Weekend climbing

The writer halfway up "Ants in your Pants" (MVS 4b/Finnish 4+)

I have managed to go the whole of the last two whole weeks without climbing. I have survived but only just. Normal service was resumed today and Tony and I headed out to our secret crag from winter weekends past to do a climb I had cleaned earlier but hadn't had chance to lead yet. It went OK, but the entire forest floor was moving with with big ants and they seemed to be just as interested in going up the rock face as I was. Add to this the normal mid-summer mosquito swarms, and Tony faced a belay session down on the ground where his normally calm demeanor was tested to the max. Even now, 12 hours later, I keep thinking I have ants up my trousers. I would describe the route as a bit like Scavenger on the Gower, South Wales, but with more ants and less ocean.

We then went on to Luhti for some more routes. I had another go at a short, sharp overhanging crackline that I had cleaned and then failed on last year. I made better progress this year but still fell about halfway up. Tony then had a go, and having just come back from a two-week climbing holiday in Norway, powered through and on to the top. Nice climbing. The route was christened "Hooligan".

Heading north towards the light

It's fuzzy and out-of-focus on purpose. Honest. It's, you know, like art...

I've had writer's block for the last few weeks. I keep staring at my thesis, expecting suddenly to be hit a by a wave of inspiration on how to rewrite the first chapter in a way that actually creates some structural coherence for the rest of the endeavor. It hasn't happened. But this afternoon the first drips began finally. Not very impressive but perhaps like a tiny breach in a dyke, the drip will become a trickle, a trickle a stream, and then a torrent of social science brilliance will burst through and carry me, unstoppable, towards PhD success. Well, it's a nice thought anyway...

During all this time when I've been failing with the PhD I have been reading about many other more interesting things (Paul Berman's lengthy piece on Tariq Ramadan in the New Republic has grabbed my attention over recent days, although ultimately it's a bit disappointing. I'll get back to that later though), writing on different issues for work, going to meetings and seminars and all the normal stuff. But my thesis writing has been failing miserably, and making me very miserable as a result.

So when the trickle began I decided to stick with it and keep writing, the end result being I didn't leave work until 11.30 pm. Having had about three cups of coffee, a donut, a chocolate bar, a microwave curry and a can of Red Bull (note to self: I hate Red Bull - why do I buy it?) for my evening 'meal', I decided cycling home, as opposed to getting the bus, would burn some of the calories and counteract the unhealthy amounts of caffeine I had pumped into my blood stream over the preceding hours.

A new days begins at 21 kmph, somewhere in Helsinki Central Park.

There is something magic about Finnish summer nights that even a shit day in the office can't completely spoil, and 45 minutes of pedaling that sometimes can seem a chore was tonight, on empty roads and cycle-paths, a real joy. I chased a couple of the leggy, lolloping hares down cycle paths. They may be much bigger than their British bunny equivalents, but no less stupid - trying to outrun an oncoming car or bike rather than heading straight off the road as sensible creatures like a cat would. The air is cool but not cold. The sunset is the sunrise, a bold orange fire just below the northern horizon. I also ride northwards, through empty streets and quiet parks, chasing the skulking sun.

A very British bombing

I've just read an excellent article "My brother the bomber" in Prospect magazine. It is about Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the London bombers and takes a serious stab at explaining the sociology of the attacks. The author, Shiv Malik, deserves congratulations.

It was, it turns out, a very British bombing. Not because of British troops in Iraq; as Malik writes:

"Khan may have felt indignant about western foreign policy, as many anti-war campaigners do, but that wasn't the reason he led a cell of young men to kill themselves and 52 London commuters."

You could say it was more about who you marry, or that the bloke down the mosque was boring and couldn't speak English properly. It's about Barelvi traditionalism of the Kashmir colliding with Salafi* modernism of the internet on the back streets of Leeds. They wanted to be global jihadis, and indeed have become that in death - I'm sure they would have wet their pants with excitement at the idea of their deaths being lauded by Ayman al-Zawahiri. But what made them take that path is to be found more in Yorkshire than in al-Anbar or South Waziristan.

The depressing thing is how, in retrospect of course, it all makes sense. I remember taking a leaflet from the guys manning a stall of one of the Hizb ut-Tahrir affiliates/fronts outside the student union of my university in Manchester in maybe 2003. It was about resisting arranged marriage. Malik nails it by saying the Salafism is in effect "liberation theology" against the ultra-conservative traditions brought to the UK by the country-bumpkin Pakistani parents (again - that is the sociology, it's not just about immigrants being 'Pakistani' or 'Muslim', it is about the specific social, economic, and cultural situation that led to Pakistani emigration to Northern England three decades ago). The leaflet I took hits a tone somewhere between radical feminist pamphleteering, reactionary evangelicalism and a teenager whining "just leave me alone!" to his parents. I'm not sure if the fathers of modern Salafism would be delighted or horrified by this.

Obvious in retrospect... I interviewed a senior British counter-terrorism police officer recently - a fascinating couple of hours. He noted that in the aftermath of 9/11 the government hauled in a load of British imams and "community leaders" for a round-table to help them 'understand' al-Qaeda and, of course, they were all clueless - having basically no more idea about bin Laden than the rest of the country. I suggested that it was like asking your local vicar to help explain Timothy McVeigh, he laughed and agreed. But people like Olivier Roy had spotted it, even if he didn't layout the specific English/Pakistani dimension. And as Malik points out in the piece, people in Khan's community knew what was going on, but just thought they were angry young men mouthing off and who ultimately wouldn't really do anything.

But they did. They stepped across the line that divides the Salafi fundamentalist (who despite having, to my mind, a reactionary and intolerant theology remains peaceful) from the violent jihadi. It seems easily done in some cases, but many thousands of others stay resolutely on the legal side of that line. It's a hard distinction to see from the outside, but I know that at least parts of the police and security forces are trying to understand better where that line is, and how to keep angry young men, like Khan, on the right side of it.

*Malik uses the term Wahhabi in his piece instead; I thinks it's inaccurate but it is a rather complex and not very important point.

1000 kilometers and counting...

On the way into work today, I went past the 1000-kms-cycled-this-year mark. Little victories and all that. Actually I have done a bit more than that as I have been out on my road bikes a few times, but that is probably only another additional 100 kms or so, the one thousand is just commuting. I'm a bit behind schedule if I want to do more than 3000 this year although unsurprisingly I tend to do more kilometers in the summer than at the start or end of the year as the weather craps out. The "frostbite" incident of February now seems a long time ago; dehydration is the bigger danger with the good weather we have been having recently.

Another minor cycling milestone was last friday when on realizing I had a meeting at 9 am, not 9.30 am, I had to ride into work in a bit of panic. I made the meeting on time but had to apologize to our Indian guests for my slightly out-of-breath state. Yet the adrenaline also meant I improved my PB for my commute from 43:42 to 41:10. Hoo-har!

Advert or art?

High art on the terrace of my local kebab/pizza joint.

I love this picture so much. Just look how happy they are eating a kebab. Their clearly perfect marriage and lives are based upon the regular, sharing of a doner kebab. For me this goes far beyond the realm of competent advertising photography and into that of high art due to the complete cognitive dissonance resulting from the depicted kebab imagery, and the kebab imagery held within my mind and memory.

Happy, well-dressed, professional couples just do not belong to the sphere of the kebab shop. The kebab shop is for me (and I would hazard a guess at 95% of other Northern Europeans) forever associated with drunken, post-pub/club ambles home with friends through dark city streets. The kebab shop is always a harsh neon and fluorescent pool of light amongst the dinginess of the night, a place with the slight edginess of anywhere that causes different groups of drunk young men to congregate and attempt to queue. I can't believe that anyone really eats a doner without having had at least three pints first, and often considerably more. Revolving-dinosaur-legs are just not associated with the dining experience when good food is a central part of the evening.

I was on stag-party this weekend, more of which later probably, and of course a kebab was part of the evenings entertainment. Let me recommend "Punjab Kebab" (they have kebab in the Punjab?! The staff also looked oddly Turkish, rather than Punjabi, as well...) in Tampere, central Finland, for a fine kebab tasting like, well, pretty much every other kebab I've ever had in dozens of Kebab joints across northern Europe.

The gastronomic arts at their finest.

Check out the website of the company advertised in the original picture as well, my German isn't good enough to understand much but it is full of great photos making kebab meat manufacturing to look like as an efficient and sterile an industrial process as the German stereotypes would lead you to expect. The opening page picture is also a winner for kebab fans everywhere.

Midnight in the north

Midnight - well, almost - in Helsinki

Midsummer is not far away and there is no real night as a result. I snapped this picture on my laptop's built in camera in the garden. I'm not sure if laptop photo art is likely to take off - you feel a bit silly holding your computer up in the air even in the privacy of your own back yard.

I've just come back from the local bar with some neighbours - I'm trying to think of a punchline to "an Englishman, an Irishman and Turk walk into a suburban Finnish pub. It is run by a Bangladeshi..." but haven't come up with one so far. Perhaps it's not funny, it's just globalisation.

The social value of conscription

Conscription as integration? (photo from Helsingin Sanomat)

The seminar I attended last week was run by the Finnish National Defence University and was title "The Future of Armed Forces". There were some gradualist approaches to change put forward mainly by serving officers from various countries and some more radical approaches from the private and academic sectors. One speaker even suggested that in the modern world you don't really need armed forces, just a strong police and nuclear weapons - although his sentiment should be seen in the light of what happened forty years ago today: events that has left his country's military playing a quasi-policing role ever since and weakening them relative to their neighbours as a result.

But being in Finland, much discussion revolved around the value of conscription for modern armed forces. The Finnish defence establishment resolutely support the concept - at least in public - but I found the French experience far more convincing. If you want a modern, technologically advanced military, you need professionals, not kids doing six months before starting uni or college. France realised this after the first Gulf War where they had to sail their aircraft carrier to the Gulf with a skeleton crew after the president announced no conscript would be put in harms way, before promptly evacuating them from the ship as it headed south.

The argument is often put forward that conscription leads to social cohesion: Finnish President Halonen said exactly this yesterday at the Defence Forces parade through Helsinki, but reading her speech I had a wry smile remembering what I had heard from a French officer last week: "The French army decided that it was the job of the schools to make little Frenchmen not the military, our job is to kill people when the government tells us to."

HMS Albion

HMS Albion visiting Helsinki

I was lucky to hear at the seminar I attended last week that HMS Albion was doing a port visit last weekend, and having promised my better half that I would get the kids out of the house so she could study, it seemed like a fun thing to do. The Albion is BIG, it holds four landing craft inside, some of which at least can take a main battle tank, and you can land a Chinook on the back. There wasn't much kit inside currently, presumably most of the UK army's tanks are kinda busy these days and they don't have spares to send cruising the Baltic. They did have various diggers and bulldozers in the hold, and one very appreciative three-year-old looking on in wonderment described them as: "wow! it's like Soldier Bob the Builder!" Bob the Builder in camouflage is probably about as cool as it gets for three-year-old boys.

The fact that one of the Royal Navy's most modern and powerful assault ships is providing family entertainment in the Baltic rather than floating menacingly in the Straits of Hormuz says perhaps something optimistic about the incoming Brown government's foreign policy direction. If that's not signaling, I don't what is.