely studied them.

A few photos were passed around amongst the group: x and y pissed at the karaoke; y and z pissed by the pool; y on the toilet (I can only assume pissed as well as pi**ing). It was obvious that they were having a whale of a time, but pictures of a party lose a certain something - the heady fumes of alcohol, perhaps.

Then it got worse. I can cope with pictures being passed around showing a load of drunken women - stare at each one for the bare minimum of time and then pass them on to the next person, making sure you say something suitably erudite and incisive about at least one to show that you were paying attention. I am used to this; I can handle it.

Then a laptop was placed on the table, and I watched with horror as more photographs were shown. Another picture of y and z pissed at the pool; another picture of a tropical plant shot at a perfect skewed angle, as if sangria had allowed the photographer to create a perfect arty shot. More and more photographs were shown, each soon covering the same ground as earlier ones.

This is where the Internet comes in useful. It is simplicity itself to create an online web album, using Picassa or one of the many alternatives. Simple upload them, add captions and send them out to everyone who thinks they might be interested. They can then peruse as many or as few as they want.

For God's sake, let's end the hell of sharing photos in pubs.

WikiLeaks

Rumours are coming out that WikiLeaks is going to publish yet more documents in the near future - allegedly they comprise of two million diplomatic wire messages between US embassies and the State Department.

The Government is putting a DA-notice on the data, meaning that British publications will not be able to publish details of the leak. It will be difficult to see how they think this will work as the WikiLeaks data will be available throughout the world. As the Spycatcher debacle showed, DA-notices are increasingly inapplicable in the modern world, where servers can be placed anywhere.

This presents many problems. Governments will have an obvious wish to keep embarrassing data secret, and whistle blowers have an obvious role in getting the truth out - the MP's expenses being a classic case to point. However, such data is also often complex to understand, and is often open to misinterpretation by non-experts.

But WikiLeaks is going far too far. Their previous large releases - 'Collateral murder', 'Iraq War Logs' and 'Afghan War Diary' are widely believed to have included information that put both soldiers and civilians in danger. WikiLeaks claim to have redacted all such data from the release, but that is widely disbelieved. Many think that their parsing was done in chunks - they put similar documents together, inspected a few, and if they saw things they did not want releasing, then they did not release the entire batch. Otherwise, the documents were released. The problems with this are obvious.

Why batch the data. From Wikipedia:

According to statements by Assange in 2010, submitted documents are vetted by a group of five reviewers, with expertise in different fields such as language or programming, who also investigate the background of the leaker if his or her identity is known. In that group, Assange has the final decision about the assessment of a document.

The 'Iraq War Logs' comprised 400,000 documents. It would take years for just five people to go through this data. Say you can parse one document a minute: that means, with a ten-hour day, the five reviewers can do 3,000 documents a day. Given these very liberal constraints, it would have taken them over100 days to check and redact all the documents. In reality, it would have been much more.


Therefore WikiLeaks rely on what they call 'volunteer journalists'. Note the word 'volunteer': the more people you have, the more you require rules, procedures, checks and balances to ensure that all the volunteers are working to the same standard. It also begs the question about whether the volunteers are qualified to make such judgements. The release of names of soldiers along with Iraqi and Afghan collaborators led Amnesty and others to make official complaints to WikiLeaks.


The amount of data is massive. The Telegraph studied the MP expenses data and analysed it, looking for the juicy stories and the best way of releasing the information to keep the story going (and their circulation up). They parsed the data and published the things that were, in their opinion, in the public interest. These made and shaped the story, and they did not do too bad a job of it.

Secondly, this data is all about the US. WikiLeaks has published interesting data from other countries (for instance Peruvian oil and Scientology), but this year they have been concentrating on the US. It would be nice if they published similar data from (say) North Korea, Russia, China, Burma, etc. It is increasingly looking like an organisation that is solely concentrating on the US state.

These new documents allegedly number 2,000,000 documents. There is no way that they have adequately parsed these to check that it is wise or moral for them to be released. And that is exceptionally worrying.

Of course, the US has an obvious problem with keeping their data secret, but that does not excuse WikiLeaks' behaviour. Even one WikiLeaks' founders is deeply critical of the organisation.

WikiLeaks could be a force for good in the world. Instead, I fear it is becoming a force of evil.

Spiral of mistakes

There is an interesting story on Grough about two men who spent the night on Kinder after having got lost.

I used to go diving, and was a member of the British Sub-Aqua Club. Every month the club magazine, Dive, would contain a one-page story about a diving incident, usually from the first-person perspective. It always made interesting reading, as it told you about the mistakes other people made, and how they managed (or sometimes not) to recover the situation.

It is a shame that walking magazines do not do something similar. Perhaps Dive can get away with it because, whilst scuba is an inherently dangerous activity, walking is most certainly not. When diving it is always important to learn from other people's mistakes. The motto 'plan the dive, dive the plan' has no walking equivalent.

The problem is that when things start going wrong, they often continue going wrong. The more things that go wrong, the harder it is to correct all of them. This is sometimes referred to as a 'spiral of mistakes'. A mistake makes it easier for another mistake to happen; the more mistakes you make, the more panicked and more liable to make mistakes you are. The sooner you correct the problems, the easier it is to recover.

In this case, the men made several mistakes, all of which are utterly understandable. They got lost on Kinder Scout, and allowed themselves to get benighted. They did not call out mountain rescue immediately, before it got dark.

On the other hand:

• They had a bivvy with them, which protected them from the worst of the weather;
• When they realised that they could not get off the hill the next morning, they called for help (presumably using a mobile).
• It seems like they were properly equipped for the weather.

How could they have improved their situation? Well, I assume that they did not have a working GPS with them. This would have helped them not get lost in the first place. At the very least it would have given the rescue services their exact position. Perhaps, if heavy rain was forecast, they should have considered not starting the walk, or cutting it short.

I do not mean this in any way to be a criticism of them: "there but for the grace of God, go I". British weather is notoriously changeable, and a good day on the hills can rapidly descend into absolute hell.  I had a minor fall off a mountain in Scotland years ago, and, although I emerged relatively unscathed, it taught me a respect (i.e. healthy fear) of the hills.

Yet I undoubtedly take risks. Mostly I walk alone, and although my recent walks have all been in the south of England, they can be surprisingly remote. I would undoubtedly be in trouble if I had a fall and got knocked unconscious, but that is a calculated risk that I am prepared to take.

I do take precautions: even on day walks I often take a map (usually a 1:50,000 OS Map, and a computer print out of the route I am walking), a whistle, a plastic bivvy bag, a GPS, spare batteries, a mobile and a basic medical kit with bandages and plasters. This means that my daysack is always rather large, but I see myself as being able to get out of many sorts of problems with these items. Additionally, I try to carry enough money for a taxi and/or a B&B.

Of course, things can still go wrong. I can only hope that, like these gentlemen, I have enough kit with me to help myself get rescued, even if I had to spend a cold and uncomfortable night on the hills.

Carto-origami

I propose a new Olympic sport, one which requires strength, manual dexterity and cunning. It combines an ancient Japanese art with the beautiful British countryside. And I call it 'carto-origami'.

I first devised the sport on a walk in the White Peak. The 1:25,000 Outdoor Leisure map for the area is double-sided; when you go past a certain point, you have to unfold the whole thing and double it back on itself to be able to read the other side. This is always a pain, and doubly so in wet and windy weather.

So my sport is as follows: give competitors a White Peak map, and take them to a top of a blustery hill; Chrome Hill would do, or perhaps Stanage Edge in a brisk easterly. They are timed to see how long it takes them to unfold and fold the map in increasingly wet and windy conditions. Points are taken off for rips and tears on the map. Points are added if your map ends up in an adjoining county.

Perhaps then the Ordnance Survey would realise that double-sided maps are evil.

The Irish Economy

The bail-out of the Irish economy is to be welcomed, at least for the moment. However, there are worries to be had over the way the bail-out will effect the other Euro-zone countries that have problems, in particular Portugal and Spain.

It is vital to remember the root cause of the Irish problem. The excellent ghostestates.com displays the half-built and unsold residential and industrial complexes on a Google map. You can click on one of the sites and use Google Streetview to drive around the abandoned developments. In some cases they make quite eerie spectacles.

Cuilin on the west coast is a case in point - half-built bare-block houses in a beautiful, remote location, yet with none of the ephemera of building around them - no scaffolding, diggers, cabins, supplies or people makes it appear a curiously apocalyptical world. In some, you see brand-new houses right alongside others that have been half-built and abandoned, the two separated by small wooden fences and a gulf of time and money. Sometimes the complete houses are obviously empty and unloved.

Someone had to pay for these developments, and it was the banks. The reason the developments were started was because everyone thought that they would make vast amounts of money from them as house prices rose unsustainably.

Greed mucked up the Irish economy. It is a salutatory lesson.