Russell Casse

Well, after a couple of weeks away, I'm back on the net. My first "proper" holiday - i.e. excluding those odd weekends away - in about two years was spent on a canalboat travelling from Stockport down to Llangollen and back. No email, no web, no computers, no Phoenix, no hockey, no comedy, no nothing for the best part of a fortnight.

Bliss.

And with the canals snaking their way through the countryside, most of the time was spent well out of range of noisy traffic and best of all, no chance of a decent signal for the mobile. Despite being a geek, I am somewhat ambivalent towards the old mobile. "But, I can get hold of you any time I want!" scream my friends... "Yes... and maybe I just don't want to be gotten hold of."

(Oddly enough, no signal in most places, but I once had a perfectly clear conversation halfway up Mount Snowdon.)

The highlight of the trip was a journey across the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. Pronounced remarkably like "Poxton Schulte", this spectacular feat of engineering takes the canal over the River Dee. 126 feet over it. And the best bit is, there is a trough for the boats with a walkway on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Thats right, about 6 inches of support ironwork, no railing, no net, no nothing. Straight down.

http://www.joe.shakespeare.btinternet.co.uk/llangollen.htm
http://www.chirk.com/aqueduct.html

Fantastic, in a terrifying kind of way. Especially when the current makes the boat bounce gently off the narrow side.

The other thing about being on a canalboat is that the pace (a whole 4mph on a good day) practically forces you to slow down and take it easy. I thought about tht what I did on the holiday, and the sum total appears to be "nothing much". Read one a half books (Michael Crichtons - "Congo", the half being Andrew Collins "Where Did It All Go Right?"). Sketched out the design for a bit of software and fleshed out the idea for a website. Wrote a lovely comedy routine with a couple of gags to die for. Did about 80-90 sets of locks. And er... thats about it.

Note the lack of Phoenix related thinking. I'd promised my girlfriend that I would try to switch off from the everyday maintenance/coding side of life. Of course, I couldn't stop completely, but just changed my thinking from "doing stuff" to "creating ideas". Had a bit of inspiration for next year - how about redoing the "Star Wars" crawl before the game that were so much fun?

"They came from a land of darkness to do battle with the Phoenix. A land of much wailing, where gangs of men would terrify newcomers with close harmony singing. Where technology would not work, and the natives spoke a language that was completely inpenetrable. A language that someone had stolen all the vowels from.

In other words... Wales."

I firmly believe I need to be forcibly dragged away - someone once described me as packing "52 weeks of fandom into a 36 week season" so when it comes to the end of May/June, I'm perfectly happy to just leave the sport alone for a while...

But only for about two weeks, maximum.